“It’s all yuppies and kids in strollers and all of that — and a few old codgers,” Crowley, 82, said over a recent lunch. The gays have scattered, not just from that building but from others, and we’ve distributed ourselves throughout the city — and throughout society. Gay sanctuaries are vanishing.

Is that true of gay culture and gay identity, too? I increasingly get the sense that gayness itself has scattered, becoming something more various and harder to define. “Gay” tells you about a person’s lusts and loves, but it used to tell you more — about his or her boldness, irreverence, independence. It connoted a particular journey and pronounced struggle, and had its own soundtrack, sartorial flourishes and short list of celebrity icons. Not so anymore…

-Frank Bruni, the New York Times, The Extinction of Gay Identity

Once upon a time gay folk had no way of networking beyond a few urban cores in a few big cities. Long distance telephone conversation, let alone travel, was expensive and cumbersome and people just didn’t make friends much beyond their local neighborhoods. So the only gay communities large enough to have any sort of scene at all were the urban ones, and for decades those urban gay scenes defined gay culture and sensibility. But it was misleading.

I remember the advent of the personal computer and how those early very primitive PC networks began allowing gay folk from distant, exotic lands like…Kansas, to network with the more established gay neighborhoods in the big cities. Can you say Culture Shock. The flame wars sometimes got pretty intense and sysadmins would have to step in and chill everyone out. But eventually there came an understanding that the urban gay scene wasn’t where every gay person experienced life, culture, coming out and finding community. We are not like other ethnic and racial minorities, we are all the colors of the rainbow. It is our weakness and our strength both.

To the degree that our safe spaces, the bars and secret members only clubs we needed are vanishing now, because we are becoming part of the fabric of American society, becoming neighbors, shedding the myths, lies and superstitions that used to define us, that is an unconditionally good thing. I expect that the gay bar will never completely vanish for the same reason that all bars and nightclubs tend to arrange themselves around a theme and clientele. But we will see lots of the old hangouts vanish, only to be fondly remembered. That happens.

There’s a Facebook page I follow dedicated to those of us who grew up in Montgomery County Maryland that’s constantly reminiscing about everyone’s old favorite restaurants, bars and hangouts. It isn’t just gay folk watching them vanish. We all experience this as we grow older. There are so many places I miss now that had nothing to do with my sexual orientation. What’s changing for us gay folk is we are part of that story now too. We are becoming once again part of the communities and cultures we were exiled from once upon a time. Normalcy. But we will always still be different. Just from now on, different in the sense that everyone is in some way different. And from that will always come a sense of fellowship and community with others like us. The gay identity isn’t going extinct, it is becoming bigger. Because it was always bigger than the urban scene that for so long was all there was for all of us to see.

So many people of my generation have such fond memories of the 50s and 60s and 70s. Simpler times it is often said. But they seem simpler looking back on them because we were young and we were simpler. What Frank Bruni is bemoaning is a past that, like much of those fond memories of simpler, happier days gone by, wasn’t completely real.