The third way.

• Author: Lochhead, Carolyn

Whether measured by the pitch of national emotion it stirs, the prominence of the magazine covers it graces, the quantity of congressional hearings it generates, the number of Hollywood B movies it spawns, or the volume of press releases that pour out of newsroom fax machines, the debate over lesbian and gay rights clearly has come of age.

Just as clearly, it was the election of Bill Clinton, the first president to openly embrace homosexual rights, and the consequent debate over lifting the ban on gays in the military, that propelled the movement out of the gay ghettos of New York City and San Francisco to the center of national discussion in Washington and in living rooms, coffee shops, and workplaces across the country. Somewhat unexpectedly, the movement thus finds itself at a watershed. Its sudden prominence has forced gay and lesbian leaders to articulate their aims, even as they grope for a political strategy to achieve them.

The classic civil-rights approach adopted by blacks seems to predominate for now. While many want to distance the movement from the radical left, with rare exceptions the leaders of gay and lesbian groups hew to a left-liberal political plank, demanding a new civil-rights bill that would add homosexuals to the panoply of groups granted legal status as protected classes.

Surprisingly, however, a quite different path is also emerging and appears to be gaining popularity among the gay intellectual and political elite, offering the possibility that this civil rights movement could veer off on an unexpected course. The values of this new politics are far more traditional, even conservative, and yet its demands are also much more radical. It enjoys a distinctly American moral appeal that disarms opponents, even as its radicalism inspires a fierce, instinctive opposition.

Its primary political and legal aim is to end discrimination by the state; those who embrace it fully would leave private discrimination legally unaddressed. Its linchpin is government sanction of same-sex marriage. On the social front, the primary goal of the new politics is to gain social acceptance--not, as the gay left would do, to subvert straight culture and superimpose its own. And its method is not an act of Congress, but the deeply personal acts of thousands of individuals who emerge from the closet and declare their homosexuality.

"It is clear to me," says Tim McFeeley, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the largest and perhaps most influential gay and lesbian organization in the country, "that regulation, to the point of preventing any two people from loving each other or entering into a public commitment that declares and publicizes two people's commitment and love for each other, is really central in terms of the government's control over our lives."

Marriage, many gay leaders now insist, is the most obvious and profound form of state discrimination against gays and lesbians. An entire body of law hinges on the marriage contract, they argue, and with it an entire body of rights that constitute the essence of the legal bias against homosexuals--from property rights to hospital-visitation privileges--as well as a deeply felt social validation. They also acknowledge that marriage is their most radical demand, considered by many, McFeeley says, to be "terrible, dangerous, countercultural."

This new politics (its leading theoretician is Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic) has grown out of an odd confluence of accident, historical experience, and the unique nature of the homosexual taboo.

In an unplanned turn of events, just as the gay and lesbian movement achieved political momentum, the debate over the military ban suddenly switched public attention from social prejudice against Greenwich Village drag queens and...