Yes, all of the above. Gay men who play by the rules of straight society and conventional masculinity, and who don’t aspire to belong to any other way of life, are more acceptable, to themselves and to others. The last obstacle to complete social integration is no longer gay sex or gay identity, but gay culture.

And yet gay culture is not just a superficial affectation. It is an expression of difference through style — a way of carving out space for an alternate way of life. And that means carving out space in opposition to straight society.

“Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a ‘style,’ ” Susan Sontag wrote in 1965. Style itself represents a deviation from the ordinary. It has to stand out, or stand apart from the world as it is given, in order to qualify as style.

To understand gay male culture as defined by style is to alter our sense of its meaning. That is especially useful when it comes to all those gay male styles that reveal some connection with femininity. Such gender-deviant styles make some gay men nervous, not only because they impugn their virility, but also because they recall those hoary Victorian definitions of homosexuality as a congenital abnormality involving a pathological reversal of sex roles — a mental illness.

Instead of worrying that the feminine associations of diva worship, interior decorating or the performing arts may make gay male psychology look diseased, the real question we should ask about gay style is what its refusal of canonical masculinity achieves and what it enables its practitioners, straight or gay, to do.

To inquire into melodrama, camp, irony, drag, bodybuilding or Art Deco as “gay” styles is to seek the content of gay culture in its practices — to describe the intervention gay culture makes in the world as it is given. Everything depends on the all-important and elusive meaning of style.

That very notion may seem paradoxical. “Style,” after all, is routinely opposed to “content.” And, indeed, style is not a sign or a representation of anything else. Rather, it is a thing in itself, whose meaning is right there on its surface but remains difficult to specify.

Unless we figure out how to specify that meaning, we will never understand gay male culture. We will never understand why it still survives, or why so many people, straight and gay, are so overeager to declare its death. And we will never understand the most essential thing about it: how gay culture continues to perform a sly and profound critique of what passes for normal.