In an interview on Marriage

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. A delightful European guy. He died quite a number of years ago, unfortunately. And Sar was a deeply honest liberal academic – liberal in the American sense, from the moderate left. Now these were the days when the main people who talked about the breakdown of the American family were the religious right, and they did it in a way that was anti-gay.