There is no big neon sign outside the entrance to The Park, the biggest and oldest -- not to mention only -- gay dance club in Roanoke, just a placard and a plain purple door, outside which a shivering knot of people is waiting. Once inside, clubgoers make their way down a small, dark, smoky hallway into a huge, dark, smoky room where, on a stage flanked by black curtains, a tiny but astonishingly loud-voiced woman is asking people how they are doing and hectoring them until they give the classically Southern response, "AHHHIIIIGHT!"

It's Sunday night, so this is The Park's regular Sunday night drag show. The woman on stage really is a woman, but before long she will be replaced by 10 or so female impersonators, elaborately coiffed temptresses with names like Savannah Savage and Phoenix Amber and Montana St. Claire and the reigning Miss Gay Virginia, a platinum-haired heartthrob named Ashley Adams. The show has not begun; just now the crowd is mingling to ear-splitting tunes and semi-intelligible emcee patter.

Out on the floor, every kind of person is dancing. There are big black guys in khakis and little white guys in dreadlocks, and women in jeans and sweaters who look like any coed you might see at a University of Virginia fraternity party. There is a circle of men swaying together with their arms interlaced and another group of men taking off their shirts to compare nipple rings. There is a guy with a biker haircut chatting amiably with a man wearing what might best be categorized as Realtor drag: a black knit pantsuit and shoulder-length blond streaked hair. Almost everybody is wearing pants.

Except, of course, the performers, who appear and enact a series of numbers while wearing the sort of elaborate costumery that little girls dream about: sequined and beribboned Cinderella gowns that, when the performer's torso is not excessively matronly, get ripped off to reveal some elaborate merry widow ensemble beneath. Tonight's show is the annual AIDS benefit; in Roanoke, as elsewhere, HIV death rates have fallen in the gay community and there is less urgency to raise funds, so the take will not be what it once was. Even so, about $2,000 will be contributed before the night is over, most of it in crumpled ones and fives stuffed into a container at the front of the stage.

"This one is in memory of Danny Overstreet," a different emcee says after one donation. He does not need to explain that he is referring to the gay man who was killed on September 22 in a shooting at the Backstreet Cafe, a nearby bar and pool hall whose clientele is predominantly gay. At another point a chubby queen, panting after doing a cartwheel, shouts, "If you won't give money to AIDS, give money to a fat girl who's out of breath!"

Backstage afterward, the drag queens stalk around in various stages of undress while I chat with Wayne, a soft-spoken, personable man in slacks and a beige ski sweater. Wayne is chair of the Roanoke AIDS Council. He began doing volunteer AIDS awareness work in 1985, when a friend of his, the director of the Alleghany and Roanoke City Health District, asked him to become a peer counselor for the men who were starting to come in for anonymous testing. As a gay man, Wayne was relied on to explain pretty much everything about gay life to other health workers. One of them, a woman who looked remarkably like Wayne's mother, asked him at the first meeting if he knew gay slang. When Wayne shyly replied, "I think so," the woman asked, very straightforwardly, the precise definition of a particular sexual practice.

"That was the beginning of my metamorphosis," says Wayne. "I blurted it out, and she was, like, 'Oh.' And I thought: Well. That didn't hurt."

And this, Wayne is reflecting at 3 in the morning while performers take off their wigs and undo their crotch bindings, is what's different about being gay in a smaller community: There is no large gay enclave to retreat into, no Dupont Circle and certainly no Castro. Because of this, you are forced to relentlessly interact with people who are not gay. To take a more prosaic example, Wayne used to head the support department of a computer firm where customer service was run by "a guy who is extremely proud of being a redneck." Over time Wayne and this man became friends, and then close friends, to the point where Wayne ended up as best man in his co-worker's wedding.

"Here," he says, "you mesh yourself into a larger community and forge friendships with people who haven't had exposure to gay people before."

Having said this, he does not put himself entirely on the record. Despite his deep commitment to Roanoke's gay community, Wayne prefers not to have his last name published. Waving to the performers as they file out of the backstage area toward their day jobs, Wayne explains that his elderly father used to be a deacon in a Baptist church in a small town nearby. He would not want to embarrass him.

"My name has never been in print," he says. "Otherwise, I'm out."

That night came to epitomize, for me, much of gay life as it's lived in my southwestern Virginia home town: the hilarity and looseness, the fun and casual friendliness, the inclusiveness, the outlandishness side by side with the quiet ordinariness, the hard-won sense of community -- and the fact that so little of it takes place in a public setting. So closeted are many gay Roanokers that some of the organizers of the city's annual gay pride event, "Pride in the Park," prefer not to have their names in the paper. Yet there are more gay groups in Roanoke than one might imagine: not just local branches of well-known national groups like Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), but also a gay political action group and a gay bowling league and a gay country dancing group and a gay Alcoholics Anonymous group and a leather-and-Levi's club that, among its many civic activities, helps an area 4-H Club put on its horse shows.

There are private supper groups for lesbians who like to dine with gay men, and supper clubs for lesbian separatists. There is a teen support group that gathers in Roanoke's central library one night each week and an informal group of men that meets weekly, for dinner, at a local deli. There is an exclusive, invitation-only club for older women that calls itself SOUL, or Slightly Older Unique Lesbians. "She's a real estate agent . . . she's a lawyer . . . she works for General Motors, traveling around the country," a church pianist named Jacque told me one evening over a roast beef sandwich, fanning out snapshots of fellow SOUL members during discreet get-togethers in one another's homes. They also meet at a local senior center, which is not aware of (and has not inquired into) the nature of the group. "One of the members plays bridge there, so she has the key," Jacque confided.

"In a town this size, and in many other towns, hundreds of thousands of towns, we don't live our whole lives as gay," one man told me, trying to explain that it is one thing to be gay and another thing to live every part of your life as a gay person. In smaller cities and towns, he argued, people may be gay, but chances are they don't live every part of their lives as gay people. They may be gay sexually but they are not gay culturally. "We have parties and we do things that are part of a homosexual community, but that's not our lives. That's just a small part of our life."

I was talking to people about this because I grew up in Roanoke, an industrial town of 95,000 in the Blue Ridge Mountains four hours southwest of Washington. As a teenager in the 1970s, I didn't, I am pretty sure, even know what the word "gay" meant: There was no gay bar that I knew of, no television shows with gay characters, no discussion of homosexuality in what little sex education we had. Being female, I rarely heard the taunts boys traded, though even I was aware that on the sandlot football team, one coach had a habit of forcing slow or untalented players to carry around a baby doll. On some level, I guess, I knew that different forms of sexuality existed: In high school we used to drive down to the city farmers market at night to look at the transvestites idling around the street corners. I also remember my mother saying with amusement that her male hairdresser had been seen downtown in a dress. There were guys in high school who didn't have girlfriends, and girls who didn't have boyfriends, but everybody was in that state at one point or another, and nobody paid much attention. It wasn't until college, when I made my first close friend who was openly gay, that I gave any real thought to the matter and, in retrospect, began to wonder what Roanoke had been like for high school friends who knew they were -- or would discover they were -- gay.

Then came the Backstreet Cafe shooting, a horrific incident in which a man named Ronald Gay allegedly walked down Roanoke's main downtown thoroughfare, asked a teenager where to find a gay bar, received directions to The Park, happened to find the Backstreet first, went inside and opened fire. In the ensuing chaos, Danny Overstreet was killed and six others were wounded, two men and four women, one of them so badly that it was feared for a while that she might die, too. Apprehended immediately after the shooting, Gay -- a Vietnam veteran with a history of mental illness -- told police that he had shot gay people because he disliked being teased about his name. He is currently in jail, awaiting trial on charges of first-degree murder and malicious wounding.

In addition to being shocked by the incident, like most Roanokers I hoped it was a fluke, and in no way representative of community sentiment. I worried that here again was a news event that would confirm every cherished stereotype of the region, and would do so in the national news. Nor was I the only one who feared this. "I'm the one who sent in the [earlier] item about how nice it is to live here, and I want everyone to know that this hasn't changed," Jacque e-mailed an Internet group she subscribes to, pointing out (as I often did) that Gay wasn't from Roanoke; that he was a drifter who had moved to Roanoke to receive treatment in a nearby Veterans Affairs hospital. "Despite a fairly hostile climate in the fundamentalist churches, at work and around the community, I have heard many voices expressing tolerance."

"Roanoke draws gay people from the surrounding hinterlands just the way Richmond does and Washington does; it's almost like a gravitational force," said Sam Garrison, an openly gay, politically active lawyer who practices in Roanoke. "I think the very fact that that happens says something about the climate. If the consensus was that it's no better to live in Roanoke than Grundy, people wouldn't move to Roanoke." Nobody wanted people thinking the city was populated exclusively by bigots and people victimized by them.

"I was shocked," Garrison added, "but the shock wasn't that this told me something about the community I didn't know. It was just a shock in the same way that I know that planes crash, and if I'd heard that a plane had hit St. Andrew's Church and 400 people were killed, I'd have been shocked. But it wouldn't have made me move."

The shooting raised other questions for me, some of them embarrassingly basic. Obviously there was a gay bar in Roanoke and, it followed, a gay community. For the people present at the shooting, what was it like being not only wounded or terrorized but, potentially, outed? Clearly things had changed since I was growing up -- but how much? Now that a pride movement born in New York and Washington and San Francisco has made its way to the heartland, now that farmers in Botetourt County can watch "Will & Grace" and teenagers in Boones Mill can log on to gay Internet sites, how does this emerging sense of identity play out on Main Street?

How it plays out on Main Street may -- I learned -- be the real story in gay life today. Though people in Roanoke and other smaller cities and towns may still live something of a twilight existence, half in the closet and half out, out with their friends but not at work, or out at work but not with their families, or out with some family members but not with others, there are more people fully out in the open every day, either by choice or involuntarily. The conflicts that ensue may be lonelier and more difficult than those that gay people are fighting in big cities, where, as one man put it, "the revolution has already happened."

"People who live here -- I don't want to say they are braver. But it's in Middle America, just by my being out or somebody else being out at work, or out with their friends -- it changes people's perceptions," said Will Trinkle, a gay man and high school friend of mine. Like me, Will had no clear sense, growing up, of what being gay meant or what a gay community might consist of, but he did have an awareness from an early age that he was "different." After graduating from U-Va., he moved to Manhattan and came out there, and lived there during the height of the AIDS crisis, losing his best friend and countless other friends to the disease, 60 or 70 names he has recorded in the back of a diary. When he moved back to Roanoke to help with the family real estate business, he was determined not to live in the closet.

"People fear what they don't know," said Will, "and if they know [you're gay], they either have to decide they don't like you and don't want to be around you, or if they do really like you and like being around you, they have to change their attitude."

But changing attitudes is a harrowing process. "It was like a battlefield," said Sue Abernathy, who has lived with her partner, Brenda Bishop, for almost 20 years. Abernathy, who runs her own housekeeping business, and Bishop, who works as a jewel cutter, share their household with Bishop's teenage nephews, two boys for whom Bishop was appointed guardian when her brother died. They have tried, they said, to give the boys a conventional, even conservative upbringing -- to ensure that the boys believe in God and that they will someday be "good husbands" -- but for the longest time the peace of the household was disrupted by neighbors who were always revving their engines and shouting things like "dyke" and "butch." Once, Abernathy got so exasperated she shouted: "You got the dyke part right, but I'm not butch! I'm femme!"

"Each year I get a little more comfortable," another woman told me at the 14th anniversary dinner for the predominantly gay and lesbian Metropolitan Community Church of the Blue Ridge, talking about her fear that she will lose her children in a custody dispute. Like many gay men and lesbians, this woman attempted heterosexual marriage but eventually moved in with another woman, a former Roanoke police officer with whom she lives on a farm in Moneta, a rural community nearby. Though her two youngest children live with them and attend school in Moneta ("Just about anybody there would tease me," her son said, explaining why he does not tell his classmates his mom lives with a woman), she lives in fear that her husband will try to win custody and that her sexual orientation will count against her, as it did in one high-profile Virginia Beach case several years ago.

"I don't want the years to go by," she said, "but every year I feel more comfortable, in that the older they are, the more say they have in who they'll live with."

When the battles aren't epic, they can be comic. I spent an hour one afternoon with a man who wanted to be identified as Larry P., the co-owner of OutWord Connections, a gay and lesbian bookstore and novelty shop. During our conversation, Larry -- who is also a volunteer firefighter and reports no problems being gay in the firehouse -- was unpacking some gels and lubricants, ForPlay Lube de Luxe and Original Formula Elbow Grease Gel, which the UPS man had just dropped off with a pleasant hello.

While he worked, Larry explained how he and his partner have arranged the store. Cruising is discouraged; all magazines are sold in plastic wrappers (flipping through open magazines is, he said, a common cruising activity); and the more explicit magazines and videos and lingerie are kept in the back. People in Roanoke have a fairly strong sense of public propriety, and gay people in Roanoke are no exception. "We keep nudity above waist level, for when we have kids coming in with their gay and lesbian parents."

Even so, the bookstore is running into problems, Larry said, in part because it refuses to remove a certain item from its display window. For the most part, the window is full of innocuous decorations like abstract sculptures and rainbow candles, but way at the tippy top, in the left-hand corner, are two -- count them, two -- Barbie-size "drag queen" collectible dolls, resting beside two "trailer trash" collectibles. The landlord came in one day and requested that the drag queens be removed, and also, Larry said, wanted to write a new lease giving her more say over the window. Larry decided he'd rather find a new building to rent.

Why would a gay person live in Roanoke? It may be a naive question, but at times it did occur to me to wonder: If you are a gay man or a lesbian (or bisexual or transgendered person, which is the inclusive term that many advocates prefer), why not do everything in your power to move to a big city where you can live life, and pursue happiness, with greater openness and comfort? Why not move to Washington, say, where even if you bought a house in Bethesda or Centreville, even if you worked for a defense contractor or high-powered law firm, you would still have Dupont Circle, and Adams-Morgan, and Capitol Hill, and the refuges therein, and the degree of tolerance these areas have helped to create throughout the city?

Obviously, there are many reasons you might not want to do that, the same reasons why many people, gay or straight, prefer to live in smaller towns and cities: The close sense of community that a small place provides. The slower lifestyle. Cheaper housing. Better traffic. Low crime rate. "This is the best place I've ever lived," said a gay man named Anthony I met at the Backstreet Cafe one night; a recovering substance abuser who formerly lived in Baltimore, he likes not just the unpretentious friendliness of the Roanoke area but, in particular, the fact that no one approaches him at traffic lights to sell him drugs.

Gay people move to Roanoke, of course, for the same varied reasons Americans move anywhere. And they stay for the same reasons Americans stay anywhere. Tammy Nerenberg moved to Roanoke from Houston, for example, to be near a woman she'd met over the Internet. When the relationship didn't work out, Nerenberg had every intention of moving on to New York -- except that by then she had worked her way into a career-track management job at Carilion Health System, a health network that owns a number of regional hospitals and is now the Roanoke area's largest employer. A lot of gay men and lesbians work in health care, and Carilion is perceived as a particularly gay-friendly place to work. So gay-friendly that when Nerenberg makes a new hire, her subordinates quietly fill the new person in on her sexual orientation, so the new person doesn't say anything rude or stupid.

Which is not to say that everybody who is gay in Roanoke really wants to live in Roanoke. "Yesterday we were at the mall and the person at the engraving place called me 'sir,' " said Nerenberg's new partner, Rhonda Chattin. Chattin, who grew up in Salem and now serves as the volunteer head of Outright, a local support group for gay teens, would love to move to a bigger city where she could find work as a gay activist that actually pays.

"If I could get a job, earn a living in Washington or New York, I'd be there in a heartbeat," said attorney Sam Garrison; he and his partner go to New York at least once a year, not just for the gay life but for the culture, "and when we come back, we're always depressed."

But if you love mountains, it's hard not to love the Roanoke area. The mountains may have a backwoods element, but they also nurture a sort of Pacific Northwest progressivism: The libertarian, leave-me-alone ideal is not the exclusive purview of gun-amassing militia movements. There are hippies in the Roanoke Valley, and organic farmers, and commune dwellers, and wineries, and Internet gurus, and even gay survivalists. When it comes to sheer spectacular living arrangements, I had never seen anything like the setup shown to me by a 70-year-old former military pilot and his longtime companion, a former high school football player, who have been together for more than 40 years. ("You hear about the cannons going off, the firecrackers," said the pilot. "They did for me.") One afternoon the couple drove me up a gravel road to the top of a mountain they own. Houses are cheap in Roanoke, and so, relatively speaking, are mountaintops. At least, they're a lot cheaper than they would be in Lake Tahoe or Vail or even Fauquier County.

As we rolled through the electronic gate leading onto their property, the two men said that they'd cleared the road leading up the mountain themselves. They cleared the mountaintop and built the house as well, a well-furnished A-frame they planned and constructed and plumbed and wired. They also built the hunting lodge and the guesthouse. They planted all the fruit and nut trees, English walnuts and hazelnuts and other varieties the pilot -- who quit the military after flying transport during the Bay of Pigs debacle and moved back to Roanoke to oversee a family business -- likes to cultivate. At sunset the two of them can stand on their deck and look down on the valley: the sun setting behind the mountains, the lights of the airport, the waters of Carvin's Cove, the city reservoir, shimmering in the waning half-light.

It's true there have been encounters. While working on the house, the men had lunch one day at a truck stop where they got into an altercation with an employee who was vacuuming under their table. One thing led to another; they objected to the dust from the vacuum and management was not obliging and so the two men left, and while they were leaving a group of men made fun of the way the ex-football player walked. When the two got in their truck, a fist came through the window and hit the ex-football player in the face.

"That hurt!" said the football player, a stout, blond-haired, ruddy-faced man who was padding around his house, wearing a down vest, rugby shirt and bright red socks as he described the encounter. "Well, I'm German and Irish and a little Cherokee, it went all over me, so I reached down underneath the seat of the truck and got a pair of tire chains that had cleats on them. And I came out swinging one chain in each hand, like this," he said, demonstrating. "And I had all five of them lined up against the side of the wall and cut the guy across the face, the one that hit me, and we called the police, and the police came, and took them all to jail."

Years later, the ex-football player ran into one of the police officers, with whom they have good relations -- the two men assist police whenever there are fugitives or vandals on the nearby Appalachian Trail -- and the officer said, laughing, "Do you remember that year you had all those guys lined up against that wall?" It had become a station legend.

"I've often thought," said the ex-football player, "and this is not making any disparaging remark against men that are a little more effeminate than I am, but if we had been that type, we could never have lasted up here."

"Because it's pretty much a redneck climate," said the ex-pilot.

"In a redneck climate," the ex-football player agreed, "they'll test you."