Jonathan Rauch on Marriage

So your first choices: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and A Doll’s House. It’s not looking good for marriage.

And Mary Poppins.

Yes, why Mary Poppins?

I was born in 1960 and possibly my first and most enduring cultural artifact on marriage was going to see Mary Poppins. The Disney movie, of course. I saw it maybe five times when I was four. And Mary Poppins is really about a dysfunctional marriage. At least dysfunctional from the kids’ point of view - because the parents don’t pay any attention to each other or, especially, to the kids. And it’s all fixed when an outsider, Mary Poppins, the nanny, comes along and shows them the error of their ways. And since my own parents didn’t get along that was the ultimate fantasy for me.

And then, as I got a bit older and started reading things that were more literary, two things stuck in my mind. One was A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, which I helped dramatize in high school when I was about 15. And the other was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which I discovered at about the same age. And what those two plays have in common is their very dark view of marriage. Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf is all about a deeply dysfunctional, co-dependent marriage. The marriage of both couples that feature in the play is obsessive, destructive: they can’t escape except by liquor or by playing these insane games. A Doll’s House is not quite as dark. The notion is that a marriage is anti-feminist. That this woman, Nora, becomes free when she leaves her marriage, that leaving it is a statement of liberation. And in the 1970’s that made an immense amount of sense to me.

So that’s where I began, with an oppressive, dark view of marriage. And by the way, these are all very powerful works of art: very, very influential on anyone who sees them – including Mary Poppins, which also has great, great music.

So your next book, Dancer from the Dance, is less well known. The reviews talk about it as very evocative, capturing the spirit of an age, Great Gatsby-esque. Lost souls wandering around at parties off Long Island Sound…

In my twenties I began to understand that I was gay. I did not want to be gay. I fought it very hard. And the reason for that was not that I was prejudiced against gay people, or thought it was a sin. It’s that I did not want to live in what I thought was the dark underworld of homosexual life in the 70’s and 80’s. One of the first books I read in that period was this book, Dancer from the Dance, by Andrew Holleran – which is actually a pseudonymous name. It was published in 1978 and is a very powerful, very poetic, evocation of gay life in the 1970s, pre-AIDS. And what it highlights is the extreme unsettledness of gay life - the transience, the fluidity of relationships. They’re not even really relationships in many ways. Just a lot of sex. And to me that was very scary. I didn’t realize it at the time but in hindsight what Holleran was depicting so vividly is a world without marriage, a world without family bonds and family commitments.

So for you this book was not about a halcyon period for gay men -indeed it elicited rather negative feelings.

It is a poetic book and it is, in many ways, an affectionate book. But it captures a moment in history when you’ve got the emergence of an entire culture of people for whom free love is legal, but marriage is unthinkable. And family is, in many cases, rejected as a kind of bourgeois obstruction. It struck me much more as a dystopia than anything else.

Eventually a few years later I would read Randy Shilts’ masterpiece And the Band Played On, which is, in some ways, an even more harrowing vision of what a world without marriage finally looks like.

This is about the early days of AIDS.

Yes. And this is a world where people are debating whether to leave sex clubs open - even though they are immense transmitters of disease. In those days we didn’t have marriage, we had sex clubs. They were our community centers. That’s what happens in a culture without marriage. You get these very strange substitutes. Both of those, the AIDS culture and the promiscuity culture, scared the pants off of me.

So what happened next?

Well along came the late 1980’s and I was working in Washington as a journalist for the National Journal. I’m writing about economic policy and I run into an economist by the name of Sar Levitan.