On Gay Marriage
April 28, 2008
The experience of young gay men venturing into marriage is the subject of a long, but well-written and insightful article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis in this week’s New York Times Magazine. The article follows the experiences of a handful of gay couples, each adding their own insight and humor to this relatively unexplored topic. My favorite bit from the piece:
If I was lucky enough to find love, I thought, I’d better hold onto it. And part of me tried, but a bigger part of me wanted to pitch a tent in my favorite gay bar. I wasn’t alone. Everywhere I looked, gay men in their 20s — or, if they hadn’t come out until later, their 30s, 40s and 50s — seemed to be eschewing commitment in favor of the excitement promised by unabashedly sexualized urban gay communities. There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence. While most of our heterosexual peers had experienced, in their teens, socialization around courtship, dating and sexuality, many of us had grown up closeted and fearful, “our most precious and tender feelings rarely validated or reflected back to us by our families and communities,” as Alan Downs, the author of “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World,” puts it. When we managed to express our sexuality, the experience often came booby-trapped with secrecy, manipulation or debilitating shame.
This is the best expression I’ve ever read of a feeling that I’ve had often in my adult, post-closet life—that growing up in a small town, where being openly gay is hazardous to one’s health, stunted my growth as a social being, leaving me to try to learn in my late 20’s what most heterosexuals picked up in high school.
Also, the accompanying photography by Erwin Olaf is pure, unadulterated fab.
