“A few weeks before the wedding, over coffee at Starbucks, I asked Jamie why he wanted to marry. For my generation of gay men (I am 45), legal marriage was unthinkable, and emerging into the gay world often meant entering a cultural ghetto and a sexual underworld. Jamie, who could just about be my son, replies with an answer that turns the world of the 1970s and 1980s upside down. Once he realized he was gay, he says, he simply expected to marry.
‘Why does anybody get married?’ he asks. ‘I wanted the stability, I wanted the companionship, I wanted to have a sex life that was accepted, I wanted to have kids. For me, it’s not a choice. A marriage evens you out.'” – Jonathan Rauch’s latest column. What many opponents of marriage for gays have yet to grasp – because so many have sadly such limited awareness of or interest in actual gay lives – is that the revolution has already happened. Or, rather, the evolution. This was not a function so much of activism, although that played a part. It was a human maturation – and one of the most encouraging, healing social changes in years. I believe that one day, most conservatives will see that. I try and describe the deeper, structural change in gay self-consciousness in a new essay here. The New Republic has also kindly collected a series of my essays on gay life in the last two decades here.
The Dish 