Unpolarizing ourselves: when all the shouting was over, we sifted into two camps: the virtually normal and the troubled with normal, the radical middle and the far left. (last word).

It's going to take us all a while to accept this, but if we as gay people are going to maintain a vibrant intellectual community, sooner or later we'll have to admit the truth: The gay culture wars are over. By this I mean the internecine ones, the nasty feuds that have polarized the gay crowd for the past decade. I don't mean the fight for equal treatment in the straight world. That'll go on as long as there are breeders and queers--which is to say, forever. Unless, by chance, the predicted nuclear/smallpox endgame comes to pass, in which case we'll all be mutants anyway and we'll have more important things to do.

But as for the civil wars in Babylon, they're done. Because as much as the 1990s were about high-profile activism and mainstream cultural visibility, they were also about leg stretching and elbow throwing in our own backyard. And when all the shouting was over, we sifted, more or less, into two camps: the virtually normal and the troubled with normal, the squares and the perverts, the radical middle and the far left. Whatever. It's all gotten very reductive by now--and stale.

In the early '90s, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, and Camille Paglia, among others, said what needed saying at a time when no one else was saying it, giving rise to the now all-too-commonplace but erroneous label "gay conservative." (Paglia, for one, is a self-declared Democrat.) Hardly a surprising mischaracterization of these provocateurs, given that back then, even more than now, a gay man was considered right-wing if he didn't shave his bails and a gay woman was considered bisexual if she used a tampon.

That was then. This is now. The gay landscape of ideas is different today. What's been said has been said, and it's time we stopped reiterating it. The arguments for and against gay marriage, gay pride, queer identity, hate-crimes laws, and linking AIDS and promiscuity have been made and remade once too often--not in the outside world, perhaps, but here, inside the movement. Our intramural zeitgeist has moved beyond the left/right dichotomy; we just haven't caught up with it yet. The debate has degenerated, for the most part, into name-calling and personal attacks. That's what happens when boredom sets in. And, as far as I'm concerned, it has--in spades.

I'm starting to feel the same guttural distaste for the terms politically correct, identity politics, and postmodernism as I once did for patriarchy and hegemony. I realized this recently when I was asked to participate in a panel discussion, the topic of which was supposed to be the gay future. They were calling it "The Third Way" or some such, and that seemed refreshing to me. Not conservative. Not liberal. Just solid center. Right on, I thought. That is, until the organizer suggested I title my talk "Beyond Lesbian."

How appropriate, I thought. And how disappointing. It was the exact title I'd given the very first opinion piece I ever published. That was in 1996. It was fresh then. Now it smells like an old cheese. Nothing could be more retrograde, and if that's where we're headed, we'd better quit while we're ahead.

After all, the whole point of picking apart the crusty Stonewall activist model had been to create a new model to fit the times. By the early '90s it had become clear to anyone who had extracted his head from the sand that the old ways and means were outmoded. They needed shaking up.

So some of us shook. And it worked for a while. But now that paradigm is starting to feel as hackneyed as its predecessor, and if we let that happen, then what will have been the point of the last 10 years? If we stay on the present course and coast on the same old swill, we'll be as guilty as Martin Duberman's generation of getting stuck in the mud. Worst of all, we'll have given up on the lifeblood of any think tank worth sustaining: new ideas.

We might start by forging a middle course between Michael Warner's and Andrew Sullivan's falsely polarized views on the queer individual in society. They need not be incompatible. We can believe in the mainstream rule of law and make it work in our favor while still being antiestablishment enough to say that "normal" is just a cycle on a dishwasher.