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In the midst of this good-natured celebration of Stonewall, however, a reappraisal of the pride strategy is beginning to emerge. After three decades, the politics of pride is beginning to look a little stale and out of step with the times, and it is becoming clear to both gay people and our straight allies that we need to take a new step forward. With June's pride celebrations over, that step is to ask what the politics of pride has left undone, and why.

Gay pride has been an enormous success. It's increasingly safe to come out, we've won passage of a few gay-rights laws and it's becoming politically expedient (at least for Democrats) to support us. But there have been setbacks. Anti-gay legislation like the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is the law of the land. Brutal hate crimes like the murder of Matthew Shepard are reminders of what can still happen to any gay person in the country -- or even straight people suspected of being gay -- if we're in the wrong place at the wrong time. We need to understand why we seem to take a step back for almost every step we take forward.

The usual answer is simply that we're up against a deep, powerful prejudice. There's more to it than that: The politics of gay pride is in a rut. It seems unable to appreciate its own success or acknowledge that circumstances have changed. Instead, pride is becoming an end in itself.

Once pride was essential to curing the shame of the closet. Today it is the medication we're addicted to. Once pride captured the spirit of a revolution. Today it is too often the gay equivalent of pro forma patriotism. Once pride made a compelling moral argument. Today it is becoming the Ten Commandments on every wall. And when pride in the simple courage that it takes to come out of the closet in a hostile world turns into complacence and ideological rigidity, it threatens everything that we've won so far.

Recognizing this isn't easy.

A few years ago, Bruce Bawer, the author of "A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society," was almost burned at the stake as an allegedly sex-negative, assimilationist conservative by gay activists without much more tolerance for questions than their counterparts on the right. Among other blasphemies, Bawer suggested that stereotypes reinforced by gay publications and events might have the same negative effects as stereotypes promoted by anti-gay conservatives.

Even gay activists as outspoken as Larry Kramer have been charged with neoconservatism for asking forthright questions about the overt sexualization of gay culture. The resulting fury has said less about Bawer and Kramer's arguments than it did about the touchiness of their attackers.

I've been through a limited version of this treatment myself. I recently wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that asked whether gay pride might be easily -- and needlessly -- misunderstood. In a circulated response, Robin Tyler, executive producer of the Millennium March on Washington for Equality, objected. She insisted that concern about how gay pride is interpreted is of no concern because everybody on the other side is an irredeemable bigot. She bragged, "The Radical Right is in decline ... We have the numbers and the commitment not to have to choose 'which fight,' but to continue to mobilize on all fronts." And equating pride with self-esteem, she asked, "How can you have too much self-esteem?"

Well, how about when it leads to conceit, overconfidence and solipsism?

Next page | Dan Savage: Gays "addicted to pride"