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Together Forever: The Gay Marriage - Hardcover

Marcus, Eric

 
9780385488754: Together Forever: The Gay Marriage
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385488750 ISBN 13: 9780385488754
Verlag: Doubleday, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

A portrait of forty homosexual couples, men and women from a variety of economic backgrounds, who have been together for as many as fifty years examines how they have built happy, fulfilling lives together despite the odds against them. Tour.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric Marcus is the coauthor, with Greg Louganis, of Breaking the Surface, the number-one New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of several books, including Is It a Choice?: Answers to 300 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Gay and Lesbian People; The Male Couple's Guide: Finding a Man, Making a Home, Building a Life; and Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

ether Forever: Gay and Lesbian Marriage, Eric Marcus takes us into the lives of forty couples who have been together for at least nine and as many as fifty years. From the high desert of southern California to the cliffs of northern New Jersey, Eric Marcus tells the stories of this diverse group of people who have welcomed him into their modest apartments, comfortable houses, and double-wide trailers.

Together Forever examines how these couples have successfully built happy, fulfilling lives. We learn how they met, how they've overcome their differences, survived through the rough spots, and stood up to the outside pressures and antigay prejudices that continue to threaten them. We see the couples' surprisingly close and at times estranged relationships with their families, children, grandchildren, neighbors, and colleagues. And, finally, we understand that a gay marriage is just as viable as any other--messy, complex, and inestimably rewarding.

Not just t

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Introduction: An Adventure Begins

Together Forever follows in the path of a not so long line of pioneering books that have taken an intimate look at gay couple relationships. For example, Mary Mendola wrote about this topic in The Mendola Report: A New Look at Gay Couples, which was published in 1980. Mendola compiled surveys from more than four hundred couples. In American Couples, an extensive study of several thousand couple relationships published in 1983, Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz included homosexual couples along with heterosexual couples. David McWhirter and Andrew Mattison published The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop, their study of 156 male couples, in 1984. And in the years that followed, there have been several "how to" books published on gay and lesbian couple relationships, including my own, The Male Couple's Guide, and two excellent books by Betty Berzon, Permanent Partners and The Intimacy Dance.

Together Forever is, however, the first book that looks in depth at happy, long-lasting gay and lesbian couples. It was inspired by a book called The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, by Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, which is about happy, long-term heterosexual married couples. But unlike The Good Marriage and the surveys of gay relationships, Together Forever is not a study or a book of advice. It's an anecdotal look at how the people I interviewed live as partners in happy, long-lasting relationships, and as couples in a world that often makes them feel less than welcome.

I was drawn to this subject in no small part because I grew up in an era when enduring gay relationships were thought to be impossible. And as the veteran of a nine-year relationship that ended badly, and now a few years into a new relationship, I wanted for very personal reasons to know how it was done.

I was also interested in this subject because of the ongoing gay-marriage debate, which has led to often bitter conflict in all quarters of American society, from the political realm to the dinner table. On one side of the divide are those who believe that granting gay and lesbian people the legal right to marry will somehow destroy family life, undermining the very foundation on which families are built. On the other side are those who, like me, believe that legal marriage for same-gender couples is a constitutional right and completely irrelevant to the success of the heterosexual marriage and family. Whatever the outcome of this debate, no one has predicted that the resolution will be quick or easy.

Whether or not gay people are ultimately granted the legal right to marry, the fact remains that many gay and lesbian people are already in successful committed relationships. As I discovered, there is much to be learned from the experience of these couples, for those of us who are currently in relationships and those of us who would like to be.

In order to create a realistic portrait of relationship life, I spoke with forty self-described happy couples who have been together for at least nine years. I decided on forty couples- twenty male and twenty female-because this seemed like a large enough group from which to draw the big picture. Yet it was small enough to be manageable within the constraints of the time and space allotted.

I chose the nine-year minimum for three reasons. I thought it was important for couples to be well past the legendary seven-year itch. I also thought that if couples were still happy after nine years, the odds were they'd be happy for a long time to come. And I was influenced by Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, who chose nine years as the cutoff for the married heterosexual couples they interviewed.

To find the couples I needed, I first talked with friends and acquaintances. From my gay and lesbian contemporaries, the comments were almost uniformly cynical: "That'll be a short book"; "Reader's Digestwon't need to condense it"; "A blank book?"; "You're writing a pamphlet?" I'd like to believe that these comments say more about disappointments than about hopes. From my heterosexual friends and acquaintances and from a few gay people, the response was: "Sounds interesting. I know a couple you should talk to."

Gathering the diverse group of couples I needed meant going well beyond my own limited contact network. The Internet proved the most efficient way to broadcast a request for volunteers. I posted a message that made its way across the Internet to various bulletin boards and mailboxes. The response was an avalanche of e-mails from couples volunteering to be interviewed and from people who knew of couples they thought I should meet.

In choosing which couples to interview, I kept in mind my desire for a mix of people who could tell a good story. I planned to use plenty of dialogue in the book, so good storytelling ability counted for a lot. The couples I ultimately selected have been together for nine to fifty years, with most falling in the fifteen- to thirty-year range. The eighty individuals range in age from thirty-one to eighty-six, with more than half in their thirties and forties. They come from fourteen states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Most live in metropolitan areas[cad124]both cities and suburbs- though some live in small towns and rural areas. Most of the couples fall into the broad category of middle-class, although a handful are working-class or affluent. Thirty-four of the couples are white, two couples are black, and four are mixed-race.

One thing that all the couples seemed to have in common was their motivation for volunteering to be interviewed. They wanted to offer their stories as an example to the next generation of gay and lesbian people, to offer themselves as the kinds of role models they themselves never had. Also, they were very proud of what they'd accomplished, and they were eager to show the world, as one person put it, "what it's really like to be gay--that we live life like most people do."

I conducted all the interviews in person, with both partners at the same time, and recorded them on tape. The setting was usually the couple's living room or kitchen table, and the interviews lasted from one and a half to four hours. I almost always began by asking the partners how they met, and almost invariably ended with two questions: "What is a happy relationship?" and "Is there a secret to a happy relationship?" In between I asked a range of questions from how the partners courted each other and how they live their everyday lives to what kinds of relationships they have with their families and how they've planned for the future.

I chose to organize the book in much the same way as I conducted the interviews. I begin with how the couples first met and then proceed more or less chronologically and thematically through the life of a relationship. I end with a chapter in which the couples talk about what they consider to be a happy relationship and in which they share their not so secret secrets of what it takes to have a happy and long life together.

Not all of the forty couples I interviewed are specifically introduced and quoted in Together Forever.  I've included quotes from thirty-one of the couples, ranging from two sentences to a dozen or more pages. And of those thirty-one couples, I've chosen to focus most closely on about a dozen couples whose experiences, it seems to me, best cover the broad range of issues I wanted to address. Still, given how much material I gathered, having to leave out so much was an enormous frustration.

The couples...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385488750
ISBN 13 
9780385488754
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
347
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar