BY JENNIFER VANASCO

One of the things that makes us most proud of being gay is our rich cultural heritage. But I wonder if that culture is now in danger.

By “culture” I don’t mean community. That is, I don’t mean rainbow rings or potlucks, Pride Parades or Judy Garland. I mean our artistic and literary tradition.

It’s not easy to define what gay culture is exactly, but I think one good answer is art done by gay people that is underscored by gay themes, if not necessarily gay content.

Our main gay themes, I think, are these: being an outsider; creating one’s own family; finding love in unexpected places and surprising forms; founding a life built on beauty; questioning society’s accepted roles, norms and processes.

This means, for example, that an Edward Albee play with no gay characters—say, “The Goat”—is still part of our gay culture, because it is written by a gay man and engages one of our major themes: finding unexpected love that is difficult for society to accept.

For a long time, we had a thriving culture, with names most gay people (and indeed, most of America) knew. We had literary writers like Gertrude Stein, artists like Andy Warhol, composers and conductors like Leonard Bernstein.

Traditionally, we lucky gay people have seemed to supply more than our share of culture, perhaps because as outsiders ourselves we understood the passionate visionaries and eccentric iconoclasts that create good art. Good art called to us, it resonated with us and we supported it, read about it, talked about it and bought tickets to it.

Then something happened.

Maybe that something was AIDS, which wiped out a generation and changed our focus from the artistic and literary to the political.

Or maybe we got lazy and, like the rest of the country, started confusing culture with entertainment.

We are not alone in this, obviously.

Last week, Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, writing in the “Wall Street Journal,” mourned the impoverishment of American culture, saying, “Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones. I worry about a culture that trades the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment.”

Culture, he says, teaches us what to value. Entertainment teaches us what to buy.

And this, in a nutshell, is what is happening to us.

Gay artists are still everywhere, of course. There will always be novelists, ballet dancers, stage actors, opera singers, violinists, painters and playwrights (Allbee is a good, living example) who happen to be gay.

But the difference between then and now is that we once seemed to have a community that thrived on supporting the arts, that actually created and nurtured an arts culture—and now we no longer do.

Instead of being awakened by challenging art, we sit back in our living rooms and let the easy drug of entertainment wash over us, numbing us to the world. We might not be able to name five great gay writers, but we can rattle off the last five celebrities who’ve been to rehab.

This might not matter. We are steadily assimilating; some day, being gay will be as remarkable as being left-handed.

Yet I think there is something about gay culture that is worth preserving, and before we lose it entirely, we should pay attention to the function it has for us.

Gioia points out that new studies say that Americans who read for pleasure and participate in the arts are much more likely to be part of a community, volunteer for charity and be generally active citizens than those who don’t.

This means that when we encourage participation and support of the arts, we are actually encouraging the existence and continuation of our own community.

That’s important. By supporting the arts, we are actually supporting ourselves.

But more important is the role we have as America’s gadflies. We have always nurtured the thinkers who exploded social norms and the artists who drew outside the lines.

We have questioned society’s rigidity through storytelling, music and the visual image. We have helped nurture artistic communities, and those artistic communities have helped expand the thinking of the country.

Entertainment is easy. Following celebrities is fun. But let’s balance that with a commitment to the challenges and considerable pleasures of the arts.

Gay culture is vital and it is ours. We are proud of it, and rightly so. Let’s not let it die on our watch.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com; her occasional blog is at jennifervanasco.com.