Media coverage of Supreme Court win drilled home love that dare not speak its name now can’t shut up. We’re as mainstream as we wanna be.

By STEVE FRIESS

My sex life with my now-ex-partner began to droop precipitously just hours after our wedding. It was a big, white, frilly affair with the rabbi, broken glass, rings, toasts, Enya music, the buzz of noisy children running every which way and the full assemblage of extended family. Well, mine, anyway.

As the reception winded down, my 83-year-old Jewish grandmother hobbled over to me with a mischievous grin. "You two should go and be alone," she nagged with a wink. "A married couple needs to be alone on their wedding night, if you know what I mean."

 I giggled with embarrassment, but sooner or later I did take my groom to our "bridal" suite and, uhh, consummated the marriage. But it just wasn't the same anymore. I couldn't get it out of my head that all those people knew what we were doing that night - and couldn't be happier for us. The whole world as we knew it was standing in our bedroom, cheering.

I won't go so far as to claim that this "problem" itself led in a straight line to our divorce three years later. But I will say that the more "normal" and "acceptable" our mating became to everyone around us, the less taboo it felt and, thus, less exotic.

Now this "behavior" even has the blessing of six aged justices of the highest court in my land and the enthusiastic support of everybody but the most hysterial religious kooks and the Wall Street Journal editorial staff.  It was the right decision, indeed, for the Supremes to say down Bowers v Hardwick, the mirror-opposite 1986 decision that continued to criminalize us, and up with the privacy of all consensual, harmless adults to do as they please.

But the vast and redundant coverage of Lawrence v Texas last month, replete with an overdose of dramatic superlatives on the importance of the moment, drilled into me that love that once dare not speak its name now can't shut up. We're as mainstream as we wanna be.

And yet, how mainstream is that, exactly? By all appearances, I'm already a basically ordinary person. I hardly drink, never smoked, was so painfully obedient when I was a boy that my mother once wondered what was wrong with me. I dress in solid colors and keep my hair short, occasionally going wacky by not shaving for a full three days.

Being gay is the one thing that ever really set me apart to the rest of the world. It has always been there to remind me that my perspective is different, that I am genuinely of an alternative breed, that I am something more than what I seemed. The rest of the world could easily mistake me as a straight white male, that bland template of society who never had to demand a single right or privilege. By fighting for gay rights, I could claim a lineage they can't to the civil-rights legacy of people otherwise vastly different than me - Gloria Steinem, Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Jordan, Cesar Chavez.

Now, we're almost fully integrated. There's still plenty of homophobia in this country, but it's retreating from blatancy to subtlety. The bigots actually say they love us and don't  want to deprive us of any rights, and an awful lot of folks believe them. The fight is morphing into trench warfare, flaring up here and there but becoming fairly unnecessary in daily dealings. At a luncheon with a group of journalists and politicians recently, I openly made references to my sexual orientation and cracked jokes about it here and there - and nobody blinked or blanched. The shock and awe is gone.

Yes, that's what we've been working toward. We wanted to be seen as friendly neighbors, as creative and industrious members of society, as good parents. It is gratifying to see that we are pretty much almost there - and dizzyingly fast as civil rights movements go. Thirty-five years, nearly to the day, from the first successful gay uprising in New York City to having the U.S. Supreme Court legitimize us by lecturing from the bench about the respect we deserve? Unthinkable.

But it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge as this moment arrives that being different had its perks and that the sense of behaving sexually contrary to what the broader society approved of was as secretly thrilling to many as it was psychologically destructive to others.

The upshot is, our Canadian neighbors must be looking south right now with a chuckle. They've already got full-fledged marriage, and we just got the constitutional right to copulate. As advanced as we think we are, there's still a ways to go. But in a strange way, I pity the Canadians. As the old ad slogan used to say, getting there is half the fun.

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