Is gay over? A new generation of same-sex-loving youths are breaking down the old definitions and choosing to call themselves queer, questioning, open, fluid--anything but gay. Should we mourn the old word, and what will take its place?

When Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time magazine nearly 10 years ago, she did it using three simple, now-iconic words: "Yep, I'm Gay." It stands as an event that in the expanding gaze of history appears to be every bit the major cultural touchstone the country believed it to be back in April 1997, if for no other reason than in the nine years since, one would need to have lived in a cave to have missed the meteoric expansion of LGBT visibility in American popular culture. Oh, and the sudden primacy of LGBT issues in national political discourse. And the explosion of out LGBT youth. And the growing elasticity of gender norms. And the revolutionary role the Internet has played in bringing LGBT people together, connecting even the most isolated on an unprecedented scale.

But let's circle back to those three words, or, really, that last one: "Gay." In the Time story, DeGeneres explained she was more comfortable using the word gay, half-joking that for a long time she felt the word lesbian "sounded like somebody with some kind of disease."

At the time, DeGeneres's nonchalant insistence on bucking the semantic status quo when it came to defining her sexuality barely registered amid the thundering cheers that Finally, Someone Did It. And yet, looking at that cover today, her decision to use gay in order to say "this is who I am" could be the most prophetic--and ironic--aspect of Ellen's entire coming out. Because in 2006, after all the swift and sudden change that tumbled forth following that cover, gay, in all its meanings--personal, communal, cultural, political seems to be going through its own identity crisis.

"Gay as an identity, as we used to know it, may be pretty much at an end," argues Arnold Zwicky, a respected Stanford University linguist who came out on the campus of Ohio State University in 1970, just a year after the Stonewall riots. "People are thinking of their sexuality in a much more diffuse way. The word gay has split and splintered and been used for all kinds of related but distinct things to the degree now where it's actually hard to talk about this stuff [and all mean the same thing]."

"There's no longer a dichotomy [like] 'either you're gay or you're straight; these are the two options,'" echoes David Levithan, who coedited the newly published The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Other Identities, compiled from submissions by writers in their teens and early 20s from red and blue states alike. By far, Levithan says, LGBT youth "see themselves more as individuals than being defined necessarily by their sexuality."

Which is, of course, a momentous development. "One of the goals of LGBT liberation," says Urvashi Vaid, a longtime gay activist best known for her 1995 call to arms, Virtual Equality, "was to give people freedom to self-determine their sexual identity and to be their gender identity as they experience it." And yet at the same time, Vaid says, she hears "from [LGBT] people of all different ages that they don't relate to the formal gay movement. They don't know how to plug in."

Therein lies the rub, the tricky paradox that as the gay movement works toward its own obsolescence, more and more same-sex-loving people opt out. Vaid herself even wrestles with the issue out loud during her interview for this story. "I see a kind of a new closet," she ruminates early on, "where it's very comfortable and roomy. [LGBT people] don't want to disrupt their comfort. They're not necessarily engaging in conversations with people who make them uncomfortable, or trying to go door-knocking to contest a ballot initiative, because it's all fine and good to look at the glass as being half full."

A few minutes later, however, she chuckles and admits, "Well, you know, there's a part of me that feels like I achieved something if people can be blase about their homosexuality. I take a great deal of pride in that, in a perverse kind of way."

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, is a bit more sanguine when asked about this quandary. "We as a movement," he says, "can take real pride that we opened this door for young people to be much more fluid about sexuality, gender, gender roles, orientation, [and] sexual behavior than any other generation in history. That's what the gay movement has contributed to society, and that's a tremendously good thing.... That said, our legal culture and our rhetorical culture has not at all caught up with that."

Ah, those kids today. Along with feeling more free to come out in high school or sooner, many people in their teens and early 20s are also free to reject gay as an identity. Instead they're defining their sexuality as queer or open or opting for no label at all. And with pop culture comparatively saturated with gay images and stories, not to mention straight artists like Franz Ferdinand unironically singing same-sex love songs, the whole idea of a separate, coded gay culture comes across to this out and proud generation as, well, not really all that necessary. Icons once venerated as the apex of gayness--Barbra, Cher, Liza--are seen in this new paradigm as punch lines or simply irrelevant.

It's an attitude that can easily and understandably lead older lesbian and gay Americans--older in some instances, mind you, by a scant decade or less--to marvel at how fast things have changed yet also feel appalled that these kids don't have a full enough appreciation for the hard, long, life-and-death battles waged while they were still grooving on Tiny Toon Adventures.

"But that's what most teenagers and 20-somethings do," asserts Levithan, 33, first lauded for his 2003 teen novel, Boy Meets Boy. "I don't think you really put your life or your identity in a historical perspective until you get older and you sort of understand history better.... It may seem like ingratitude right now, but gratitude takes time. I mean, how long did it take for 'the greatest generation' to be coined?"

Certain aspects of "gay" culture itself may be part of the problem. Created by a population that came out to an overwhelming degree in its adulthood, its sense of recapturing a lost adolescence--with the requisite emphasis on idealized beauty--doesn't really apply to gay kids who are coming out in their actual adolescence. For some, it's downright unhealthy.

"There are so many boys out there with body image problems who are really beating themselves up because they have this Abercrombie ideal," Levithan says. "It's not just 'Am I gay?' They get to the answer to that question much sooner than ever before, but then the question becomes 'Am I the right kind of gay? Am I doing gay things?' Some reject [the Abercrombie image], some fall for it, and I think we need to totally revise that stereotype, or at least open it up."

Much of this fluctuation is par for the course, says linguist Zwicky. It's just that this is the first time LGBT people have really gone through it. "Social labels are like this," he says. "They never sit still. They end up having different meanings for different people. Almost every generation wants to reinvent the labels, either reinterpret them or use new ones. They want to distinguish themselves."

So is gay, in a word, over? "It's in trouble, yeah," says Zwicky. "But the unfortunate thing is, it's not clear what's going to replace it. We still need a way of talking about people who have 'the taste,' and we also need a way of coming together, for socializing, for political ends, for cultural activities of all kinds. Those needs aren't going to go away. Look, we're still living with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It's hard to know what to do."

There are a few candidates. Queer, once an epithet, then a badge of political radicalism, has recently become adopted by people who enjoy its vague hints at a more fluid sexuality and cultural sensibility. Then again, Queer as Folk and Queer Eye aren't exactly cutting-edge when it comes to embracing new ways of being "gay." Writers, like this one, can cast a net into the alphabet soup of LGBT--or LGBTQ, etc.--and hope it catches everyone. But "LGBTQ" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Another problem: For many ethnic and racial minorities, gay is synonymous with white and male. Enter downe, pronounced "down," an apparent retooling by West Coast Asian-Americans of the African-American down low as a kind of oblique queer; one can ask "Are you downe?" and those who get it, get it, like a modern-day "friend of Dorothy" but this time with their own social networking Web site, DowneLink.com. Naturally.

"Maybe people automatically think of Gay and Lesbian Task Force and think it must be white men," says Foreman. In fact, he notes, "I'm the first [white man] in 16 or 17 years to lead the organization." Getting people involved in activism, he says, is "about what we do [to] reach out to and include the diverse parts of our community. It's not just about young people. It's about people of color and poor people and leather people and dykes on bikes who don't relate to the word lesbian."

But if everyone is casting about, seeking their own way of being and defining themselves--which is, to reiterate, what we're all striving for, the freedom to be exactly who we are--if gay both figuratively and literally no longer defines us, then under what banner can we unify to fight for that common goal? If decidedly cohesive antigay forces are stronger than ever precisely because we have come so far, how can we fight back if we can't even agree on a word that describes who we are?

As Vaid puts it, "What is it going to take to get millions of people out in the streets again?"

Foreman has an idea, but it isn't exactly heartwarming. "It felt very much in the early 1980s that we were losing the steam that Stonewall had unleashed," he says. "Then our community faced the HIV/AIDS crisis and that infused the movement with young people, new energy, new excitement, new anger. Movements have to keep being reinvigorated.... I think this time it's going to be another Matthew Shepard."

Really? It's going to take something that severe? "It always does. It always does," he sighs. "We're all very good as human beings in doing what we have to do psychologically to get through the day. Until you hit the ugly face of homophobia, whether that's a fist in your face, or you don't get a job, or you can't get an apartment, people can be lulled into the sense that Will & Grace rules the world." Besides, Foreman argues, "gay is the word. Sometimes it's gay and lesbian, but gay is not going to leave the lexicon in my lifetime."

Though Zwicky may see things differently, he's reticent to zero in on any replacements for gay--social movements, he notes, tend to suss these things out on their own. "We need a lot of dialogue," the 65-year-old says. "The early gay movement was extraordinarily tolerant. We took in the drag queens and the guys in totally revealing leather and the S/M folks and people who didn't want to identify with one gender or the other. That was part of the political package. Frankly, I miss that. I feel like we need more of that [now]."

It is incredibly tempting, when discussing these increasingly disparate outlooks, to just shrug our shoulders and draw a line in the generational sand, but then Vaid observes that "we actually have a multigenerational movement. Somebody who is 60 may have just come out last year--in movement terms they're a year old. And they hit all that raw energy and passion of a [brand-new] activist."

It may be our great test, then, whether a movement as innately diverse as ours can weather this momentous and contentious expansion and not get stretched so thin we simply break apart. For his part, Levithan is optimistic, seeing a "universal theme of gayness even if the specific plot is different." He points out that in states where all after-school clubs were banned just to avoid gay-straight alliances, the high-schoolers in those states from all shades of the sexual rainbow--fought back.

"If anything," Levithan says, "the kids become more activist when they're challenged and then take that activism out into their adulthoods. Either way, it's a positive. If it's unchallenged, that's great. If it's challenged, that will still activate the people who need to be activated. I think that will set the pace for the future. Or at least, I hope. But that may be so gay of me to say."

Vary is a Los Angeles--based writer.

WHAT "GAY" MEANS

                             Not sure/
                            no opinion   No    Yes

Is "gay" over?                  21%     73%     6%

Is "gay" white?                  8%     84%     8%

Are gays and lesbians
welcoming to transgender
people?                         35%     30%    35%

Note: Tables made from pie chart.

Do you ever wear any of the above symbols or
put them on your backpack, bumper, etcetera?

No, never                     29%
No, but I have in the past    21%
Occasionally                  34%
Yes, frequently               16%