In an interview on Marriage

Sar was one of the first liberals to come along and say ‘No! We have a very real problem here.’ The breakdown of marriage, the rise of out of wedlock childbearing, these things are behind a whole lot of other social problems. The rise of crime, the rise of poverty – these are, to a large extent, a product of family breakup. So he published this book, What’s Happening to the American Family? Tensions, Hopes, Realities with two other authors, Richard Belous and Frank Gallo.

And I read it when the second edition came out in 1988 and it hit me like a thunderbolt. Because the message of this book is that if you want to fix a lot of things that are wrong with society and culture, you need to take a long, hard, look at marriage and family. And the social structures that support marriage and family. Sar was much too good an economist to say ‘everything is bad today and in the 1950s everything was good’. It’s a very nuanced portrait of the family.

It had the effect on me of saying that family is awfully important, that family is a core institution not just for transmission of traditional values--which is why the religious right likes it--but also in order to have an egalitarian society where most kids have a good chance in life.

The book is out of print but you can still buy it.

Yes, and it’s still in libraries. The data is out of date, but the framework is still right. And Sar, if he were alive, would be very pleased to see that a lot, in fact most, of the liberal establishment has swung behind him. You won’t hear a lot about how marriage is oppressive and evil from the left anymore.

So, onto the Andrew Sullivan article. It’s OK to be gay and bourgeois – you don’t have to be a rebel.

That comes out in 1989, which is about the same time that my thinking had swung around so much that I was beginning to think I was wrong about family and marriage, and that the literature I had grown up with (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf etc) had also been wrong.

So along comes Andrew Sullivan, this young, openly homosexual British writer, who publishes this article that still--almost on its 20th anniversary--contains pretty much the entire core of what I call the ‘conservative case’ for same-sex marriage. Which is that marriage makes sense for gay people for all the same reasons that it makes sense for straight people. That a whole lot of the tragedy of the AIDS crisis, a whole lot of those deaths, would not have happened, if you’d had young people coming out into a world where they could aspire to settle down, form a family, and have a destination for their love. That it in no way benefited society to have gay people live in a world where love and sex are legal, but marriage is absolutely forbidden.

So that was another piece of thunderbolt reading for me. Because that was when I realized what was so deeply unsettling, so profoundly alienating about gay culture in the 70s - the bars, the bathhouses, the drugs: it was a marriageless culture. And as it turned out, it was exactly what Sar Levitan had identified in the dysfunctional culture of some of the American inner cities: namely the decline of marriage. Or the absence of marriage, in the case of gay people.

To come out as gay meant alienating yourself from the core institution of adult life, from the institution that allows you to say, in society’s eyes, that you have formed the ultimate bond of commitment with another human being. That you’re not on the sex market anymore. And from that moment on I was a gay marriage advocate. I was really a complete believer – and I still am – that marriage is the solution, not the problem.

So 1989 was the turning point for you?

Yes, Andrew’s article. At that time of course it was pie in the sky, it was a short New Republic article. No one really thought it would happen anytime soon.

With all these states allowing gay marriage, even Iowa: are we at a critical juncture right now? Is the tide turning? I’m not close to the issue, but my feeling is that there’s something in the air. Is that misguided?

No it’s not misguided. But I would distinguish between the weather and the climate. We’re certainly at a dramatic moment in the weather. All of a sudden you’ve seen the political breakthrough of gay marriage in a number of New England states. It is being passed legislatively, through publicly elected officials. It’s not just happening because of court orders any more. And that’s something the right said we could not do. And there was always a legitimacy problem for same-sex marriage when the right could say ‘the only way you’ll ever get it is if the courts force it down the throats of the people.’ So that’s a very big breakthrough.

But the climate in the United States is changing only very slowly. The fundamentals remain that the public is divided into three very roughly equal parts. One part favors same-sex marriage. One part favors some kind of civil union or partnership provision for gay couples, but don’t call it marriage. And the third part says the law should make no provision for same-sex couples at all. And those polls are shifting gradually in the direction of same-sex marriage, as young people get older. But only gradually. After all, 29 states have outlawed gay marriage in their constitution. So it’s going to be a while.

I happened to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 16th 2004 and went to watch at midnight when the first gay couples to be married came out of the city hall. The atmosphere was extraordinary, it was so poignant, so romantic. I was there to interview Wang Dan, one of the student leaders at Tiananmen Square in 1989, who had spent nearly a decade in a Chinese prison but had been let out and was a student at Harvard at that time. He was outside at midnight too. He said: “I want to be here for this historic event.”

2004 was a major event – but there were others. The original Hawaii decisions that put gay marriage on the map in the 1990s. All the way back to 1970, the year after the Stonewall riots. 1970 is the first time a gay couple walked into a courthouse and said we want to get married. Of course they got thrown out. What’s happening now is that it does start to feel more like a tipping point. It’s very hard now to say that we’re ever going back to an age where gay marriage might not exist in the United States. It’s now clearly with us for good and the question will be on what terms and in what places. Not whether, but how. Once we’ve got legislatures passing it voluntarily, it’s really all over for people who thought they could ban it on every square inch of US soil.

And if it’s going to happen it’s probably going to be marriage rather than civil unions?

I think at the federal level, marriage may be quite some distance away. It may end up being civil unions combined with robust protections for religious liberty. I think that’s much more doable. The country is ready to see certain parts of the country have same-sex marriage, but I don’t think it’s ready to see the whole country have it. But I could be wrong.