HEATON, Ill. — Mike and Sue Weinberg were out to dinner when their 6-year-old son, Jack, declared, "Mommy, I'm going to marry you." When Ms. Weinberg explained that she was already married, Jack persisted, "Then I'll marry Daddy."

"You can't marry Daddy," Ms. Weinberg said patiently, "He's a boy."

"But Mark and Kevin are boys," replied Jack, logic that his mother could not refute.

Mark Demich and Kevin Hengst, the couple across the street, are not actually married. Still, in the seven years they have lived in this Chicago suburb they have become like the Buckinghams, the Therrons, the Siconolfis — just another young family in the neighborhood, socializing porch to porch on summer evenings.

Choosing the suburbs over the city, Mr. Demich and Mr. Hengst feared they would be The Gay Couple. But even in Wheaton — the home of an evangelical Christian college that until last year prohibited drinking and dancing, the seat of a reliably Republican county — they have found plenty of company. Sixty gay men and lesbians turned out for a wine-tasting a few weeks ago. About 30 played softball at a local park on a recent Saturday.

Thirty miles away, in the Chicago area known as Boystown, which officials say is the nation's first city-designated gay business district, business owners and residents say the influx of young heterosexual families has rendered the neighborhood's name an anachronism. The gay bookstore now sells more children's books than gay books.

In churches and in politics, the debate about homosexuality has focused recently on whether gays should be allowed to marry or whether gay sex should be legal. But in places like Wheaton and Boystown, people are sorting out more fundamental questions about everyday life. As gays live openly with straights, they are confronting stereotypes about one another and testing comfort zones, with varying degrees of conflict and cooperation.

One step toward assimilation almost invariably prompts another toward rejection. As the Philadelphia Phillies became the latest Major League Baseball team to hold a "Gay Community Day," talk radio lit up with accusations that the all-American sport had sold its soul. When an openly straight woman won the Gay Pride Idol talent contest in San Francisco, gays cried foul.

Overall, though, those who study trends say living side by side in more places — the 2000 Census showed gay couples living in 99.3 percent of the counties in the United States — has produced a tremendous shift in social attitudes over the past decade.

The General Social Survey, done by the University of Chicago, found that the percentage of people saying intercourse between people of the same sex is "always wrong" has dropped by 21 points in the last 10 years, to 56 percent from 77. That was after almost no movement in the previous decade, said Tom W. Smith, director of the survey. While opposition remains high, Mr. Smith said, the decline "is as large a social change as any ever."

Much survey data, Mr. Smith said, suggests that greater acceptance has come from more people knowing someone who is gay.

"It's the same as racial equality," he said. "The point is to think of them as individuals, who are also co-workers, neighbors, someone who supports the local charity drive — to see people as people, except in this one little way they're different."

In Wheaton, Mr. Demich, 42, said he liked the diversity. "Of families," he explained, after a brief pause. "As opposed to city culture, where everything is around gay life, gay events. That's not really the way America lives."

When he and Mr. Hengst decided to move to the suburbs, they told their real estate agent, "Anything but Wheaton," knowing its conservative reputation. Then they found the perfect house. They hung out a Gay Pride flag, and the neighbors invited them to a block party. The couple said they would bring fruit salad.

"Everyone broke out laughing," Mr. Weinberg, a contractor, recalled. "They were making fun of it, which went over well."

Neighborhood children have confronted the couple with questions: Do you two sleep together? Do you have wives? Their parents cringe, but also say they consider themselves, and their children, fortunate.

"Growing up in a good Catholic family, I didn't even know about anything like this," Ms. Weinberg said. "It wasn't thrown in front of me. These kids, if they don't see it now, they're going to see it soon. Living on a block like this is more the real world."

A few blocks over the train tracks, Ladd McClurg and Brad Ogilvie had similar concerns about moving to Wheaton when Mr. Ogilvie accepted a job in town. Mr. McClurg, who grew up in the Mormon faith, being taught that gays were sinners, said he arrived with "almost a visceral disdain" for Wheaton's many churches and their members.

"I learned to discover they're not all bigoted," Mr. McClurg said. "There are a lot more variations on the middle out here than I was willing to give credit for."

Still, gays here say they step carefully to avoid causing offense.

Betty Burns and Lisa Rechkemmer say they would never hold hands or hang out a pride flag for fear of upsetting their good relations with the neighbors. Mr. Ogilvie and Mr. McClurg display the flag, but resist the urge to hold hands unless they visit the city. One lesbian in Wheaton talked about how accepting her neighbors were, but did not want to be identified by name because she feared the kind of hate calls she and her partner received when they moved in two years ago.

Mr. Demich and Mr. Hengst had to go to six or seven churches before they found one that did not preach that homosexuality is a sin.

The church they chose, St. Paul Lutheran, had declared itself "open and affirming" to gays five years ago, but only after a struggle. The decision was prompted not by gay parishioners — there were none at the time — but by a young man who had been baptized and confirmed in the church who died of AIDS.

"It lifted the issue," said Marianne Avery, a member of the church council that debated the change. "It was, `This is our children, this is not about letting someone in.' "

Still, a handful of members left. "What if they show up in drag?" the Rev. Melody Eastman, the pastor, recalled one woman asking.

Three years ago, when Rena Thompson and her husband bought their condominium just off North Halsted, the main thoroughfare of the Boystown neighborhood in Chicago , four out of five units in their building were owned by gays. Now, just two are. Living in such close quarters, Ms. Thompson said, has broadened her conception of gays.

"The guys upstairs, they bought a summer house in Michigan," she said. "I see gay couples all over the neighborhood who have better relationships than some straight couples I know. If they want to live like me and my husband, fine."

Even as some gays welcome the acceptance that the arrival of straight neighbors seems to signal, others worry about losing their hold on the once-abandoned neighborhood they gentrified. Lee Neubecker, who is selling the apartment he and his partner own beneath the Thompsons, is happy to see the diversity. Yet he sounds wistful. "Too much of an influx can change the character too quickly," he said.

Gay business owners are particularly worried, most recently because of a lawsuit filed by residents of a new condominium against a gay nightclub over complaints about noise and trash. The more family and residential the neighborhood becomes, they fear, the more hassles they will confront.

"We need to have some respect for each other," said Arthur Johnston, co-owner of Sidetrack, a 22-year-old gay nightclub. "My issue is when people come in and say, `Oh, I didn't know there were gay people here.' I mean, come on, folks."

He and other bar owners demanded meetings with developers of other condominiums when they discovered that promotional materials for the project said nothing about the neighborhood's gay history.

"People have to be told that the street shuts down once a year for the Gay Pride Parade," Mr. Johnston said. "You can't have people buying and then discovering the six-foot-eight drag queen on roller wheels."

In 1997, concerned that new residents and developers were not respecting the neighborhood's identity, gay business owners convinced the city to put up rainbow-painted steel pylons along North Halsted to stake out Boystown as gay territory.

Tom Tunney, a restaurant owner who was appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley as the city's first openly gay alderman, and elected to the position in February, said the rainbow pylons were intended to protect from "overgentrifying."

"We want to keep it as gay-friendly as possible," he said.

Some gays feared identifying the neighborhood as "gay" would depress real estate values.

On the contrary, values increased; straight people who moved in say they think of gays as maintaining nice homes and yards.

"Chicago has been been so segmented, and not gay-friendly," said Desiree Witte, stopping her baby stroller in a tiny park on a quiet side street in Boystown. "It speaks wonders that they would do something like put those pylons up, to say not only is this a gay community, but we're honoring it."

The increasing diversity of the neighborhood has prompted a debate among gays about whether they need enclaves like Boystown anymore.

Jerry Sherwood, the owner of a candy store, is pleased that Baby Gap and Walgreens have arrived to stabilize the business district. He prefers the name Lakeview to Boystown. At the same time, he says, "I want it to be gay because I want to feel comfortable."