NYRB review<\/a> of several new books on gay marriage, Edmund White reflects on the price paid by gays for the success of their efforts: \u201cWhy did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked. Gays had converted many people to the belief that they constituted a minority\u2014like Jews or African-Americans or Asians. It was a strange sort of minority, truth be told, to which one\u2019s parents didn\u2019t belong and which was made up mostly of members who could \u2018pass.\u2019 It was more an identity than a minority, an identity that one could assume at age six or sixty or never.\u201d<\/p>\nHe returns to this theme at the end of the essay: \u201cOn the last page of Redeeming the Dream<\/i>, we are told that Americans are accepting \u2018gays and lesbians . . . as normal, loving, decent members of our lives and our communities.\u2019 I shouldn\u2019t quibble, but as a gay man in his seventies I don\u2019t quite recognize in that description most of the flamboyant, creative, edgy, promiscuous, deeply urban gays I have known. Kenji Yoshino, a law professor, wrote a book called Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights<\/i> in which \u201ccovering\u201d is seen as downplaying a discordant trait in order to blend into the mainstream. It seems to me that gays are in danger of \u2018covering\u2019 in order to obtain the permission to marry. Perhaps that\u2019s a small enough price. I can\u2019t decide.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a\u00a0NYRB review of several new books on gay marriage, Edmund White reflects on the price paid by gays for the success of their efforts: \u201cWhy did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[820],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gay-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\n
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