Once in the closet, now in the courts

Gay marriage is one of today's most hotly debated issues. In May, Massachusetts extended the right to marry to lesbians and gay men. On Thursday, 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. So far such an amendment has no chance of winning congressional approval, but efforts to add anti-gay provisions to individual state constitutions are moving forward across the country.

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 few remaining state sodomy statutes and declared that gay Americans cannot be treated as second-class citizens. Conservative Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Republican from California and a devout Roman Catholic, wrote the opinion.

Just 17 years earlier, the high court issued an opposite, virulently homophobic decision, Bowers vs. Hardwick, which upheld the criminal statutes now voided by Lawrence. Bowers made it seem as if gays would remain the social outcasts that it claimed they always had been.

Yet 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 George 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 it is a tour de force of historical analysis and explanation, essential for anyone eager to understand current political arguments.

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" of the 20th century and "is neither natural nor inevitable."