Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 11:57:46 -0500 From: mohr richard d "John Boswell and Gay Generations" by Richard D. Mohr (January 1995) Census folk tally a generation as twenty-five years. But in the gay world -- even before the temporal compressions worked by AIDS -- a generation logs about every seven years, sometimes quicker. This feature of gay time was driven home to me anew by John Boswell's obituary in Christmas Sunday's _New York Times_. I rubbed my eyes: he was only three years older than me. Though in both person and photo he always appeared an agelessly angelic youth, his career had been so accomplished and he had done so much personally for me, so much (how to say) paternally for me, that it was hard to imagine that but three New Years's separated our births. Boswell's 1980 book _Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality_ dashed the taboo covering gay subjects in academe. It cleared the space in which gay studies began to grow exponentially and initiated gay-affirming discourses in the wider public sphere. Especially since it now appears that gay progress for a long time will have to take the form of cultural rather than political change, the value of Boswell's work for gays is inestimable. Published just five months before his death, Boswell's final book is a history and prizing of gay marriage. Its main cultural import and challenge is for gays -- and others -- to take gay relationships more seriously. It invites us to view gayness not as something that, like eye-color or an earring, one might have in splendid isolation, but as something, like loving and caring, which is a relational property, a connection between persons, a human bonding, one in need of tendance and social concern. Think about it. For me, Boswell performed that thankless ivory-tower chore whose real-world counterpart is helping friends move. He wrote letters of recommendation -- ones that got me years off to write _Gays/Justice_ (1988) and _Gay Ideas_ (1992) and one that got me promoted to full professor. I think about these good deeds often. But Boswell was no saint. He could be quite the grouch and his obit gave cause for moral puzzlement. Boswell's writings possessed the real-world virtues of candor, boldness, and courage that are usually the first things to go in an institution as bureaucratic as the academy. So I was surprised to see that, apparently at his behest, his obit did not take advantage of the _Times_' policy of listing intimate life partners among survivors and named his only as "a friend" rather than "long-time companion," the _Times_' concession to the emerging institutionalization of gay marriage. Further, for years Boswell had told people, including me, that his long illness was "just" Lyme's Disease, not AIDS, and so I was morally deflated to read that the cause of death indeed was AIDS. Perhaps these events have innocent explanations, but a fair cultural read of them suggests that in our actual lived experience (whatever our ideals may be), we gay folk, even at our best, have made little moral progress beyond Rock Hudson and Liberace. It is, of course, unreasonable to expect heroism in every dimension of a person's life. We should be glad that it occurs at all. And Boswell's heroism is already having real-world effects on new gay generations. Christmas eve, the day of Boswell's death, the post brought me a card of greetings from a gay graduate student with whom I'd been corresponding a bit but about whose personal circumstances I knew nothing. The photo-card's classic format of family snapshot plus Xmas message is the sort of thing that has made Olin Mills the Cambells Soup of the photo industry. Well, the student and his lover had just adopted an infant. And there they all are, without the slightest hint of irony or camp, posed against a brick wall with a piece of couch art at head level; the dads, in matching rented tuxedos, beam with pride as they jointly hold up baby Joshua swaddled only in a diaper. The photograph is at once a rune and an icon of gay family, an imploding yet radiant fusion of American Gothic and gay Bethlehem. Admittedly at first the photo struck me as a little bit silly, even as it was a great deal wonderful -- silly because my feelings weren't instantly up there where my mind tells me my pride is. As I sorted out my feelings, I was taken back half a dozen years to remember another gay family event, the one and only gay wedding I've attended. I didn't bother to take a present, not because I was a skinflint, but because -- shamefully -- I clearly wasn't taking gay relationships seriously enough, even though by that time I'd already been in one for a decade. We have learned much from Boswell's writings, but I suspect we -- and our future generations too -- still have much more to learn. -30-