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I don't know what gave you this impression. It bears no resemblance to the gay world I live in. Very few gays are getting married and having kids. Most remain "counter-culture outsiders" ("counter-culture insiders," I might suggest) who "want to challenge the nuclear family". (That might be putting it too strongly, I would characterize the spectrum of gay responses to the nuclear family as critical, but not entirely in opposition.)
I mean, genuinely, I'm not trying to shut you down here. This is just so different from my gay experience, that I'm not sure what information you are considering. In my experience, the vast, vast majority of gay men are dating casually and sleeping around. Gay marriage has been positive for the small minority of gay men in stable relationships who want to have kids. For the rest, I'd say it's basically had no effect at all. The organizing around the fight for gay marriage was much more important than the actual final result.
For what it's worth as an over-50, nearly all of the gay men and lesbians I know (from work, from high school, from college, from my military years) are with long-term partners or married. The few who aren't are partiers/drinkers/a bit nuts, like a fair number of the single/divorced straight people I know in this cohort.
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As far as I can tell from googling, it's something like 38% of gay/lesbian adults married or cohabiting with a long-term partner, vs about 62% for straight adults (with the caveat that the LGBT community skews young right now, so those rates might be higher if you looked at adults 30+, but I can't find that data).
That's definitely a gap, but 38% of people in traditional pair-bonded relationships (vs a baserate of 62%, so like 28/62=61% conversion rate) is nothing to sneeze at from a conservative family values viewpoint.
If you are talking about your personal experiences, I'd guess that this has a lot to do with selection effects; married people tend to disappear from a lot of communities, especially those based around dating and hookups, and of course this is hugely correlated with age.
40% is a shocking number to me, that doesn't match with my experience in the remotest. I would need to see a lot more to believe that's anywhere close to normal. If you throw in "cohabiting with a long-term partner," then maybe that gets up to 40%. Googling around I casually see 1/10 "LGBT" are married, but I'd really need to see that split out between gay/lesbian and bisexual. (Would be easy otherwise to conflate bisexuals in heterosexual marriages with gay marriages.)
I also want to add that, from experience, a lot of these "traditional" relationships in the gay community are open. I would not assume every cohabiting same-sex couple is automatically "traditional". A significant fraction of gay male relationships would not be. (I couldn't begin to estimate how many -- one-fifth? One-fourth?) I would imagine lesbian relationships to be much more monogamous, but I wouldn't be surprised if the baseline of polygamy was still higher than for the heterosexual population.
Could be, could always be, but I still really doubt ~40%. I've known a lot of gay men in various stages of life. I can think, off the top of my head, of five married couples. (1) just had their first kid via surrogate. (2) is planning to. (3) seemingly is not. (4) was happily married until one died of a freak condition. (5) got married to celebrate gay marriage getting legalized, immediately proceeded to celebrate the honeymoon with an orgy (with (1)), and divorced a year or so later when the relationship wasn't fun anymore.
There's probably a lot more I could dig into here, and I don't want to just dump all of this on you. But I would theorize that, generally, there are some gays who match your earlier description of "radical counter-culture outsiders," and some who match your earlier description of "respectability-politics-first normies". And I think these two groups are basically distinct, and always have been, and the balance between them shifts like political parties in a democracy, and there's not much of a pipeline. Gay marriage changed a lot of different dynamics, but I'm highly skeptical that it really induced gays who would not have formed stable relationships to form them.
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