INEVITABLY, SOMEBODY HAD to rain on our victory parade, in the middle of Stonewall Sunday. I refer not to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who endorsed the Let’s Blame Gays for Our Marital Problems Amendment, but to John Rechy, author of the landmark gay novel “City of Night.”

In a commentary in the Los Angeles Times, Rechy praises the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, but then launches into a litany of all the discrimination and indignities and violence endured by gay people during the past 30 years. Refusing to celebrate our monumental victory without griping, he drags gloom and doom into the room like Snoopy sitting on the television set imitating a vulture.

“Without in any way belittling the decency of the justices in their brave opinion,” Rechy says as he does it anyway, “some might view the decision as a vastly imperfect apology for the many lives devastated by cruel laws that made possible the myriad humiliations of gay people, the verbal assaults and screams of ‘faggot!’ — the muggings, the suicides, the murders.” Well, happy Pride to you, too!

Pardon me, Mr. Rechy, but the news on June 26 was so bad for right wing bigots that Strom Thurmond finally keeled over. As Paddy Chayefsky said to Vanessa Redgrave the night she ranted against “Zionist hoodlums” in accepting an Oscar, “a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.”

Rechy is not the only one among us who won’t take yes for an answer. Last month, at a “state of the movement” confab in Washington, Matt Foreman of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force talked as if we were about to be overrun by the radical right. He even discounted the anticipated victory on sodomy laws, saying that the mere removal of a negative was no big deal. Considering that people have lost their jobs and children over it, it’s a very big deal, indeed.

AS TO THE increasing apoplexy of the far right, African-American lesbian activist Mandy Carter got it exactly right when she replied to Foreman that the reason they are so upset is that they know we are winning. Maybe we’ll get lucky when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issues its upcoming marriage ruling, and all the nutty fundamentalists will have a collective Rapture and be sucked into the void.

Pardon my irreverence, but I just got an email from Focus on the Family trying to sell me two videos challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution, and I am thinking, “Bush is afraid these guys will bolt the party?” He should worry that they’ll stay. It is hardly in his interest to have the culture war take center stage in his re-election effort.

It is high time that we acknowledge we are winning. This is not to say we have won, despite conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg having so declared. Of course our fight is not over.

But as veteran gay activist Frank Kameny says, the tide of history is with us. At last the Supreme Court has upheld our right to liberty and to respect for our relationships. The implications are profound, which is precisely why the right-wing scapegoaters are up in arms.

IN SAN FRANCISCO on the day of the Lawrence ruling, members of a gay American Legion post took down the huge rainbow flag that flies over the Castro District and raised the Stars and Stripes. The only other time this was done was after 9/11, when gay rugby player Mark Bingham died among the heroes of Flight 93. We already knew that the flag flew for us, too, but Justice Kennedy and his colleagues have made it official.

There may be no such intersection, but symbolically gay people are turning in growing numbers from Christopher Street onto Main Street. This does not mean that we are abandoning our gay identities, but simply that we are shedding our outsider status.

Those who cherish the film noir appeal of cruising windowless bars in warehouse districts are free to indulge themselves. The rest of us can enjoy the sunshine.

As to the so-called “crime against nature,” given that the theocrats are impervious to the evidence and logic refuting this old slander, I can only quote the late Kate Hepburn in “The African Queen”: “Nature, Mr. Alnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

Richard J. Rosendall is a past president of the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C. He can be reached at rrosendall@starpower.net.