EDMUND WHITE

MARRIAGE HAS ALWAYS APPEALED to my heart (and even, oddly enough, to my crotch) and offended my head. For years, throughout my 20s, I longed to get married to a man, and the idea so excited me that I had to learn not to propose: I realized it was too much of a turn-on for me to trust it. The rhetoric of eternal love and marital fidelity thrilled me, though I was never faithful to anyone longer than a month. At the same time I knew that real marriage--the kind that actually existed between men and women and not in my same-sex fantasies--was primarily a legal and economic institution, a bride exchanged for cowrie shells or cows. Having seen my parents live through a difficult divorce, I knew perfectly well that when love evaporated what was left was rancor, a hit squad of lawyers and drained family coffers.

Nevertheless, from a practical political point of view I'm not sure that the breakdown of marriage has been of any advantage to women and children. On the contrary, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist revolution of the 1970s have had the totally unexpected and unintended result of depriving women of husbands' support and pushing women into the labor market, where they earn about 76 percent of what men earn for the same work. Social changes have also left single mothers high and dry without alimony or shared parental responsibilities. Men have gained and women have lost; as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued, the end of marriage has been a practical disaster for women. Perhaps these inequalities will be righted when the feminist revolution is more thoroughly assimilated.

And what about gay marriage? At first my rational side could see no advantages to it. I belong to the 1970s generation of gay liberationists who thought that gays might provide straights with a new, superior model of association, long chromosomes of lovers, partners, serial husbands and fuck buddies that would answer the real complexity of human needs. We were all certain that the ideal of companionate marriage invented in the nineteenth century represented an unrealizable goal, especially when the claims of hedonism and self-realization that cropped up in the second half of the twentieth century weakened the ethic of self-sacrifice. Companionate marriage--in which just one other person was supposed to be helpmate, sexual partner, best friend, domestic manager and soul-sister for life--obviously was not something that came naturally to the vagrant human spirit. Only strong religious convictions and an inflexible self-discipline could make it work, as well as a sense that one was living not for pleasure but out of duty to the next generation. Once that model of marriage started to collapse, gays proposed their own molecular models of multiple partners. To be sure, our model emerged in the late 1970s because that was an era in which antibiotics had stilled our fears of venereal disease and AIDS had not yet appeared with a new fatal consequence to promiscuity.

AIDS in the 1980s killed off many of the gay men who'd been adventurous about their personal lives--guys who slept around, took it up the ass, tried out new positions, played versatile roles, experimented with drugs. It preserved those men who were too drunk or too fearful or too puritanical or too homely or too traditional or too stiffly macho to try out any of those fun new gadgets or practices. Whereas the only visible gay leaders in the 1970s had been the leftist liberationist crowd, AIDS in the 1980s flushed out of the woodwork conservative, middle-class men, the ones who'd had no stake in coming out previously but who now were forced by disease out of the closet. Once out, these middle-class men seized power and knew how to wield it. They brought to the gay movement their own conservative values--including a respect for the family and for marriage.

Until a year ago I would have sniffed at the gay pro-marriage movement as just one more effort on the part of gay neocons to assimilate with their white, middle-class, straight friends and relatives. But the uproar of the Christian right against gay marriage has won me over to the cause. Anything that Republicans and Christians hate so much can't be all bad. The question for me is no longer one of lifestyle but rather of civil rights. Lesbians and gays should have all the same rights as straights. Some of the rights we gained earlier were peripheral (and often reversible), whereas marriage goes right to the heart of national concepts of community and the future. Civil unions are not as good as marriages precisely because they lack the quasi-mystical symbolism (and many of the rights of inheritance and adoption).

Curiously, perhaps the ardor and zeal that gays are bringing to marriage may renew the prestige of the institution even in the eyes of straights. And maybe gay male couples--who aren't subjected to the compassionate, civilizing influence of women--need marriage to soften them, bring a note of humanity and kindness into their relationships.

Edmund White, who teaches writing at Princeton, has written seventeen books.

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