Swimming in the mainstream. (last word).

Maybe it was the effects of September 11. Maybe it is a recognition of the progress our community achieved in the past decade. But it wasn't until my pastor, of all people, suggested that gays and lesbians seem to be facing the challenges of assimilation that I realized something really was happening here: Being gay is more accepted by the mainstream than ever before.

What happens when a minority group becomes accepted into the mainstream? How do we keep our identity while celebrating our acceptance into the greater society that we were seeking in the first place? This question, long faced by the Jewish and African-American communities in America, now seems to rest on our table. And this decade may be the time we have to answer that question--whether we like it or not.

All of this came into focus when my pastor and I were discussing the difficulties we faced in getting openly gay people to become comfortable and active members of a mainstream church. Despite countless examples of inclusion and celebration of its gay and lesbian members, our congregation's outreach efforts have produced little. And this is not unique to my personal Evangelical Lutheran church. Except for the dedicated activists seeking reform within their denominations, most gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people seem to fear acceptance within the church.

This isn't unique to religious organizations either. The same struggles are evident in many gay people's attitudes toward public service, military service, professional accommodation, neighborhood participation, and almost every aspect of our lives. It makes one wonder if we love the fight more than the victory, if we prefer the passion and freedom of our minority status over the obligations and expectations of full acceptance into society.

I suspect the year ahead will give GLBT people little comfort as we struggle with these questions. Increasingly, out gays and lesbians are being appointed and elected to public service--not because of their sexual orientation but because they are qualified for such service. Likewise, most of corporate America now proudly celebrates its gay and lesbian professionals. While discrimination in the workplace still exists, the reality is that many, many more companies celebrate their cultural diversity than resist it. Finally, there is little doubt in my mind that most mainline Protestant churches in America--and perhaps other faiths such as Reform Judaism--will reconcile their religious teachings with reality and open their doors to our community during this decade ahead.

There is also evidence that our nation displays more accepting hearts than it did before the tragedy of September 11. After nearly a decade of struggle, Congress allowed the District of Columbia to implement domestic partner benefits. The Red Cross has become the first national relief agency to recognize same-sex relationships when determining eligibility for disaster-related assistance. And many lesbians and gay men feel more like Americans and less like political activists than we did before.

Author Lewis H. Lapham wrote in the December issue of Harper's that the citizenship America displayed after September 11 included "a generous upwelling of tolerance and compassion among people of different colors, their regard for one another grounded in the recognition that the modifying adjectives (black, gay, white, native, etc.) matter less than the noun American." If that is true, the question now is, How do we, as gay people, respond?

The gay community as a whole is more open, more united, more active, more strategic, and more diverse than ever before. Our challenge in the coming decade will be to find a balance between becoming full members of society--with all the assimilation that implies--and finding ways to build on our history as a community. Will we allow members of our community to define their activism differently while honoring the choices we each make as individuals? We are, as Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken" articulated, at the fork in the road. And the path we take will make all the difference.