Here in Vermont, where I live — the state that paved the way for marriage equality with its first-in-the-nation civil union law in 2000, followed nine years later by becoming the first state to voluntarily accord full marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples — coming out is so casual these days that most Vermonters shrug their shoulders and say “So what? Who cares?” when they find out that a prominent figure is gay.

Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, is in the midst of a municipal election campaign. Its voters will choose the city’s next mayor in march 2012. One of the candidates vying for the Democratic mayoral nomination is Jason Lorber, a Vermont state senator who is openly gay. if lorber wins, he was become Burlington’s first openly gay mayor.

But most Burlingtonians don’t really care. The local media here know Lorber’s gay — but they treat that fact so nonchalantly that it barely gets mentioned at all.

When Seven Days, the city’s alternative weekly, mentioned in a profile last January of Darren Perron, chief news anchor at WCAX-TV, that he was gay, the paper did it in such a matter-of-fact manner — by simply mentioning that Perron lived in Burlington “with his partner, Peter Jacobsen” and without using the word “gay” even once — many readers were surprised, yet delighted that the paper was so nonchalant about it.

That nonchalance speaks volumes about how far Vermont has come away from the sexual-identity politics that still flares in other parts of the country.

It’s certainly a far cry from my years living in San Francisco (1982-1994), when asserting one’s sexual identity was practically de rigueur for virtually everyone who lived and worked there — whether you were a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, a transgender or even a heterosexual.

Perhaps this casual nonchalance about one’s sexual orientation is what is really meant by the term “post-gay.” For a growing number of LGBT people — particularly the younger generation born in the 40-plus years after Stonewall — coming out is no longer the big deal that it once was.