WHAT an altered world we live in. What an advanced one. The man I love and I can be married in New York or 35 other states if we ever get organized enough, if we decide that we want public vows and a gaudy cake — I’m thinking devil’s food, for a host of reasons — to seal our commitment.

I’m grateful for that. I’m stunned, really.

And yet. When we’re walking down the street after a long dinner or a sad movie and he slips his hand in mine, I tense. I look around nervously: Is anyone staring? Glaring? I feel exposed, endangered, and I’m right to, even here in New York, even near my apartment on Manhattan’s epically liberal Upper West Side. Just two years ago and two blocks from my home, an inebriated young woman who spotted us shouted: “So you’re gay? These two are gay!” She went on and on like that, for what seemed an eternity.

It was the booze talking, sure. But sometimes alcohol is a truth serum, stripping the varnish of etiquette to reveal the ugliness beneath.

A straight woman puts a photograph of herself and her beloved on her desk at work and it’s merely décor. A lesbian displays the same kind of picture and it’s an act of laudable candor or questionable boldness: a statement, either way you cut it. She knows that some people’s eyes will linger on it too long, or will turn from it abruptly. She has to decide not to care.