is for Nostalgia.  As the gay sensibility begins to collapse, a tremendous amount of nostalgia is generated among certain homosexual purists who want to protect their ethnic heritage from cooptation, from the pillaging of grave robbers.  They cling sentimentally to relics of their history like curators and archaeologists bent on salvaging indigenous subcultural rituals from their destruction at the hands of careless tourists.  Sentimentalization is a symptom of the subculture's decline.  It represents the wistful longings of a group witnessing the sunset of a sensibility, seeking to intervene in its preservation long after the irreversible process of its absorption by straight society has been set in motion.  Our exasperated cries of protest are a requiem for gay culture, an elegy composed by a community in mourning for itself, lamenting its own passing, beating its breast and tearing its hair as stately pallbearers carry the casket into the mausoleum.