After public calls for same-sex marriage to be put on the agenda of a special session now scheduled for Nov. 10, members of the State Senate Democratic conference are hoping to at least hash it out in a closed-door conference.

"I think it's a conversation we need to have," said State Senator Diane Savino, a Staten Island Democrat, who is pushing to take up the issue. She said advocates in the gay community now "think the discussion is more important than the bill."

"There's tremendous risk of bringing this bill to the floor if it's going to fail. But it's not my life, it's their life, and they've made the determination," Savino told me by phone. It's unclear if the 32 votes to pass the measure are there: roughly half a dozen Democrats are either not committed to voting yes or have said they will vote no, and no Republican publicly support the bill (though my best read, talking to sources on all sides, is that at least a few would vote yes if it came to the floor.)

The thinking of advocates like the Empire State Pride Agenda is that putting legislators on record will allow them to be targets in 2010. The organization hasn't been shy about throwing its weight around in the past.

The party line, as delivered by an e-mail from Austin Shafran, is that "Senator Sampson is working with Senator Tom Duane and speaking with members of both conferences about how to bring marriage equality to the floor."

"Our new senator has been proactive in reaching out to our community and asking how she could be helpful in changing policy in Washington," said Alan Van Capelle, the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda. Van Cappelle also notes that she has been “spearheading” national initiatives of importance to gay-rights advocates.

This should all be very helpful stuff for Gillibrand, who, as a member of Congress, was considerably to the right of the Democratic primary electorate statewide on a number of high-profile issues.

For Gillibrand and her handlers, though, it’s not quite enough. They want the record to show not only that she is a friend of gay rights now, but that her outspokenness on gay rights since becoming a senator is perfectly consistent with her prior record.

As a result, the Gillibrand press team has aggressively countered any suggestion that she has shifted at all on gay issues, arguing that her relative silence on gay rights previously was just a function of the powerlessness to effect change, pointing to qualified remarks she made once about her personal support for gay marriage as evidence of her true pre-Senate position.

"Senator Gillibrand has always supported repeal, but felt there was zero opportunity to repeal this legislation when George Bush was in the White House," her spokesman, Matt Canter, told the New York Post recently.

Presumably, her political advisers—a group that includes her senior colleague and mentor, Chuck Schumer—see gay-rights advocacy as a unique opportunity for her to send a signal to liberal donors and activists as well as to super-prime Democrats in the city and suburbs that, despite her recent past as a conservative Democratic House member from an upstate district, she has the same values they do.

On the issue of gay rights, unlike, say, guns and immigration, she was certainly not actively opposed to the consensus position of her party. In the House, Gillibrand kept quiet on gay issues, generally voting with her Democratic colleagues while taking care not to attach her name to any potentially controversial legislation or to speak out in on-the-record situations on hot-button issues like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or same-sex marriage.

Her office says that the reason they need to fight against any notion of an “evolution” on gay rights—despite the fact that Senator Gillibrand is clearly more outspoken and aggressive on the issue than Representative Gillibrand ever was—is to prevent the intellectually lazy media from characterizing all of Gillibrand's changes in emphasis and focus as flip-flops simply because that fits a pre-established narrative.

Which is one way of looking at it, tactically. Another is that picking a fight, in the absence of much actual evidence, about what was in Kirsten Gillibrand’s heart before she became a senator is a counterproductive distraction from her significant advocacy on a high-profile issue.

"The Sotomayor stuff didn't go so well, so you are seeing a regrouping," said Jennifer Duffy, a senior political analyst who specialized in the Senate at the Cook Political Report. "The stuff about Don't Ask Don't Tell—this is quintessential Schumer. She needs something to run on. This is what I've seen him do with vulnerable incumbents before. So this seems to be the one that he has her picking up, or that they've decided to pick up."

There’s also another drawback to the contention that Gillibrand was secretly always a champion for gay rights: It’s that the argument, substantively, is weak.

When she was in the House, according to gay-rights groups, Gillibrand had a more conservative record on gay issues than the rest of her colleagues in the New York delegation.

As late as the day before her selection, she had the lowest rating of all of New York's Democratic representatives from the Human Rights Campaign, which gave her less-than-stellar-marks on her commitment to gay marriage, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and legislation to grant same-sex partners of U.S. citizens and permanent residents the same immigration benefits of married couples.

As I reported at the beginning of the year, Gillibrand’s posture toward the demands of gay activists changed quickly in the hours preceding her Senate appointment, when an ally of Governor David Paterson called her to say that she needed political cover from Van Capelle and from Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker and longtime gay-rights activist.

Gillibrand promptly called Van Capelle and began by expressing her commitment to same-sex marriage. In her introductory press conference as the state's next senator, Gillibrand stood on a stage with many of the state's elected officials and, to reporters and television cameras, stated a position on gay issues that went further than Clinton before her and Schumer, standing next to her.

"I will strive for marriage equality," she said.

Some time after that, when she began taking fire for her admitted leftward drift on guns and immigration, she started arguing that her conspicuous embrace of gay-rights issues wasn’t a shift at all.

Gillibrand cited a radio appearance from October 2008 with New York Post state editor Fred Dicker in which she made the case for federal support for civil unions and for a state-by-state determination of whether to label those unions marriage. (At the time, this was the default position for Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and, then, Chuck Schumer, who weren’t ready to support legalizing gay marriage. When pressed by Dicker, Gillibrand said that as an individual and a voter in New York—not as a legislator—she was in favor of gay-marriage rights.)

But in another interview around the same time, she had fully articulated an official position in support of expanded benefits and rights for same-sex couples in a civil union, and observed that many people were still uncomfortable with the notion of calling that union marriage. 

"I think the way you win this issue is you focus on getting the rights and privileges protected throughout the entire country, and then you do the state-by-state advocacy for having the title,” she said.

That was then.

In June, Gillibrand explored the possibility of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell by offering an amendment to the defense authorization bill, but found insufficient support among her colleagues.

On July 27, Gillibrand, likely with some help from her senior partner, managed to get a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

"This policy is wrong for our national security and wrong for the moral foundation upon which our country was founded," Gillibrand said in a press release. "I thank Chairman Levin for agreeing to hold this important hearing.  Numerous military leaders are telling us that the times have changed.  ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is an unfair, outdated measure that violates the civil rights of some of our bravest, most heroic men and women. By repealing this policy, we will increase America's strength - both militarily and morally."

Gillibrand's office says, correctly, that by pushing for the hearing, she is making one of the first significant efforts to repeal the law in 15 years.

Despite their best efforts, Gillibrand and her advisers are still getting headlines in the New York Post like "Gillibrand Flips on Don't Ask Don't Tell." The Post story noted that when Gillibrand sat on the committee that oversaw the matter in the House, she refused to co-sponsor a measure that would have repealed the policy. 

Her campaign responded by saying that she always supported the aims of the measure, and, after the story came out, the Human Rights Campaign released a statement praising her commitment on the issue. (“In the last several months, Sen. Gillibrand has truly become a national leader in the effort to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’”)

But there’s a much simpler way of making the criticism irrelevant.

As University of Virginia political scientist (and noted sound-bite machine) Larry Sabato put it, "She can now say, ‘Look at this, I am way out in front of even the White House on this.’”

Isn’t that the important thing?

It raged and stormed outside, while inside, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the first openly gay person to win that office, thanked the group for coming.

They'd been summoned either because they had money or because they had influence in the "gay movement," such as it is today, and the organizers of this affair needed their money and influence to stage a large national march for gay rights in Washington, D.C., this October.

The mood was intense, and hardly celebratory, despite the tremendous progress toward legalizing gay marriage in New York State that many of the attendees had been involved in.

"We want results," Ms. Quinn said. "We want them now. We don't want to be told any longer that we have to wait. 'Cause look, in Albany? They said they couldn't do marriage at the beginning of the session—that they had to get other business done first. And now it's exploded in Albany. If they kept their promise from Day 1, we wouldn't be where we are."

As she spoke, Lance Bass, the now openly gay entertainer who was a member of the boy band N'Sync, sat on a couch directly to her right, throwing a small stuffed toy repeatedly to a black Labradoodle.

Dustin Lance Black, the square-jawed young Oscar winner who wrote the screenplay for Milk, leaned against the side of a fireplace with a glass of white wine, listening.

Cleve Jones, the longtime gay rights activist famous for coming up with a giant quilt made of panels sent in by the friends and families of people who have died or were suffering from AIDS (and who was played by Emile Hirsch in Milk), spoke next.

"This doesn't come around that often, the Democrats have both houses!" he said, swinging his arms and twirling his neck in a way that made him nearly a dead ringer for Lewis Black. "We elected Barack Obama. Hello? The door is open. Some of it is due to hard work of people over a very, very long period of time. Some of it is due to coincidences and anniversaries. But the door has opened and it's already swinging shut."

In New York, where a provision to allow gay marriage looked likely to pass before it factored into the implosion of the Democratic-controlled State Senate, New York's gay movement was getting some pretty great P.R. Few constituencies had the clout in Albany that organizations like the Empire State Pride Agenda had developed over years of working the halls of the Capitol to get a bill to extend the right to marry to gays and lesbians.

The issue attracted the Gill Action Fund, which, with the help of the Empire State Pride Agenda, gave $1 million to defeat weaker Republicans in local elections last year, as New York magazine recently reported. The catch, of course, was if the Democrats were victorious—which they were—they would get marriage.

The lobbying firm of Patricia Lynch, consistently one of the highest-grossing lobbyists in Albany and a former top aide to Sheldon Silver, got a $10,000-a-month contract to work on the issue.What's more, which has plenty to do with intensive direct lobbying efforts and campaign involvements by advocacy groups, advocates managed to get a number of legislators to switch their positions on gay marriage, and some of them, like State Senator Bill Perkins of Harlem, supported it even when their constituents were mostly opposed.

But to many, as important as the issue of gay marriage is, and as winnable as it still looks, the struggle to get it has had its drawbacks.

Winning on gay marriage has become an obsession among wealthy donors and lobbying groups, and carrying out the mission has, to the chagrin of some gay activists, taken gay leaders into the campaign strategy sessions and legislative offices of Albany's elected and hopefuls—and away from the mass rallies and demonstrations that had characterized the gay politics of the past. The result is a powerful lobbying machine the work of which is dominated by the caprices of state legislatures, and which at times appears to have little serious ground support from the gay on the street. And yet, when the dust has settled on the legalization of gay marriage in New York, it is precisely this movement that many gay leaders believe they will need to carry out the next big items on the Gay Agenda—whatever they are.

Also, a strategy of incremental gains in state legislatures across the country—mandated by the presence of a president perceived as cool to the gay movement's aims—appears lead-footed in light of the liberal social positions suggested by the power of the Democrats in Washington. In the last presidential cycle, little was made of the positions of the Democratic candidates on gay issues except for marriage; as a result, the Obama administration remains largely untested by gay leaders for its positions on nationwide change.

At Mr. Connor's townhouse, Ms. Quinn described a visit to the White House's St. Patrick's Day reception in March.

"For eight years, George Bush had done a lunch with no booze and you can imagine that didn't go very well," she said. "This year it was an evening party with open bar. Everyone was much happier! When I saw the president and Mrs. Obama, I introduced myself as the first Irish speaker of the City Council, the first woman and the first openly gay."

The president pretty quickly got on the defensive about his administration's commitment to gay causes.

"He kept saying the same thing," Ms. Quinn remembered. "'Don't worry, by the end of my term, you'll be happy.' It's actually not about being happy. I'm not going to wait until the end of anything."

How fast can a serious national gay movement, with a well-developed structure of fund-raising support from among the deepest sympathetic pockets and a ground operation for motivating the rank-and-file to donate smaller increments in larger number, get off the ground? While an October rally was the direct object of the group meeting in the West Village townhouse this evening, these questions were the ones everyone was asking.

"So I'm so happy that there's something we can organize around in October, to send a clear message that we're thrilled that he's the president and we're thrilled that the Democrats have control of the House and the Senate, but it's simply not enough."

Outside this fund-raising mixer, Mr. Jones had gone to the corner for a cigarette break.

"Look at New York, at your Legislature," he said as he exhaled smoke and held a glass of red wine in his hand. "I'd like to thank the New York State Senate for making the California Legislature appear competent by comparison. It's pretty vulgar, really. It's really crass. It's about the greed and personal ambitions of one of two people and they're obviously crooks. Are we going to be the pawns in this? No, we're not!"

Mr. Jones said he believed the gay movement in New York had to develop its own proposition for the future of the movement and pull away from negotiating with individual state governments on the limited number of issues politicians are willing to put on the docket."I don't think we've actually made that much progress," said Mr. Jones. "As Prop 8 showed you, every bit of progress we make at the state or local level is completely impermanent. Our brothers and sisters in Massachusetts and Iowa and the other states that passed marriage equality are still second-class citizens. The most important rights that are given to heterosexuals are not determined by the states, but by the federal government."

Mr. Jones and his friends at this reception hope that a national march on Washington on Oct. 11 will re-energize their base, move the focus away from individual state legislatures and refocus the priorities of the movement.

Back inside, longtime gay activist David Mixner was getting to the point.

"I don't have much money, but I'm going to put up $5,000," he said. "So who will match me?"

There was about a three-second silence.

"Who will match that?" he repeated, a little more forcefully this time.

Mr. Connor, the host of the party, said he would.

The topic changed to getting more donations outside the group.

And that's when Lance Bass seemed to shift the focus of the conversation. If they were looking for a grass-roots movement, maybe an approach to fund-raising should be modeled on the AIDS walk, with pledges and sponsors, and a large number of individual donations at smaller amounts?

A few people shouted, "Yes!"

"O.K., good," he said, seeming relieved. "Because I've got a Facebook that has something like 500,000 fans."

That night, $15,000 in donations were collected. A start, perhaps.

AFTER THE HONEYMOON

"I lived through the early days of the movement," said Allen Roskoff, longtime New York Democrat and gay rights activist, in an interview with The Observer last week. "Back then, there was no such thing as professional lobbyists working for our rights. There were volunteers, people who devoted their all to achieving gay rights. We took over people's offices, and we were children of the '60s and the '70s. That doesn't really exist anymore. You don't have the mass mobilization movement you had in the '70s. Everything has gotten more establishment."

Mr. Roskoff was speaking to the sense many gay New Yorkers have that the movement has become obsessed with marriage, something many who would otherwise be very politically engaged don't care much about.

"I was a little distressed at the beginning of the marriage movement and I felt like it wasn't our winner," said Ethan Geto, the longtime Democratic operative who is openly gay. "I thought it was an outlier, and then I came around to supporting it because it seemed to touch a real responsive chord with the Legislature and with activists."

Empire State Pride Agenda was patient, and moved ahead on an issue that many gay leaders found intellectually promising. And yet, in terms of rallying the base, it was also a complicated one.

"There are so many perspectives on it," said Clarence Patton, the former executive director of the Anti-Violence Project who is now running The Pipeline Project, a group dedicated to expanding leadership roles for gay people of color. "There are friends and associates on it that this is their issue they are passionate about. There are friends—it's not that they could care less, they don't necessarily believe in marriage to begin with; it's hard for them to connect that belief to the intellectual understanding importance as a human rights issue. They haven't been able to reconcile that."

"The fact is, not everyone wants to get married and not everyone is in a position to get married," said Richard Goldstein, the former executive editor of The Village Voice and a gay journalist, who said he supported gay marriage. "More than that, it has to do with a certain attitude with who is in your community and who isn't."

Specifically: Older, and middle-to-upper-income, gay couples, tend to value the right to marry more than others. And their voices are the ones heard the loudest outside of the gay universe.

"This is a typical affluent perspective," Mr. Goldstein said. "There's an illusion that what interests affluent people have are the common interests."

Take a tour of the bars that serve young, struggling gay men in Manhattan, and you will hear a very different assessment of the importance of marriage legislation. Marriage is a tricky issue—one that doesn't necessarily rouse the base for the "day to day," said Mr. Patton.

"It's a practical thing," he said. "Safety is an animal thing, an adrenaline or flight-or-fight. AIDS was life and death and it felt very immediate. But marriage is much more ephemeral."

"The fact of the matter is, our reasons are very logical: They have nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with emotion," said Cathy Marino-Thomas, the board president of Marriage Equality New York, who has been working on this issue for over a decade.

"If we ever do get marriage, it's like the movement will collapse," said Mr. Goldstein. "It's like we're whole."

"One of the things that has been very important to me and to Cleve is that we're talking something that isn't just about marriage equality," said Mr. Black, the Milk writer, back at the townhouse in his slight Texas drawl. "I think marriage equality is so very important to a certain age range and a certain group of gay people, but not to everybody. Listen, a lot of people my generation or younger don't care because we're just dating. We're not settling down. We're talking about something far more inclusive."Other gay activists interviewed by The Observer talked about how gay marriage was the kind of issue that demanded a new kind of activist methodology from the gay movement.

"This is a family issue," said Ms. Marino-Thomas. "And families are affected. I have a little kid, I'm not going to get dragged away and arrested."

She was referring to the ACT-UP days, when thousands of gays and lesbians would storm the streets and protest the local and national government's indifference to AIDS. Then, some years later, it was the death of Matthew Shepherd that organized gays to push for hate crimes legislation.

But at least here in New York, we haven't seen much of that for marriage.

"I'm a law-abiding citizen," said Ms. Marino-Thomas. "For those battles back then, it was the right thing to do. I got arrested with the best of them! I got dragged down the block. Not on this issue, though. This is about children. Our livelihood. It just has a different feel."

"There was a sense with AIDS that the issue was being ignored by the political structure and direct action was required to arouse the public," said Ken Sherrill, a professor of political science at Hunter College. "I think the objective situation here is different. Quite true, no one dies from not getting married. But the other thing is it's not being ignored and met with silence the way AIDS was. You had to go and slap people around and make people miserable to make them pay attention. Here you have a situation, state legislators are passing marriage, and the kind of action that is effective here is within the normal legislative process."

He compared the lobbying for gay marriage to "a pension increase for municipal workers."

"How do you get a pension increase?" he said. "Do people gather in churches to get that? You send busloads up to Albany, you walk through the halls and you walk through the local elected officials offices."

"The strategies are very different to depict ourselves as normal and respective and not threatening," he continued.

A few days after the fund-raiser on Friday, one of the organizers, Michelle Clunie, the attractive actress and former star of the Showtime series Queer as Folk, as well as girlfriend to State Senator Eric Schneiderman, said the group had raised $100,000 from an individual and they were looking for someone to match it.

The March for Equality is feeling momentum.

"In California, it's very inspiring right now; if you go somewhere, even if it's the more bubbly pop gay bars where people are just drinking, you just bring up Prop 8, you bring up gay marriage or you bring up discrimination and people put their drink down," said Mr. Black. "It's very, very true. People have very strong passion out there. People were marching in the streets, and many, many times now West Hollywood has been shut down because we've taken people out of bars and it was very reminiscent of what Cleve was talking about."

So why isn't that happening right now, in New York?

"I'm old, so I've seen this before," said Mr. Jones. "It seems like every eight to 10 years there's a some new burst of energy, some new issue that galvanizes people and then it dissipates and not much comes of it. What I'm really trying to do here is make the most of this new energy in the community."

By this time, the rain had let up, the sky turned bright orange, with little fluffy cotton-ball clouds that dotted the sky. Up and down Hudson Street and Eighth Avenue, onlookers craned their necks and pointed outward while snapping pictures from digital cameras and cell phones. The weather for the pride march was looking good. Governor David Paterson was there, as was Ms. Quinn.

The next day, President Obama hosted a cocktail reception in the East Room in honor of gay pride and to mark the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

"I know that many in this room don't believe that progress has come fast enough, and I understand that," he told the activists that had assembled there. "It's not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African-Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half-century ago.

"But I say this: We have made progress and we will make more. And I want you to know that I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises I've made, but by the promises that my administration keeps."

And then came his big applause line: "As we've seen so many times in history, once that spirit takes hold, there is little that can stand in its way."

By some estimates, that spirit takes hold in the gay universe about once every decade. Is it time yet?

The National Organization for Marriage, a New Jersey-based group that has campaigned across the country to stop or repeal the legalization of same-sex marriage, produced the ad, which focuses on what the group says will be the consequences of same-sex marriage on children.

The New York Times reported that the ad will start running today in New York City and the Capital Region.

"We'll all have to accept gay marriage whether we like it or not," the ad says.

This advertisement will compete upstate with ads supporting marriage, sponsored by the Empire State Pride Agenda. That group and its allies, until now, have dominated the conversation and lobbying over the issue.

The ad shows a kitchen table discussion with Karen Schuster and her children Luke and Jessica, in which she says Luke should have "the same rights as other people."

Josh Meltzer, a spokesman for the Pride Agenda, said it was not yet determined which markets the ad would air in or how much they would spend. Their last television advertisement is airing in Albany, Rochester and Syracuse.

The ad lands amid a final push for the same-sex marriage bill, which is not yet scheduled for a vote in the State Senate. Although it easily passed the State Assembly, passage is not assured in the Senate, but advocates of the measure have said they are optimistic. Earlier today, David Paterson said passage of the bill was one of his priorities for the end of the legislative session.

More than 2,000 people packed the Empire State Convention center. Organizers communicated via radio head set. Advocates sat at tables marked by legislative district—the Senate district tables tended to be longer, and lined with more people.

"This is not just about this year," said Alan Van Capelle, the executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, and the organizer of Equality & Justice Day. "For a lot of people this is about what happened in the last several months, and a lot of people are engaged now in something that we are engaged in every day of the year."

But undeniably, at show time, the muscle is there like it's never been before. Since 2002, ESPA has tripled their staff and quadrupled their budget. Around five years ago, about 500 people were coming to the annual lobby day.

Now, one of Albany's elite lobbying houses—Patricia Lynch Associates—is involved with the effort, retained by the ESPA's outside lobbyist. And for the last two weeks, the ESPA has been on the air in three upstate areas pitching same-sex marriage.

"In four days, the ad raised $150,000," Van Capelle said. This is the first time ESPA has ever hit the airwaves.

He was in Albany Tuesday to meet with legislators, throwing a pitch that at this point is well honed. There is the political angle: legislators know that there are people who care deeply about the issue and aren't shy about supporting challengers to those who oppose it. Danny O'Donnell, the gay assemblyman who sponsored of the bill in the state's lower chamber, never misses a chance to remind me that no legislator in recent memory has lost his or her seat because they voted for the bill.

"I think there's a lot more on the upside for being in favor than there is to be against it," he said. "I would not want to be a politician in 2020 running for office having voted no. I wouldn't want to be that person. And I've told all my 20-something-year-old colleagues."

Van Capelle said that he is proud to have broadened the advocacy coalition to include religious people, business groups, and unions. Indeed, many unions went on the record supporting same-sex marriage after the 2007 vote, including the labor councils in Buffalo, Central New York and the Capital District.

And then there's the emotional card: When in a meeting, Van Capelle said he talks about his twin sister, who is straight. Organizers have found more and more people willing to tell their stories. Assemblywoman Janet Duprey, who changed her position on same-sex marriage between 2007 and 2009, told me that it was after visits from parents in her district who had gay children that she decided to vote to support it.

Assemblyman Bob Reilly, who also flipped, said it was the product mostly of seeing O'Donnell and other colleagues.

"The people who I talked to who influenced me the most was Danny O'Donnell, who I had spoken to the first time, and then Deborah Glick, when I heard her speak. And somewhat Matt Titone," he said. "I thought that gay marriage was ahead of society and ahead of my constituents. And I can't say I'm particularly comfortable with it, even today, because I'm older and I didn't grow up with knowledge of gays and acceptance."

He says he was mistaken about his constituents, and there has been little pushback: As many people approached him to say they appreciated his vote as did those who were angry about it. Reilly told me he attended a memorial service earlier this week where he bumped into Howard Hubbard, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. He didn't say anything.

"What has happened is a sea change in American society, that gay people are here and around," O'Donnell said. "People are not willing to hide and not say who they are, which makes it very difficult for elected officials to ignore them. It is harder in 2009 then it was in 2003 when I first got here. Fully four Republican Assembly members have told me that they will not vote no again."