Escape from New York. (last word).

I have lived in New York City for nearly nine years, and now I am leaving it. There is nothing unique in this; hordes of people do it every year. But in my case, as perhaps in yours or someone else's you know, there is special significance in the change, and it derives, of course, from being gay. I came to New York to do what many gay people before me had done, people who came to this brightest of big cities to be inspired or to lose themselves in sexual risk or to indulge their cherished eccentricities at last in the presence of like-minded freaks. I came to New York to be gay. And now I am doing something I never thought I would contemplate, something that, for gay people, is a potentially far more disconcerting proposition than for straights: I am--dare I say it--moving to the suburbs.

For straight people, this is more or less the normal course of things. They meet, they work, they breed, they relocate, they invest, and they garden. The end. But for most queer people, it's the reverse. They start out the progeny of unsuspecting and usually hostile breeders, simultaneously trapped and outcast in a small town or Mallsville, USA, and they rush headlong at the first opportunity into the scuzzy confines of the urban demimonde for their first breath of fresh air and a toss at single life on the prowl. Having made it to the Emerald City with our arrested development intact and our postadolescent fantasies in full flower, even well into middle age, most of us aren't inclined to think that Green Acres is the place to be.

I was typical in this regard. Riding into Penn Station at the age of 25 with my pretend head still firmly up my ass and that ass neatly tucked into a pair of roughly ready jeans, I felt like a swirling particle of blood, a platelet or mote of iron being pumped--God, can the emotion have really been this trite?--into the heart of the world. I fell in love with New York in a way I never have with any person. As Joan Didion once said of the same experience: "Was anyone ever so young?"

Yes, apparently. And many times over. I, like most everybody else, found all the fucking and the drugs and the posturing I was looking for on sofas in art bars and in industrial kitchens at catering gigs and on the hardwood floor of my ill-furnished studio apartment in the Village. I whispered the usual unsavory cliches to virtual strangers while dribbling down their necks or, more often, just prior to disgorging on their shoes. I bought my glad rags too dearly in Soho and downed my Prozac with beer. Elizabeth Wurtzel had nothing on me but a book contract.

And then, slowly but also quite suddenly, it all came to an end. I met a girl who didn't make me feel like Rod Stewart, but somehow that turned out to be enough. She was, quite simply, the only callipygian I'd ever met who knew what the word meant, and I guess for me, that clinched it.

Well, that's not quite true. It was more than that. It was the small things: that she didn't care if I wore my pajamas everywhere for a week without washing myself or them or that she didn't bolt if I manifested on average four distinct personalities a day. She didn't seem to mind that I thought fetuses were human and that free markets can work. Best of all, she didn't make me feel like Renfield or Forrest Gump when I failed (gasp) to make the all-important distinction between "Fur Elise" and fleur-de-lis or when I admitted that I was in fact not familiar with a particularly well-dropped name.

She was and still is, in short, my dearest friend, who taught me that love is not a feeling but an act--a series of tiny acts repeated over time until they turn into what, with any luck, turns out to be a lifetime.

A chapter in that lifetime has now ended, and we are moving on to the next. We have grown up together, and in doing so we have found that our lives have turned inward. Living space means more to us now than seductive bustle. And so, at long last, we are saying goodbye to the lifestyle we thought defined us, because we have learned that it never did.