"Lanny, what now?" reporters ask Lanny Davis one by one. "We're going to take the White House" is his talking point today.

And here's a reporter who's been covering Hillary for the whole shebang. What's next for him? "Gonna take a week off."

Inside. There are 10 American flags in the room, six of them on the stage around the podium where she will speak. It's Mark Penn's strategy come at last to full flower, too late.

One-quarter of the floor space is unused, cordoned off.

I talk with two women reporters who are down from New York. One just bought a new blouse at Union Station because she didn't think hers was dressy enough. The other is upset because she hasn't put on makeup yet and she is 35. These women are both self-described feminists.

The standard bleachers-thing is set up in the far distance behind where the former candidate will speak, to show up on TV. One older woman, who is nearly completely inaudible in the horrible acoustics and music of the room, has plunked down a chair next to the bleachers: "Well I just picked up my chair and moved it over here." She moved to D.C. when her husband left The New York Times a long time ago. Ooh, The Times, good paper. "It used to be much better," she said. Well, I won't tell them that to their faces. "Oh, I will," she said. So? She was for Hillary and now? "I guess I'm for Obama," she said, without any great enthusiasm, which I heard repeatedly from people. They're in, but you know, they're DEMOCRATS. So she doesn't hold an Obama grudge? "I'm more concerned about the country."

"Are you properly independent and neutral?" she asked. Me? Oh no! But I don't believe in mixing and matching. "Good."

Then Terry McAuliffe entered the area between the bleachers and the stage, accompanied by his assistant, who is a slighly funky dresser and is constantly tapping at her BlackBerry with her weird emerald-blue nail polish. People slowly begin to notice that he is here and he gets more and more applause, people standing up in the bleachers, clapping, and he keeps putting up his arms like a champion boxer, posing for lots of pictures. The man of the hour! "She'll be back" he says to no one in particular. He looks a little sheepish because this is really going on for quite some time.

One of the people with whom he posed for pictures is Michael "Mike" Michener. Is he a donor to HRC? "Oh yeah, I've given." So, well, let's be blunt: The Clinton campaign ended up with a mountain of debt and she is not the nominee for president. So do we think Terry did a good job? "Yeah, I think he did. She raised an amazing amount of money. She raised a record amount of money. I think he did a great job." Okay, so will you give to Obama? "Yes, I will." Why? "I'm a partisan." And are you in favor of her for the VP slot? "Very much. I would love to see her on the ticket--but it's Obama's decision. I'm not one of those people pushing it...." Should Obama take Terry into his organization? "Yeah. He was head of the party--he was amazing. Sure! Everybody Hillary brings along with her--she's got an amazing cadre."

Holy shit. There’s Matt Drudge. In person. In D.C. With Glover Park Group's Tracy Sefl. (Sefl featured in the NYT article last year about how Clinton + Drudge = Internet heaven.) Tracy's Facebook friends include Ana Marie Cox and Mike Allen!

Matt Drudge is wearing a brown Munsen Wear polo shirt and a bulging upper body. He keeps his wallet in his back pocket, it seems.

This HRC event took place after a 5K Race For the Cure so there are lots of women in breast-cancer-pink, some of whom have shirts that declare them to be a "Survivor." The race started at 8 a.m. and it was hot as hell. "I ran faster than I've ever run before," said one nearly faint woman. And who is she voting for come November? "I guess Obama. Well, I'm not voting for a Republican!"

12:34: Ben Smith is talking to Matt Drudge.

Off to the inaccessible side of the stage where the candidate and her family will stand, Anthony Wiener darts by like a dachshund after a rat before disappearing behind a black-glass door into a holding room.

HRC enters.

HRC: "See, you can be anything you want to be." UM, EXCEPT WHEN YOU CAN'T, APPARENTLY.

Behind HRC, above the bleachers, hang two MASSIVE American flags. Unfortunately, they block people's view on the balcony, so the one to Hillary's right (and the TV camera's left) was being pulled aside in the middle so people could peer down at the back of Hillary's head. A staffer goes up to ask them not to. Then he comes back to the main floor--and they're doing it again. "PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE" he shout-whispers up at them, gesturing psychotically. They let the flag fall back into place, and stand, apparently, blindly behind it.

The first endorsement of Obama gets most of the people clapping. Two staffers are holding on to each other for dear life. At 12:57 HRC attempts to do some salvage work on Bill's reputation.

1:05 p.m. "If we can launch 50 women into space ..." she says. HAHAHA, that is the setup to my favorite joke! Then why not ALL OF THEM?

Look, there's Glenn Thrush, longtime, massively dedicated Hillary Clinton reporter for Newsday. What now, Glenn Thrush? "Chuck Schumer will be covered by Newsday again."

One the web site, womenforfairpolitics.com, women may send a form letter to Barack Obama, asking him to make Hillary Clinton his pick for vice president.

Mr. Davis said that he did not know what she thought of this, despite their conversation.

So on Mrs. Clinton's last primary victory night, it was like all the Clinton surrogates had gone way off the reservation! Except they never do, so therefore they hadn't.

Mr. Davis rewrote some serious history, to the distress of reporters. "Everyone accused her of being negative," he said, but she never, ever had been! But what about remarks by Bill Clinton, and all that hubbub down in South Carolina? What about when Mr. Clinton said-- "I bet you he didn't mean that," Mr. Davis said. This was crazy. The press was getting gas-lighted!

"This night is a celebration for a candidate that has finished the course," said Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, one of Hillary Clinton's national campaign co-chairs. Surely she did not mean to use the word "finished"? Where is this reservation now? Are we near it? "She's had her fans," Ms. Jackson Lee said of Ms. Clinton. Oh had she?

Hillary Clinton finally gave her South Dakota primary victory speech, down in the weird, cellphone-dead zone of Baruch College's basement gym. Why? No one knew! "Our theory is that she's taking us hostage and releasing us in a one-for-one exchange for superdelegates," said a reporter.

Terry McAuliffe, chairman of Hillary Clinton for President, introduced Senator Clinton as "the next president of the United States." One reporter's mouth actually went Wha?

Mrs. Clinton wore an electric just-brighter-than-Yves-Klein-blue pantsuit. She began with praise of Barack Obama. She called him "my friend." The speech was good but a little manipulative. Like how she kept touting her 18 million votes, like a club. "The question," she asked near the end "is where do we go from here?" Then, after she needlessly invoked 9/11, the stage was stormed by some pals, like Governor David Paterson. Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" played. Her hair was extra-sleeked; it had no movement whatsoever.

"I just sent you an email," Lanny Davis said then, as the Clintons and friends were leaving the stage. Even as she had been making her victory speech, her best friend had been working the press regarding his campaign to get her selected as Mr. Obama's running mate.

Outside, a crowd gathered to watch her motorcade leave, at the corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street.

Two Obama supporters were there with signs. One read "Unite For A Change." The other read "Drop Out Now."

"What do you think man, you feeling it?" one of the white Obama supporters asked a black man who was considering their proposal.

The man didn't answer for a while. Then: "All of a sudden you're all right?" he asked. "You're pulling my nuts out all year."

"Politics are dirty," said the Obama supporter.

"You rob me and treat me to lunch--that make you all right?" said the black man. He was in a panama hat and salmon-colored summer pants and shirt. "Fuck that," he said. "Get the fuck out of here."

On Hillary Clinton: "She's had her fans."

More importantly, on Barack Obama and Clinton talking: "I think an invitation has been extended. Senator Clinton will accept that."

UPDATE: She also said, "This night is a celebration for a candidate that has finished the course."

The supporters waiting on a line that stretched from East 24th Street and Lexington Avenue up to East 25th Street (and around the corner), apart from the whole Cloverfield-9/11 echo, looked very much like an Obama crowd. Young and old and gay and brown and white: “I’m from Brooklyn and I’m a Hasidic Jew,” a Hasidic Jew told a Japanese reporter very slowly.

The entire block was encircled by TV vans and trucks belching heat.

Crowds gathered across the streets to watch the crowds. People chanted, “Denver! Denver! Denver!” They were referring to the convention. “Take it to Denver!” a woman shouted.

But what did they expect to hear from Senator Clinton inside? “I’m not sure!” said Kathy, an older woman who lives on Union Square. “I’m trying to figure out how we can keep McCain out of the White House without a merger.”

Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination is effectively over, but her political career, even now, is still barreling onward. The immediate next steps will be to negotiate the terms of withdrawal and to sort out a general-election campaign role. (And then, no doubt, she’ll have a star-studded Democratic “unity event” of some sort at which she’ll be lauded as no runner-up has ever been lauded before.)

She could, if her supporters have their way, end up on an Obama-Clinton ticket. Failing that, she’ll be back in the Senate.

Even then, though, she would not return as just another senator.

While Mrs. Clinton’s primary bid is ending in defeat, the way she lost—with a lock on certain core demographic groups, with unwavering aggression and durability, with an expansive national network of voters and donors—seems only to have enhanced her celebrity brand.

“If anything, she’s gotten a lot of admiration for being tough, hanging in there, and for just going—she’s like a tank,” said Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island who knows the Clintons personally. “It’s not like the other people when they go to primaries—they lose and they’re gone. She is still a very, very powerful, powerful force in American politics.”

Nationally, her campaign has helped to develop a sense of political individuality, giving her an image apart from Bill Clinton’s.

“The most important thing that happened to Senator Clinton in the past year is that she is no longer in the shadow of her husband,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic consultant who heads the New Democrat Network and who worked on Mr. Clinton’s presidential campaign. “She is a national leader in her own right, and I don’t think that was true before.”

If Mr. Obama were to lose (without her on the ticket), she’d be in prime position to contest for the nomination in 2012. If Mr. Obama wins, she could conceivably create her own power base in the Senate, growing, in the reckoning of her colleagues, to assume a Ted Kennedy-esque role among the Senate Democrats as an orchestrator of great compromises and landmark laws.

“She’s going to have the capacity to debate and participate in the legislative action much more than she ever did before,” said Bob Kerrey, the New School’s president and a former senator. “Even more than Ted Kennedy. I mean Teddy didn’t campaign in all 50 states.”

“She will return to the Senate with enhanced political capital,” said Representative Carolyn Maloney said. “She will be a very sought after political ally.”

The effect of an enhanced role in the Senate for Mrs. Clinton, it is lost on no one around here, would be to elevate New York’s presence in the legislative body (for at least for as long as it’s controlled by Democrats) to a level not seen in recent memory.

Mrs. Clinton’s senior colleague, Senator Chuck Schumer, is poised to deliver a second straight set of victories as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, putting him in a position, going forward, to ask much of his colleagues in return. He is already the third-highest-ranking member of the Democrat-controlled Senate, commands a famously strong presence in the media and is not shy about cashing in chits.

(Schumer spokesman Josh Vlasto modestly bills Mrs. Clinton and his boss as “the best one-two punch in New York history.”)

Both Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton have staked out roles in the Senate by which they devote considerable attention to national and international issues—something of a tradition for New York’s members—and their ability to lead on issues from judicial appointments to questions of war and peace will be enhanced.

Not that either of them is averse to playing the “Senator Pothole” role once fulfilled for New York by Al D’Amato. According to the government spending watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer each brought in more than $300 million in earmarks for the 2008 budget, ranking them among the top pork achievers in the Senate.

For Mrs. Clinton in particular, it wouldn’t be a stretch to do more of both.

“I don’t know why she’d change anything she’s done,” said former Governor Mario Cuomo. “She’s going to be Hillary Clinton, and she does the Al D’Amato role—she does all of that—but she does the big issues, too.”

In an e-mail sent on the day of the last primary contests, in South Dakota and Montana, Mrs. Clinton’s Senate spokesman Philippe Reines wrote: “She’s pursuing the nomination and while we love her to death we hope not to see her on the Hill until she’s inaugurated as the 43rd President on January 20th, 2009.”

Uncertainties are many at this point. Mr. Cuomo is pushing to have a joint Obama-Clinton ticket, and even if that doesn’t happen, Mrs. Clinton’s medium-term future is going to be contingent on what happens to Mr. Obama this fall. And of course whatever happens, it will be up to Mrs. Clinton to decide whether or not spending the rest of her career in the Senate, after all the time and effort she’s spent trying to get back to the White House, is something she wants.

“The road back in is always very painful,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University and a former aide in the Senate. “You have to have a certain tolerance for this place, and there are people who are in the Senate for t
he long run, and those who find it stifling and slow-moving and frustrating. And I think she’s the kind of person who would find it that way.”

Certainly, at the Clinton event on the night of the last primary, shortly before her speech, the long run was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

“She’s clearly the front-runner,” said Steven Mantz, an human resources director from Brooklyn. “She has that air of gravity.”

ebrown@observer.com,
csicha@observer.com

An appellate court upstate had said that a Canadian marriage between two women must be recognized in New York. This wasn’t much in the way of news! Mr. Paterson had already lobbied for (and seen passed last year, in the Assembly, at least) a bill saying much the same.

But that case, Martinez v. County of Monroe, caused some panic elsewhere. On May 30, the attorneys general of 10 states, led by the attorney general of Utah, sent a letter to the chief justice of the Supreme Court of California. They were concerned, in light of Martinez, about that court’s own decision on May 15; California set aside its ban on marriage between people of the same gender.

The offices of the attorneys general would be, they said, overburdened by the “inevitable result” of “marriage tourism.” (That’s like sexual tourism, but everyone gets blenders, and no one gets hurt, except family values.)

You see, the gays will travel to California, get married, come home and sue to have recognized any number of the rights accorded to everyone else’s arrangement of merged sexual duties and labor-sharing—demanding their own witchy little rituals that culminate in the receipt of useless bits of cutlery and sexual boredom.

So the court could, they suggested, wait a while. Homosexual-paired marriages are to commence on June 17 in California. Couldn’t California hold off until November—when a voter initiative will or will not amend the state constitution to re-ban gay marriages?

“To us it didn’t make sense to engage in any litigation or tie up any resources for six months or so,” said Sandi Copes, spokesperson for the Florida AG. “We’re asking them to wait until this ballot initiative. And then, if necessary, we can engage in litigation. So it’s really just saying: Don’t put the cart before the horse.”

But by the next day, there were only nine states begging for this help. New Hampshire had to bag out.

Its Senate and House had passed a bill last year, it turned out, that explicitly stated “a marriage between a man and another man or a woman and another woman” from out of state would be recognized as a civil union there. Sort of embarrassing! Particularly given that the law just went into effect this January. (The New Hampshire attorney general’s office did not return a phone call and does not have a communications office.)

Then, on June 2, the California secretary of state confirmed that the ballot measure to actually alter the state constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman would indeed go before the voters this November.

ON THE FIRST floor of the New York City Bar Association, there is the Davis room, full of memorabilia. It is named after John W. Davis, elected president of the American Bar Association in 1922. One of the last cases Davis argued was Briggs v. Elliott, one of the five cases consolidated into the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education.

Unfortunately for history, Davis was representing desegregation-adverse South Carolina, and arguing against the N.A.A.C.P.

Upstairs in that building on Monday night, a few lawyers, before an audience that seemed to be composed mostly of summer associates, presented their thoughts on the state of the sphere of privacy five years after Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that made legal the previously criminalized “deviant sexual intercourse” between people of the same sex.

Arthur Leonard, of New York Law School, gave a little history—which was interrupted at one point by New York Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan. “History will be on our side,” she yelled. (She is a rare real-life example of what conservatives are actually talking about when they make those arguments about activist judges.)

In 2005, Ms. Ling-Cohan had declared that New York State laws that defined marriage as an arrangement between a man and a woman violated the state constitution. Mayor Bloomberg was then campaigning for reelection; he made the choice to say that he supported the ruling and gay marriage, and also that the city would appeal, and the decision was overturned later that year.

“I think he tried to punt,” current City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who is now in Mr. Bloomberg’s very good graces, told The New York Times.

SOMEWHAT SIMILARLY, the attorney general of Utah, Mark Shurtleff, was opposed to his state’s Amendment 3—which in 2004 amended Utah’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage—and yet must now defend it as a matter of law.

But, contrary to the way the Log Cabin Republicans and others have trimmed and rebroadcast his statement into seeming like support for gay marriage, Mr. Shurtleff opposed that amendment only because it also outlawed domestic unions between men and women.

Also because the language could quite possibly be interpreted to invalidate the rights of those in common-law marriages—a situation that is a very hilarious case of idiots amending their constitutions in a panic, only to shoot themselves in the foot.

Mr. Shurtleff took a lot of flak for his opposition. This year, though, he is up for reelection! And so his office, composed of more than 400 staffers and approximately 225 lawyers, somehow believes it must oppose the California court.

“We’re just making our position known,” said Paul Murphy, the office’s spokesperson. “The California Supreme Court will do what it plans to do. I think we wanted the court to know there are consequences for other states beyond California.”

Unlike, you know, so many other decisions.

In the letter sent by the attorneys general, the 10, now 9, states get caught up in their own drama. “Out of our commitment to the principles of ‘our federalism,’ we would simply shoulder that burden without comment,” they write—were it not for the icky forthcoming voter strife.

That phrase, “our federalism,” comes from U.S Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence to U.S. v. Lopez, 1995. The decision in that case, essentially, rebuked Congress for intruding on the states. Justice Kennedy went on: “The States may perform their role as laboratories for experimentation to devise various solutions where the best solution is far from clear.”

="left">So the attorneys general are actually taking the extraordinary step of asking an out-of-state court to unmake a decision, and to transform an order into a voter guide. When really their duty is to accept, state by state, the burden of litigation—to defend their own hapless voters from the alleged onslaught of marriage tourists. It makes Mr. Paterson look like a bomb-throwing revolutionary.

csicha@observer.com

The town’s dock becomes a short boardwalk that deposits arrivals deboarding the boat from the mainland at a cramped, poorly planned intersection; that is Cherry Grove, Fire Island’s entire tiny downtown.

So arrivals find that to their right is a restaurant, and then behind that a bar. Ahead of them is the walkway to a bar; and behind that the pizza parlor; and, a bit up, a store; and, nearer, a Prudential Douglas Elliman office. To their left is a tiny post office, another real estate office and a bar. In the middle of all this, essentially, is the hole.

As spring came, the hole became a bit of real estate in its own right. Rebar was posted. Eventually, a waist-high concrete wall was poured along its periphery. This work had been done, now and again, by different young men, white and Latino. Who employed them, and on whose behalf, was not clear. None seemed to be particularly skilled, but some of them were shirtless, and therefore were often photographed.

One particularly thin yet muscular young man, referred to around town as "the porn star," disappeared from his work at the hole for a day or two.

One of the joys of a small town, like this outpost on Fire Island with its entire physical presence described by just shy of 300 buildings, is that everyone knows absolutely everything, except the details of all those things, which are usually conveyed increasingly incorrectly as each person takes his turn with each story.

For one thing, it was unclear whether this workman had ever performed in a pornographic film, or whether the nickname only asserted the analogy between such performers and this guy with the slightly shaggy, swaggery demeanor.

The story was, according to people in town, that the porn star had brought his young daughter to town for a while. In her presence, his lover had made sexual comments to him.

"I want to suck your dick" was cited as one of these comments; an unsurprising thing to say to a lover, but less plausible in front of his young daughter.

Over this, or over something else, the young man had beaten his lover "to a pulp," according to two residents; had, they and others said, broken the other (older!) man’s jaw; and then been arrested and taken to the mainland for a day, or two, or more.

In any event, he did eventually return. The porn star’s hands, when I saw them, were mangled, every knuckle bloody. They looked like a Bonobo’s feet.

There was more. That had just been one of three altercations that day, according to a real estate agent downtown.

So progress on the hole was slow. As May came on, renters arrived to join the owners. The small grocery store opened. The island’s population exploded. The trees came in. Frogs began their screaming in the evenings. The big hole gained a small hole inside itself; a cinder-block heart, surrounded by a sand field, nestled inside the concrete retaining wall.

Memorial Day weekend, the real beginning of the season, came at last. According to what everyone said, it was a project of the pizza parlor.

"It’s an interesting idea to put a septic tank in the town square," said a landscape architect on Friday at noon. "I don’t know what to say about it."

He talked about it with an East Village landlord for a while.

"They should get Claes Oldenburg to do a big soft sculpture of a turd over it," said the architect.

The restaurant directly opposite the septic tank, the Island Breeze—newly rebuilt, again; that location has a long history of suspicious off-season fires—was putting up American flag bunting. "That’d make a cute little skirt," said the architect.

Everyone was here. At night every house was lit up. Residents of the town by then included an early retired Long Island Rail Road conductor; an esteemed conceptual-minimalist artist; a designer of slippers; some great number of lesbian cops; more than enough real estate agents; a classical music critic; an Apple executive; an IBM executive; the lawyer who took Mastercard public in 2006; a Jungian therapist.

The weekend ground itself into a frenzy with day-trippers. On Sunday, in broiling late-afternoon sun, the septic tank was being used for al fresco dining of pizza with garlic knot crust. Kelly Rowland’s "Work" played; "And I Am Telling You" played for at least the second time in a few hours; then a disco remix of "Tiny Dancer"; a house mix of Mariah Carey’s "My All" followed by a spare version of Britney Spears’ "Gimme More" and then Ms. Carey again, "O.O.C." No one was playing the new Madonna at all.

A sunburned straight boy lay on his side on one of the downtown walks, clutching a pink plastic parrot.

"Eh," said the guy at the grocery store. "Nickle and diming. Last couple of years, that’s been the trend. Nobody’s got it, nobody wants to spend it."

Late Sunday night, the four main audio systems downtown, each playing different music full blast, swirled into a cold torrent of noise. The moon came up late, the wind from New York City pulling all the sound further east in a tangle. A boy was weeping and shivering on the septic tank. No one was really talking, just shouting or squealing or ranting—and walking in circles, making for, as in Rope, long, uninterrupted sequences.

"Guys, guys, guys, why aren’t we going to a bar? Why are we walking more into coldness?" one man asked his friends.

Another described a man he’d found attractive to his friends, who had not. "Totally like dumb, like hot, like straight up from L.A.," he said.

The rectangular hole inside the queer square hole—the septic proper, delineated by the cinder blocks—had nearly a dozen slabs of concrete laid across its top, shortways. In the moonlight, the slabs were silver. Each section looked like a baby’s coffin.

Memorial Day was quieter—mostly. "Pizza, pizza, pizza!" screeched a boy, quoting Amy Sedaris from Strangers With Candy. So much pizza. His pack followed behind him, past the septic and up to lunch.

For the first time in many years, spurred by the California Supreme Court decision last week providing the opportunity of marriage in that state to any two adult humans, there is this talk of open culture warfare. This marks a bold return to the kulturkampf of more than a decade ago—this time with the gays in charge of the argument. For now. Maybe not for long.

The great culture wars—they seem so long ago!—reached their climax and then evaporated a dozen years ago, when the gay agenda was denounced in 1996 by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the most disgusting piece of writing of our time, his dissent to Romer v. Evans; in it he claimed that the God-fearing people of Colorado were justifiably preventing homosexual special rights via legislation forbidding equal rights protections.

Since then, gay organizations, worn out and stretched thin, quietly huddled up and settled on tactics. Donations went up (although some estimate that only 5 percent of gay people donate to these organizations at all). Over the past five years, the funders and heads of gay organizations insisted upon an actual gay agenda. And the legal departments of these organizations settled on a unified argument, which they have applied to marriage cases in California, Iowa and Connecticut (decisions in those latter two states are forthcoming).

So this year, both federally—all three leading presidential candidates are opposed to gay marriage—and state by state, their schemes will either blow up disastrously or make irrevocable changes in American society. (Until perhaps the next culture war undoes them. Who knows?)

Matt Foreman, who was until recently the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, has just settled in California. He was planning on marrying his partner in Montreal this coming Labor Day, and now he will be spared that trip. His marriage may be invalidated a few months after that, as those opposed to gay marriage organize an amendment to undo the court’s doings.

“The battle here to save that decision is going to be the most costly, high-profile gay rights battle ever,” he said. “The ramifications of it are going to be long-lasting. If the amendment is defeated, not only will we have preserved marriage in California, but it’s going to give a lot of new energy to the marriage-equality movement. If we lose it here, there’s going to be a lot of wind taken out of the sails.”

This gay agenda has not only those high stakes but also an illogical tactical underpinning, one that its legal proponents will not acknowledge. On one front, primarily through legislatures, the organizations are pressing for civil unions. At the same time, in courts, they argue that such a second-class status for relationships is unconstitutional.

“Well, civil unions are definitely a second best, no question about it,” said Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and co-counsel on the California marriage decision. “But it can be an important stepping stone to get to marriage. It was a very important stepping stone in California. It hopefully will be stepping stone in Connecticut, where they have civil unions.”

So won’t domestic-partnership legislation see renewed opposition from the right, if the courts see it, as they did in California, as such a stepping stone?

“I don’t think that’s a revelation to folks who are considering civil-unions bills,” said James Esseks, litigation director for the ACLU’s gay rights project. “They support them because they know they’re a compromise. I don’t think this decision—which does say this is not equal, this is a lesser status—I don’t think that that is going to make it harder to pass civil-union legislations.”

“And I think those civil-union states will be converted to marriage states,” he added. “I don’t think it’s going to be a deterrent.”

“There’s so much momentum,” said Mr. Minter, “so much excitement, people are gearing up to get married. Once they’re actually married, they’re going to be very motivated to not have it taken away.”

On the day before the California decision, because there was a man in a good suit next to me on the bench, distractedly eating a lunchtime sandwich, and because there was a toddler with close-cropped hair in a green shirt playing perilously around the park’s fountain, I understood for just one moment the allure of marriage. It passed, but still.

I e-mailed some friends in California. Were they getting married, now that they could? No. And they were offended by the question. “As I’ve always said,” my friend K___ wrote, “the only thing gayer than marriage is gay marriage.” Well, that’s the next culture war.

The male writers we find on the pay-for-placement bookstore tables today could be the unhappy real-world future of Mr. Pinkwater’s narrator, Yggdrasil Birnbaum, who attends, near the corner of Sunset and Vine, the Harmonious Reality School, founded by a doctor of fruitopathy (it is what you would think), and where “the teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and mostly illiterate, are friendly.”

It all sounds rather like a barely disguised parody of Deep Springs.

These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly. And ambitious and ashamed of ambition. At night they plot. “He knew about every little magazine that ever was,” the late New York Times editorial board member Mary Cantwell wrote in her memoir Manhattan, When I Was Young, of the boy-writer she married in the 1950s.

A little penis, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing. But it’s not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books. There are these legends that loom; all women, all terrifying. (Norman Mailer, sad to say, belongs to 1968, and that was so long ago already.)

Ursula Le Guin, who’s been tirelessly writing about war and conflict for the last 40 years in a way that no one has before or since, just published the big and lovely Lavinia, in which she picks up the history of the Latins where Virgil couldn’t be bothered to tread.

Renata Adler is now nearly finished with a new novel. (Almost! “Except for superstition,” Ms. Adler wrote in an e-mail last week.)

Katherine Dunn has still not turned in her long-awaited fourth novel—her most recent, Geek Love, is nearly 20 years old. And yet here she is. Her agent, Richard Pine, told me recently: “She’s going to have a book out next year—a collection of her boxing columns.”

Janet Malcolm’s latest, on Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein, was slight and so modest, and also perfectly formed, a biography like the shell of a nautilus being laser-sheared open.

Sharon Olds, the strongest poet of our time—although, really, Erykah Badu is coming up on her, no?—has not had a new book in four years. (Perhaps she is waiting out the Bush regime.) But she will.

Do we need to even discuss Joan Didion? Particularly when no boy today can even surpass Edna O’Brien, the inventress of chick lit now nearing 80, who was always just way more groovy and readable than J. D. Salinger.

It’s no wonder that a fella can’t figger out what to do, with these Durgas and Rheas crashing around, rearranging seaboards and raising mountains.

FOUR YEARS AGO now, this newspaper expressed its discontent at the scruffy, feelings-talking boys that had begun to plague our city, and presumably other urban zones. (It also ends with what has since become a punch line: “With additional reporting by Jessica Joffe.”) But since then, men’s underwear has only become more sculpted, more package-enhancing; men’s thoughts have become smaller and more interior; and so their books have become more miserable, more antisocial.

“When did men get all the baggage?” one interview subject wondered back in 2004. Another suggested that they were just Frenchmen manqué. Which is why they want books. Bernard-Henri Lévy has books!

It’s rare that siblings have books published at the same time, but Masha and Keith Gessen both put something out this spring. Ms. Gessen is a longtime nonfiction writer who careens from newspaper hackery (that is praise) to reported family memoir to science writing; Mr. Gessen is an editor of n+1. His first novel, All The Sad Young Literary Men, resulted in a profile in the Styles section of The New York Times in which he should never have participated; it begins with him playing football with bond traders in the park and ends with his declaration of earnestness.

“To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little; but to be young—to be young was divine,” wrote Mr. Gessen early in his book, a sentence that reads like a rejected blurb to Cantwell’s 1995 memoir.

Ms. Gessen’s, Blood Matters, is a history and memoir of BRCA1 genetic mutation.

(She would surely object as much as he to this breezy comparison; and to his credit, he has also translated politically charged material from Russia. Also, let the record reflect that while he did attend Harvard, he did so on a scholarship!)

But. From Dave Eggers to Jonathan Safran Foer to Dana Vachon to Joshua Ferris to Jeff Hobbs to Charles Bock to Mr. Gessen, JT Leroy outdid them all. And he was a lady. And a bona fide nutjob.

Why can’t men write anymore? Why is Christopher Hitchens, a man who will seize upon any idea that causes a slight shock to build a book around, a prominent nonfiction writer of our time? Things are different now.

“What is peculiar to our time is a habit of disparagement, persisted in with a kind of obsessiveness that seems like rigor. We go to the shopping mall,” wrote Marilyn Robinson in The New York Times in 1985. (That was written so long ago that it does not appear on the Internet, and therefore there are no Google results at all for the essay’s excellent phrase “a dark night of the prole.”)

“In Amerika,” Andrea Dworkin wrote two years later, “there is the nearly universal conviction—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right. …”

But these two facts have collided, with terrible results, since the delicious mid-’80s. The American desire for fucking has become, locally, the Brooklyn-based or -bound desire for a book deal and a brownstone. Men, finding that they cannot really get status or security from the ownership of women very often, find their very selves disparaged. Like most of us, they get their status first from consumption, and the way out is to become a maker of consumables; a high-class published author. And they are bewildered, I think, because their bewilderment shows in books that try to understand class and economic conditions even as they are being happily further ensnared by them. Their books read as if this were the first time they’d ever thought of all this.

Ms. Robinson—This may be apocryphal! It was relayed by a (male!) former student of hers—apparently lost the only manuscript of Housekeeping not once but twice, at least one of those times in a women’s bathroom. Not one of these boys would survive that.