Edmund White On Same-Sex Marriage
In the New York Review of Books, Edmund White reviews three books about same-sex marriage, including “Redeeming the Dream,” by David Boies and Ted Olson. White writes: ‘On the last page of “Redeeming the Dream,” we are told that Americans are accepting “gays and lesbians…as normal, loving, decent members of our lives and our communities.†I shouldn’t quibble, but as a gay man in his seventies I don’t 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 in which “covering†is seen as downplaying a discordant trait in order to blend into the mainstream. It seems to me that gays are in danger of “covering†in order to obtain the permission to marry. Perhaps that’s a small enough price. I can’t decide.’
