If there’s one good thing about living in south Louisiana (and there are many, certainly more than one, it’s not quite the sinkhole it is sometimes accused of being), living in driving proximity to New Orleans would be it.

New Orleans is a really terrific city. The best way to describe the place is rich; it’s rich with history, with music, with food, with experience. It’s a city that effuses itself everywhere you turn, and in the years since Hurricane Katrina, the city’s rebirth has amped up that feeling, adding a resilience to the richness, and the place’s exuberance is steelier.

And every Labor Day weekend, Southern Decadence takes place in New Orleans. It’s, in short, a gay Mardi Gras, a weekend-long gay block party in the French Quarter. People from all over the country come down for Decadence, and as the name suggests, there’s a lot of vice running down Bourbon Street, because if New Orleans is good for anything, it’s good for giving people an excuse for excess.

I’ve lived in Louisiana all my life, but I’ve never been to Southern Decadence. It’s never been my speed (I’m a word nerd, more comfortable at Barnes and Noble than a gay bar), and even though in my early 20s I had my share of, um, extracurricular activities, now in my late early 30s — a guy’s got to hold on to youth in any way he can — the idea of decadence doesn’t seem quite so useful anymore, it’s lost a good bit of its shine.

I went this year. Sort of.

Gardner, an online friend of mine from Oregon, came down to Decadence with friends. He’s just ended a 17-year relationship, and the promise of an unfettered weekend where he could do whatever the hell he wanted with whomever the hell he wanted seemed like a perfect expression of newfound freedom. Great in theory, sure, but once he found himself here, in practice, the freedom didn’t fit quite so comfortably.

He needed a little rescuing, so I hopped in the car and drove to New Orleans.

For about an hour we walked around the French Quarter, then we grabbed a bite for lunch while an afternoon rain carried on outside. Then, we decided to go to the Audubon Zoo, and we spent four hours wandering around, checking out monkeys and giraffes, talking, laughing, hanging out.

“You know we’re the only two gay guys in the city here at the Zoo today,” Gardner said while we were checking out reptiles. “We could be our own exhibit.”

That made me think of a coffee date I had the week before with my friend Jude. We were talking about Decadence, and he offered me this:

“Back in the days when everything was about sex and partying, it was like the gay community was just in its adolescence. And now, we’re fighting for marriage, and it seems like adulthood. As a community. So Decadence seems, I don’t know, out of step with who we are.”

I get that. And listening to my friend Gardner talk about coming down here for one thing and ending up with me at the Zoo, I was struck by how that dichotomy plays out in our community all the time.

On the one hand, we’re still defining ourselves by our sexual liberation, earning an identity in it, calling freedom the ability to love who we love, be physical with who we want to be physical with and do it without shame. On the other hand, we’re asking to define ourselves in a new way — solely through the way we love, through the acknowledgement of our relationships, through our emotional and spiritual commitment to another person.

I don’t think it has to be one or the other. But I don’t think the extremes of the two can exist together without some hypocrisy being present.

It works for me, anyway. Right now. Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe it’s really where our community is headed.

It’s an interesting time to be gay. Our community is changing. In itself. In its relationship to the world around it. And change always means, to some degree, losing something you’re carrying. And I wonder sometimes if we need to think about losing a bit of the adolescence and embrace a bit of our adulthood.