With the end of World War II, millions of American men returned home after years of preserving freedom on foreign soil and went to work building the United States into the most prosperous nation in history. With their wives and girlfriends, they were also busy in the bedrooms, catching up on lost time and kicking off the Baby Boom, the period from 1946-1964 that saw a dramatic rise in the birth rate.

Homosexual relations can't produce children, but there was likely a sudden celebratory increase in gay sex activity following the Supreme Court's recent decision to reverse the sodomy laws. Babies did not result, but one could certainly hear a boom when the landmark ruling was handed down.

"It's the work of the devil," shrieked one respondent to a newspaper's inquiry, while many gay activists celebrated the news with public rallies. Newsweek's July 7 issue went to press with dual covers, one featuring a lesbian couple and another with two gay men, both with a headline asking, "Is Gay Marriage Next?"

But there were dissenting voices to be heard even among gays. "It's No Big Deal" wrote John Cloud in Time as he correctly pointed out that homosexuals were making love all along even in states with laws forbidding them from doing so. Though men and women can no longer be arrested for engaging in same-sex relations within the privacy of their homes, David Smith of the Human Rights Campaign tells the news weekly that "you can still be fired from your job for being gay."

Even if the sodomy ruling leads to greater acceptance of lesbians and gays, some of us may be reluctant to let go of our outlaw status. Society doesn't embrace those who lead alternative lifestyles so much as chew them up and spit them out once their individual flavor is gone. One need only look back at the decade now known as the Sixties for evidence of that. To speak in broad generalizations, there were the short hairs and the long hairs, the hard hats and the hippies, the hawks and the doves. To be among the former was to wield the power or align yourself with those who did. To be among the latter was to be a part of the "counter-culture." You might have burned your draft card in opposition to the Vietnam War, or burned your bra in support of women's rights. If you were gay, you might have done both.

But where is that counter-culture now? It has been absorbed into the mainstream, swallowed up by the very culture it once rejected. Rock and roll, the music that communicated the counter-culture's message of rebellion, has been declawed and defanged, safe enough for use in TV commercials where it hustles the products of the capitalist system its fans once seemed determined to destroy. Hippies gave way to yuppies, and to be rebellious meant rejecting liberal political philosophies in favor of Reaganomics.

Some of these changes can be attributed to assimilation, but others are simply an example of a movement's having been co-opted by the opposition.

Certainly, the concept of equal rights for women is not as radical now as it was four decades ago, but it's still more dream than reality. And even though Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday is a national holiday, the unemployment rate for African-Americans remains double that of whites.

For minorities, the American Dream is still something you're more likely to experience while sleeping. And if it does match reality, it often means relinquishing much of what makes you an individual and recasting yourself in the image of white, heterosexual America.

To those who wish to disappear into the mainstream, I say "More power to you," as long as you don't insist on dragging everyone along into that already cloudy pool. But then some of our invitations will likely be lost in the mail. Since drag queens were ostracized by many gays almost as soon as the Gay Liberation Movement they started began to flourish, we can rightly wonder if they will be invited to the party if and when mainstream society opens its arms to fully welcome us into the fold. And what about the proud dyke with the boyish hairstyle and the masculine clothing? Might she not be judged too radical for full acceptance and encouraged to adopt a more feminine image?

Keep in mind that there can be no acceptance if exceptions are made.

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