The next year, on the first anniversary of Stonewall, somewhere between five and twenty thousand people marched from Greenwich Village to Central Park in what would later be called the first Gay Pride Day. The early Gay Pride marches -- during the 1970s in Boston, and right up through today in more conservative and rural areas, such as Utah -- had a sense of the excitement, and danger, of Stonewall. When a few dozen gays and lesbians marched through a shopping district on a sunny afternoon, they could be sure that most of the people eyeing them were two things: straight and surprised. (Miller quotes from the Village Voice report of the first Pride march: "Sunday tourists traded incredulous looks. . . . My God, are those really homosexuals? Marching? Up Sixth Avenue?") The point was that the marchers weren't intimidated by the possibility that they'd wind up on the front page of a newspaper under the headline HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD FOR RIGHTS -- or by the chance that a few spectators could turn violent after the police escorts left.

Participating in a Pride march of 100,000 has quite a different feel. There are almost as many marchers as spectators, and most of the people on the sidewalks are gay or lesbian anyway. Straight people aren't necessarily scared off; when sidewalks get this congested, people naturally stay away unless they have a compelling reason to be there.

This has been especially true in Boston since the Pride parade route was changed in 1993. Originally, the procession started at Government Center and proceeded to Beacon Hill and the State House before ending on the Common. But the merchants on tony Charles Street complained, and the new route is a serpentine path from Copley Square through the South End, where many gays can watch the parade from their living-room windows. In essence, the parade moved from the centers of political power to the hot spots for Sunday brunch.

As it has grown, Gay Pride has become less about confronting straight society and more about coming out in the original, debutante sense of the term. Boston's best and brightest gays wave to almost unanimously supportive crowds and show off the results of their winter workouts at the gym.

At the same time, the Gay Pride march is no longer the only time of year that straight people are forced to acknowledge the existence of gays. Even a trip to the mailbox can bring an unexpected reminder of the "queering" of American culture. Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story on "The Gay '90s" last fall; and what some gays used to call "closet case" magazines, such as GQ and Details, now include pieces on such topics as gay Republicans and gay-bashings in the military. Ironically, the AIDS epidemic has made the details of gay sex an unavoidable topic -- whether on safe-sex posters in subway stations or on questionnaires given at health clinics.

Yet Bawer undercuts his own concerns about Gay Pride by admitting that "homosexuality is now a more conspicuous topic of public debate in America than it has been at any place and time in American history." It stands to reason, then, that less and less of that debate involves the specific event called Gay Pride Day. Any photo or video of leathermen (or other "sleazy" gays) marching down Boylston Street in Boston has to compete with a year-round barrage of images of more conventional-looking gays in all manner of media. And, of course, keeping the S&M crowd out of Gay Pride parades would not erase them from the consciousness of straight society. They can be seen all the time in advertisements accompanying personal ads in magazines and major-city newspapers; and if the religious right couldn't use footage of Pride marches for hate videos, they could easily send someone to shoot the annual International Mr. Leather Contest in Chicago or the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.

Since Gay Pride is increasingly becoming old news to the press, more and more coverage is of the "Whose line is it anyway?" variety. Should the North American Man Boy Love Association be allowed to participate? What about gay anti-abortion groups? Are bisexuals or transgendered people slighted by the name of the event? Should the speakers at the rally after the parade be equally balanced in terms of gender, race, and political affiliation?

Straight society shouldn't expect to find clarity in all this (let alone in the "agenda" that Buchanan keeps going on about), and it may be a sign of progress that few gay activists care anymore. Boston Pride Committee co-chairs Sabrina Taylor and Gregg Fraker essentially agree on a hands-off approach to political content at the march. (Taylor notes, "We have to find a way to say everything," and Fraker responds, "I'd rather just let people get together.")

Abe Rybeck, director of Boston's Theatre Offensive and co-founder of the band Adult Children of Heterosexuals, sees Pride as a chance for some free-form dialogue about divisions in the community. "People underestimate folks' ability to deal with the tough issues," he says. "I'd rather have the conflicts played out in an engaging way on stage."

He recalls such a moment from the 1993 March on Washington. The parade ended with a rally on the Mall, and Adult Children of Heterosexuals were on stage with emcee Brian Freeman, an African-American and member of the comedy group Pomo Afro Homos. Freeman talked of parallels between the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and the gay-rights movement today, and he told the crowd that when blacks demonstrated at Woolworth lunch counters, "We weren't just trying to get a chicken-salad sandwich." Rybeck good-naturedly retorted, "But is that all you got?", provoking laughter and cheers.

The idea of Gay Pride as a smorgasbord of gay opinion is a nice one, but a laissez-faire approach to political content almost never results in an even-handed exchange of ideas. If an event becomes associated with a particular point of view, it generally attracts more people who share that point of view (just like radio call-in shows and Internet discussion groups). Gays and lesbians who share Bawer's discomfort with S&M groups or drag queens are not necessarily interested in competing for attention against their more colorful opponents -- they're more likely to stay home and write letters to the editor.

In every city that I'm aware of, Gay Pride has a reputation for left-leaning politics -- as do most large gay-and-lesbian gatherings. That's natural, since most gay activism from before Stonewall has been associated with the left. Calls for "diversity" won't change that. For instance, a tiny anti-abortion group that participated in last year's event in Boston claims to have attracted not just verbal arguments, but people trying to turn over its literature table. Gays and lesbians do need places to discuss philosophical issues among themselves, but we can't expect a Pride parade to fit the bill.

This doesn't mean that gays and lesbians have "made it to the table," to use Bawer's favorite metaphor. On the contrary, they are still woefully underrepresented in mainstream politics and intellectual discussion in America. This is partly because many gays and lesbians naturally look back at the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s -- the last great "liberation" movements -- as models of political behavior. Thus, the hype surrounding the March on Washington in 1993 and the Stonewall 25 celebration in New York the following year. Those two events were exhilarating for anyone who participated in them, but they had little effect on anyone else.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. discusses last year's Million Man March of black Americans in the recent "Black in America" issue of the New Yorker, noting, "Some critics express a sense that the mass mobilization may itself be a relic of a bygone era." It's true. The purpose of a protest action is to inconvenience (but not necessarily anger) people, to keep them from turning away from your message. But to get attention these days, it's not enough to tie up city blocks; too many people have fled the chaos of urban streets for shopping malls and home-entertainment centers. Instead, you must hijack television and radio stations, take over magazine covers, and stuff mailboxes.

In the same New Yorker piece, Jesse Jackson faults the Million Man March in language similar to that used by gay and lesbian critics of their own March on Washington: "The March was essentially disconnected from our political leadership. Any mass action must be connected to the public-policy leaders."

That complaint may seem ironic coming from Jackson, who has been called a show horse (as opposed to a workhorse). And Jackson's actions speak louder than his words. Public debate in America increasingly centers on strong personalities rather than organized actions. The bulk of the political analysis in the New Yorker's "Black in America" issue is contained in profiles of Farrakhan, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the Jesse Jackson family. (There are no stories on the logistics behind the Million Man March, or on voter-registration drives in the rural South.) Major news stories on race relations or the status of blacks in America are almost always prompted by the fate of an individual: Jackson's as a presidential candidate, Thomas's as a Supreme Court nominee, Rodney King's as a victim of police brutality, O.J. Simpson's as a defendant, Colin Powell's as a reluctant Republican, and now Farrakhan's as a religious leader.

This doesn't mean, of course, that gays and lesbians should hope for a high-profile gay-bashing or sex scandal to occasion some headlines in USA Today. Nor does it mean the gay community needs to pick a charismatic spokesperson that can somehow represent both "unity" and "diversity" before straight audiences. It would be better for a queer equivalent to Jackson -- or Farrakhan, or filmmaker Spike Lee -- to emerge, not as a spokesperson for all gays and lesbians, but as someone who arouses passion in gays and straights alike.

It also means that the movement is mature enough to stand real internal debate. And there are plenty of issues worth airing. Is same-sex marriage a fundamental human right or a pathetic plea for assimilation? Are gay men as sexist and racist as their straight brethren? Would the discovery of a gay gene help tolerance of gays and lesbians or lead to widespread abortions? Is there really such a thing as bisexuality? Do gay men have the right to seek sex in public spaces such as highway rest areas? These are some of the questions I hear discussed at parties and gay bars, but rarely in the mainstream media.

I'd love to see a gay or lesbian thinker come down hard on one side of a divisive issue within the gay community and end up on the cover of Newsweek. Eventually, opponents from within the gay community would end up there, too. And such a vigorous debate would help reduce homophobia, because most straights would be able to identify like minds among gays and lesbians -- just as the rise of African-American conservatives has reduced racism in the Republican Party and other conservative institutions.

I'll be attending the parade next month, but, next year, I'd like to see a couple of formal debates in Boston sometime around Pride Day: bare-knuckle brawls on some of the forbidden -- but essential -- topics we've often tried to keep hushed in the name of unity. The debates could involve traditional (read: progressive) gay-and-lesbian spokespeople such as Urvashi Vaid or Michelangelo Signorile and iconoclasts such as Andrew Sullivan or Camille Paglia. People will get angry, take sides, and carry on their arguments for months afterward not only in the gay press but in the so-called straight world.

As for the parade, let it continue. We can enjoy the flamboyant drag queens and over-the-top floats without agonizing over their effect on the gay community's "image." Twenty-seven years after Stonewall, it's time to let Pride relax a little.