DADA WOOF PAPA HOT

Fall 2015 Issue No.66

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2015, Issue Number 66 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

Every so often a play is written and produced at just the right moment that it resonates profoundly with the times. Peter Parnell’s Dada Woof Papa Hot is a gorgeous, funny, insightful play about marriage, parenting, and gay culture. When I first read the play, I was moved by how perfectly Parnell captures the experience of being a parent to a young child—the new and distracted rhythm of conPhotograph © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos.

The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Marlene Hess, Brooke Garber Neidich, and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown R. Jeep Bryant H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack

versation, the doubt, the arguments, the pressure on a marriage, the humor in daily happenings, and the overwhelming and ineffable love. Then, while we were putting this edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review together, the Supreme Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, and their decision rippled through the issue because it capped a massive cultural shift that is precisely the landscape of the play.

Along with excerpts from the Court’s opinions, the current issue of the Review looks at parenting— in gay and straight families—with a moving essay by the writer Andrew Solomon and an insight-filled

Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Isabel Rose Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis David Warren Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

DADA WOOF PAPA HOT Oh, Dad, Poor Dad

by Andrew Solomon

bravely and beautifully excavates the nature of marriage, monogamy, and sex, and the psychologist Christopher Ryan trains an ethnographic lens on these topics. The writer Brad Gooch talked with us

5

part of mainstream culture where marriage and children today are often part of a person’s identity.

The Rules of Engagement

by Stephanie Grant

7

The Outlaw Builds a House: An Interview with Brad Gooch

9

Love & Liberty: Supreme Court

13

Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983

by Tom Bianchi

14

16

Eight Ways Kids Kill the Romance

by Ilana Wiles

18

The Last Binding Commitment: An Interview with Jennifer Senior

19

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

The Hug

by Thom Gunn

23

© 2015 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Front cover illustration by Tomi Um. www.tomiillustration.com.

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation.

Back cover photograph © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos.

We have a portfolio of Polaroids by Tom Bianchi taken on Fire Island in the distant, halcyon, pre-AIDS years 1975-1983. The parenting blogger Ilana Wiles reminds us to laugh about how hard being a parent can be on romance. We close the issue with a Thom Gunn poem about love, which is, after all, at the

The Novelty-Seeking Species

by Christopher Ryan

The Rosenthal Family Foundation—Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

about the shift in gay culture from the eighties era of the sexual outlaw to a more widely accepted

heart of this wonderful play. —Alexis Gargagliano

COMIC RELIEF

Courtesy of Mike Berenstain.

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Robert E. Linton, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman Honorary Trustees

interview with the journalist Jennifer Senior. In her personal essay, the novelist Stephanie Grant

For generations, cartoons and comic strips have distilled the joy, the challenges, and the sublimely ridiculous nature of parenthood.

From Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, and Stan and Jan Berenstain to the next generation of artists like Natasha Sharpe (see her incisive drawing on page 20), families have provided a rich vein of humorous insight in graphic form.

Long before their eponymous bears, the Berenstains had a successful career as gag cartoonists whose primary subject was the family as seen here in this “It’s All in the Family” feature that appeared in McCall’s in 1980.

It is not a matter of whether you are an “adult”—it is a matter of whether you want to become a single adult.

3

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2015, Issue Number 66 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

Every so often a play is written and produced at just the right moment that it resonates profoundly with the times. Peter Parnell’s Dada Woof Papa Hot is a gorgeous, funny, insightful play about marriage, parenting, and gay culture. When I first read the play, I was moved by how perfectly Parnell captures the experience of being a parent to a young child—the new and distracted rhythm of conPhotograph © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos.

The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Marlene Hess, Brooke Garber Neidich, and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown R. Jeep Bryant H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack

versation, the doubt, the arguments, the pressure on a marriage, the humor in daily happenings, and the overwhelming and ineffable love. Then, while we were putting this edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review together, the Supreme Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, and their decision rippled through the issue because it capped a massive cultural shift that is precisely the landscape of the play.

Along with excerpts from the Court’s opinions, the current issue of the Review looks at parenting— in gay and straight families—with a moving essay by the writer Andrew Solomon and an insight-filled

Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Isabel Rose Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis David Warren Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

DADA WOOF PAPA HOT Oh, Dad, Poor Dad

by Andrew Solomon

bravely and beautifully excavates the nature of marriage, monogamy, and sex, and the psychologist Christopher Ryan trains an ethnographic lens on these topics. The writer Brad Gooch talked with us

5

part of mainstream culture where marriage and children today are often part of a person’s identity.

The Rules of Engagement

by Stephanie Grant

7

The Outlaw Builds a House: An Interview with Brad Gooch

9

Love & Liberty: Supreme Court

13

Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983

by Tom Bianchi

14

16

Eight Ways Kids Kill the Romance

by Ilana Wiles

18

The Last Binding Commitment: An Interview with Jennifer Senior

19

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

The Hug

by Thom Gunn

23

© 2015 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Front cover illustration by Tomi Um. www.tomiillustration.com.

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation.

Back cover photograph © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos.

We have a portfolio of Polaroids by Tom Bianchi taken on Fire Island in the distant, halcyon, pre-AIDS years 1975-1983. The parenting blogger Ilana Wiles reminds us to laugh about how hard being a parent can be on romance. We close the issue with a Thom Gunn poem about love, which is, after all, at the

The Novelty-Seeking Species

by Christopher Ryan

The Rosenthal Family Foundation—Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

about the shift in gay culture from the eighties era of the sexual outlaw to a more widely accepted

heart of this wonderful play. —Alexis Gargagliano

COMIC RELIEF

Courtesy of Mike Berenstain.

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Robert E. Linton, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman Honorary Trustees

interview with the journalist Jennifer Senior. In her personal essay, the novelist Stephanie Grant

For generations, cartoons and comic strips have distilled the joy, the challenges, and the sublimely ridiculous nature of parenthood.

From Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, and Stan and Jan Berenstain to the next generation of artists like Natasha Sharpe (see her incisive drawing on page 20), families have provided a rich vein of humorous insight in graphic form.

Long before their eponymous bears, the Berenstains had a successful career as gag cartoonists whose primary subject was the family as seen here in this “It’s All in the Family” feature that appeared in McCall’s in 1980.

It is not a matter of whether you are an “adult”—it is a matter of whether you want to become a single adult.

3

OH, DAD, POOR DAD By Andrew Solomon Children used to be a by-product of sexual ecstasy, a dubious loot bag you got at the end of the party. Birth control and assisted reproduction have changed the conversation, so that it is now possible to have sex without producing children and to have children without engaging in sex. The erotic and the procreative are newly divorced. Nowhere are the results of this separation more fully evident than in same-sex families. We have set out to have children through legal, medical, and emotional processes that are protracted, bewildering, and expensive. No other children have ever been produced as deliberately as ours.

Expectations have evolved for some young gay people, but most of us struggled with self-acceptance, expecting little acceptance from others. In a society that told us that we were excluded even from the love of God, the love of human beings, by nature less forgiving than divinity, seemed an unlikely stretch. Pushed to the margins, we were often told that we might as well seize the pleasure of youth, because there wouldn’t be much in our later years.

Gayness was rumored to be a lonely, sad way of life. The very word gay used to refer to a whole lot of fun; marriage is a word less widely associated with fun, but for gay people it has been a step into the human fold. Straight people agree to marital relinquishments; they will constrain base impulses in the name of fidelity. For gay people, marriage has come as a liberation, not a constraint.

It’s odd that marriage and children have come to gay people with such proximity. Neither truly came first; gay people started having families and started gaining some form of recognition for their relationships at much the same time. There is some impetus to have children simply because everyone said we couldn’t do so; it can feel a little like space tourism in that regard. But, for most of us, having children is more deeply thought out and more wantonly optimistic than any previous assertion of love. Many gay people didn’t get to be adolescent in adolescence, when they were occupied with feelings of repression or shame, and so even gay people who have children in middle age are having children young; we are in a different location on the spectrum of development. Triangulate is a word usually used to refer to a bad idea. Dialogue is often presumed to be harmonious, at least under better circumstances, but three is a crowd. Yet parents triangulate their relationship the minute they reproduce.

Negotiating how we will care for these children of our liberation can be tough; there are no obvious role models for us, no gender roles on which to rely or to fall back. A recent study on the division of labor in gay families showed that people did better when they’d discussed this before having a child. I was bemused by the study, because before having a child you don’t really know what labor you’ll be needing to divide. And you don’t know what you’ll be good at and what you’ll find really, really difficult. Things that sound easy prove hard; things that sound terrifying come readily. Parenthood is unknowable before the birth of a child. Some people who think themselves well equipped for maternal or paternal care prove incompetent when faced with an actual baby; some people who didn’t think they could care for children are enraptured by their own sons and daughters and by the permanence of the relationship.

Studies of gay parenting always measure it against the gold standard of straight parenting. Do our children turn out as well? Are they more likely to be depressed/angry/gay themselves/suicidal? We are warned that our children may be traumatized by playground mockery or by the deprivation that comes of not having a crucial role model.

Children of gay parents are what interracial children were a half century ago—objects of considerably complicated Illustration © Tamar Cohen.

identity who have to explain themselves to themselves and to everyone else. It’s not always clear what it is they are explaining. As a gay parent, your sexuality is an identity, constantly front and center; you are reminded over and over that you are a gay parent. And yet your sexuality is, at the same time, de-eroticized by the mandatory innocence of fatherhood and motherhood. Once, when my son was in kindergarten, I went with my husband to drop him off at school. I had to leave on a business trip later that day, so I was saying goodbye to John, too, and we

5

OH, DAD, POOR DAD By Andrew Solomon Children used to be a by-product of sexual ecstasy, a dubious loot bag you got at the end of the party. Birth control and assisted reproduction have changed the conversation, so that it is now possible to have sex without producing children and to have children without engaging in sex. The erotic and the procreative are newly divorced. Nowhere are the results of this separation more fully evident than in same-sex families. We have set out to have children through legal, medical, and emotional processes that are protracted, bewildering, and expensive. No other children have ever been produced as deliberately as ours.

Expectations have evolved for some young gay people, but most of us struggled with self-acceptance, expecting little acceptance from others. In a society that told us that we were excluded even from the love of God, the love of human beings, by nature less forgiving than divinity, seemed an unlikely stretch. Pushed to the margins, we were often told that we might as well seize the pleasure of youth, because there wouldn’t be much in our later years.

Gayness was rumored to be a lonely, sad way of life. The very word gay used to refer to a whole lot of fun; marriage is a word less widely associated with fun, but for gay people it has been a step into the human fold. Straight people agree to marital relinquishments; they will constrain base impulses in the name of fidelity. For gay people, marriage has come as a liberation, not a constraint.

It’s odd that marriage and children have come to gay people with such proximity. Neither truly came first; gay people started having families and started gaining some form of recognition for their relationships at much the same time. There is some impetus to have children simply because everyone said we couldn’t do so; it can feel a little like space tourism in that regard. But, for most of us, having children is more deeply thought out and more wantonly optimistic than any previous assertion of love. Many gay people didn’t get to be adolescent in adolescence, when they were occupied with feelings of repression or shame, and so even gay people who have children in middle age are having children young; we are in a different location on the spectrum of development. Triangulate is a word usually used to refer to a bad idea. Dialogue is often presumed to be harmonious, at least under better circumstances, but three is a crowd. Yet parents triangulate their relationship the minute they reproduce.

Negotiating how we will care for these children of our liberation can be tough; there are no obvious role models for us, no gender roles on which to rely or to fall back. A recent study on the division of labor in gay families showed that people did better when they’d discussed this before having a child. I was bemused by the study, because before having a child you don’t really know what labor you’ll be needing to divide. And you don’t know what you’ll be good at and what you’ll find really, really difficult. Things that sound easy prove hard; things that sound terrifying come readily. Parenthood is unknowable before the birth of a child. Some people who think themselves well equipped for maternal or paternal care prove incompetent when faced with an actual baby; some people who didn’t think they could care for children are enraptured by their own sons and daughters and by the permanence of the relationship.

Studies of gay parenting always measure it against the gold standard of straight parenting. Do our children turn out as well? Are they more likely to be depressed/angry/gay themselves/suicidal? We are warned that our children may be traumatized by playground mockery or by the deprivation that comes of not having a crucial role model.

Children of gay parents are what interracial children were a half century ago—objects of considerably complicated Illustration © Tamar Cohen.

identity who have to explain themselves to themselves and to everyone else. It’s not always clear what it is they are explaining. As a gay parent, your sexuality is an identity, constantly front and center; you are reminded over and over that you are a gay parent. And yet your sexuality is, at the same time, de-eroticized by the mandatory innocence of fatherhood and motherhood. Once, when my son was in kindergarten, I went with my husband to drop him off at school. I had to leave on a business trip later that day, so I was saying goodbye to John, too, and we

5

leaned in and kissed each other. It was barely a peck, but I still found myself wondering which of the other parents at drop-off were uncomfortable knowing their children had seen that overt expression of affection. Perhaps no one was, but the self-consciousness is inescapable. Gay affection blurs into gay sensuality in a way that straight affection doesn’t blur into straight sensuality.

Parenting is both sudden and longitudinal. I became a father on November 5, 2007, but I have not stopped becoming a father since. I wish I could go back and be the father I now am to my newborn children, look at those infants with the knowledge of who they would become and who I would become in consequence. But such farsightedness isn’t possible. I was one of the gradual parents. I’d gone through such gymnastics to define my identity, and changing it again was effortful. So, while I adored my first child from the minute she was born, I wasn’t yet at ease thinking of myself as a father. Children are not like nouns and verbs, to be arranged tidily on the page. I felt tentative—not worried about my ability to love my children but uncertain that I would know what to do for them. Young children need to feel safe, and part of what makes them feel safe is a sense of their parents’ certainty. Parents have been affecting confidence as long as there have been parents.

As a gay dad, I feel particularly exposed. If my children don’t turn out perfectly, it will be read by some as a comment on the inadequacy of gay parenting. It will be construed as evidence that I should never have participated in this great social experiment. Gay people are not allowed to complain about their children. If my brother’s children are imperfect, that’s because of bad luck or perhaps bad parenting; if mine are, it’s because of the alternative family into which they were born. Many gay parents live with the fear that their children aren’t really theirs, that someone will take them away. Judges long did: through the late twentieth century, in most divorce cases, the mothers were given custody—but if the mother was a lesbian the father was given custody.

My family of origin was a very entangling one. We were all a little vague about boundaries and lived in one another’s pockets in a fashion that was often joyous and occasionally hellish. I relied on those entanglements as defining. I moved to another country because I felt that I couldn’t achieve an identity so long as I was in the vicinity of my parents. Having children was my fondest dream and hope, and it also terrified me. Though my father was and is delightful, my mother was the one who took care of us, and whom I would have to echo. I didn’t know whether I

THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT By Stephanie Grant

could do those things which mothers do. I hadn’t been groomed for this. But if my husband and I each did just what fathers do, then how would our child survive?

Neither of us is a mother, but neither of us is, strictly speaking, “just a father” in the classical sense of that construction. Those are two roles defined by heterosexuality. We have our own roles. We cherish hard-won things more

hood. People have children both to love and to be loved, and gay fatherhood entails towering before your children as all parents tower, even in a world that has marginalized you. We both make and are made by our children. This has turned out to be my purpose. I wasn’t expecting that this would be my purpose. The patina of surprise never disappears; I did not expect to have children, yet I have them. Since children always reflect back your moods, they, too, have an occasional aura of surprise—even in their own implacable normality. They are my identity, and I am theirs.

Andrew Solomon is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, the president of PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, NPR, and the New York Times. A lecturer and an activist, he is the author of the forthcoming Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents,Twenty-five Years; the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity; and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His TED talks have been viewed more than ten million times. Please visit his website at andrewsolomon.com.

6

Holly Andres, Outside the Forbidden Bedroom, 2008. © Holly Andres, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York. Holly Andres: The Fallen Fawn, October 29-December 5, 2015 Robert Mann Gallery.

than what is easily won. Gay people have worked so hard to have children, and that urgency infuses our parent-

Not unlike many straight couples, my partner and I decided to try to get pregnant around the time our sex life went sour. But that overstates it. Simplifies a complex, yet partly unconscious, calculus. Let me back up.

She and I knew, when we fell in love, that we were going to have children together. It was part of why we fell in love. At the time, she—let’s call her A—was finishing her Ph.D. in anthropology, and I had just published my first novel. She was involved in more than one “story,” as she liked to call them; one lover lived in Thailand, the other in Mexico. I felt certain that I occupied a strong, bird-inthe-hand position. I was single —I’d just left a five-year relationship with someone whom I loved deeply but with whom I could not build a life. This because she was—how to put it?—absolutely crazy. Sexy, devastatingly sexy, but certifiable. (Which she announced on our first date, and which I cavalierly brushed aside. But that is another essay.)

In A, I glimpsed the promise of a life replete with what Freud had said all of us need: good work and good love. I have never fallen so hard.

To the surprise of our closest friends (“So soon after your last breakup?” mine asked; “With an American?” hers asked), we aban-

doned our former lives, left New York City, and set up a household in Columbus, Ohio, where she had landed her first tenure-track teaching job and where I embarked on my second novel. We agreed that she should get tenure and I should finish my book before we had kids. We didn’t love the Midwest, but it was a means to an end, and we buckled down, quite joyfully, to work.

Early on—I don’t recall when—dissatisfaction crept into the bedroom. Sex was no longer easy or automatic. Not surprisingly, we had different viewpoints on the problem. Suffice it to say that she disdained what I wanted, and I was unable (she would say unwilling) to provide what she needed. In retrospect, I think our differences— the ways in which we were incompatible—came to be expressed most forcefully in the bedroom. If sex is a kind of theater for the psyche, the bedroom became the stage where we dramatized our disagreements and, perhaps, because of the nature of sexual intimacy, activated each other’s deepest wounds. Somewhere along the route—year four? year five?—and despite the obligatory visits to couples therapy—we stopped having sex altogether. Which felt like 7

leaned in and kissed each other. It was barely a peck, but I still found myself wondering which of the other parents at drop-off were uncomfortable knowing their children had seen that overt expression of affection. Perhaps no one was, but the self-consciousness is inescapable. Gay affection blurs into gay sensuality in a way that straight affection doesn’t blur into straight sensuality.

Parenting is both sudden and longitudinal. I became a father on November 5, 2007, but I have not stopped becoming a father since. I wish I could go back and be the father I now am to my newborn children, look at those infants with the knowledge of who they would become and who I would become in consequence. But such farsightedness isn’t possible. I was one of the gradual parents. I’d gone through such gymnastics to define my identity, and changing it again was effortful. So, while I adored my first child from the minute she was born, I wasn’t yet at ease thinking of myself as a father. Children are not like nouns and verbs, to be arranged tidily on the page. I felt tentative—not worried about my ability to love my children but uncertain that I would know what to do for them. Young children need to feel safe, and part of what makes them feel safe is a sense of their parents’ certainty. Parents have been affecting confidence as long as there have been parents.

As a gay dad, I feel particularly exposed. If my children don’t turn out perfectly, it will be read by some as a comment on the inadequacy of gay parenting. It will be construed as evidence that I should never have participated in this great social experiment. Gay people are not allowed to complain about their children. If my brother’s children are imperfect, that’s because of bad luck or perhaps bad parenting; if mine are, it’s because of the alternative family into which they were born. Many gay parents live with the fear that their children aren’t really theirs, that someone will take them away. Judges long did: through the late twentieth century, in most divorce cases, the mothers were given custody—but if the mother was a lesbian the father was given custody.

My family of origin was a very entangling one. We were all a little vague about boundaries and lived in one another’s pockets in a fashion that was often joyous and occasionally hellish. I relied on those entanglements as defining. I moved to another country because I felt that I couldn’t achieve an identity so long as I was in the vicinity of my parents. Having children was my fondest dream and hope, and it also terrified me. Though my father was and is delightful, my mother was the one who took care of us, and whom I would have to echo. I didn’t know whether I

THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT By Stephanie Grant

could do those things which mothers do. I hadn’t been groomed for this. But if my husband and I each did just what fathers do, then how would our child survive?

Neither of us is a mother, but neither of us is, strictly speaking, “just a father” in the classical sense of that construction. Those are two roles defined by heterosexuality. We have our own roles. We cherish hard-won things more

hood. People have children both to love and to be loved, and gay fatherhood entails towering before your children as all parents tower, even in a world that has marginalized you. We both make and are made by our children. This has turned out to be my purpose. I wasn’t expecting that this would be my purpose. The patina of surprise never disappears; I did not expect to have children, yet I have them. Since children always reflect back your moods, they, too, have an occasional aura of surprise—even in their own implacable normality. They are my identity, and I am theirs.

Andrew Solomon is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, the president of PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, NPR, and the New York Times. A lecturer and an activist, he is the author of the forthcoming Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents,Twenty-five Years; the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity; and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His TED talks have been viewed more than ten million times. Please visit his website at andrewsolomon.com.

6

Holly Andres, Outside the Forbidden Bedroom, 2008. © Holly Andres, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York. Holly Andres: The Fallen Fawn, October 29-December 5, 2015 Robert Mann Gallery.

than what is easily won. Gay people have worked so hard to have children, and that urgency infuses our parent-

Not unlike many straight couples, my partner and I decided to try to get pregnant around the time our sex life went sour. But that overstates it. Simplifies a complex, yet partly unconscious, calculus. Let me back up.

She and I knew, when we fell in love, that we were going to have children together. It was part of why we fell in love. At the time, she—let’s call her A—was finishing her Ph.D. in anthropology, and I had just published my first novel. She was involved in more than one “story,” as she liked to call them; one lover lived in Thailand, the other in Mexico. I felt certain that I occupied a strong, bird-inthe-hand position. I was single —I’d just left a five-year relationship with someone whom I loved deeply but with whom I could not build a life. This because she was—how to put it?—absolutely crazy. Sexy, devastatingly sexy, but certifiable. (Which she announced on our first date, and which I cavalierly brushed aside. But that is another essay.)

In A, I glimpsed the promise of a life replete with what Freud had said all of us need: good work and good love. I have never fallen so hard.

To the surprise of our closest friends (“So soon after your last breakup?” mine asked; “With an American?” hers asked), we aban-

doned our former lives, left New York City, and set up a household in Columbus, Ohio, where she had landed her first tenure-track teaching job and where I embarked on my second novel. We agreed that she should get tenure and I should finish my book before we had kids. We didn’t love the Midwest, but it was a means to an end, and we buckled down, quite joyfully, to work.

Early on—I don’t recall when—dissatisfaction crept into the bedroom. Sex was no longer easy or automatic. Not surprisingly, we had different viewpoints on the problem. Suffice it to say that she disdained what I wanted, and I was unable (she would say unwilling) to provide what she needed. In retrospect, I think our differences— the ways in which we were incompatible—came to be expressed most forcefully in the bedroom. If sex is a kind of theater for the psyche, the bedroom became the stage where we dramatized our disagreements and, perhaps, because of the nature of sexual intimacy, activated each other’s deepest wounds. Somewhere along the route—year four? year five?—and despite the obligatory visits to couples therapy—we stopped having sex altogether. Which felt like 7

a huge relief: the little sex we’d been having often left one or both of us feeling enraged and grief-stricken. At the same time, abandoning sex felt like the worst, indeed the most tragic, outcome possible. We were, both of us, bereft.

By then, we were also trying to get pregnant. When I try to reconstruct how I narrated this to myself—how can I commit to raising children (a lifelong project) with someone with whom I no longer have sex?—the best I can do is say that I pushed my disappointment away. That is, I wanted children, at the time, more than I wanted sex.

Or: I knew that I wanted to have children with A, and I knew that I was likely, at some point, to have sex again. I did not dwell on the question of how, or with whom, this would come to pass.

When our twin daughters were born, we were each forty years old, and we hadn’t had sex for two years. Once the girls arrived, we didn’t care very much. We loved being parents, loved having twins, and we worked very hard at the give-and-go necessary to parenting,

IF SEX IS A KIND OF THEATER FOR THE PSYCHE, THE BEDROOM BECAME THE STAGE WHERE WE DRAMATIZED OUR DISAGREEMENTS. which was all-consuming and astonishingly exhausting. When we traveled home to New York City to show off the babies, our friends remarked on how well we worked together and how little rancor was evident between us. The idea that our coupledom was tragic (how can we love each other so much and yet not be able to express this sexually?) began to ebb. We abandoned the moribund project of “the two of us” in favor of the ecstatic and ever-unfolding project of “us four.”

It wasn’t until our daughters were three years old that we recovered enough energy to think about sex again. Of course, we were miserable in our tandem celibacy; neither of us had any notion that abandoning our sexual lives was a good choice for our children or for ourselves. But we were a strong unit; neither A nor I wanted to risk ruining that. We decided to “open up” our relationship. Because one-night stands with quasi-strangers did not appeal, we knew that we had to find a way to establish significant outside sexual relationships that could sustain us without threatening our family.

Once we’d decided, the change came quickly. My partner met someone at a conference. We set up some basic rules: the kids—our foursome—were paramount; no one could audition for the role of “stepmommy”; and out of town was best. The first six months were challenging. I was jealous and resentful until I found a lover and a certain balance of power was restored. Soon the rage and grief we had been living with began to dissipate. We each felt enormously grateful for the other’s willingness to make space for our sexual desires. The joy of being fully seen—recognized—returned.

We have been living in this state of mutual recognition ever since.

Which is not to say that our relationship is issue-free, far from it. (I like to joke that, now that sex is not a place of constant struggle we are free to argue endlessly about money.) I have always felt lucky to be a lesbian, and I have felt especially so while we’ve negotiated this.

What an added burden heterosexuality brings to this delicate conversation: the (ritualized) expectation of lifelong fidelity (which, from a distance, looks patently absurd), as well as the history of—how to

8

put it?—The Battle of the Sexes, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The history of misery between men and women. Also known, in some circles, as patriarchy.

The question everyone asks: What do the kids think?

Usually, I dance around the answer—and I’m going to bring out my tap shoes here in order to protect their privacy. No doubt, in a few years they will pen their own essays about their burdensome moms. But the question points to what feels like the paradox of being a queer parent. Before my children were born, I drew a lot of meaning from my queerness. From where I sat, everything looked different: sex and gender, friendship and family; even the nature of intimacy had revealed itself to be more complex than advertised by the mainstream, which is to say, by the straight world. (There is nothing like being disinherited by your parents to give you a fresh take on family ties.) And there was urgent meaning everywhere—in the way I lived my life, in the choices I made and the politics I espoused.

I was part of a radical community that was transforming American culture—being queer was a thrilling place to live.

And then came the kids. Who have, of course, brought other meanings with them. Also thrilling. Perhaps what I didn’t expect was being integrated into the mainstream, where my children live much of their public lives. At the school talent show, I am one white, middle-class mom among many, raising my head when one of my daughters appears onstage. Indistinguishable. I love my kids, but I don’t always like the view. That is, I don’t fully recognize myself in these settings, and yet I feel churlish in my resistance: isn’t acceptance what queer folks have been after? Well, some of us have, yes; but not all of us, no, not exactly. There is a difference, after all, between acceptance and assimilation. We had, many of us, been hoping to change the world. Quite possibly—and this is not a frivolous fear—it is the world that is changing us.

After much lobbying from them, I took my tween girls to see Magic Mike XXL this summer. If you don’t know, the movie is about male entertainers of the Chippendale variety, and features heartthrob Channing Tatum. One of my daughters was bored and somewhat irritated by the aggressive male display; the other, whose heterosexuality has recently exploded into view, was elated. She whispered in my ear throughout the movie: who was hot and who wasn’t, what was sweet and what was “weird.” She was moved by how “loving” the men were with each other and pronounced it “not-homophobic” and “not racist,” high praise in her carefully kept book of accounts. At one point, she reached over and held my hand, full, I thought, of both fear and pleasure, full of excitement about what was yet to come.

It was an ecstatic parenting moment—there is no other way to describe it—an ecstatic moment of recognition. I see you, I thought but did not say. I see you—your glorious self—not being me.

Stephanie Grant is the author of two novels, The Passion of Alice, which was nominated for Great Britain’s Orange Prize, and Map of Ireland, which was selected as an Honor Title in Fiction by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her just completed third novel, Home Equity, is about contemporary marriage and debt. Grant teaches in the MFA program at American University in Washington, D.C.

THE OUTLAW BUILDS A HOUSE: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRAD GOOCH Brad Gooch, whose books include Smash Cut, Flannery, and The Golden Age of Promiscuity, sat down with André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, and John Guare and Anne Cattaneo, the Review’s executive editors, to talk about the radical shift from reveling in the gay culture of New York in the eighties to getting married and becoming a father.

Brad Gooch: When I read Dada Woof Papa Hot, I was startled to discover that everything I thought was original about my life was already somebody’s dialogue.

John Guare: Would you talk about coming out and the very glamorous, rather thrilling life that you created for yourself after you came out?

BG: Quasi-glamorous (Laughs). When I came to New York to go to Columbia College in the early seventies there was no such thing as a “gay” identity, really, so we made things up as we went along. I wanted to be a poet, and was writing stories. Eventually I went to grad school in English at Columbia, though my dissertation took over a decade to complete, as I was modeling with the Wilhelmina Agency in New York, Paris, and Milan, and writing for Vanity Fair while also reviewing gay porn films for the New York Native, a newspaper located somewhere on Christopher Street.

It was a romantic era, full of thrills, but not coherent on the career front, as you can tell.

JG: Are you married?

BG: Yes, and we have a four-month-old baby boy.

André Bishop: Is this an adopted son?

BG: No, he was born with the help of a gestational surrogate, which is why a lot of those moments in the play mean something to me.

JG: How long have you and your husband been together?

BG: Paul and I’ve been together for fourteen years, and we were married about two and a half years ago.

JG: Before you and Paul found each other, what did your romantic life look like?

BG: In the late seventies and all through the eighties I was with Howard Brookner, the subject of my memoir. Howard died of AIDS in 1989. He was my “lover,” as we

called each other then, though there was not—on the event horizon—anything even resembling the remote possibility of a legal marriage between two men, and few rules of engagement during the period for a relationship. We negotiated a complex fandango involving monogamy and everything but, a kind of experimenting made possible by the ground of our authentic love for each other, and the fun we had in each other’s company.

In the decade afterward, I wandered in the desert. You could tell that from the title of a book I wrote during that period, “Finding the Boyfriend Within.”

JG: Did you think monogamy would ever be in the cards for you?

BG: I don’t remember ever giving much thought to monogamy as an ideal, one way or the other. But I was—and am—very interested in affection, love, and intimacy, the important things.

JG: When did you shift from the kind of sexual-outlaw identity to thinking of yourself as a marriage-and-family man?

BG: Well, the laws did change. There’s no point in thinking of yourself as a Martian if there are no spaceships traveling to the red planet. It’s now an option, for me a natural one that opened out in my relationship with Paul. Every relationship is different, but ours eventually led, by a natural emotional and legal logic, to children. The thinking then catches up. I’m also sixty-three rather than twenty-three, which may—or may not—have contributed to the, uh, transfiguration.

JG: Was it difficult for you to get married?

BG: Paul and I spent a lot of time discussing whether to have this marriage. And then we spent a lot of time discussing whether to have the child. And then we went to a kind of counselor about whether to have a child, and so all these issues came up in advance.

Now that we actually have Walter, it’s great.

AB: I’m a parent—my daughter is seventeen now. We weren’t the first wave of gay men to have children, but we were the first-anda-half wave. We had our daughter in 1998.

We adopted her. It took Peter more than three years to persuade me to do it.

JG: Did you know any gay men who had a child?

AB: The first gay person I knew who had a child with his partner was very radical. He

had specific ideas of what you should and should not do if you were a gay man or woman having a child. He was of the school that says you can have nothing to do with the birth parents; you must have nothing to do with the birth mother.

But I think he wanted a child to make some kind of political statement. By the time we were trying to adopt, we were making personal statements, if we were even making statements. Peter always wanted to be a father. He comes from a large Catholic family. I thought, I’m too old. I had a distant, difficult relationship with my family.

I was sent away to boarding school when I was six. So a cozy home life was unknown to me. I have no paternal skills, no parental skills at all.

BG: I was you. That was my role.

AB: I was wrong, within reason. Peter is clearly the strong, hands-on parent and I’m not, probably, because I work so much, but probably because I don’t know what that is.

I had no relationship with my parents.

BG: In our relationship, Paul always wanted to be a father.

JG: Is Paul older than you?

BG: He’s younger. I’m sixty-three; he’s fifty-one. So age was an issue. At first we talked about him finding a lesbian who wanted to have a baby, and giving the wonderful gift of his sperm. The child would live with the mother and it would all be fine. And then we had dinner, I remember, with A. M. Holmes, who has an eleven-year-old daughter.

JG: Did she give birth to her?

BG: Yes. And she said, “Oh, you should just do it yourself. It’s a lot less complicated. It’s something for you to do together, a kind of project.” When it was that much more radical a proposition, suddenly it really appealed to me.

JG: You mean the idea of finding the birth mother—the biological mother—yourself, and the three of you sharing in that experience?

BG: Well, no, more the adventure of raising a kid together. As far as setting it up, though, there were lots of moving parts to consider.

We worked through an agency. They have lawyers, they have doctors, they have contacts with surrogates. It’s complicated.

9

a huge relief: the little sex we’d been having often left one or both of us feeling enraged and grief-stricken. At the same time, abandoning sex felt like the worst, indeed the most tragic, outcome possible. We were, both of us, bereft.

By then, we were also trying to get pregnant. When I try to reconstruct how I narrated this to myself—how can I commit to raising children (a lifelong project) with someone with whom I no longer have sex?—the best I can do is say that I pushed my disappointment away. That is, I wanted children, at the time, more than I wanted sex.

Or: I knew that I wanted to have children with A, and I knew that I was likely, at some point, to have sex again. I did not dwell on the question of how, or with whom, this would come to pass.

When our twin daughters were born, we were each forty years old, and we hadn’t had sex for two years. Once the girls arrived, we didn’t care very much. We loved being parents, loved having twins, and we worked very hard at the give-and-go necessary to parenting,

IF SEX IS A KIND OF THEATER FOR THE PSYCHE, THE BEDROOM BECAME THE STAGE WHERE WE DRAMATIZED OUR DISAGREEMENTS. which was all-consuming and astonishingly exhausting. When we traveled home to New York City to show off the babies, our friends remarked on how well we worked together and how little rancor was evident between us. The idea that our coupledom was tragic (how can we love each other so much and yet not be able to express this sexually?) began to ebb. We abandoned the moribund project of “the two of us” in favor of the ecstatic and ever-unfolding project of “us four.”

It wasn’t until our daughters were three years old that we recovered enough energy to think about sex again. Of course, we were miserable in our tandem celibacy; neither of us had any notion that abandoning our sexual lives was a good choice for our children or for ourselves. But we were a strong unit; neither A nor I wanted to risk ruining that. We decided to “open up” our relationship. Because one-night stands with quasi-strangers did not appeal, we knew that we had to find a way to establish significant outside sexual relationships that could sustain us without threatening our family.

Once we’d decided, the change came quickly. My partner met someone at a conference. We set up some basic rules: the kids—our foursome—were paramount; no one could audition for the role of “stepmommy”; and out of town was best. The first six months were challenging. I was jealous and resentful until I found a lover and a certain balance of power was restored. Soon the rage and grief we had been living with began to dissipate. We each felt enormously grateful for the other’s willingness to make space for our sexual desires. The joy of being fully seen—recognized—returned.

We have been living in this state of mutual recognition ever since.

Which is not to say that our relationship is issue-free, far from it. (I like to joke that, now that sex is not a place of constant struggle we are free to argue endlessly about money.) I have always felt lucky to be a lesbian, and I have felt especially so while we’ve negotiated this.

What an added burden heterosexuality brings to this delicate conversation: the (ritualized) expectation of lifelong fidelity (which, from a distance, looks patently absurd), as well as the history of—how to

8

put it?—The Battle of the Sexes, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The history of misery between men and women. Also known, in some circles, as patriarchy.

The question everyone asks: What do the kids think?

Usually, I dance around the answer—and I’m going to bring out my tap shoes here in order to protect their privacy. No doubt, in a few years they will pen their own essays about their burdensome moms. But the question points to what feels like the paradox of being a queer parent. Before my children were born, I drew a lot of meaning from my queerness. From where I sat, everything looked different: sex and gender, friendship and family; even the nature of intimacy had revealed itself to be more complex than advertised by the mainstream, which is to say, by the straight world. (There is nothing like being disinherited by your parents to give you a fresh take on family ties.) And there was urgent meaning everywhere—in the way I lived my life, in the choices I made and the politics I espoused.

I was part of a radical community that was transforming American culture—being queer was a thrilling place to live.

And then came the kids. Who have, of course, brought other meanings with them. Also thrilling. Perhaps what I didn’t expect was being integrated into the mainstream, where my children live much of their public lives. At the school talent show, I am one white, middle-class mom among many, raising my head when one of my daughters appears onstage. Indistinguishable. I love my kids, but I don’t always like the view. That is, I don’t fully recognize myself in these settings, and yet I feel churlish in my resistance: isn’t acceptance what queer folks have been after? Well, some of us have, yes; but not all of us, no, not exactly. There is a difference, after all, between acceptance and assimilation. We had, many of us, been hoping to change the world. Quite possibly—and this is not a frivolous fear—it is the world that is changing us.

After much lobbying from them, I took my tween girls to see Magic Mike XXL this summer. If you don’t know, the movie is about male entertainers of the Chippendale variety, and features heartthrob Channing Tatum. One of my daughters was bored and somewhat irritated by the aggressive male display; the other, whose heterosexuality has recently exploded into view, was elated. She whispered in my ear throughout the movie: who was hot and who wasn’t, what was sweet and what was “weird.” She was moved by how “loving” the men were with each other and pronounced it “not-homophobic” and “not racist,” high praise in her carefully kept book of accounts. At one point, she reached over and held my hand, full, I thought, of both fear and pleasure, full of excitement about what was yet to come.

It was an ecstatic parenting moment—there is no other way to describe it—an ecstatic moment of recognition. I see you, I thought but did not say. I see you—your glorious self—not being me.

Stephanie Grant is the author of two novels, The Passion of Alice, which was nominated for Great Britain’s Orange Prize, and Map of Ireland, which was selected as an Honor Title in Fiction by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her just completed third novel, Home Equity, is about contemporary marriage and debt. Grant teaches in the MFA program at American University in Washington, D.C.

THE OUTLAW BUILDS A HOUSE: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRAD GOOCH Brad Gooch, whose books include Smash Cut, Flannery, and The Golden Age of Promiscuity, sat down with André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, and John Guare and Anne Cattaneo, the Review’s executive editors, to talk about the radical shift from reveling in the gay culture of New York in the eighties to getting married and becoming a father.

Brad Gooch: When I read Dada Woof Papa Hot, I was startled to discover that everything I thought was original about my life was already somebody’s dialogue.

John Guare: Would you talk about coming out and the very glamorous, rather thrilling life that you created for yourself after you came out?

BG: Quasi-glamorous (Laughs). When I came to New York to go to Columbia College in the early seventies there was no such thing as a “gay” identity, really, so we made things up as we went along. I wanted to be a poet, and was writing stories. Eventually I went to grad school in English at Columbia, though my dissertation took over a decade to complete, as I was modeling with the Wilhelmina Agency in New York, Paris, and Milan, and writing for Vanity Fair while also reviewing gay porn films for the New York Native, a newspaper located somewhere on Christopher Street.

It was a romantic era, full of thrills, but not coherent on the career front, as you can tell.

JG: Are you married?

BG: Yes, and we have a four-month-old baby boy.

André Bishop: Is this an adopted son?

BG: No, he was born with the help of a gestational surrogate, which is why a lot of those moments in the play mean something to me.

JG: How long have you and your husband been together?

BG: Paul and I’ve been together for fourteen years, and we were married about two and a half years ago.

JG: Before you and Paul found each other, what did your romantic life look like?

BG: In the late seventies and all through the eighties I was with Howard Brookner, the subject of my memoir. Howard died of AIDS in 1989. He was my “lover,” as we

called each other then, though there was not—on the event horizon—anything even resembling the remote possibility of a legal marriage between two men, and few rules of engagement during the period for a relationship. We negotiated a complex fandango involving monogamy and everything but, a kind of experimenting made possible by the ground of our authentic love for each other, and the fun we had in each other’s company.

In the decade afterward, I wandered in the desert. You could tell that from the title of a book I wrote during that period, “Finding the Boyfriend Within.”

JG: Did you think monogamy would ever be in the cards for you?

BG: I don’t remember ever giving much thought to monogamy as an ideal, one way or the other. But I was—and am—very interested in affection, love, and intimacy, the important things.

JG: When did you shift from the kind of sexual-outlaw identity to thinking of yourself as a marriage-and-family man?

BG: Well, the laws did change. There’s no point in thinking of yourself as a Martian if there are no spaceships traveling to the red planet. It’s now an option, for me a natural one that opened out in my relationship with Paul. Every relationship is different, but ours eventually led, by a natural emotional and legal logic, to children. The thinking then catches up. I’m also sixty-three rather than twenty-three, which may—or may not—have contributed to the, uh, transfiguration.

JG: Was it difficult for you to get married?

BG: Paul and I spent a lot of time discussing whether to have this marriage. And then we spent a lot of time discussing whether to have the child. And then we went to a kind of counselor about whether to have a child, and so all these issues came up in advance.

Now that we actually have Walter, it’s great.

AB: I’m a parent—my daughter is seventeen now. We weren’t the first wave of gay men to have children, but we were the first-anda-half wave. We had our daughter in 1998.

We adopted her. It took Peter more than three years to persuade me to do it.

JG: Did you know any gay men who had a child?

AB: The first gay person I knew who had a child with his partner was very radical. He

had specific ideas of what you should and should not do if you were a gay man or woman having a child. He was of the school that says you can have nothing to do with the birth parents; you must have nothing to do with the birth mother.

But I think he wanted a child to make some kind of political statement. By the time we were trying to adopt, we were making personal statements, if we were even making statements. Peter always wanted to be a father. He comes from a large Catholic family. I thought, I’m too old. I had a distant, difficult relationship with my family.

I was sent away to boarding school when I was six. So a cozy home life was unknown to me. I have no paternal skills, no parental skills at all.

BG: I was you. That was my role.

AB: I was wrong, within reason. Peter is clearly the strong, hands-on parent and I’m not, probably, because I work so much, but probably because I don’t know what that is.

I had no relationship with my parents.

BG: In our relationship, Paul always wanted to be a father.

JG: Is Paul older than you?

BG: He’s younger. I’m sixty-three; he’s fifty-one. So age was an issue. At first we talked about him finding a lesbian who wanted to have a baby, and giving the wonderful gift of his sperm. The child would live with the mother and it would all be fine. And then we had dinner, I remember, with A. M. Holmes, who has an eleven-year-old daughter.

JG: Did she give birth to her?

BG: Yes. And she said, “Oh, you should just do it yourself. It’s a lot less complicated. It’s something for you to do together, a kind of project.” When it was that much more radical a proposition, suddenly it really appealed to me.

JG: You mean the idea of finding the birth mother—the biological mother—yourself, and the three of you sharing in that experience?

BG: Well, no, more the adventure of raising a kid together. As far as setting it up, though, there were lots of moving parts to consider.

We worked through an agency. They have lawyers, they have doctors, they have contacts with surrogates. It’s complicated.

9

Photograph © Tod Papageorge, 1978.

Anne Cattaneo: However you do it, it’s very, very carefully, legally regulated. Now that we’ve moved from closed adoption to open adoption, all adoption, whether it’s gay or straight, is very different now from the way it was in the eighties.

AB: When we adopted, we couldn’t be married, so only one of the two parents could adopt, and then you had to petition later to see if you as a couple could legally become parents. And we did it through this, strangely, Catholic agency in New York and in Fresno, California, where our daughter was born. We had this radical New York lawyer who moved us out of the family court and into the surrogate court, and said, “We are going to make a precedent here. I’m going to petition for you to adopt your daughter as a couple,” which was the first time it had ever happened in New York State. And we became the first gay couple to legally adopt here. This must have been about 2000.

BG: I wrote a piece for Out magazine in the mid-nineties about adoption. I didn’t think that I was interested in becoming a parent, but it was kind of a new phenomenon.

JG: When you wrote your Out piece, what startled you? Was it the fact that gay life was taking a turn? That gay people were suddenly becoming bourgeois? Suddenly conforming?

BG: Yes, that was the issue. It’s still an issue, funnily. I gave a reading the other night at the Gay and Lesbian Center. Jim Fouratt was there. He’d been at Stonewall, and there were very young people. In the discussion there was this issue surfacing from the slightly older group that gay life is synonymous with being an outlaw, in some way, and that with marriage there’s a concern that we’re giving that up.

JG: Two friends of mine were married the first day that gays could marry in New York State, and they said that when their relationship was secret it was sexier.

AB: When we adopted Katie there were two sad things out of ten million wonderful things. One of the sad things was that I lost friends—not through violent argument, but friends of mine, in 1998, simply couldn’t wrap their minds around it.

JG: Gay friends?

AB: Yes. They just couldn’t deal with it, and suddenly I just stopped hearing from them.

It was completely beyond their ability to understand. And once we had our daughter we started moving in slightly more domesticat-

ed, heterosexual circles because of schools.

But there was always someone who would come up and look at the two of us, and our daughter, and ask, “Which one of you is the mother?” We always used to hear that.

JG: What would you say?

AB: We are two fathers. But that wouldn’t happen now.

BG: I loved the line in the play: “And, anyway, isn’t being normal the most radical thing of all?” That’s what I felt with A.M. when she said, “Why don’t you just raise the child yourself?” It was such a shock. It’s not an Olympian adventure for me to put on a black leather jacket and go to a shadowy club, but it’s an adventure having a child.

AC: I’m really interested in the notion that when you have a child you have to leave a certain part of your life in abeyance for quite a while, because your child is more important than you are. Usually it’s the woman who does that. Your career, or your personal life, or your friends, or whatever— that just goes away for fifteen years, and then you resume it. And you do that with some resentment, but also a good deal of joy. And I don’t know whether men are as used to doing that as women are.

BG: I don’t think they’re as used to doing it, but I also think that it’s not just gay life that’s changing. It’s everyone’s life.

AC: How would you describe what the transition to parenthood has been like for you?

BG: I feel more at home in the world, as a result of being a parent.

JG: In the last four months?

BG: It was gradual. I think all these things— marriage, living with someone, being a parent—contributed. I feel more invested in the future.

AC: The transition from the world that you lived in, and that many of our friends lived in, in the eighties, which was about as far from a world of children as you could possibly get, to this one is a pretty big jump. Is there residue from your old life? Does your old lifestyle tug at you?

BG: No. The reason I wrote Smash Cut (which is an editing term for smashing one image up against another) was that my life of the seventies and eighties and my life now kept butting up against each other. The trigger for writing that book was that Paul and I moved to Chelsea Gardens, on Twenty-third Street, so I would walk out in the morning and look up across the street at the Chelsea Hotel and remember that I lived there with

Howard Brookner, who was my partner and a filmmaker. We lived there for three or four years in the late seventies or early eighties.

So I’d somehow moved to this neighborhood without fully realizing that I was now just across the street.

AC: Chelsea Hotel to Chelsea Gardens.

BG: Howard died in London Terrace from AIDS in ’89—that’s two blocks down the street. And none of this had really been at the top of my mind, which maybe is a testament to my dullness. But it’s also because the world changed so much. I mean, it is Chelsea. It is the Chelsea Hotel, but it has been revamped into a boutique hotel.

JG: It was disgusting.

BG: (Laughs) Such another planet. And likewise our lives. I mean, a few years ago two gay guys moved in downstairs and they had a baby. They would wheel a baby carriage up and down the street. It was shocking. Now I am the one rolling the Bugaboo stroller.

JG: Does that 1969-Stonewall-San Francisco world still exist?

BG: Well, I think it certainly exists in people’s minds.

JG: And the hard-core clubs like the Anvil?

BG: No, I think AIDS really stopped that.

AB: Because of the Supreme Court decision I’ve been thinking a lot about how profound an impact AIDS had on the future life of gay men. I have friends, who are more or less my age, who sought the comfort of marriage and monogamy or some version of that, or children because they had been so traumatized. This new form of being gay was for them a refuge for those who survived; it was a salve for these years of terror. I was in those years of terror. It was unimaginable how awful it was, the fear.

BG: I didn’t have survivor’s guilt. I don’t think that my family life now is trying to drive that away or make up for that period, particularly. But I do think AIDS had a gigantic effect, because if you survived then you had to sort of remake your life without a lot of your friends, without your partner. This experience of going through AIDS was like a war, like the effect of World War I on all those young English poets I imagine, with rarified sensibilities, suddenly seeing their friends drop to the right and left, and being in trenches rather than nightclubs. A lot of our trenches were the doctors’ offices and hospital wards. I remember becoming a bit numb emotionally and sexually during those

11

Photograph © Tod Papageorge, 1978.

Anne Cattaneo: However you do it, it’s very, very carefully, legally regulated. Now that we’ve moved from closed adoption to open adoption, all adoption, whether it’s gay or straight, is very different now from the way it was in the eighties.

AB: When we adopted, we couldn’t be married, so only one of the two parents could adopt, and then you had to petition later to see if you as a couple could legally become parents. And we did it through this, strangely, Catholic agency in New York and in Fresno, California, where our daughter was born. We had this radical New York lawyer who moved us out of the family court and into the surrogate court, and said, “We are going to make a precedent here. I’m going to petition for you to adopt your daughter as a couple,” which was the first time it had ever happened in New York State. And we became the first gay couple to legally adopt here. This must have been about 2000.

BG: I wrote a piece for Out magazine in the mid-nineties about adoption. I didn’t think that I was interested in becoming a parent, but it was kind of a new phenomenon.

JG: When you wrote your Out piece, what startled you? Was it the fact that gay life was taking a turn? That gay people were suddenly becoming bourgeois? Suddenly conforming?

BG: Yes, that was the issue. It’s still an issue, funnily. I gave a reading the other night at the Gay and Lesbian Center. Jim Fouratt was there. He’d been at Stonewall, and there were very young people. In the discussion there was this issue surfacing from the slightly older group that gay life is synonymous with being an outlaw, in some way, and that with marriage there’s a concern that we’re giving that up.

JG: Two friends of mine were married the first day that gays could marry in New York State, and they said that when their relationship was secret it was sexier.

AB: When we adopted Katie there were two sad things out of ten million wonderful things. One of the sad things was that I lost friends—not through violent argument, but friends of mine, in 1998, simply couldn’t wrap their minds around it.

JG: Gay friends?

AB: Yes. They just couldn’t deal with it, and suddenly I just stopped hearing from them.

It was completely beyond their ability to understand. And once we had our daughter we started moving in slightly more domesticat-

ed, heterosexual circles because of schools.

But there was always someone who would come up and look at the two of us, and our daughter, and ask, “Which one of you is the mother?” We always used to hear that.

JG: What would you say?

AB: We are two fathers. But that wouldn’t happen now.

BG: I loved the line in the play: “And, anyway, isn’t being normal the most radical thing of all?” That’s what I felt with A.M. when she said, “Why don’t you just raise the child yourself?” It was such a shock. It’s not an Olympian adventure for me to put on a black leather jacket and go to a shadowy club, but it’s an adventure having a child.

AC: I’m really interested in the notion that when you have a child you have to leave a certain part of your life in abeyance for quite a while, because your child is more important than you are. Usually it’s the woman who does that. Your career, or your personal life, or your friends, or whatever— that just goes away for fifteen years, and then you resume it. And you do that with some resentment, but also a good deal of joy. And I don’t know whether men are as used to doing that as women are.

BG: I don’t think they’re as used to doing it, but I also think that it’s not just gay life that’s changing. It’s everyone’s life.

AC: How would you describe what the transition to parenthood has been like for you?

BG: I feel more at home in the world, as a result of being a parent.

JG: In the last four months?

BG: It was gradual. I think all these things— marriage, living with someone, being a parent—contributed. I feel more invested in the future.

AC: The transition from the world that you lived in, and that many of our friends lived in, in the eighties, which was about as far from a world of children as you could possibly get, to this one is a pretty big jump. Is there residue from your old life? Does your old lifestyle tug at you?

BG: No. The reason I wrote Smash Cut (which is an editing term for smashing one image up against another) was that my life of the seventies and eighties and my life now kept butting up against each other. The trigger for writing that book was that Paul and I moved to Chelsea Gardens, on Twenty-third Street, so I would walk out in the morning and look up across the street at the Chelsea Hotel and remember that I lived there with

Howard Brookner, who was my partner and a filmmaker. We lived there for three or four years in the late seventies or early eighties.

So I’d somehow moved to this neighborhood without fully realizing that I was now just across the street.

AC: Chelsea Hotel to Chelsea Gardens.

BG: Howard died in London Terrace from AIDS in ’89—that’s two blocks down the street. And none of this had really been at the top of my mind, which maybe is a testament to my dullness. But it’s also because the world changed so much. I mean, it is Chelsea. It is the Chelsea Hotel, but it has been revamped into a boutique hotel.

JG: It was disgusting.

BG: (Laughs) Such another planet. And likewise our lives. I mean, a few years ago two gay guys moved in downstairs and they had a baby. They would wheel a baby carriage up and down the street. It was shocking. Now I am the one rolling the Bugaboo stroller.

JG: Does that 1969-Stonewall-San Francisco world still exist?

BG: Well, I think it certainly exists in people’s minds.

JG: And the hard-core clubs like the Anvil?

BG: No, I think AIDS really stopped that.

AB: Because of the Supreme Court decision I’ve been thinking a lot about how profound an impact AIDS had on the future life of gay men. I have friends, who are more or less my age, who sought the comfort of marriage and monogamy or some version of that, or children because they had been so traumatized. This new form of being gay was for them a refuge for those who survived; it was a salve for these years of terror. I was in those years of terror. It was unimaginable how awful it was, the fear.

BG: I didn’t have survivor’s guilt. I don’t think that my family life now is trying to drive that away or make up for that period, particularly. But I do think AIDS had a gigantic effect, because if you survived then you had to sort of remake your life without a lot of your friends, without your partner. This experience of going through AIDS was like a war, like the effect of World War I on all those young English poets I imagine, with rarified sensibilities, suddenly seeing their friends drop to the right and left, and being in trenches rather than nightclubs. A lot of our trenches were the doctors’ offices and hospital wards. I remember becoming a bit numb emotionally and sexually during those

11

years when we did not know what was even causing this science-fiction-like disease. I do not have guilt, but I did experience trauma.

I’m certainly much happier living with birth than with that brand of death.

AC: That marriage of sexuality and death, of sexuality and danger, is incredibly powerful. Do you think the extreme sexuality of gay culture in the eighties has lessened now?

BG: I thought it was interesting in the play when they talk about how little gay fathers talk about sex. Everything was tamped down in some way.

AC: But flares up occasionally.

BG: Yes. You go to Fire Island for your vacation, but then these guys are out in the bushes frolicking, so how do you explain that to your kids?

AC: Do you feel that children and a sexual environment are antithetical?

BG: No, although, as in the play, the explaining can get a bit tricky. When I was a kid my parents would take me with them to drive-in movies. (Mmm, I miss drive-in movies.) The first feature was always some boring Peter Pan cartoon; the second feature was a sexy but great European “adult” film. I saw La Dolce Vita from the back seat of my parents’ car when I was supposed to be asleep in my jammies with footsies. I don’t remember being damaged by the experience, just mystified.

JG: How much of having a child, especially a gay couple having a child, is because we can afford it? How much of it is a status symbol?

BG: I don’t know if it’s a status symbol yet, but for most gay couples it’s expensive to have a child. It’s not something that just happens by accident in the back of the car or something.

AC: Another side of the play is the way it examines this cultural phenomenon of attachment parenting, of a child being the ultimate accessory.

BG: In the play, the two interesting sociological things I noticed were that these guys are all upper-middle-class white guys, and also that their social life revolves around the child. Being a parent trumps gay identity. (Laughter) AC: And that’s the thing—hetero- or homosexual, other parents become your friends for twenty years, you spend a lot of time with them, then your kids go off to college and your social life breaks apart again be-

12

cause you find you have very little in common with them. You leave a way of life behind when you become a parent, and the question at the heart of the play is whether you’re happy about that.

To me, one essence of parenting is sacrifice. You’re putting someone else before yourself, for the rest of your life. And the essence of what I remember from the seventies and eighties was the opposite of that— doing something for yourself.

BG: It was just a different time. So certainly in my generation, when I went to college, there wasn’t a gay identity to come to particularly, and most of us were coming out of these American towns where we had been repressed. And so what was part of the selfishness of it was people finally acting out romantic and sexual fantasies that had been in check for all these years. We had kind of a delayed reaction.

JG: What are the new emotions? Emotions that are new for the people experiencing them? Or are there new emotions?

BG: The emotions that come up in the play, and in the lives of gay parents generally, are old emotions arising in new settings. Worries about which parent the child is closer to.

Competition as to who is the better parent.

The desire to then have an erotic adventure outside of the relationship, and what such a pattern-interrupt and the ensuing conflict might do to the child. Is it worth it? Those are all old emotions, but they’re put in this new context.

JG: What will people think of the gay world of the fifties and sixties and eighties? Will those years just be a historical oddity? Is this the end of a gay identity?

BG: That’s certainly the question of the moment. I was giving this talk about my memoir the other night and someone said that in thirty years there won’t be gay memoirs.

And I thought that was a wonderful thing, meaning it kind of goes away as an identity.

Someone else thought that was horrifying, that the gay spirit should continue.

JG: Talk about the gay spirit.

BG: I’ve been writing a biography of Rumi, and he was in love, and had this intense transformative relationship with Shams of Tabriz. It wasn’t gay, but it had all these powerful components of love and spiritual awakening. All these connections are slightly indefinable. At the same time, it is true that I was gay from as early as I can remember,

and certainly as a seven-year-old. So there is an identity that’s connected to erotic attraction, but it’s connected to other kinds of things, too. Somehow in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, I could read the poems of Frank O’Hara and, without knowing why, I felt some attraction, to his poetry, and to lines like, “You’re gorgeous and I’m coming.“ That mysterious attraction was a clue to a kind of identity.

JG: What do you think Frank O’Hara would have made of today?

BG: Well, Frank O’Hara was a very open figure. “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” It’s on his tombstone. But certainly a lot of gay men and artists and intellectuals of his generation wouldn’t necessarily easily adapt to gay marriage and family. There’s a feeling of something being lost by becoming normal.

AB: I don’t really understand why it has all become so “this” or “that.” I don’t believe that getting married or having children as a gay man or a gay woman negates your entire gay identity. I just don’t understand that.

AC: Well, I don’t see much transition between you in the seventies and you now, in your behavior and where you go at night.…

AB: (Laughter) You’re right. I wasn’t so much talking about myself as others. When I was reading the Times yesterday I thought, Of course, finally, everyone is thrilled—the Supreme Court is voting on marriage equality. We’ve finally gotten what many of us wanted or all of us feel we deserve, whether we want it or not. We’ve got this, but now we can’t help but feel that we’re giving up a free and sort of hidden lifestyle. Well, you can’t have everything. Just be happy that this has happened JG: It’s a false nostalgia. It’s like looking for Paris in the twenties.

AB: Suddenly everyone’s talking about how thrilling it was to be secretive and to run around dark hallways and meet people in glory holes. Or use code words…But although it may have been thrilling and erotic, what about all the horrible things about it? And the scary, frightening, life-threatening things?

BG: We were always being mugged. There were a lot of drug casualties, lots of OD’ing.

JG: It’s interesting—the role of the gay outlaw is something that will belong to the twentieth century.

BG: Well, I think this shift we’re describing really was heavily impacted by AIDS. If AIDS hadn’t happened, and all these people who helped shape the culture were still alive— Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, James Merrill—if they continued into the present, the change would have been less radical. But losing that generation of thinkers and artists defined that piece of history. When I was writing about that period, I realized that everyone I was writing about is dead. That time was prematurely flattened into history by AIDS. Actually, writing this memoir I relived the smash-cut experience because to write about my relationship with Howard and the seventies was so much fun; it had almost this taste to it, and color and everything about that period was so alive. Then you get to 1981 and the piece in the New York Times about the forty-one homosexuals coming down with a mysterious disease that they thought came from the air-conditioning system at the Mineshaft or something, like Legionnaires’ disease. And then, at a certain point, Howard is diagnosed as HIV-positive, whatever it was called at that point, and I realized that I’d gotten myself into this corner where I now needed to write about all of that horror as well. I’d already set up my approach—vivid describing of what was going on—and then I had to write about these darker memories. I realized that I hadn’t revisited them in twenty-five years. And there they were. It was as if my memory was on a dolly track going down the AIDS wards in St. Vincent’s. It was all very clear.

JG: I would love to see Peter’s play and Boys in the Band running in rep. AIDS doesn’t come up in Boys in the Band because it hasn’t happened yet, and in Dada Woof Papa Hot because it has. The absence of that horror in both plays is fascinating.

AC: Before and after.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

LOVE & LIBERTY: SUPREME COURT This summer, as our issue was in progress, the Supreme Court’s historic decision legalized gay marriage throughout the United States, declaring that the constitutional principle of equal protection overwhelms any state or local bans on same-sex marriage. We’ve selected a few of the most powerful passages from the dissenting and majority opinions: THE DISSENTING OPINIONS: “Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.”

—Justice Antonin Scalia “I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

—Justice Samuel Alito “If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal.

Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

—Justice Anthony Kennedy THE MAJORITY OPINION: The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity. ♥ ♥ ♥ Recounting the circumstances of three of these cases illustrates the urgency of the petitioners’ cause from their perspective. Petitioner James Obergefell, a plaintiff in the Ohio case, met John Arthur over two decades ago. They fell in love and started a life together, establishing a lasting, committed relation. In 2011, however, Arthur was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. This debilitating disease is progressive, with no known cure. Two years ago, Obergefell and Arthur decided to commit to one another, resolving to marry before Arthur died. To fulfill their mutual promise, they traveled from Ohio to Maryland, where same-sex marriage was legal. It was difficult for Arthur to move, and so the couple were wed inside a medical transport plane as it remained on the tarmac in Baltimore. Three months later, Arthur died. Ohio law does not permit Obergefell to be listed as the surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. By statute, they must remain strangers even in death, a state-imposed separation Obergefell deems “hurtful for the rest of time.” App. in No. 14–556 etc., p. 38. He brought suit to be shown as the surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. ♥ ♥ ♥ The ancient origins of marriage confirm its centrality, but it has not stood in isolation from developments in law and society. The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. That institution— even as confined to opposite-sex relations—has evolved over time.

For example, marriage was once viewed as an arrangement by the couple’s parents based on political, religious, and financial concerns;

13

years when we did not know what was even causing this science-fiction-like disease. I do not have guilt, but I did experience trauma.

I’m certainly much happier living with birth than with that brand of death.

AC: That marriage of sexuality and death, of sexuality and danger, is incredibly powerful. Do you think the extreme sexuality of gay culture in the eighties has lessened now?

BG: I thought it was interesting in the play when they talk about how little gay fathers talk about sex. Everything was tamped down in some way.

AC: But flares up occasionally.

BG: Yes. You go to Fire Island for your vacation, but then these guys are out in the bushes frolicking, so how do you explain that to your kids?

AC: Do you feel that children and a sexual environment are antithetical?

BG: No, although, as in the play, the explaining can get a bit tricky. When I was a kid my parents would take me with them to drive-in movies. (Mmm, I miss drive-in movies.) The first feature was always some boring Peter Pan cartoon; the second feature was a sexy but great European “adult” film. I saw La Dolce Vita from the back seat of my parents’ car when I was supposed to be asleep in my jammies with footsies. I don’t remember being damaged by the experience, just mystified.

JG: How much of having a child, especially a gay couple having a child, is because we can afford it? How much of it is a status symbol?

BG: I don’t know if it’s a status symbol yet, but for most gay couples it’s expensive to have a child. It’s not something that just happens by accident in the back of the car or something.

AC: Another side of the play is the way it examines this cultural phenomenon of attachment parenting, of a child being the ultimate accessory.

BG: In the play, the two interesting sociological things I noticed were that these guys are all upper-middle-class white guys, and also that their social life revolves around the child. Being a parent trumps gay identity. (Laughter) AC: And that’s the thing—hetero- or homosexual, other parents become your friends for twenty years, you spend a lot of time with them, then your kids go off to college and your social life breaks apart again be-

12

cause you find you have very little in common with them. You leave a way of life behind when you become a parent, and the question at the heart of the play is whether you’re happy about that.

To me, one essence of parenting is sacrifice. You’re putting someone else before yourself, for the rest of your life. And the essence of what I remember from the seventies and eighties was the opposite of that— doing something for yourself.

BG: It was just a different time. So certainly in my generation, when I went to college, there wasn’t a gay identity to come to particularly, and most of us were coming out of these American towns where we had been repressed. And so what was part of the selfishness of it was people finally acting out romantic and sexual fantasies that had been in check for all these years. We had kind of a delayed reaction.

JG: What are the new emotions? Emotions that are new for the people experiencing them? Or are there new emotions?

BG: The emotions that come up in the play, and in the lives of gay parents generally, are old emotions arising in new settings. Worries about which parent the child is closer to.

Competition as to who is the better parent.

The desire to then have an erotic adventure outside of the relationship, and what such a pattern-interrupt and the ensuing conflict might do to the child. Is it worth it? Those are all old emotions, but they’re put in this new context.

JG: What will people think of the gay world of the fifties and sixties and eighties? Will those years just be a historical oddity? Is this the end of a gay identity?

BG: That’s certainly the question of the moment. I was giving this talk about my memoir the other night and someone said that in thirty years there won’t be gay memoirs.

And I thought that was a wonderful thing, meaning it kind of goes away as an identity.

Someone else thought that was horrifying, that the gay spirit should continue.

JG: Talk about the gay spirit.

BG: I’ve been writing a biography of Rumi, and he was in love, and had this intense transformative relationship with Shams of Tabriz. It wasn’t gay, but it had all these powerful components of love and spiritual awakening. All these connections are slightly indefinable. At the same time, it is true that I was gay from as early as I can remember,

and certainly as a seven-year-old. So there is an identity that’s connected to erotic attraction, but it’s connected to other kinds of things, too. Somehow in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, I could read the poems of Frank O’Hara and, without knowing why, I felt some attraction, to his poetry, and to lines like, “You’re gorgeous and I’m coming.“ That mysterious attraction was a clue to a kind of identity.

JG: What do you think Frank O’Hara would have made of today?

BG: Well, Frank O’Hara was a very open figure. “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” It’s on his tombstone. But certainly a lot of gay men and artists and intellectuals of his generation wouldn’t necessarily easily adapt to gay marriage and family. There’s a feeling of something being lost by becoming normal.

AB: I don’t really understand why it has all become so “this” or “that.” I don’t believe that getting married or having children as a gay man or a gay woman negates your entire gay identity. I just don’t understand that.

AC: Well, I don’t see much transition between you in the seventies and you now, in your behavior and where you go at night.…

AB: (Laughter) You’re right. I wasn’t so much talking about myself as others. When I was reading the Times yesterday I thought, Of course, finally, everyone is thrilled—the Supreme Court is voting on marriage equality. We’ve finally gotten what many of us wanted or all of us feel we deserve, whether we want it or not. We’ve got this, but now we can’t help but feel that we’re giving up a free and sort of hidden lifestyle. Well, you can’t have everything. Just be happy that this has happened JG: It’s a false nostalgia. It’s like looking for Paris in the twenties.

AB: Suddenly everyone’s talking about how thrilling it was to be secretive and to run around dark hallways and meet people in glory holes. Or use code words…But although it may have been thrilling and erotic, what about all the horrible things about it? And the scary, frightening, life-threatening things?

BG: We were always being mugged. There were a lot of drug casualties, lots of OD’ing.

JG: It’s interesting—the role of the gay outlaw is something that will belong to the twentieth century.

BG: Well, I think this shift we’re describing really was heavily impacted by AIDS. If AIDS hadn’t happened, and all these people who helped shape the culture were still alive— Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, James Merrill—if they continued into the present, the change would have been less radical. But losing that generation of thinkers and artists defined that piece of history. When I was writing about that period, I realized that everyone I was writing about is dead. That time was prematurely flattened into history by AIDS. Actually, writing this memoir I relived the smash-cut experience because to write about my relationship with Howard and the seventies was so much fun; it had almost this taste to it, and color and everything about that period was so alive. Then you get to 1981 and the piece in the New York Times about the forty-one homosexuals coming down with a mysterious disease that they thought came from the air-conditioning system at the Mineshaft or something, like Legionnaires’ disease. And then, at a certain point, Howard is diagnosed as HIV-positive, whatever it was called at that point, and I realized that I’d gotten myself into this corner where I now needed to write about all of that horror as well. I’d already set up my approach—vivid describing of what was going on—and then I had to write about these darker memories. I realized that I hadn’t revisited them in twenty-five years. And there they were. It was as if my memory was on a dolly track going down the AIDS wards in St. Vincent’s. It was all very clear.

JG: I would love to see Peter’s play and Boys in the Band running in rep. AIDS doesn’t come up in Boys in the Band because it hasn’t happened yet, and in Dada Woof Papa Hot because it has. The absence of that horror in both plays is fascinating.

AC: Before and after.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

LOVE & LIBERTY: SUPREME COURT This summer, as our issue was in progress, the Supreme Court’s historic decision legalized gay marriage throughout the United States, declaring that the constitutional principle of equal protection overwhelms any state or local bans on same-sex marriage. We’ve selected a few of the most powerful passages from the dissenting and majority opinions: THE DISSENTING OPINIONS: “Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.”

—Justice Antonin Scalia “I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

—Justice Samuel Alito “If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal.

Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

—Justice Anthony Kennedy THE MAJORITY OPINION: The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity. ♥ ♥ ♥ Recounting the circumstances of three of these cases illustrates the urgency of the petitioners’ cause from their perspective. Petitioner James Obergefell, a plaintiff in the Ohio case, met John Arthur over two decades ago. They fell in love and started a life together, establishing a lasting, committed relation. In 2011, however, Arthur was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. This debilitating disease is progressive, with no known cure. Two years ago, Obergefell and Arthur decided to commit to one another, resolving to marry before Arthur died. To fulfill their mutual promise, they traveled from Ohio to Maryland, where same-sex marriage was legal. It was difficult for Arthur to move, and so the couple were wed inside a medical transport plane as it remained on the tarmac in Baltimore. Three months later, Arthur died. Ohio law does not permit Obergefell to be listed as the surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. By statute, they must remain strangers even in death, a state-imposed separation Obergefell deems “hurtful for the rest of time.” App. in No. 14–556 etc., p. 38. He brought suit to be shown as the surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. ♥ ♥ ♥ The ancient origins of marriage confirm its centrality, but it has not stood in isolation from developments in law and society. The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. That institution— even as confined to opposite-sex relations—has evolved over time.

For example, marriage was once viewed as an arrangement by the couple’s parents based on political, religious, and financial concerns;

13

but by the time of the Nation’s founding it was understood to be a voluntary contract between a man and a woman. See N. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation 9–17 (2000); S. Coontz, Marriage, A History 15–16 (2005). ♥ ♥ ♥ The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.

14

FIRE ISLAND PINES: POLAROIDS 1975-1983

By Tom Bianchi

© Tom Bianchi, Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983.

All photographs courtesy of the artist.

In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967), which invalidated bans on interracial unions, a unanimous Court held marriage is “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” The Court reaffirmed that holding in Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374, 384 (1978), which held the right to marry was burdened by a law prohibiting fathers who were behind on child support from marrying. The Court again applied this principle in Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 95 (1987), which held the right to marry was abridged by regulations limiting the privilege of prison inmates to marry. Over time and in other contexts, the Court has reiterated that the right to marry is fundamental under the Due Process Clause. ♥ ♥ ♥ As all parties agree, many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted. And hundreds of thousands of children are presently being raised by such couples. See Brief for Gary J. Gates as Amicus Curiae 4. Most States have allowed gays and lesbians to adopt, either as individuals or as couples, and many adopted and foster children have same-sex parents, see id., at 5. This provides powerful confirmation from the law itself that gays and lesbians can create loving, supportive families.

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage thus conflicts with a central premise of the right to marry. Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples. ♥ ♥ ♥ [T]he right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them. ♥ ♥ ♥ No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

—Chief Justice John Roberts

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

but by the time of the Nation’s founding it was understood to be a voluntary contract between a man and a woman. See N. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation 9–17 (2000); S. Coontz, Marriage, A History 15–16 (2005). ♥ ♥ ♥ The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.

14

FIRE ISLAND PINES: POLAROIDS 1975-1983

By Tom Bianchi

© Tom Bianchi, Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983.

All photographs courtesy of the artist.

In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967), which invalidated bans on interracial unions, a unanimous Court held marriage is “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” The Court reaffirmed that holding in Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374, 384 (1978), which held the right to marry was burdened by a law prohibiting fathers who were behind on child support from marrying. The Court again applied this principle in Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 95 (1987), which held the right to marry was abridged by regulations limiting the privilege of prison inmates to marry. Over time and in other contexts, the Court has reiterated that the right to marry is fundamental under the Due Process Clause. ♥ ♥ ♥ As all parties agree, many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted. And hundreds of thousands of children are presently being raised by such couples. See Brief for Gary J. Gates as Amicus Curiae 4. Most States have allowed gays and lesbians to adopt, either as individuals or as couples, and many adopted and foster children have same-sex parents, see id., at 5. This provides powerful confirmation from the law itself that gays and lesbians can create loving, supportive families.

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage thus conflicts with a central premise of the right to marry. Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples. ♥ ♥ ♥ [T]he right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them. ♥ ♥ ♥ No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

—Chief Justice John Roberts

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

THE NOVELTY-SEEKING SPECIES By Christopher Ryan

16

dered, nonreproductive sex can be risky, potentially bringing us into contact with sexually transmitted infections, incautious falls from trees, stinging nettles, and a menagerie of things that crawl. Any predator that hears us going at it knows that we’re deeply distracted, and that there’s likely to be a two-for-one special on human. So why all this superfluous bunga-bunga?

Although many cultures refuse to acknowledge it, Homo sapiens long ago repurposed sex from its original reproductive role to a vital social function. Millions of years ago, our ancestors began sharing sexual pleasure as a way to establish trust, confirm intimacy, and reinforce the complex social networks vital to their survival. This insight is inescapably obvious and well documented, and yet so deeply disturbing to some that it remains invisible and unthinkable to many political, religious, and even scientific authorities.

Once we understand that human sexuality is primarily about forming and maintaining relationships with other adults and not about having children, the so-called “conundrum of homosexuality” vanishes. That two men or two women cannot reproduce sexually becomes a non-issue once we acknowledge the nonreproductive essence of human sexuality. As the esteemed biologist E. O. Wilson has written, “All that we can surmise of humankind’s genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as means for procreation.” Not coincidentally, our two closest primate cousins, chimps and bonobos (as well as dolphins), also have plenty of nonreproductive sex.

There are more than three hundred species of primates, many of which live in complex social groups defined as including more than one adult male. Of these group-living primates, precisely none are sexually monogamous. Those who argue that human sexuality (and, by extension, marriage) is primarily about reproduction ignore several million years’ worth of data and all but a tiny fraction of contemporary human sexual activity.

They also ignore the fact that intelligent creatures are, by definition, drawn to novel experiences. Human beings could be defined as the ultimate novelty-seeking species (and you New Yorkers may be the most novelty-driven of all humans!). We are the ultimate omnivores. We eat everything from ants to elephants, avocados to acorns. Within a few blocks of where you’re sitting right now, people are enjoying cuisine from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Zanzibar. But our omnivorous nature extends far beyond food. We travel beyond distant horizons in search of new vistas and then sit at home listening to world music. We have an insatiable appetite for new art, new friends, new fashions, new ideas, new sensations of every sort. Members of our species have been known to pay good money to have needles stuck in their meridians, to sit in a small room crowded with naked, sweating strangers, and to have their colons irrigated with cucumber-in-

Mitch Epstein, Liquidation Sale I, 2000, Chromogenic print (color). Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. © Black River Productions, Ltd./Mitch Epstein.

When I was asked to contribute my thoughts about Peter Parnell’s wonderful play, my first thought was “Do they know I’m a straight psychologist?” The challenges faced by the same-sex couples in Dada Woof Papa Hot aren’t ultimately about sexual orientation; Parnell’s characters are confronting the eternal issues that arise in every long-term relationship (trust, intimacy, the yearning for stability), and the yangs to those yins (betrayal, drift, the unignorable hunger for novelty). Parnell seems to be wondering (as I do) if same-sex couples will fortify the institution of marriage by offering new ways for couples to address these inescapable issues—or if they’ll simply paint themselves into the same rigid corners in which straight couples have been mired forever.

Or, at least, since the 1950s. Sixty years isn’t forever, but it feels like forever to anyone trapped in an unhappy marriage.

Dan Savage, America’s favorite gay uncle, has argued for decades that aspirations toward sexual monogamy need to be tempered with realism and flexibility. When women finally gained enough cultural leverage to get a voice in redefining marriage, American culture faced a fork in the road. Savage argues that we took the wrong path—the one more traveled, and, yes, it has made all the difference. “The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told the New York Times in 2011, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.

Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.”

Rather than adjusting our expectations by extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we went the other way—imposing the same rigidly unrealistic rules upon men that women had suffered under for millennia. And, in Savage’s words, “it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

“When a couple has an argument,” according to Kurt Vonnegut’s words, “what they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: ‘You are not enough people!’” Our inane insistence on lifelong sexual monogamy virtually guarantees that the vast majority of American marriages will be founded on deceit, shadowed by shame, and/or abandoned in pursuit of a new and improved version of the same old thing. How could it be otherwise? Despite cultural and scientific protestations to the contrary, Homo sapiens is arguably the most sexual mammal on the planet. While all but a handful of mammals have sex only a dozen or so times per birth, our average is somewhere closer to a thousand. Most of the sex we humans engage in cannot possibly result in babies. We do it when we’re already pregnant, postmenopausal, lactating, alone, with a same-sex partner, in dreams, fantasies, and in poorly written best-sellers…. Most human sexual behavior never brings sperm anywhere near an ovum. From an evolutionary perspective, this seems nonsensical and potentially dangerous. In addition to the energy squan-

fused water while watching the proceedings on high-definition TV. Given our species’ well-documented, overwhelming appetite for the new, whence the persistent notion that the impulse toward erotic novelty is aberrant, shameful, and a sure sign of psychopathology?

It’s not coming from gay men, that’s for sure. Many gay male couples long ago learned to navigate the turbulent waters swirling between the casual sex of friendship and the sacred sex that bonds a much deeper kind of union for decades. While sexual monogamy is something many of us aspire to—gay, straight, and otherwise—we should appreciate how difficult the ideal will be to sustain over time. We can choose never to eat meat again, but that refusal makes us vegetarians, not herbivores. Some things never come naturally, no matter how hard we try—and the fact that we have to try at all tells us a lot. Which is not to say that natural is always better or that choosing to live monogamously is necessarily a mistake. Like vegetarianism, a monogamous marriage can be a wonderful, healthy, and wise path to choose. But it’s likely to be an uphill path. Choosing to give up meat doesn’t mean that bacon suddenly stops smelling good. It may even start smelling better than ever. Your Pavlovian response doesn’t mean that you’re a bad vegetarian; it simply means that you’re a human being.

For me, Parnell’s play arrived like a postcard from another fork in the road of marriage. Which path will we choose this time? Will we expand our definitions to include the perspective and experience of many gay (and, increasingly, straight) couples for whom “marriage” and “sexual exclusivity” are not synonymous terms, or will we insist that gay couples at least pretend to respect the same unrealistic, oppressive expectations that have been so destructive to so many straight marriages? Will we finally acknowledge what sort of animal Homo sapiens is and design more flexible, inclusive marriages that accommodate our evolved essence, or will we continue to insist that otherwise loving, functional, compatible marriages be destroyed and discarded simply because one or both partners slipped up and got caught acting like a human being?

Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. is the co-author of the global bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, along with his wife, Cacilda Jethá, M.D. He has appeared everywhere, from the stage at TED to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House. He hosts the popular podcast Tangentially Speaking. His next book, Civilized to Death: Why Everything’s Amazing but Nobody’s Happy, will be published in 2016 by Simon & Schuster.

17

THE NOVELTY-SEEKING SPECIES By Christopher Ryan

16

dered, nonreproductive sex can be risky, potentially bringing us into contact with sexually transmitted infections, incautious falls from trees, stinging nettles, and a menagerie of things that crawl. Any predator that hears us going at it knows that we’re deeply distracted, and that there’s likely to be a two-for-one special on human. So why all this superfluous bunga-bunga?

Although many cultures refuse to acknowledge it, Homo sapiens long ago repurposed sex from its original reproductive role to a vital social function. Millions of years ago, our ancestors began sharing sexual pleasure as a way to establish trust, confirm intimacy, and reinforce the complex social networks vital to their survival. This insight is inescapably obvious and well documented, and yet so deeply disturbing to some that it remains invisible and unthinkable to many political, religious, and even scientific authorities.

Once we understand that human sexuality is primarily about forming and maintaining relationships with other adults and not about having children, the so-called “conundrum of homosexuality” vanishes. That two men or two women cannot reproduce sexually becomes a non-issue once we acknowledge the nonreproductive essence of human sexuality. As the esteemed biologist E. O. Wilson has written, “All that we can surmise of humankind’s genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as means for procreation.” Not coincidentally, our two closest primate cousins, chimps and bonobos (as well as dolphins), also have plenty of nonreproductive sex.

There are more than three hundred species of primates, many of which live in complex social groups defined as including more than one adult male. Of these group-living primates, precisely none are sexually monogamous. Those who argue that human sexuality (and, by extension, marriage) is primarily about reproduction ignore several million years’ worth of data and all but a tiny fraction of contemporary human sexual activity.

They also ignore the fact that intelligent creatures are, by definition, drawn to novel experiences. Human beings could be defined as the ultimate novelty-seeking species (and you New Yorkers may be the most novelty-driven of all humans!). We are the ultimate omnivores. We eat everything from ants to elephants, avocados to acorns. Within a few blocks of where you’re sitting right now, people are enjoying cuisine from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Zanzibar. But our omnivorous nature extends far beyond food. We travel beyond distant horizons in search of new vistas and then sit at home listening to world music. We have an insatiable appetite for new art, new friends, new fashions, new ideas, new sensations of every sort. Members of our species have been known to pay good money to have needles stuck in their meridians, to sit in a small room crowded with naked, sweating strangers, and to have their colons irrigated with cucumber-in-

Mitch Epstein, Liquidation Sale I, 2000, Chromogenic print (color). Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. © Black River Productions, Ltd./Mitch Epstein.

When I was asked to contribute my thoughts about Peter Parnell’s wonderful play, my first thought was “Do they know I’m a straight psychologist?” The challenges faced by the same-sex couples in Dada Woof Papa Hot aren’t ultimately about sexual orientation; Parnell’s characters are confronting the eternal issues that arise in every long-term relationship (trust, intimacy, the yearning for stability), and the yangs to those yins (betrayal, drift, the unignorable hunger for novelty). Parnell seems to be wondering (as I do) if same-sex couples will fortify the institution of marriage by offering new ways for couples to address these inescapable issues—or if they’ll simply paint themselves into the same rigid corners in which straight couples have been mired forever.

Or, at least, since the 1950s. Sixty years isn’t forever, but it feels like forever to anyone trapped in an unhappy marriage.

Dan Savage, America’s favorite gay uncle, has argued for decades that aspirations toward sexual monogamy need to be tempered with realism and flexibility. When women finally gained enough cultural leverage to get a voice in redefining marriage, American culture faced a fork in the road. Savage argues that we took the wrong path—the one more traveled, and, yes, it has made all the difference. “The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told the New York Times in 2011, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.

Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.”

Rather than adjusting our expectations by extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we went the other way—imposing the same rigidly unrealistic rules upon men that women had suffered under for millennia. And, in Savage’s words, “it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

“When a couple has an argument,” according to Kurt Vonnegut’s words, “what they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: ‘You are not enough people!’” Our inane insistence on lifelong sexual monogamy virtually guarantees that the vast majority of American marriages will be founded on deceit, shadowed by shame, and/or abandoned in pursuit of a new and improved version of the same old thing. How could it be otherwise? Despite cultural and scientific protestations to the contrary, Homo sapiens is arguably the most sexual mammal on the planet. While all but a handful of mammals have sex only a dozen or so times per birth, our average is somewhere closer to a thousand. Most of the sex we humans engage in cannot possibly result in babies. We do it when we’re already pregnant, postmenopausal, lactating, alone, with a same-sex partner, in dreams, fantasies, and in poorly written best-sellers…. Most human sexual behavior never brings sperm anywhere near an ovum. From an evolutionary perspective, this seems nonsensical and potentially dangerous. In addition to the energy squan-

fused water while watching the proceedings on high-definition TV. Given our species’ well-documented, overwhelming appetite for the new, whence the persistent notion that the impulse toward erotic novelty is aberrant, shameful, and a sure sign of psychopathology?

It’s not coming from gay men, that’s for sure. Many gay male couples long ago learned to navigate the turbulent waters swirling between the casual sex of friendship and the sacred sex that bonds a much deeper kind of union for decades. While sexual monogamy is something many of us aspire to—gay, straight, and otherwise—we should appreciate how difficult the ideal will be to sustain over time. We can choose never to eat meat again, but that refusal makes us vegetarians, not herbivores. Some things never come naturally, no matter how hard we try—and the fact that we have to try at all tells us a lot. Which is not to say that natural is always better or that choosing to live monogamously is necessarily a mistake. Like vegetarianism, a monogamous marriage can be a wonderful, healthy, and wise path to choose. But it’s likely to be an uphill path. Choosing to give up meat doesn’t mean that bacon suddenly stops smelling good. It may even start smelling better than ever. Your Pavlovian response doesn’t mean that you’re a bad vegetarian; it simply means that you’re a human being.

For me, Parnell’s play arrived like a postcard from another fork in the road of marriage. Which path will we choose this time? Will we expand our definitions to include the perspective and experience of many gay (and, increasingly, straight) couples for whom “marriage” and “sexual exclusivity” are not synonymous terms, or will we insist that gay couples at least pretend to respect the same unrealistic, oppressive expectations that have been so destructive to so many straight marriages? Will we finally acknowledge what sort of animal Homo sapiens is and design more flexible, inclusive marriages that accommodate our evolved essence, or will we continue to insist that otherwise loving, functional, compatible marriages be destroyed and discarded simply because one or both partners slipped up and got caught acting like a human being?

Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. is the co-author of the global bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, along with his wife, Cacilda Jethá, M.D. He has appeared everywhere, from the stage at TED to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House. He hosts the popular podcast Tangentially Speaking. His next book, Civilized to Death: Why Everything’s Amazing but Nobody’s Happy, will be published in 2016 by Simon & Schuster.

17

EIGHT WAYS KIDS KILL THE ROMANCE By Ilana Wiles From the second a baby shoots out of your nether parts, your relationship with your spouse is forever changed. Yes, it’s a wonderful bonding moment as you begin your new family, but it’s also the moment romance flies out the window. You know what I find romantic? When my husband volunteers to change the baby’s diaper without asking for instructions first.

Here are eight other ways in which romance dies when you have a kid:

1. Many couples say that witnessing the birth of their baby was the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen. I’m not sure about that. The baby, yes. The baby’s head crowning? Not so much. I tried to make sure that my husband kept his eyes on me.

Unfortunately, he sneaked a peak and, according to him, “there are some things you just can’t unsee.”

2. There is nothing less sexy than a breast pump, especially when you live in a small New York City apartment and your milking paraphernalia are on full display. I remember a time when I wouldn’t let my husband see me pee for fear of ruining some illusion that everything excreted from my body smelled like freshly cut flowers. Now my husband has seen my nipples stretched across the kitchen counter and its contents stacked in Baggies and stored in the freezer as if I were selling breast milk on the black market. Peeing seems like foreplay in comparison.

3. Prior to having children, I dressed in a presentable fashion and spent a considerable amount of time ensuring that I looked good in my clothes. When I got home from work, I stayed fully dressed to make sure I got maximum mileage out of my cute outfit. After having our first kid, cute became a word reserved for our newborn. There is nothing cute about continuing to wear your maternity jeans six months after you gave birth. And, once you expose your ass bending down to pick up a pacifier at Mommy & Me, you understand why women switch from low-rise to mom jeans.

Even after I lost the baby weight and went back to work in semi-acceptable outfits, I still removed them the second I got home. You don’t want to risk ruining the one nice shirt that still fits with a baby’s well-placed handful of pea purée. As for my husband? I hope he finds my comfy pj’s appealing. If he told me otherwise, I’m afraid I’d still wear them daily.

4. If you didn’t already know, a crying baby coupled with extreme exhaustion is not the best aphrodisiac. And if you thought that sex starts up once the baby begins sleeping through the night, you have not considered the fact that toddlers can leave their big-boy beds and suddenly appear in your room.

5. Nights out are mandatory for being a successful couple (or so they say), but babysitting does not come cheap. Especially when you’re spending money so that you can doze off in a movie theater, which is what my husband and I did every time we tried to have a normal evening out. If by some miracle you remain awake through dinner but then your sitter requires a ride home, I can almost guarantee that the person who drove her home will return to his or her spouse passed out on the couch.

6. To this day, my husband and I see our marriage in two phases: before and after the Big Diaper Blowout. This was a situation that required me to carry my screaming baby at arm’s length and stick her in the tub. My husband peeled off her clothes and threw them directly into the garbage. This task was made more difficult because our poo-covered baby would not stop flailing her arms and legs. There was splatter. On my face. On his face. Images that were seared into our brains forever.

7. Do you and your significant other talk about your shared hopes and dreams? Have healthy political discussions? Debate the cultural relevance of your favorite movies and music? Sorry to say, but interesting conversations about adult topics come to a screeching halt after you’ve had kids. You’ll find yourselves discussing bedtime routines, potty-training tactics, and preschool options. What’s happening in the election? Who’s starring in the latest Coen brothers flick? You have no idea, unless it was covered on Sesame Street.

8. If you like cuddling with your partner or smooching on the couch, good luck finding a prime opportunity. Kids are Parental PDA Blockers. They’ll crawl in between you during a couch cuddle, scream “EWWWWW!!!” when they catch you trying to sneak a kiss in the kitchen, and take up all the space in your bed. My kids like to lie between us, so that my husband and I are relegated to opposite edges of the mattress. Forget trying to snuggle; we’re just trying not to fall off the bed.

Yes, kids are incredibly effective at ruining the romance, but that does not mean they have to destroy your relationship. There is nothing that makes me happier than watching my husband take care of our children. Surprising me with an economy-size pack of diapers can be even more rewarding than flowers. Vacuuming the floor after the girls crushed Cheerios in the carpet scores more points than jewelry. And, trust me, you have not lived until you’ve had a family dance party in your kitchen.

Times have changed, for sure. But the love gets stronger every day. At least, that’s what I tell myself while wearing my comfy pj’s.

Ilana Wiles writes the parenting blog Mommy Shorts and hosts a Web series called The Mommy Show, where she interviews celebrities at home while taking care of her kids. She has earned international media attention by creating various baby photo memes, such as Baby Suiting, Baby Mugging, and Epic Baby Hair, which have appeared on everything from Jimmy Kimmel to Ellen to Jeopardy. Follow her on Instagram—@mommyshorts, @insta2yearold, @pinkinnyc, and @averageparentproblems.

18

THE LAST BINDING COMMITMENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH JENNIFER SENIOR This summer Jennifer Senior, the author of All Joy and No Fun, spoke with our executive editor Anne Cattaneo, and our editor Alexis Gargagliano, about parenting and marriage.

Alexis Gargagliano: I loved your book All Joy and No Fun. I read hardly any parenting books when my son was born, but your book was such a thoughtful and true way of looking at parenthood.

Jennifer Senior: Maybe it’s just because I’m a slightly melancholy Jew, but I kind of like it all analyzed and laid out for me. I’m really big into breaking new things down culturally. That, for me, is the best kind of therapy.

You probably didn’t see my TED talk—it was my first public talk ever, which was totally surreal—but when I was at TED I just railed against all the stupid, contradictory parenting books on the shelf. I didn’t read a single one of them. In some measure, because I just figured my mother only had one, and before her there were no commercial parenting books, really. Or just a few.

Anne Cattaneo: She had Dr. Spock, right?

JS: She had Spock. Miraculously, there was a time when plenty of people managed to figure out how to raise their kids without parenting message boards.

AC: Well, perhaps they had families nearby.

JS: Well, yeah, although that’s also kind of a myth, or at least an arrangement we overstate and romanticize, as I learned from the historian Stephanie Coontz. Once we moved away from the agrarian model, people were no longer living in big family groupings. The Industrial Revolution really put an end to that. Starting in the early 1800s, the young men were moving to the city and leaving their families.

Conservatives harken back to the 1950s, believing that that’s the way it always was, and it wasn’t. It was a peculiar aberration that definitely was not good for women. Liberals tend to harken back to some mythical time that they can’t quite isolate, when lots and lots of families were nearby, and that also was really pretty distant. We think that we had more social capital than we did, actually.

AC: But still, like many of my friends, I learned everything about parenting from my mother, whose family came from the

West, and she learned everything about parenting from her mother.

JS: Well, their version of parenting is going to be pretty DIY, right? That’s a pretty good model.

AC: Well, I think so too. (Laughter) JS: But we’re all improvising, to some extent.

Gay parents in particular, because there’s really no model for that. As a side note, I’m surprised by the number of gay parents who read my book and come running up to me at readings, telling me that they were listening to me in their cars, that they had the audiobook or whatever. And, whenever I hear it, my heart always sinks a little, because I didn’t have any gay couples in my book.

AG: I was going to ask about that.

JS: It’s the one enduring source of heartbreak for me regarding my book, this one awful regret that I have. What happened was this: I went to Minnesota for the early chapters about the transition to parenthood and the effect of little, little kids on their parents, and I did everything through the Early Childhood Family Education Program. Each class had to choose whether to let me in. That’s how I met the parents I featured. I asked to be in a class with gay parents, but none of them really wanted a stranger in there. And who can blame them? Then, the next group of parents I interviewed were of kids who were in elementary school, to see how having a kid that age affected you as a parent. I went to a very, very conservative suburb of Houston for that chapter, and, man, was I not going to find any gay parents there. The final section was about how teens affected their parents. I talked to this close-knit group of schoolteachers and their friends in New York for it. But those who were gay were of that generation that had generally been in straight marriages first—they were in these blended families. It’s just such a different story. It wasn’t starting out as a pair with your kid. So I missed the boat. And I’m heartbroken over it. The time to find gay families was in Minnesota, in retrospect, at the very beginning.

AG: Since writing the book, have you discovered anything new about gay parents?

JS: Well, I did most of my research in 2011, and then I wrote it in 2012, and had the

manuscript in by January 2013. There wasn’t a ton of research on gay families. There was some, for sure—that’s not an excuse—but you kind of want a big body of research. I do cite two studies with gay parents. They’re not completely absent as a category in the book. I definitely talk about them in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact way, as it was just part of the marriage landscape and a fact of American life.

AG: One of the characters in the play actually says, “Who knows? Nobody’s done the research yet!”

JS: Well, that is part of it. The current research isn’t longitudinal, either—there hasn’t been enough time. And that’s another problem.

Many of the gay couples now who have adult children or eighteen-year-olds—many of them started in straight relationships. So it’s hard to find big longitudinal data sets. I think the most interesting data would have been about divisions of labor. Liza Mundy wrote a great story about this in The Atlantic. She said that research suggests that the chores are divided in a way that the couples perceive to be fairer. It’d be so great if gay marriage could provide a kind of guide for what a more equitable distribution of labor in straight couples might look like.

AG: Are they happier about their distribution of labor?

JS: Yep, according to Mundy their marital satisfaction tends to be higher. People tend to do what they’re good at, not what the culture expects them to do.

AG: Is there anything in particular that people respond to in the book?

JS: Many new moms and dads say they appreciate my first chapter, in which I talk about how parenthood means a radical departure from your freewheeling life. That speaks to everybody, actually. That is a huge piece, especially for the gay parents to whom I speak. The data show that if you’re a college-educated woman you are not going to have your first baby until you’re 30.3 years old, and your husband, if you’re in a straight relationship, is going to be 32.3. I mean, those numbers have to apply to gay men and women, too, right? They had a lot of freewheeling single years.

19

EIGHT WAYS KIDS KILL THE ROMANCE By Ilana Wiles From the second a baby shoots out of your nether parts, your relationship with your spouse is forever changed. Yes, it’s a wonderful bonding moment as you begin your new family, but it’s also the moment romance flies out the window. You know what I find romantic? When my husband volunteers to change the baby’s diaper without asking for instructions first.

Here are eight other ways in which romance dies when you have a kid:

1. Many couples say that witnessing the birth of their baby was the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen. I’m not sure about that. The baby, yes. The baby’s head crowning? Not so much. I tried to make sure that my husband kept his eyes on me.

Unfortunately, he sneaked a peak and, according to him, “there are some things you just can’t unsee.”

2. There is nothing less sexy than a breast pump, especially when you live in a small New York City apartment and your milking paraphernalia are on full display. I remember a time when I wouldn’t let my husband see me pee for fear of ruining some illusion that everything excreted from my body smelled like freshly cut flowers. Now my husband has seen my nipples stretched across the kitchen counter and its contents stacked in Baggies and stored in the freezer as if I were selling breast milk on the black market. Peeing seems like foreplay in comparison.

3. Prior to having children, I dressed in a presentable fashion and spent a considerable amount of time ensuring that I looked good in my clothes. When I got home from work, I stayed fully dressed to make sure I got maximum mileage out of my cute outfit. After having our first kid, cute became a word reserved for our newborn. There is nothing cute about continuing to wear your maternity jeans six months after you gave birth. And, once you expose your ass bending down to pick up a pacifier at Mommy & Me, you understand why women switch from low-rise to mom jeans.

Even after I lost the baby weight and went back to work in semi-acceptable outfits, I still removed them the second I got home. You don’t want to risk ruining the one nice shirt that still fits with a baby’s well-placed handful of pea purée. As for my husband? I hope he finds my comfy pj’s appealing. If he told me otherwise, I’m afraid I’d still wear them daily.

4. If you didn’t already know, a crying baby coupled with extreme exhaustion is not the best aphrodisiac. And if you thought that sex starts up once the baby begins sleeping through the night, you have not considered the fact that toddlers can leave their big-boy beds and suddenly appear in your room.

5. Nights out are mandatory for being a successful couple (or so they say), but babysitting does not come cheap. Especially when you’re spending money so that you can doze off in a movie theater, which is what my husband and I did every time we tried to have a normal evening out. If by some miracle you remain awake through dinner but then your sitter requires a ride home, I can almost guarantee that the person who drove her home will return to his or her spouse passed out on the couch.

6. To this day, my husband and I see our marriage in two phases: before and after the Big Diaper Blowout. This was a situation that required me to carry my screaming baby at arm’s length and stick her in the tub. My husband peeled off her clothes and threw them directly into the garbage. This task was made more difficult because our poo-covered baby would not stop flailing her arms and legs. There was splatter. On my face. On his face. Images that were seared into our brains forever.

7. Do you and your significant other talk about your shared hopes and dreams? Have healthy political discussions? Debate the cultural relevance of your favorite movies and music? Sorry to say, but interesting conversations about adult topics come to a screeching halt after you’ve had kids. You’ll find yourselves discussing bedtime routines, potty-training tactics, and preschool options. What’s happening in the election? Who’s starring in the latest Coen brothers flick? You have no idea, unless it was covered on Sesame Street.

8. If you like cuddling with your partner or smooching on the couch, good luck finding a prime opportunity. Kids are Parental PDA Blockers. They’ll crawl in between you during a couch cuddle, scream “EWWWWW!!!” when they catch you trying to sneak a kiss in the kitchen, and take up all the space in your bed. My kids like to lie between us, so that my husband and I are relegated to opposite edges of the mattress. Forget trying to snuggle; we’re just trying not to fall off the bed.

Yes, kids are incredibly effective at ruining the romance, but that does not mean they have to destroy your relationship. There is nothing that makes me happier than watching my husband take care of our children. Surprising me with an economy-size pack of diapers can be even more rewarding than flowers. Vacuuming the floor after the girls crushed Cheerios in the carpet scores more points than jewelry. And, trust me, you have not lived until you’ve had a family dance party in your kitchen.

Times have changed, for sure. But the love gets stronger every day. At least, that’s what I tell myself while wearing my comfy pj’s.

Ilana Wiles writes the parenting blog Mommy Shorts and hosts a Web series called The Mommy Show, where she interviews celebrities at home while taking care of her kids. She has earned international media attention by creating various baby photo memes, such as Baby Suiting, Baby Mugging, and Epic Baby Hair, which have appeared on everything from Jimmy Kimmel to Ellen to Jeopardy. Follow her on Instagram—@mommyshorts, @insta2yearold, @pinkinnyc, and @averageparentproblems.

18

THE LAST BINDING COMMITMENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH JENNIFER SENIOR This summer Jennifer Senior, the author of All Joy and No Fun, spoke with our executive editor Anne Cattaneo, and our editor Alexis Gargagliano, about parenting and marriage.

Alexis Gargagliano: I loved your book All Joy and No Fun. I read hardly any parenting books when my son was born, but your book was such a thoughtful and true way of looking at parenthood.

Jennifer Senior: Maybe it’s just because I’m a slightly melancholy Jew, but I kind of like it all analyzed and laid out for me. I’m really big into breaking new things down culturally. That, for me, is the best kind of therapy.

You probably didn’t see my TED talk—it was my first public talk ever, which was totally surreal—but when I was at TED I just railed against all the stupid, contradictory parenting books on the shelf. I didn’t read a single one of them. In some measure, because I just figured my mother only had one, and before her there were no commercial parenting books, really. Or just a few.

Anne Cattaneo: She had Dr. Spock, right?

JS: She had Spock. Miraculously, there was a time when plenty of people managed to figure out how to raise their kids without parenting message boards.

AC: Well, perhaps they had families nearby.

JS: Well, yeah, although that’s also kind of a myth, or at least an arrangement we overstate and romanticize, as I learned from the historian Stephanie Coontz. Once we moved away from the agrarian model, people were no longer living in big family groupings. The Industrial Revolution really put an end to that. Starting in the early 1800s, the young men were moving to the city and leaving their families.

Conservatives harken back to the 1950s, believing that that’s the way it always was, and it wasn’t. It was a peculiar aberration that definitely was not good for women. Liberals tend to harken back to some mythical time that they can’t quite isolate, when lots and lots of families were nearby, and that also was really pretty distant. We think that we had more social capital than we did, actually.

AC: But still, like many of my friends, I learned everything about parenting from my mother, whose family came from the

West, and she learned everything about parenting from her mother.

JS: Well, their version of parenting is going to be pretty DIY, right? That’s a pretty good model.

AC: Well, I think so too. (Laughter) JS: But we’re all improvising, to some extent.

Gay parents in particular, because there’s really no model for that. As a side note, I’m surprised by the number of gay parents who read my book and come running up to me at readings, telling me that they were listening to me in their cars, that they had the audiobook or whatever. And, whenever I hear it, my heart always sinks a little, because I didn’t have any gay couples in my book.

AG: I was going to ask about that.

JS: It’s the one enduring source of heartbreak for me regarding my book, this one awful regret that I have. What happened was this: I went to Minnesota for the early chapters about the transition to parenthood and the effect of little, little kids on their parents, and I did everything through the Early Childhood Family Education Program. Each class had to choose whether to let me in. That’s how I met the parents I featured. I asked to be in a class with gay parents, but none of them really wanted a stranger in there. And who can blame them? Then, the next group of parents I interviewed were of kids who were in elementary school, to see how having a kid that age affected you as a parent. I went to a very, very conservative suburb of Houston for that chapter, and, man, was I not going to find any gay parents there. The final section was about how teens affected their parents. I talked to this close-knit group of schoolteachers and their friends in New York for it. But those who were gay were of that generation that had generally been in straight marriages first—they were in these blended families. It’s just such a different story. It wasn’t starting out as a pair with your kid. So I missed the boat. And I’m heartbroken over it. The time to find gay families was in Minnesota, in retrospect, at the very beginning.

AG: Since writing the book, have you discovered anything new about gay parents?

JS: Well, I did most of my research in 2011, and then I wrote it in 2012, and had the

manuscript in by January 2013. There wasn’t a ton of research on gay families. There was some, for sure—that’s not an excuse—but you kind of want a big body of research. I do cite two studies with gay parents. They’re not completely absent as a category in the book. I definitely talk about them in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact way, as it was just part of the marriage landscape and a fact of American life.

AG: One of the characters in the play actually says, “Who knows? Nobody’s done the research yet!”

JS: Well, that is part of it. The current research isn’t longitudinal, either—there hasn’t been enough time. And that’s another problem.

Many of the gay couples now who have adult children or eighteen-year-olds—many of them started in straight relationships. So it’s hard to find big longitudinal data sets. I think the most interesting data would have been about divisions of labor. Liza Mundy wrote a great story about this in The Atlantic. She said that research suggests that the chores are divided in a way that the couples perceive to be fairer. It’d be so great if gay marriage could provide a kind of guide for what a more equitable distribution of labor in straight couples might look like.

AG: Are they happier about their distribution of labor?

JS: Yep, according to Mundy their marital satisfaction tends to be higher. People tend to do what they’re good at, not what the culture expects them to do.

AG: Is there anything in particular that people respond to in the book?

JS: Many new moms and dads say they appreciate my first chapter, in which I talk about how parenthood means a radical departure from your freewheeling life. That speaks to everybody, actually. That is a huge piece, especially for the gay parents to whom I speak. The data show that if you’re a college-educated woman you are not going to have your first baby until you’re 30.3 years old, and your husband, if you’re in a straight relationship, is going to be 32.3. I mean, those numbers have to apply to gay men and women, too, right? They had a lot of freewheeling single years.

19

AC: Do you think it’s inevitable that one parent has to make adjustments to their own life in order to take care of the children? And, obviously, in heterosexual marriages it’s usually the woman.

JS: So long as the state doesn’t kick in help for us—so long as we don’t have paid maternity or paternity leave, so long as we don’t have subsidized child care—then yes, the burden will probably fall disproportionately on one parent. The situation is so ridiculous right now: We’re relying on this closed loop of two people to do everything. It’s such a small number. Two! (If you’re lucky! Many parents are single!) Kids are an unbelievable amount of work. And that’s why in many European countries—not most, but many of them—there is subsidized child care, and in all of them there is paid maternity and paternity leave. But as long as there isn’t, who’s going to do that? The parents alone. And probably one more than the other. If you’re lucky, you can get a grandparent to help.

AC: How did we get to helicopter parenting?

JS: There are a number of forces. For starters, women went to work. And the result of women going to work was not that women saw their children less; they saw their children more. Because what they were doing before, when they were home, was not spending intensive time with their children; they were keeping a perfect house. If you look at the American Time Use Survey data, what women were doing in the 1950s and ’60s was buffing the floors to a high shine, making sure there was no ring around the collar, making scrumptious and punctual meals. But they were putting their children in playpens or telling them to get on their bikes and not come home until six o’clock.

AC: That was my life.

JS: Right, that was all of our lives. But then women started going to work, and the second women started going to work there was this cultural backlash, which led women to furiously overcompensate by spending more time with their children. If you look at the American Time Use Survey, today we spend four more hours a week with our kids than we did in the 1960s, when most of us were not working.

Artist Natasha Sharpe is from San Rafael, California, and is currently a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, class of 2017. Her major is film, animation, and video. She loves corgis, drawing with Sharpies, and drinking milk-shakes late at night. (natasharpie.tumblr.com)

And if you look at the American Time Use Survey data it’s very clear what’s going on.

Our houses are now filthy, and no one can cook. (Laughter) But we spend time with our kids. Our houses are what we neglect, not our children, so I think helicoptering is, in part, a result of this compensatory impulse.

By the way, fathers are spending almost as much time today with their kids as mothers spent with kids in the 1960s. That’s how much time we’re all now spending with our kids. For them, it was in part the inevitable by-product of their wives working; they had to do more.

Even though they’re still not doing nearly as much as their wives. But for women I think it was a compensatory move—they wanted to make up for their work-guilt.

There certainly has been an economic transformation, too. In the 1950s and ’60s, there was very little income equality in the United States. My grandfather was a union guy. I don’t know if he finished high school.

He certainly never went to college. He ran a motion-picture projector in Rockaway. He was the guy you screamed “Focus” to. And he still managed to save enough money to help my parents put away a down payment on a house in the suburbs.

That’s just inconceivable now. So by the seventies middle-class wages were stagnating, and by the nineties, even the late eighties, the world was globalizing. So what you had, eventually, was this situation where it wasn’t enough to simply shelter and protect your children; you had to raise a species of superchild just to make sure they had a toehold in the shrinking middle class. And so that meant driving them to soccer practice and ballet, and doing this plague of extracurricular activities, just to keep them viable in this world with shrinking economic prospects. So that’s another reason for the helicoptering. There’s been an economic transformation.

And it started even earlier. I should rewind the tape even further. Really, this started when children became economically useless.

Kids worked right through the progressive era. Like, right through the 1920s they were working. No one was helicoptering over them.

They were helping us. They were contributing to the family till. We were not by any means hovering over them. We were expecting them to contribute. And then child-labor laws kicked in, and thank God they did, but pretty soon children lost their jobs, and parents

acquired another, which was to care for them and make sure they were, you know, marching through school, grades K through twelve, and doing all these extracurriculars to prepare for a competitive world. That created enormous burdens for us.

AC: Do you see this phenomenon across the board in every part of American life now?

JS: No, I think it’s really the middle class.

Working-class parents are stretched way too thin; they’re working too many shifts.

AG: Would you talk a little bit about how marriages have worked, in tandem with that? What couples sacrifice in terms of their personal relationships, because they’re giving so much to the kids instead of to their partner.

JS: What we know is that, since the seventies, the amount of time that married couples have spent together has been decreasing. So kids are getting more time from the parents. And husbands and wives, or, now, husbands and husbands and wives and wives, are giving each other fewer hours.

In part because they’re driving to soccer league, or whatever they’re doing.

AG: So is anybody happier? (Laughter) JS: Well, happier is a funny question. That’s a tricky one. I don’t want to really wade into this question of happy and not happy.

AG: What’s the difference between how people define their marriage and their relationship before they have kids and how they look at it afterward?

JS: What we think modern marriage should be now is a superrelationship—a pair of sociologists coined this term, and I used it in my book—that satisfies all your emotional needs. You think that your partner is going to be your soul mate, and your confidant, and your helpmate. They’re supposed to be this source of emotional nourishment, because we’re living so high up now on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that we expect self-actualization in our marriages.

And the economic incentives for marriage, they’re just different now. Women are earning their keep. And in gay marriage you’re probably going to have two breadwinners, too, because that’s how it’s been. They were probably single for a while. So we look to marriage for this kind of spiritual and emotional thing. It’s not an economic thing.

AG: What happens when the kids come

along, and you take away from all that?

JS: Well, suddenly all the romantic notions that you had about your marriage are suspended (Laughter), rudely and abruptly suspended, or, at least, have to be renegotiated. Because now you’ve got this totally helpless creature in the room next door, who can’t change themselves or eat or talk for a while. They’re like a drunken foreigner. They have no motor control, they can’t speak your language. And you’re not getting any sleep.

AC: It’s interesting. I have the, whatever it was, Better Homes & Gardens baby book, that my mother filled out in the 1950’s. You know, with birth weight and formula fed. And I was put to bed every night at six-thirty. And my parents had the evening together.

JS: Right. Parents were much more willing to privilege their own relationship over their kids, or they were willing to tolerate a lot more “suffering” on the part of their kids. Right now, if a kid comes up to their parents and says, “I’m bored,” the parents immediately feel this responsibility to alleviate their boredom, rather than tell them, “Well, your room needs cleaning, why don’t you go clean your room?” Or, “That’s not my problem to solve, that’s yours.” And if parents did that, and then said, “Let’s have a cocktail together,” or, “Let’s sit and listen to music and talk about our day,” it would be a very different ballgame. What started to evolve once kids became economically useless, and, especially, once a new set of economic imperatives grew around how to sustain a middle-class life for your kid, was this other idea that we had to work for them. We started obsessively focusing on them, and cultivating them.

AG: What happens when the kids leave the house?

JS: Well, when they’re adolescents they’re pulling away from you, and then they’re gone. You’ve been focused on them all this time. And when they were little, they were providing you with all this love and adoration. But then they’re pulling away from you, and then they’re out, and you’re left to reassess what’s left of your life.

They’ve exited stage left, and now you’re staring at the other props onstage and wondering whether or not they’re looking a little threadbare. That’s when you go, “Oh, well, at least I have my job, except, oh, wow, I guess I actually really don’t like my job.”

21

AC: Do you think it’s inevitable that one parent has to make adjustments to their own life in order to take care of the children? And, obviously, in heterosexual marriages it’s usually the woman.

JS: So long as the state doesn’t kick in help for us—so long as we don’t have paid maternity or paternity leave, so long as we don’t have subsidized child care—then yes, the burden will probably fall disproportionately on one parent. The situation is so ridiculous right now: We’re relying on this closed loop of two people to do everything. It’s such a small number. Two! (If you’re lucky! Many parents are single!) Kids are an unbelievable amount of work. And that’s why in many European countries—not most, but many of them—there is subsidized child care, and in all of them there is paid maternity and paternity leave. But as long as there isn’t, who’s going to do that? The parents alone. And probably one more than the other. If you’re lucky, you can get a grandparent to help.

AC: How did we get to helicopter parenting?

JS: There are a number of forces. For starters, women went to work. And the result of women going to work was not that women saw their children less; they saw their children more. Because what they were doing before, when they were home, was not spending intensive time with their children; they were keeping a perfect house. If you look at the American Time Use Survey data, what women were doing in the 1950s and ’60s was buffing the floors to a high shine, making sure there was no ring around the collar, making scrumptious and punctual meals. But they were putting their children in playpens or telling them to get on their bikes and not come home until six o’clock.

AC: That was my life.

JS: Right, that was all of our lives. But then women started going to work, and the second women started going to work there was this cultural backlash, which led women to furiously overcompensate by spending more time with their children. If you look at the American Time Use Survey, today we spend four more hours a week with our kids than we did in the 1960s, when most of us were not working.

Artist Natasha Sharpe is from San Rafael, California, and is currently a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, class of 2017. Her major is film, animation, and video. She loves corgis, drawing with Sharpies, and drinking milk-shakes late at night. (natasharpie.tumblr.com)

And if you look at the American Time Use Survey data it’s very clear what’s going on.

Our houses are now filthy, and no one can cook. (Laughter) But we spend time with our kids. Our houses are what we neglect, not our children, so I think helicoptering is, in part, a result of this compensatory impulse.

By the way, fathers are spending almost as much time today with their kids as mothers spent with kids in the 1960s. That’s how much time we’re all now spending with our kids. For them, it was in part the inevitable by-product of their wives working; they had to do more.

Even though they’re still not doing nearly as much as their wives. But for women I think it was a compensatory move—they wanted to make up for their work-guilt.

There certainly has been an economic transformation, too. In the 1950s and ’60s, there was very little income equality in the United States. My grandfather was a union guy. I don’t know if he finished high school.

He certainly never went to college. He ran a motion-picture projector in Rockaway. He was the guy you screamed “Focus” to. And he still managed to save enough money to help my parents put away a down payment on a house in the suburbs.

That’s just inconceivable now. So by the seventies middle-class wages were stagnating, and by the nineties, even the late eighties, the world was globalizing. So what you had, eventually, was this situation where it wasn’t enough to simply shelter and protect your children; you had to raise a species of superchild just to make sure they had a toehold in the shrinking middle class. And so that meant driving them to soccer practice and ballet, and doing this plague of extracurricular activities, just to keep them viable in this world with shrinking economic prospects. So that’s another reason for the helicoptering. There’s been an economic transformation.

And it started even earlier. I should rewind the tape even further. Really, this started when children became economically useless.

Kids worked right through the progressive era. Like, right through the 1920s they were working. No one was helicoptering over them.

They were helping us. They were contributing to the family till. We were not by any means hovering over them. We were expecting them to contribute. And then child-labor laws kicked in, and thank God they did, but pretty soon children lost their jobs, and parents

acquired another, which was to care for them and make sure they were, you know, marching through school, grades K through twelve, and doing all these extracurriculars to prepare for a competitive world. That created enormous burdens for us.

AC: Do you see this phenomenon across the board in every part of American life now?

JS: No, I think it’s really the middle class.

Working-class parents are stretched way too thin; they’re working too many shifts.

AG: Would you talk a little bit about how marriages have worked, in tandem with that? What couples sacrifice in terms of their personal relationships, because they’re giving so much to the kids instead of to their partner.

JS: What we know is that, since the seventies, the amount of time that married couples have spent together has been decreasing. So kids are getting more time from the parents. And husbands and wives, or, now, husbands and husbands and wives and wives, are giving each other fewer hours.

In part because they’re driving to soccer league, or whatever they’re doing.

AG: So is anybody happier? (Laughter) JS: Well, happier is a funny question. That’s a tricky one. I don’t want to really wade into this question of happy and not happy.

AG: What’s the difference between how people define their marriage and their relationship before they have kids and how they look at it afterward?

JS: What we think modern marriage should be now is a superrelationship—a pair of sociologists coined this term, and I used it in my book—that satisfies all your emotional needs. You think that your partner is going to be your soul mate, and your confidant, and your helpmate. They’re supposed to be this source of emotional nourishment, because we’re living so high up now on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that we expect self-actualization in our marriages.

And the economic incentives for marriage, they’re just different now. Women are earning their keep. And in gay marriage you’re probably going to have two breadwinners, too, because that’s how it’s been. They were probably single for a while. So we look to marriage for this kind of spiritual and emotional thing. It’s not an economic thing.

AG: What happens when the kids come

along, and you take away from all that?

JS: Well, suddenly all the romantic notions that you had about your marriage are suspended (Laughter), rudely and abruptly suspended, or, at least, have to be renegotiated. Because now you’ve got this totally helpless creature in the room next door, who can’t change themselves or eat or talk for a while. They’re like a drunken foreigner. They have no motor control, they can’t speak your language. And you’re not getting any sleep.

AC: It’s interesting. I have the, whatever it was, Better Homes & Gardens baby book, that my mother filled out in the 1950’s. You know, with birth weight and formula fed. And I was put to bed every night at six-thirty. And my parents had the evening together.

JS: Right. Parents were much more willing to privilege their own relationship over their kids, or they were willing to tolerate a lot more “suffering” on the part of their kids. Right now, if a kid comes up to their parents and says, “I’m bored,” the parents immediately feel this responsibility to alleviate their boredom, rather than tell them, “Well, your room needs cleaning, why don’t you go clean your room?” Or, “That’s not my problem to solve, that’s yours.” And if parents did that, and then said, “Let’s have a cocktail together,” or, “Let’s sit and listen to music and talk about our day,” it would be a very different ballgame. What started to evolve once kids became economically useless, and, especially, once a new set of economic imperatives grew around how to sustain a middle-class life for your kid, was this other idea that we had to work for them. We started obsessively focusing on them, and cultivating them.

AG: What happens when the kids leave the house?

JS: Well, when they’re adolescents they’re pulling away from you, and then they’re gone. You’ve been focused on them all this time. And when they were little, they were providing you with all this love and adoration. But then they’re pulling away from you, and then they’re out, and you’re left to reassess what’s left of your life.

They’ve exited stage left, and now you’re staring at the other props onstage and wondering whether or not they’re looking a little threadbare. That’s when you go, “Oh, well, at least I have my job, except, oh, wow, I guess I actually really don’t like my job.”

21

William Whyte, who wrote The Organization Man, was one of the sociologist-journalists-urbanists in the fifties, and he talked about America growing into a filiarchy, with kids being at the top of the pecking order.

And this was a direct by-product of kids becoming economically useless but emotionally priceless. Once kids lost their economic value, they had to acquire some other kind of value, and it became that they were sources of happiness, little bundles of joy, etc. Not that we didn’t love our kids before then. But we assigned them extra emotional significance.

That was another notion that developed around children—they provided us with fulfillment of some kind. It’s a very sec-

SUDDENLY ALL THE ROMANTIC NOTIONS THAT YOU HAD ABOUT YOUR MARRIAGE ARE SUSPENDED, RUDELY AND ABRUPTLY SUSPENDED, OR, AT LEAST, HAVE TO BE RENEGOTIATED. BECAUSE NOW YOU’VE GOT THIS TOTALLY HELPLESS CREATURE IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR.

22

ond-half-of-the-twentieth-century kind of idea—that we’re fulfilled, that we have this right to be fulfilled—and this grew over time.

(This idea probably first got really big in the seventies.) You could argue that this idea that kids automatically mean happiness explains why we’re spending all these hours with kids, and why we’ve organized our lives around them. And why the rhythms of our families are determined by our children and not by the grown-ups. It can probably be filed under the cognitive-dissonance theory of children.

AC: Wait, tell me what the cognitive-dissonance theory of children is.

JS: Well, there have been a few studies showing that people value their children more when they’re shown how much money they spend on them and how many hours they’ve spent with them. They will literally reevaluate their assessment of their own happiness, saying they enjoy child rearing more once they’re shown the great cost of having kids.

It’s an intriguing and eccentric set of studies that’s always made me smile. It’s not in my book, but it’s always given me a grin.

AG: I was really struck by your observation that, now that we can choose whom we marry, what our careers are, there’s all this

THE HUG By Thom Gunn 1929–2004

“The Hug” from Collected Poems by Thom Gunn. © 1994 by Thom Gunn.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

JS: For some reason, it’s not what sex researchers are looking at; it hasn’t captured their imagination. But, anecdotally, we all know that children are not great enhancers of one’s sex life. They sleep-deprive you.

When they reach adolescence—when perhaps they’re not sleep-depriving you or wandering into your bedroom because of a nightmare they’ve just had—they’re kind of lurking. And also they’re coming into their own sexuality, which is slightly peculiar. So we all just sort of anecdotally know this.

But here’s one thing the data said that I thought was interesting: the big falloff in a couple’s sex life is after year one in their marriage. Makes sense, the novelty wears off. But what the data don’t show, and what I couldn’t find, and what I searched high and low for, was whether there was another falloff after the kids came along.

AC: Why do you think everyone has to pretend to feel happy? That seems so new nowadays.

JS: The way that I think about it in the book is that “joy” is this really profound sense of connection and satisfaction that you have.

But the “happy” part—I think a lot of that is the emphasis in our culture.

mobility in our lives, but the children are the last binding commitment.

JS: That’s the last binding commitment we have. Whenever I say that to audiences, the air in the room is completely still.

It really is deeply profound. It’s being connected and knowing love in that particular way. It’s love in a way that you didn’t really imagine possible. And it’s a different kind of love than the love that you feel for your spouse or your parents or your siblings or your friends. It is different. It’s a kind of love that involves you gladly saying that you would remove an organ for someone.

AG: And that’s William Whyte’s filiarchy?

JS: William Whyte also talks about the tyranny of the suburbs. He just looked at the fifties and said well, this is wrong. He had fairly harsh words to say.

AC: I wonder if it’s ever right.

JS: That’s an amazingly good question. Because people are always asking me this, and I think it’s why, when you say, are marriages happier now, do people complain more or less, it’s so hard to know, because okay, so if you look at the 1920s we certainly don’t want children working in textile mills and mines and factories again. (Laughter) That was bad. Okay, and then there was the war—that was bad for everyone. Then there was the fifties—that seemed to be very, very bad for women, and I would argue that it wasn’t great for men. They had nothing in common with their wives. I would not want to be in a Don and Betty Draper marriage.

That was not good.

Then you look at the sixties, and they were still the fifties right until about 1967 or ’68. Hillary Clinton was part of the graduating class where half of her classmates still went off into their domestic snuggeries and the other half went off and wore the pants, but then they had to sit there and chip away at glass ceilings until their knuckles ached from gripping that ice pick.

I mean, was that good? I don’t know. No time is really right. Each time just seems fraught in its own particular way. And will continue to be.

Maria Martinez-Cañas, Vestigios: Untitled 003, 2015. Her current show at the Julie Saul Gallery, What Remains, is up through October 24, 2015 © Maria Martinez-Cañas, Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

Or, “At least I have my spouse. Oh, actually, my spouse has been kind of mean to me for the last five years.”

AG: What about sex in marriages with children?

JS: The data on that is so, so scant, it’s frustrating. Most data about sex...first of all, the big population surveys just look at everybody’s sex habits. They’re very interested in age, and married couples and stuff, but how kids factor in, it’s hard to find good data. The data that you tend to find around couples and children and sex is really frustrating. It tends to be how much sex people are having when they’re pregnant, or postpartum. That is the bias of that data.

AC: Why is that?

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined Half of the night with our old friend Who’d showed us in the end To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.

Already I lay snug, And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug, Suddenly, from behind, In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed: Your instep to my heel, My shoulder-blades against your chest.

It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial.

My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place.

I only knew The stay of your secure f irm dry embrace.

Born on August 29, 1929, in Gravesend, England. Thomas William Gunn wrote many books including The Fighting Terms, Touch, To the Air, and The Man with Night Sweats, exploring themes of sexuality, intimacy, drugs, and death. The recipient of such laurels as the Levinson Prize and the Rockefeller Award, Gunn died on April 25, 2004.

William Whyte, who wrote The Organization Man, was one of the sociologist-journalists-urbanists in the fifties, and he talked about America growing into a filiarchy, with kids being at the top of the pecking order.

And this was a direct by-product of kids becoming economically useless but emotionally priceless. Once kids lost their economic value, they had to acquire some other kind of value, and it became that they were sources of happiness, little bundles of joy, etc. Not that we didn’t love our kids before then. But we assigned them extra emotional significance.

That was another notion that developed around children—they provided us with fulfillment of some kind. It’s a very sec-

SUDDENLY ALL THE ROMANTIC NOTIONS THAT YOU HAD ABOUT YOUR MARRIAGE ARE SUSPENDED, RUDELY AND ABRUPTLY SUSPENDED, OR, AT LEAST, HAVE TO BE RENEGOTIATED. BECAUSE NOW YOU’VE GOT THIS TOTALLY HELPLESS CREATURE IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR.

22

ond-half-of-the-twentieth-century kind of idea—that we’re fulfilled, that we have this right to be fulfilled—and this grew over time.

(This idea probably first got really big in the seventies.) You could argue that this idea that kids automatically mean happiness explains why we’re spending all these hours with kids, and why we’ve organized our lives around them. And why the rhythms of our families are determined by our children and not by the grown-ups. It can probably be filed under the cognitive-dissonance theory of children.

AC: Wait, tell me what the cognitive-dissonance theory of children is.

JS: Well, there have been a few studies showing that people value their children more when they’re shown how much money they spend on them and how many hours they’ve spent with them. They will literally reevaluate their assessment of their own happiness, saying they enjoy child rearing more once they’re shown the great cost of having kids.

It’s an intriguing and eccentric set of studies that’s always made me smile. It’s not in my book, but it’s always given me a grin.

AG: I was really struck by your observation that, now that we can choose whom we marry, what our careers are, there’s all this

THE HUG By Thom Gunn 1929–2004

“The Hug” from Collected Poems by Thom Gunn. © 1994 by Thom Gunn.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

JS: For some reason, it’s not what sex researchers are looking at; it hasn’t captured their imagination. But, anecdotally, we all know that children are not great enhancers of one’s sex life. They sleep-deprive you.

When they reach adolescence—when perhaps they’re not sleep-depriving you or wandering into your bedroom because of a nightmare they’ve just had—they’re kind of lurking. And also they’re coming into their own sexuality, which is slightly peculiar. So we all just sort of anecdotally know this.

But here’s one thing the data said that I thought was interesting: the big falloff in a couple’s sex life is after year one in their marriage. Makes sense, the novelty wears off. But what the data don’t show, and what I couldn’t find, and what I searched high and low for, was whether there was another falloff after the kids came along.

AC: Why do you think everyone has to pretend to feel happy? That seems so new nowadays.

JS: The way that I think about it in the book is that “joy” is this really profound sense of connection and satisfaction that you have.

But the “happy” part—I think a lot of that is the emphasis in our culture.

mobility in our lives, but the children are the last binding commitment.

JS: That’s the last binding commitment we have. Whenever I say that to audiences, the air in the room is completely still.

It really is deeply profound. It’s being connected and knowing love in that particular way. It’s love in a way that you didn’t really imagine possible. And it’s a different kind of love than the love that you feel for your spouse or your parents or your siblings or your friends. It is different. It’s a kind of love that involves you gladly saying that you would remove an organ for someone.

AG: And that’s William Whyte’s filiarchy?

JS: William Whyte also talks about the tyranny of the suburbs. He just looked at the fifties and said well, this is wrong. He had fairly harsh words to say.

AC: I wonder if it’s ever right.

JS: That’s an amazingly good question. Because people are always asking me this, and I think it’s why, when you say, are marriages happier now, do people complain more or less, it’s so hard to know, because okay, so if you look at the 1920s we certainly don’t want children working in textile mills and mines and factories again. (Laughter) That was bad. Okay, and then there was the war—that was bad for everyone. Then there was the fifties—that seemed to be very, very bad for women, and I would argue that it wasn’t great for men. They had nothing in common with their wives. I would not want to be in a Don and Betty Draper marriage.

That was not good.

Then you look at the sixties, and they were still the fifties right until about 1967 or ’68. Hillary Clinton was part of the graduating class where half of her classmates still went off into their domestic snuggeries and the other half went off and wore the pants, but then they had to sit there and chip away at glass ceilings until their knuckles ached from gripping that ice pick.

I mean, was that good? I don’t know. No time is really right. Each time just seems fraught in its own particular way. And will continue to be.

Maria Martinez-Cañas, Vestigios: Untitled 003, 2015. Her current show at the Julie Saul Gallery, What Remains, is up through October 24, 2015 © Maria Martinez-Cañas, Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

Or, “At least I have my spouse. Oh, actually, my spouse has been kind of mean to me for the last five years.”

AG: What about sex in marriages with children?

JS: The data on that is so, so scant, it’s frustrating. Most data about sex...first of all, the big population surveys just look at everybody’s sex habits. They’re very interested in age, and married couples and stuff, but how kids factor in, it’s hard to find good data. The data that you tend to find around couples and children and sex is really frustrating. It tends to be how much sex people are having when they’re pregnant, or postpartum. That is the bias of that data.

AC: Why is that?

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined Half of the night with our old friend Who’d showed us in the end To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.

Already I lay snug, And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug, Suddenly, from behind, In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed: Your instep to my heel, My shoulder-blades against your chest.

It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial.

My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place.

I only knew The stay of your secure f irm dry embrace.

Born on August 29, 1929, in Gravesend, England. Thomas William Gunn wrote many books including The Fighting Terms, Touch, To the Air, and The Man with Night Sweats, exploring themes of sexuality, intimacy, drugs, and death. The recipient of such laurels as the Levinson Prize and the Rockefeller Award, Gunn died on April 25, 2004.

Lincoln Center Theater Review Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Lincoln Center Theater 150 West 65 Street New York, New York 10023

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