In other, less trivial teen idol news, my old friend Benoit Denizet-Lewis turned in a super-smart cover story for the New York Times magazine this Sunday about young gay men who get married. While not officially part of our Power List count of NYT gay mafia, Benoit's stories have consistently zoomed in on the complex ways that our cultural ideas about sexuality are changing. An article he did in 2004 about the end of teen romance (to much hand-wringing news-hour despair) found one major exception to the "friends with benefits" trend: gay teens, who were embracing proms and coupledom with an enthusiasm long left behind by their straight peers.
This article is in some ways an extension of that idea, based on the experiences of a few of Benoit's friends and other guys who make up the 700-odd gay men under the age of 30 who had married in Massachusetts by last summer. In the piece, he writes:
On the one hand, I wondered why these guys were marrying so young. What was the rush? It seemed to me that one of the few advantages of being young gay men -- until gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, at least -- was that we were institutionally protected from ever appearing on "Divorce Court."
But I could also relate to young gay men yearning for companionship and emotional security. Had gay marriage been an option when I was 23 and recently out of the closet, I might very well have proposed to my first gay love. Like many gay men my age and older, I grew up believing that gay men in a happy long-term relationship was an oxymoron. (I entered high school in 1989, before gay teenagers started taking their boyfriends to the prom.) If I was lucky enough to find love, I thought, I'd better hold onto it. And part of me tried, but a bigger part of me wanted to pitch a tent in my favorite gay bar. I wasn’t alone. Everywhere I looked, gay men in their 20s -- or, if they hadn't come out until later, their 30s, 40s and 50s -- seemed to be eschewing commitment in favor of the excitement promised by unabashedly sexualized urban gay communities. There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence.
When I chatted with Benoit about the piece late last week, he was careful to throw a few other cautionary logs on the fire: "This is not a trend story," he said. "Young gay men in Massachusetts aren't beating down the doors of churches and city hall to get married." In fact, way more young lesbians are likely to shack up than the guys, but that's even less of a trend story. (Almost all the men he talked to were also white, as are the majority of those who register legally.)
But as he discovered over the course of following these young men for a few months, there is something pretty awesome going on even if only among a minority: "They're able to live their gay adolescence. Their sexualty is not as compartmentalized. They're going to want different things."
Anyway, go read the piece for yourself! Make erudite conversation about it at your next gay party and win yourself a husband, if that's the kind of kinky thing you're into! Report back accordingly! And if you like this sort of writing, keep an eye out for two books Benoit has coming out from Simon & Schuster in January: America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life and American Voyeur: Dispatches from the Far Reaches of Modern Life, a collection of previously published writing.
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