The Gay Movement, After Marriage

"I don't think we've actually made that much progress," said Mr. Jones. "As Prop 8 showed you, every bit of progress we make at the state or local level is completely impermanent. Our brothers and sisters in Massachusetts and Iowa and the other states that passed marriage equality are still second-class citizens. The most important rights that are given to heterosexuals are not determined by the states, but by the federal government."

Mr. Jones and his friends at this reception hope that a national march on Washington on Oct. 11 will re-energize their base, move the focus away from individual state legislatures and refocus the priorities of the movement.

Back inside, longtime gay activist David Mixner was getting to the point.

"I don't have much money, but I'm going to put up $5,000," he said. "So who will match me?"

There was about a three-second silence.

"Who will match that?" he repeated, a little more forcefully this time.

Mr. Connor, the host of the party, said he would.

The topic changed to getting more donations outside the group.

And that's when Lance Bass seemed to shift the focus of the conversation. If they were looking for a grass-roots movement, maybe an approach to fund-raising should be modeled on the AIDS walk, with pledges and sponsors, and a large number of individual donations at smaller amounts?

A few people shouted, "Yes!"

"O.K., good," he said, seeming relieved. "Because I've got a Facebook that has something like 500,000 fans."

That night, $15,000 in donations were collected. A start, perhaps.

AFTER THE HONEYMOON

"I lived through the early days of the movement," said Allen Roskoff, longtime New York Democrat and gay rights activist, in an interview with The Observer last week. "Back then, there was no such thing as professional lobbyists working for our rights. There were volunteers, people who devoted their all to achieving gay rights. We took over people's offices, and we were children of the '60s and the '70s. That doesn't really exist anymore. You don't have the mass mobilization movement you had in the '70s. Everything has gotten more establishment."

Mr. Roskoff was speaking to the sense many gay New Yorkers have that the movement has become obsessed with marriage, something many who would otherwise be very politically engaged don't care much about.

"I was a little distressed at the beginning of the marriage movement and I felt like it wasn't our winner," said Ethan Geto, the longtime Democratic operative who is openly gay. "I thought it was an outlier, and then I came around to supporting it because it seemed to touch a real responsive chord with the Legislature and with activists."

Empire State Pride Agenda was patient, and moved ahead on an issue that many gay leaders found intellectually promising. And yet, in terms of rallying the base, it was also a complicated one.

"There are so many perspectives on it," said Clarence Patton, the former executive director of the Anti-Violence Project who is now running The Pipeline Project, a group dedicated to expanding leadership roles for gay people of color. "There are friends and associates on it that this is their issue they are passionate about. There are friends—it's not that they could care less, they don't necessarily believe in marriage to begin with; it's hard for them to connect that belief to the intellectual understanding importance as a human rights issue. They haven't been able to reconcile that."

"The fact is, not everyone wants to get married and not everyone is in a position to get married," said Richard Goldstein, the former executive editor of The Village Voice and a gay journalist, who said he supported gay marriage. "More than that, it has to do with a certain attitude with who is in your community and who isn't."

Specifically: Older, and middle-to-upper-income, gay couples, tend to value the right to marry more than others. And their voices are the ones heard the loudest outside of the gay universe.

"This is a typical affluent perspective," Mr. Goldstein said. "There's an illusion that what interests affluent people have are the common interests."

Take a tour of the bars that serve young, struggling gay men in Manhattan, and you will hear a very different assessment of the importance of marriage legislation. Marriage is a tricky issue—one that doesn't necessarily rouse the base for the "day to day," said Mr. Patton.

"It's a practical thing," he said. "Safety is an animal thing, an adrenaline or flight-or-fight. AIDS was life and death and it felt very immediate. But marriage is much more ephemeral."

"The fact of the matter is, our reasons are very logical: They have nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with emotion," said Cathy Marino-Thomas, the board president of Marriage Equality New York, who has been working on this issue for over a decade.

"If we ever do get marriage, it's like the movement will collapse," said Mr. Goldstein. "It's like we're whole."

"One of the things that has been very important to me and to Cleve is that we're talking something that isn't just about marriage equality," said Mr. Black, the Milk writer, back at the townhouse in his slight Texas drawl. "I think marriage equality is so very important to a certain age range and a certain group of gay people, but not to everybody. Listen, a lot of people my generation or younger don't care because we're just dating. We're not settling down. We're talking about something far more inclusive."