Brave Newsom World

It’s also a lost cause. Aside from naked politics, what’s fueling the right’s fevered attack on same-sex marriage is its frustrated realization that wide-open gay life is here to stay and, over the next generation or so, will inevitably claim its full legal rights. In the 35 years since Stonewall, gay Americans have already made amazing strides; national attitudes toward homosexuality have changed more profoundly than Western attitudes had in the previous thousand years. Back in 1991, 71 percent of people said gay sex was always wrong; 11 years later, that number had dropped to 53 percent, with a full third of Americans saying it wasn’t wrong at all. And though two-thirds of Americans still oppose gay marriage, 49 percent support civil unions. Such a view is being ratified in the workplace, where nine of the 10 largest Fortune 500 companies — including Wal-Mart, hardly the guiding star of the liberal elite — have adopted anti-discrimination rules about gay employees.

As more and more gays and lesbians come out, more and more heterosexuals realize they know someone who is gay or lesbian. When The New York Times asked if she and Dubya have gay friends, Laura Bush unhesitatingly replied, “Sure, of course. Everyone does.” And even if they don’t know them personally, straight Americans have grown used to sympathetic gay characters appearing on sitcoms (Will & Grace), Rosie and Ellen hosting talk shows, Isaac Mizrahi selling clothes at Target, and the Fab 5 “manscaping” sad sacks with nose hair on Queer Eye, a program that offers the most innocuous possible version of gayness — it makes straight men better able to please their girlfriends. Such programs are not aimed at the coastal elite. Cheerfully putting their queer shoulders to the wheel, their stars present a soothing, neutered version of an enduring subculture that mainstream society has been raised to find frightening or immoral.

In such a cultural moment, it is perhaps fitting that the beautifully giddy display of social rebellion being performed by thousands of gay and lesbian couples should be the profoundly conservative act of getting married. Such domesticity helps explain why so many gays who fight for the right to same-sex marriage don’t like the idea of it any more than Justice Scalia, albeit for opposite reasons. They fear it may cheat gay life of its splendor — the gender twisting, nonconformity, unabashed hedonism, aesthetic idealism and rebel audacity refined through centuries of being outsiders.

“The privilege of being gay,” John Waters recently told Fresh Air, “was that you didn’t have to get married or have kids. Now Provincetown will be the new Niagara Falls, and gays have more babies than Catholics.”

And the right finds this too radical?