“We are talking about making commitment.”Thirty years ago gays rioted for rights. These days, Larkin suggests, their aspirations lie in the suburbs with a mini-van and kids, leaving inner city gay enclaves and rubbing shoulders with straight parents at Little League baseball and toddler playgroups. But Frank and other gay thinkers, even as they circle the wagons against the religious right, question the wisdom of taking on the issue now. Some wonder why fellow gays, after rejecting the straitjacket of traditional relationships, are rushing into the institution of marriage.

But gay America, says Dean Larkin, the gay father of a teenage girl and leader of a parenting group in Los Angeles called Maybe Baby, is looking to settle down. In the 1970s, he says, “we were really in our adolescent stage, a lot of free sex. In the 1980s we moved into our twenties in a way, sort of coupling up. In the 1990s, we are moving into our thirties” – and addressing, he says, those paternal and maternal instincts that never went away.”Growing up as an adolescent,” says Eric Shore, a Jewish interior designer who has lived for 15 years with another California man, “my dream wasn’t about a lifetime of promiscuous sex It was about being a happy gay man. A rising number of people know someone who is gay; even Newt Gingrich’s sister is a lesbian.

“How does the fact that I love another man and live in a committed relationship with him threaten your marriage?” he demanded. “Are your relations with your spouses of such fragility that the fact that I have a committed, loving relationship with another man jeopardises them? My God, what do you do when the lights go out, sit with the covers over your head? Are you that timid? Are you that frightened?”Frank believes gay marriage will be a fact of life within 15 years in America. America, Barr said, could not be “the first country in the world to throw the concept of marriage out of the window”. It was left to Barney Frank, an openly gay Massachusetts congressman whose political career survived a scandalous liaison with a male prostitute, to fire back. Under British law a marriage is void if the parties are not male and female. The American people demand this legislation.”Only Denmark has a national partnership law that extends to gay couples.