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There may well be more openly gay men and women in America now than in any other country at any other time in history. The long-ago sexual revolution, gay visibility in the media, the reckonings forced by AIDS--there are any number of reasons for this emergence. It has changed straight America, of course. Just go rent My Best Friend's Wedding, or watch Will & Grace on NBC. What's less noticed is that it has also changed gay America, which is a very different place now than when Shepard was born, or even when he was a teenager. By a complex but not very surprising reciprocal relationship, the simple fact that there are a greater number of visible and comfortable gays has created more of the same, more visible and comfortable gays. "I think we've done a great deal of persuading people that we are not a countercultural force," says Andrew Sullivan, author (Love Undetectable) and former New Republic editor, who epitomizes the argument that homosexuals should embrace the existing institutions of heterosexual society. "We are a mainstream force." Sullivan likes to point out that the richest gay group in the nation isn't a political group but a religious denomination, the Metropolitan Community Church, whose offerings totaled $17 million last year and whose membership across the nation has grown to 40,000. And the mainstreaming of gays isn't confined to New York City and Los Angeles: 21-year-olds are coming out everywhere, so that, for instance, a gay freshman landing this fall at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo or at the University of Idaho in Moscow could find a group to join. In little Agency, Mo. (pop. 300), a woman named Liz Jalbert is president of Midland Empire Task Force, a gay group that has doubled in size, to nearly 100 paid members, in the past two years. Two Saturdays ago, more than 100 showed up at her house for the group's annual bonfire.
As a consequence, even the anti-gay right has had to shift the tone of its message as more straight Americans become acquainted with their own gay friends and family. Anita Bryant, the singer turned anti-gay campaigner of the 1970s, said that what homosexuals really want is "the right to propose to our children." It says something about the difficulties of demonizing homosexuals these days when Senate majority leader Trent Lott merely compares them to kleptomaniacs, as he did this summer, or when Christian groups run ad campaigns insisting gays can be cured. While that language may try to throw the debate back more than 20 years, before psychologists concluded that homosexuality is not a mental illness, it represents a recognition that pure contempt is tricky when you are talking about people's children or friends.
At the same time, lesbian and gay organizations have gone from being outcasts of the left to being an expected presence in politics, or at least in Democratic coalitions, and a presence knocking at the door of the Republican Party. "The whole public attitude on gay issues has become much more mainstream," notes Al From, who runs the Democratic Leadership Council, which breeds centrist New Democrats like Clinton. "A lot of gay businessmen are New Democrats. A lot more people are dealing with gays in their families."