Composing a Further Life

responsibility, which raises the question of where transient relationships fit in, whether the responsibilities created by a given sexual relationship conflict with others, and whether they are or can be honored. And certainly it suggests that the coercive and exploitative use of others for sexual pleasure is a distortion of this basic potentiality of pleasure to build and strengthen human ties.
    Marriage, in its many and diverse forms, has been the human institution in which the capacity for sexual pleasure serves individuals and society, not only through reproduction but in a variety of ways. When couples marry in their seventies, as is increasingly common, we don’t look for babies, we look for contentment and trusting companionship and frequently find improved health. No one argues that adults who are unable or unlikely to reproduce should not marry, and only the bleakest of moralists would suggest refraining from intercourse during periods of infertility—indeed, reliance on these periods is the form of family planning approved by those who insist that reproduction is the only legitimate function of sex. This argument can be applied to same-sex marriage—true, same-sex partnership does not lead directly to reproduction, but it can lead to love and fidelity, to caregiving and responsibility in the same way as heterosexual marriage. The threat to marriage in our own society is not the inclusion of same-sex couples but the increasing failure to recognize marriage and family as the primary context in which individuals take sustained responsibility for the well-being and happiness of others. Inevitably, when same-sex relationships break down, we can see the same kinds of disappointment, anger, and irresponsibility that occur in heterosexual marriages.
    Throughout history, there have been men and women struggling to live heterosexual lives, denying the sexual orientation that truly gives them pleasure and satisfaction, or struggling with loneliness or guilt for desires they have been told are sinful. Decriminalizing homosexuality was only a first step. We should be moving on to inviting same-sex couples to the same responsibilities that marriage represents to others—caring for each other in sickness and in health, sustaining the community, contributing to the development of future generations. And we should recognize that marriage is not an exclusively private matter, that long and happy marriages survive and benefit the community where kin and society approve and support them.
    Critical to my approach to this subject has been learning as an adult that my mother was bisexual—and recognizing that a number of family friends lived with same-sex partners. But I grew up in the world as it was before the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, only a few blocks from the house in Greenwich Village where I lived as a child. The Stonewall riots triggered the gay liberation movement when, for the first time, the customers of a gay bar resisted what was then routine police harassment. In those days, homosexuality was a matter for concealment that could destroy careers and even lead to prison terms.
    A decade later, homosexuality had been decriminalized but acquired a new stigma as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which spread especially rapidly through a community that had been largely limited to casual and transient sexual relationships, and was suddenly and flamboyantly claiming freedom. When I look around at gay men and women of my generation, I have to remind myself that they did not have the privilege I had in growing up of establishing early and stable relationships of reciprocal caring, and that within the gay community there have been perennial losses and traumas; because of the plague, even death has a different face.
    Those who stood up for gay pride in 1969 and are still living are in their sixties and seventies, sorting out the meanings of aging and the possibilities of participation and contribution as they grow older. Like others who have grown up during struggles for “liberation” or against discrimination, they have had the experience of learning to look differently at themselves and at their peers and have had to resist internalized oppression as their own aspirations rubbed up against those of others newly claiming a place in the sun.
    By 1975, Dan’s career in music education had run into a series of obstacles, complicated by various kinds of sexual politics. He had married after college and had two