But he's had quite a few years already.

Drake and Alex have no comparable alibis. But Alex may have the best out of all: He might still happily marry a woman one day. "I go back and forth," he says. "Sometimes I think I'll end up with a guy. Eventually I will make a choice." He never acted on his gay urges until 1997, and it's been mostly men since then, but he still feels attracted to women. He scoffs at the notion he's just going through a bisexual phase, but some of his friends believe it's only a matter of time until he settles down with men for good.

Bookish Alex feels an extra sense of isolation, stationed at Peterson Air Force Base, hundreds of miles from the nearest Marine base. He's also quiet and reserved among strangers. He barely spoke at Brett's barbecue where we first met, but days later he invited me into his home for an interview. The Dallas Wind Symphony swept through his tastefully understated apartment, wafting serenely through Gustav Holst's "Moorside Suite."

The next week he hosted a dinner party of a dozen close friends -- all gay, a mix of military men and civilians -- at his apartment just outside the base, and Brett invited me along. The discussion crackled with dissension on gay issues, especially marriage, gay culture and the separatism within "the community."

Drake and Alex are frankly hostile toward liberal gay activists, and take a dim view of the isolationism of gay ghettoes. Brett isn't exactly waving a rainbow flag, but tends to sympathize with those leading the gay-rights charge. Alex and Drake have only been out to themselves a few years, and some of the guests believe they're still in a transitional phase, a view they clearly resent. Their frustration peaks at what they see as the homogeneity of accepted "gay culture," which Alex calls "part of the Wal-Martization of America."

While they enjoy the company of gay friends a great deal, Drake and Alex feel little affinity for the swishier elements of urban gay culture -- particularly in contrast to the aggressive masculinity of the military life they enthusiastically embrace. Their discomfort is probably exaggerated by their sense that they're one false move away from hurtling straight from military culture to the exclusive company of gays.

They look around the living room at the most frustrating symptom of their quandary: They're discussing it exclusively with other gay men, a requirement imposed by the culture they embrace, which constantly threatens to eject them.

As the group sits around the fireplace debating gay life and gay politics -- and it's a diverse group despite being all-gay -- it's clear that while many of the debaters have significantly greater gay experience, Alex proves better read than anyone on one gay issue after another. He quotes liberally and effectively from an eclectic collection that spills out of bookcases stacked from living room to bedroom. Kerouac and Camus look down on Bill Buckley and Bill Bennett; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche nestle snugly around Dennis Miller.

But he has to scramble to the rear of the apartment to retrieve a passage from Michelangelo Signorile's "Life Outside." The gay collection is hidden away in a storage closet, piled in among combat gear, field guides and a stack of manuals on Marine Corps doctrine.

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