Families Forged by Illness

[kentuck]

No matter our position on the issue of gay-marriage, this is a perspective well worth reading...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/opinion/04rauch.html

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WE feared for our lives; we prayed for a remedy. What none of us in the gay world imagined, when word of a mysterious affliction surfaced 25 years ago, was what proved to be the epidemic's most important moral legacy: AIDS transformed the gay-marriage movement from implausible to inevitable.

In May 1970, two men applied for a marriage license in Minnesota and then filed suit after being refused. The gay world hardly noticed. "Support for marriage was a distinctly minority position in the gay and lesbian movement," wrote the historian George Chauncey. "After an initial flurry of activity, marriage virtually disappeared as a goal of the movement."

Marriage, after all, hardly seemed relevant. The master narrative for gay life was: come out, leave home, gorge at the banquet of sexual liberation. Gay men celebrated their image as sexual rebels; straight America was happy to consign them to that role. After 1981, the master narrative changed from ubiquitous sex to ubiquitous death. Death became, as the writer Andrew Sullivan noted at the height of the epidemic, not just an event in gay America but "an environment." For the stricken there were lesions, chills, wasting, death; for friends and lovers, there was grief compounded by despair.

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Watching gays become family to each other, the public saw nobility. AIDS reminded the country that a good marriage is the best public-health measure known to man. "Gay marriage," so recently an oxymoron, began to make sense.

Yes, the idea of same-sex marriage predated AIDS. But would gay America have internalized as deeply the need for marriage if it had not first internalized H.I.V.? Would straight America have been as willing to consider gay marriage if not for AIDS? Impossible. In gay cultural history, marriage is to AIDS much as Israel is to the Holocaust in Jewish cultural history. It offers a safer shore, a better life, and a promise: never again.