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Imagine an idyllic Gay Valley. It's a paradise for homosexuals. Everybody's queer. The streets are cruisy, carefree, and clothing-optional. Beside hot and cold, there are taps in every kitchen with municipally-supplied strawberry daiquiris and a fruity Australian shiraz. Madonna gets piped into all elevators, and Valley-wide wi-fi means everyone's always checking their state-provisioned Blackberries to hook up. In taxi cabs, the cameras trained on passengers aren't there to prevent hold-ups -- you simply tip your driver by flashing your member. Public toilets offer lube next to the soap dispensers, with porno spreads on the walls to set the mood. Tapping your foot in a stall doesn't always mean a dick pokes through the regulation glory holes, but never does it end with a cop pulling out his badge.

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estled among evergreens on the mountain peaks towering over Gay Valley looms a giant natural reservoir, the judicious release of water from which provides Valley denizens excellent power and plumbing. Electricity is too cheap to meter. Toilets flush with bowl-clearing vigor. Waterwheels run the beloved Whipmatic Spankmeisters that are fixtures at The Sphincter, the Valley's most popular Levi/leather bar.

For the sake of their tans, Valleyites appreciate sunny days. But they love the occasional drenching downpours even better. You see, the more water in the mile-high reservoir, the more free power for running the local server-farm that's behind the hookup lines. The more presure and steam to keep bathhouse jacuzzis hot and gushing. The more rain, the more pink bottles that Gay Valley lets loose on the world of its signature L'eau du Gai, favored by metrosexuals from Nairobi to Guangzhou.

In truth, the reservoir's walls have been weakening for decades. But just in the past few months, they've been cracking visibly. It's obvious to anyone pausing to look up while enjoying the famous open-air urinals in Michaelangelo Square. After a recent heavy August storm, Gay Valley's generators were humming like never before, and the bottling plant ran above quota by 100,000 cases, assuring a surge of hard currency. But in the back of residents' minds lurks a growing fear the reservoir will burst. That would spell the end of the vibrant queer life that flourishes in Gay Valley, which would then find itself at the bottom of deep mountain lake.

At least the death would be quick and collective, folks rationalize as they try to lull themselves to sleep. Silent dread is seeping through the town like radon into a basement, but finds curious expression: for weeks the leaders of the Gay Valley City Council have been rent into bitter factions about whether to repaint the cracked retaining wall chartreuse or teal.

Gay Valley works very well. But the same watery dynamics that keep its jacuzzis surging, the Spankmeisters slapping, and bank accounts flush with foreign exchange could also destroy it in a moment. Gay Valley's secret of success could be its doom.

Is Gay Valley a parable for today?

The U.S. gay movement has gone from success to success. But lately, we've hit some walls.

Simply making marriage the GLBT centerpiece evidently lurched national politics rightward in the key 2000 presidential election. Now 45 U.S. states have either passed a law or amended their constitutions to bar same-sex marriage.

And it's hard not to notice a raging hate-politics around sex ongoing in America. It's not that gay people are the direct targets. But the firestorms -- around "kiddie porn," "sex-offenders," "internet predators" -- singe the margins and cast glowing embers into the Gayborhood.

This sexual hate isn't new. The heat has been building up for years. But it's now hot enough to be noticeably buckling the pillars of civility.

· After its voters ratified "Jessica's Law" in 2006, California police are raiding, evicting, and arresting thousands of men who had records for breaking sex laws and who are now prohibited from living within 2000 feet of a park or school. In September alone, 2700 people were told to get lost or go to jail. People with sex raps are now barred, in effect, from living in San Francisco or most other cities. In hunting them down, cops without warrants are knocking down doors at homes of friends and relatives where they believe sex offenders may be hiding.

· Last February, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the 200-year sentence handed to Morton Berger, an Arizona teacher, for possessing 20 images of gay porn depicting minors, erotica one could have bought with a wink in Greenwich Village a dozen years ago.

· In Charleston, South Carolina, Emory Michau is in his fifth year of confinement after he completed a three-year sentence for suggesting sex to a 17-year-old boy. "I'm back in the dungeon, the old jail, where I spend 24 hours per day (out for showers three times per week) in a 4-1/2 by 6-1/2 foot iron cell with a dirty concrete floor," says Michau. His jailors allow him no reading matter except the Sunday New York Times. Michau, who had a previous nonviolent conviction, is being held simply for refusing to submit to an examination by a psychologist for the state, which is seeking to lock him up forever under its civil-commitment law.

To note that injustices such as these are not central concerns of U.S. gay institutions would be an understatement. In fact, these manifestations of sexual hate -- even if partly reactions against the rise of the gay movement -- are widely seen as underscoring our gains. They play to our strength: celebrating the sexual freedom of consenting adults.

But that's where maybe something's now shifted.

Of course it's hard to gauge inflection points of big trends. When is it the start of a catastrophic jag of global warming, and when is it just a hurricane season in which there's Katrina?

But this past summer gay people in the U.S. had an unexpected shock. There was sudden widespread realization that a slightly modified version of a federal porn record-keeping law -- a relic of the Reagan administration's Meese Commission -- could destroy what has become one of gaydom's most prominent new institutions: online hookup services that now serve millions.

Other kinds of legal weaponry, aimed hitherto at only despised sexual minorities, are increasingly aimed at sadomasochists, fetishists, and people with HIV.

In Gay Valley, the long-standing view of hydraulics was: the more water in the reservoir the better. More forward-looking minds are wondering: is the pressure getting too high?

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com