is for Youth Culture.  Rather than representing a significant advance in the development of our self- awareness as gay people, the new gay glossies represent a profound erosion of gay identity, a wholesale collapse of the subculture into straight urban youth culture.  The latter has become so androgynous and homosympathetic that it is virtually impossible to distinguish trendy young heterosexuals from the habitues of the flourishing club scene in gay Meccas like New York and San Francisco.  As the boundaries between gay and straight culture have become blurred and permeable, subject to cross influences and mutual maraudings, groups that were once clearly differentiated, and even antagonistic, now overlap, sharing the same interests in film, music, and clothes.  In fact, the collapse of formerly rigid demarcations has been so complete that many young gay men now have far more in common with young straight men than they do with older gay men.