Oui to life.

I'm saying au revoir to New York this fall, to move to Paris to write a book about an extraordinary French family I've known all my life, who fought in the Resistance during World War II. I've lived somewhere in the 10 blocks above Duke Ellington Boulevard on the upper west side of Manhattan since 1968;

I've been looking forward to writing this book for a decade; and the mayor of Paris is gay! So it seems like a good moment to resume the expatriate life I last experienced when I was 16.

Since I came out the year after the Stonewall riots, I've benefited as much as anyone from the fastest progress any minority group has achieved in the history of the United States. I've rejoiced at the transformations wrought by and within 7he New York Times, the Democratic Party, network television, and Queer as Folk as the rainbow revolution has transformed many of the attitudes and some of the laws of every major country in the Western world (and even permitted an occasional pop star to come out of the closet in Taiwan). "The sheer global reach of homosexuality!" That was how one young gay American soldier described his joy when he found himself on the dance floor of a gay bar in Paris in 1944, where he saw soldiers in every imaginable Allied uniform slow-dancing. Now that global reach is obvious to anyone anywhere who owns a television.

And yet ... there is also reason to despair. A couple of months ago, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker hosted one of those events that would have been unimaginable when I was in my 20s: a panel discussion about the magazine's latest AIDS cover, with an invited audience that was 95% gay. Larry Kramer, who says he won't live much longer unless he can get a liver transplant, was even grimmer than usual. But he said something I wholeheartedly agreed with. He said the unwillingness of people to stop having unsafe sex made him feel that despite everything we have achieved, we have all been total failures.

It is incredible to me, in the 21st year of the AIDS pandemic, that there are still supposedly intelligent people who argue that having anal intercourse without a condom is more important to them than curbing this terrible scourge. And no, I'm sorry: It does not make a difference if you are an HIV-positive person with another HIV-positive person. There are plenty of serious scientists who believe that unsafe sex between two positive people is just as dangerous as unsafe sex between a positive and a negative one, because of the danger of creating new strains of HIV that are untreatable by any available medication. The fact that some people in extreme forms of denial continue to ignore this evidence does not mean that it does not exist. (Obviously, two HIV-negative people in a completely monogamous relationship are the one kind of couple who are exempt from the condom rule.)

Unlike many of my colleagues, I have never wanted to lecture my community about whether people should be married, monogamous, or multipartnered. If being gay means anything, it ought to mean that each of us has the right to create our own idiosyncratic answers to those questions. But there has always been one exception to my rule against moralizing. I believe it is wrong to engage in unsafe sex.

"Today the most effective thing we can do to prevent the spread of this infection is to focus responsibility for our health on ourselves. Until now, openly gay men and lesbians have often had to define ourselves through extremism; the virulence of our enemies left us no other choice. But [now] we also need to embrace less fashionable virtues, including maturity and restraint. Gay men have displayed unlimited energy and enormous discipline in the pursuit of pleasure from our bodies. For the second stage of the gay revolution to succeed, we must now learn to do the same thing with our minds."

I wrote those words for The New York Times in 1992. I am still very proud of them.

Fifty years ago, James Baldwin declared, "The trick is to say yes to life."

Thirty-two years after the birth of gay liberation at Stonewall, a tragically large number of my brothers still haven't figured out how to do that.