Scenes from the gay life.

NEW YORK-The first day of Lesbian and Gay Pride Weekend fell here on Friday, June 23. Early that morning, across the country in Nevada, Sean Flanagan was executed for the murders of James Lewandownski and Albert Duggins. Shortly before his death by lethal injection, Flanagan had admitted that he despised his own homosexuality and that, in strangling one fellow homosexual and dismembering another, "the thought that I would be doing some good for our society crossed my mind." Meanwhile, in New York, I joined tens of thousands of homosexuals-as they talked, danced, rallied, and marchedto take the measure of gay pride as it manifested itself the weekend Sean Flanagan died.

This year's celebration marked the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot, the event generally held to have inaugurated thc modern gay-rights movement. The riot began as a routine liquor raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. But after a group of the bar's patrons and employees was led into a waiting police van, a mob of five hundred protestors gathered, throwing anything that came to hand-coins, bottles, cobblestones, an uprooted parking meter-and, for the first time in the history of street protest, chanting, "Gay power! Gay power!" And, "I'm a faggot and I'm proud of it." Three people were injured and 13 protestors arrested. The Stonewall itself was set on fire.

The New York news media were united against the demonstrators. The Daily News mocked the crowds of "fairies, nances, swishes, fags, lezzescall 'em what you will." A reporter for the Village Voice taunted "blatant queens" and "the forces of faggotry."

Needless to say, in the last two decades reality has changed on both sides of the police barriers. This year, in honor of Lesbian and Gay Pride Weekend, the Voice ran a special front-page section celebrating "Gay Life '89." The Times, Post, and Daily News all ran respectful notices. The New Yorker described Stonewall as "the Bastille Day of gay liberation."

As for the New York City police, far from reprising their role as arch-villains, several hundred spent a full shift assigned to cover Sunday's march down Fifth Avenue. There, and at gay-pride events across town all weekend, they stood patiently watching, in groups of two or three, smirking or giggling only upon the most determined provocation, ready to protect gay marchers from any troublesome homophobes. Unless you counted the few lonely counter-demonstrators across from St. Patrick's Cathedral-middle-aged men waving limp wrists at the passing marchers, women holding condemnatory signs ("Homosexuality is a sin. It condemns to hell," read one)-no such homophobes turned up.

The mood among gays has changed, too. In the years following Stonewall there was something genuinely gay about militant homosexuality. During the riot itself, lines of crossdressing homosexual cheerleaders led the assembled crowds to the tune of Ta-RaRa-Boom-De-Ay: "We are the Stonegirls. / We wear our hair in curls. / We have no underwear / We show our pubic hair" Of Stonewall's riotous patrons, Allen Ginsberg remarked at the time, "You know, the guys there were so beautiful-they've lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago."

Today, activist gay culture retains only a muted version of that era's cheerful outrageousness. In most matters it has adopted instead the numbing seriousness of conventional minority-rights advocacy. In fact, many gays have come to think of themselves as a kind of ethnic group of their own. Arnold Kantrowitz, a principal chronicler of the gay-liberation movement, talks about what he calls the "gay nation." Gays have even designed their own colorfully stripe d flag- which New York City hung from street lamps all along Sunday's parade route.

The phenomenon of gay ethnicity is complicated, though, by the encouragement the movement offers to groups representing every conceivable variation on the gay lifestyle. These include, for example, Girth & Mirthdescribed to me as an organization for "large gay men, their friends, lovers, and admirers." Also, Gay Male S&M Activists. I missed GMSMA's dinnerdance, but read in an official guide to the weekend that it celebrated "the leather community's contributions to the gay community. ($7, not accessible to handicapped.)"

Such confusions aside, the symbols and rhetoric of pride, both general and specific, suffused the weekend. Asian Lesbians of Long Island assured spectators along Fifth Avenue, "WE'RE ASIAN, GAY, AND PROUD." Marchers rep resen tin g the People with AIDS Coalition proclaimed themselves "PROUD TO BE ALIVE AND WELL WITH AIDS."

Yet, the more I watched and listened, the more I came to suspect that gay confidence is failing. In one respect at least, self-justification remains harder for gays than for any other minority group. Hostility toward them -unlike hostility toward, say, blacks -proceeds in large part from sincerely held moral beliefs. Susan Sontag has argued that gays are peculiarly attracted to camp because-being the "sensibility of failed seriousness"-camp acts as a solvent of morality. "It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness." One thing you noticed again and again over the weekend was the sheer brittleness of the gay camp on display.

The most common variety was "dragging." Drag queens were everywhere. Yet there was something oddly serious and determined about them-about, for instance, the elderly man at Saturday's rally who stood up in a lavender tutu and drooping crepe wings to read a turgid, three-thousand-year history of homophobia, concluding with a stonyfaced curtsy. The next day, I was standing at the corner of Fifth and 38th when the parade came to an unexplained three-minute halt. Two men identified by a banner as "miss N.Y.C.: ELECTRA 1988, VANESSA 1989," hunched silently atop a red Chrysler convertible in blond wigs and silver lamb cocktail dresses, exchanging uncomfortable looks with some patrons of Lord & Taylor on the sidewalk below.

That an element of shame has crept into gay consciousness was likewise hinted at by the large number of special religious services. At a candlelight street vigil for AIDS, a white-robed Episcopal priest, introduced as "Doctor Dick," led a crowd of three hundred in a collective prayer: "I forgive myself for any mistakes or errors I may have made." "You're unique, you're special, and you're good," he assured the crowd. One man helped him adjust his microphone. "There's one of my angels," said Doctor Dick. He winked. "I'll see him in the bar later."

For Roman Catholic services Saturday night, gay men filled the main auditorium at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center to capacity. With their crewcuts, short-shorts, tank-top T-shirts, and downcast looks, the congregants filed solemnly down the middle aisle, took communion, crossed themselves almost apologetically. Under naked, oversized light bulbs hung from a ceiling of gloomy blue pressed tin, the scene looked like nothing so much as church services in a prison.

Nevertheless, in concluding Mass, an attending priest pronounced a "general absolution" and declared the event "a Eucharist of Pride."

So goes the gay life.