No special rights.

In the movie Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, Billy's lover turns him on by whispering, in his breathy Latin accent, "You are so special." It's a funny bit because Billy (Sean Hayes) isn't really buying it, but it revs him up anyway. After all, everyone wants to feel special. Part of the tragedy of coming out, for too many lesbians and gays, is that Mom--the most, reliable source for affirmation that we're special--may not think so anymore. (Mine does, for which I'm very grateful.)

One thing we gay folks learn to tell ourselves as we settle into our skins is that our sexuality makes us more special, not less. When I first realized there was a name for my feelings of same-sex attraction and that there were others like me even in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where I was in college, I remember feeling like I'd joined a secret society, I knew things most people didn't. When the guys in my dorm noticed that I was rarely in my private room the semester I spent most nights with an off-campus boyfriend, I just smiled.

Everyone wants to protect the specialness that makes them smile. Gay men who came of age in the '60s and '70s, for example, may recoil at same-sex domesticity and parenting because these things threaten the sexy outlaw status that is precious to their self-image. Queer youths may dismiss the values and cultural touchstones of their lesbian and gay elders in an effort to retain the individuality that is special to them.

It's the same on the antigay side of the divide. People who oppose gay equality are afraid they may not be as special as their mothers always told them they were. How can they look down on gays if we co-opt the "family values" that they believe give them privilege in society, in church, and in heaven? How can they malign me as a dangerous sexual outlaw when I've been all-but-legally married to the same man for more than 17 years?

As gays and lesbians become commonplace in every mall of America, on every TV network, and in ninety of the nation's churches, the great last stand of the homophobes will be to defend the specialness of marriage. They will ignore all evidence to the contrary (for example, historian John Boswells Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe) to argue that we're demanding admission to a holy club that has excluded us for "3,000 years of recorded history," to quote Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

On the morning that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Coral ordered the state to make way for same-sex marriages in 180 days, I watched a leading "family values" activist on CNN literally shaking with anger. The people of Massachusetts would not stand for this, she said. (Wrong. Two late-November polls found about 50% of the state's voters support the marriage ruling, while only about 38% oppose it.) Massachusetts would be another Vermont, she said, where any politician who supported sonic-sex unions was tossed out of office. (Wrong. Some Vermont lawmakers lost their jobs, but Gov. Howard Dean was reelected and could soon be the Democratic Party's nominee for president.)

This woman's desperate lies had one purpose: to stoke the fear that strikes some straight people at the prospect of losing their unique access to civil matrimony. Forget about moral decay and Leviticus and AIDS and "natural order" and the ick factor; those are just excuses. The right's real argument against stone-sex civil marriage comes down to this: If gays get marriage, being straight will no longer get you special rights. Homosexuality will at last be as normal as heterosexuality.

Our job in this debate should be easy: to prove that we're pretty ordinary folk, ready to take on the responsibilities that come with equality. A lot of straight people already support our bid for equal rights. Some people, it seems, are grown up enough to believe in their own specialness without the need to belittle their neighbors.

But are we that grown up? The hard part for many of us may be reining in our "secret society" fantasy and not looking down our noses at the straights. We can still feel superior to the frumpy heteros on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but we also have to be OK with the fact that for many of us, life resembles Friends, Everwood, or even Average Joe more than it does Queer as Folk.

Does that mean we're not special? Of course we are. Just go ask your mother. Or mine.