The end I'm talking about is the vitality of the San Francisco gay community.
AIDs did horrific damage to the vitality of San Francisco's gays and to the world. It killed a vast army of imaginative bold and creative young men.
The gay population has been slowly regaining its vitality with new entrants...it has been revitalizing, but not wholly.
Now a new and equally devastating scourge is on the doorsteps of the gay community: a battle for gay marriage.
Why might gay marriage be a destructive force in the vitality of the gay community? Picture yourself as a 22 year old gay man, horny as hell and looking for other horny men. You know the history of the Castro District is licentious, risque and wild.
Now you show up in the Castro and see men, like the photo on the right, proclaiming the value and stability of long term coupling. Everywhere you go in the gay community you hear the plea for having children and settling down in a gay marriage.
Do you, a horny young man, want to stay in this future home of middle-class suburban values? Do you want to be a horny gay man with social pressure everywhere around you to settle down and be monogamous? Could you see yourself as a gay Puritan?
Doesn't such a scenario, which is already here, sound like the end of a vital gay community to you?