Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality, by George Chauncey (Basic Books: 200 pp., $22)
Why Marriage Matters : America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry by Evan Wolfson (Simon & Schuster: 242 pp., $22)
Gay marriage is one of today's most hotly debated issues. In May, Massachusetts extended the right to marry to lesbians and gay men. This month, a California court voided thousands of gay marriages performed in San Francisco. President Bush is calling for a constitutional amendment to limit marriage to male-female couples. Efforts to add anti-gay provisions to individual state constitutions are moving forward.
Why is gay marriage now a front-page issue, and where did it come from? Right-wing critics blame "activist judges," but the Massachusetts court that mandated marriage equality was directly inspired by last year's historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down the nation's remaining state sodomy statutes and declared that gay Americans cannot be treated as second-class citizens.
Over the last two decades, gays and lesbians have entered the U.S. cultural and civic mainstream. There also has been a remarkable blossoming in scholarship on gay and lesbian history, books that recaptured and brought to light a forgotten American past. One of the most notable was Chauncey's Gay New York, an eye-opening account of how, in the decades before 1930, gay men were openly visible and widely accepted participants in the city's social and cultural life.
Now Chauncey, a University of Chicago historian, turns his expert eye to how the evolution of gay life since then has brought the marriage issue to the fore. Why Marriage? is a short book, but essential in the current public debate.
Only with the onset of the Depression and its effect on men's status as family breadwinners, Chauncey explains, did gays encounter the widespread social ostracism and intense legal persecution that drove them underground into all-but-invisible lives until the late 1960s. "Anti-gay discrimination," he writes, "is a unique and relatively short-lived product."
Fifty years ago, gays "confronted a degree of policing and harassment that is almost unimaginable to us today." Homosexuals faced brutal employment discrimination and endless police hostility. Though the McCarthy era is remembered for the targeting of alleged Communists, far more government employees were fired for being gay.
