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  • From the Streets to the Altar
  • Jeffery Sugarman (bio)
Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America
Nathaniel Frank
Harvard University Press
www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737228
456 Pages; Print, $35.00

Nathaniel Frank's Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America follows upon an earlier book, Unfriendly Fire (2009), examining the US military's ban on homosexuals, and confirms his place as an historian of great discernment. Awakening, highly detailed but immediately accessible, is written to a broad audience–straight as well as gay, with or without previous knowledge of, or engagement in, the gay rights movement; specialist readers–academic or activist–with interests in law and legal theory, civil rights and feminism; gay rights and conservatism in America. It's to Frank's great credit that Awakening manages its specialist task while reading from start to finish as a gripping story.

Frank goes to great ends to fairly incorporate the widest range of views and myriad, illuminating stories of individual contributors, frequently from outside "the movement," many of whom will not be known to most readers. The result is a dizzying, uplifting jigsaw of events that reveals how, beginning in the 1960's, a drive for greater dignity and acceptance for homosexuals led to the radical conception, and eventual establishment, of "marriage equality" in America.

This extraordinary transformation is vividly illustrated by two pre-Stonewall essays (the first among many fascinating historical details and artifacts found throughout): one written in 1953 and the other ten years later, for ONE, "the first enduring gay-themed magazine published in the United States." The earlier essay opposed the idea of homosexual marriage, "a prospect the author considered horrifying: that social acceptance of homosexuality would lead to homosexual marriage." And significantly, as Frank points out, the essayist's belief "that marriage would stifle the freedoms that gay people enjoyed anticipated the sentiments of gay liberationist thought that would flower in the 1970s." The later essay, however, expressed a very different view, and its author "readily identified himself as 'married' to another man" reflecting, Frank says, "how common it was, even in the mid-twentieth century, for same-sex partners to identify themselves–and live–as married couples, albeit without official recognition of their union." This commentator "maintained that social acceptance and 'marriage' would be mutually reinforcing," and "'that when society finally accepts homophiles as a valid minority with minority rights, it is going first of all to accept the married homophiles.'"

For some readers, these conflicting views within the gay community, especially in the early years of the gay-rights movement, will come as a surprise. For myself, a gay (and now married) man whose life very much tracks the chronology of the book, such well-articulated positions by those uncomfortable with marriage was refreshing, and essential to the story. Frank recounts that this was a view held quite strongly among lesbians, some of whom thought same-sex marriage was "'an attempt to mimic the worst of mainstream society'" when they sought to expand family rights, and options, beyond marriage. As articulated by Paula Ettelbrick, a lesbian feminist and lawyer, the problem was "'not so much that lesbian and gay couples cannot marry. Rather . . . the legal and social benefits and privileges constructed for families are available only to those families joined by marriage or biology."' [End Page 39]

These tensions were often played out in a little-known group called the "Litigators' Roundtable," comprised of attorneys "animated by the 1969 Stonewall riots against police harassment," it served over many years as an invaluable arena to mediate conflicting priorities and develop effective political and legal strategy. The history of the Roundtable, as told by Frank, is central to marriage equality: "Roundtable lawyers, with their unprecedented level of focus, coordination, and strategic prowess, would ultimately play the most influential role in obtaining marriage equality, [though] almost none began their work fighting for it. Indeed, only a very few embraced marriage early on . . . viewing other priorities as paramount." These passages give a clear impression of how significant Frank, himself an LGBTQ strategist and director of Columbia Law School's...

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