I’m beginning to feel that I am simply not accomplished enough to be a lesbian these days; that I’m not professional enough, don’t earn enough, haven’t enough secondary degrees and couldn’t begin to match the volunteering and charitable giving required. It used to be enough for me to be a lesbian mother, a pioneering parent, to be useful to “the cause”. Now it seems you need to be at the top of your profession, healing the sick, litigating for the poor, while coaching soccer and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in your spare time in order to be a “worthy” gay person.

If you believe what you see in the media.

This cultural change in 20 years is incredible. I vividly remember the days when any mention of gay men and lesbians (then referred to as “homosexuals”) would bring with it footage of the most outrageous participants of San Francisco Pride – even if it was an article on gay Harvard graduates. These days you can’t even pick up the latest People Magazine without seeing our bright, shining, accomplished faces. The issue I picked up last month had an article about one of the couples who sued to marry in Massachusetts; no drag queens, no topless dykes, just two professional, wholesome women and their happy daughter. Then I checked out the Human Rights Campaign website, perusing the slide show of newly married couples in Massachusetts and there was not a scary tattooed dyke or leather man to be seen. Are they camera shy, commitment phobic, edited out?

I suspect the latter, which is why I have mixed feelings about this parade of respectability. In the old days, I yearned for some “everyday gays” to appear in print once in a while, to balance out the Queer Nation crowd, but we’ve gone from cutting edge to a cut above the rest in a couple of decades and I’m experiencing paradigmal whiplash. I am a realist and know that if every stereotype-reinforcing couple who strove for equal rights was represented on the HRC site, it wouldn’t have the same positive impact on Middle America or politicians as these couples who look like they belong in Beaver Cleaver’s neighborhood, but I’m still not sure it’s right. Are we only as worthy of respect as our most impressive members? Are the equal rights of the many bought by the goodness, charitable giving and photogenic qualities of the few? Shouldn’t each and every stone butch, nelly queen or mullet-wearing double-mint dyke count equally in this struggle as well?

We witnessed the poster couple phenomenon firsthand when same-sex marriage came to Portland in March. The first two marriages were performed by former governor Barbara Roberts, after licenses were granted in a media-packed press conference. Weeks later it was divulged that Roberts would only do this if the couples were “non-controversial”. Poster couples. Both couples fit the bill beautifully: They had children and were well-paid professionals (or former ones, one was currently a stay-at-home mom) who dressed neatly, photographed well and were willing to put up with the media circus involved – no small task. They were chosen in advance for this symbolic and potentially litigious role, with plenty of time to prep family and be camera-ready on that fateful morning.

The rest of us waited in line outside in the cold, dressed as if for an arctic expedition, calling folks frantically on our cell phones, hoping they might be able to make it on time, or at least send flowers.

Of course in a way it’s fun to be associated with all these doctors, lawyers and lobbyists, when in such recent memory we gay folks were regularly associated with pedophiles and, say, Jeffrey Dahmer, every time we came up in print. Never in my days as co-chair of the gay and lesbian group in college did I dream that 20 years hence we, as a people, would epitomize the desire to marry, raise children, pay taxes and tithe. All we wanted at the time was for the government to pay attention to this disease called AIDS, and for the college to let us use a little space on the campus as a safe haven from our fellow students. For us, meeting in that basement room, children were out of the question, marriage between same-sex partners was a joke, and our hope was to remain unscathed and alive while being out and proud.

We’ve come a long way baby.

Though it seems that if we are asking for more than survival, it is not enough to be out, proud and a human being – we must be super-human, in order to be equal.

It is the maturity of the gay movement that brings us to this strange place. We are more politically savvy, more calculating and less strident than 20 years before. We have concrete goals, professional fund-raisers and paid lobbyists. We have adapted to the rules of the game played by those with “a place at the table”. These poster couples are pretty pawns in this game, which we might finally be winning, though in the back of my mind I wonder, is this the game we should be playing?