The AIDS Crisis and the Same-Sex-Marriage Movement

I was listening to yesterday’s episode of Charlie Cooke’s podcast, which featured a fine debate between Charlie and Michael Brendan Dougherty on same-sex marriage. Allow me to add one thought. Michael posed the question: “Why now?” Why, at this particular point in human history, did the demand arise among gay couples to marry, and why did Western (and even, in a number of cases, non-Western) society embrace it? Michael and Charlie both talked about the big-picture trends in the decoupling of marriage, sex, and children and the decline of the matrimonial ideal. To this I would add one key event that caused same-sex marriage to surface as an issue when it did in the early 1990s: the AIDS crisis.

Recall that open homosexuality burst out of the closet in the 1970s, at the peak of a culture-wide Sexual Revolution of youthful Boomer hedonism and swinging embrace of divorce and more-exotic things. The gay culture of the Seventies was at the vanguard of rejection of bourgeois sexual norms. That era toned down among heterosexuals in the Eighties for largely generational reasons, as the Boomers moved into their thirties in force and settled down to family life. But for gays in America and much of the West, the AIDS crisis brought things to a screeching halt. The uncontrolled spread of HIV among sexually promiscuous gay men shattered the bathhouse culture and almost literally decimated the gay community, sowing an apocalyptic level of terror.

This shifted the attitudes of gay and straight America in different ways. Among the former, not only was there a frightful bill paid for promiscuous sex, but people who had scoffed at the idea of needing a piece of paper from the government to enjoy sexual relations now found themselves watching loved partners die alone in hospitals where they lacked the legal standing for family-visitation rights. There is nothing inherently unjust about family-visitation rules, which are necessary for hospitals to do their jobs, but they were experienced during the AIDS crisis as a form of discrimination between types of relationships. Collision with the public-health bureaucracy (including Dr. Anthony Fauci) as well as with the conservative forces of church and state also spawned a new spirit of political militancy. As for the rest of America, yes, there were public outbreaks of fear and disgust and moral judgment and moral panic towards gay AIDS sufferers, but that is by no measure the whole story. Even many Americans who saw gay sex as immoral and rightly closeted and frowned-upon did not think it ought to be a death sentence, and they were genuinely moved to sympathy by the death toll, by the carefully closeted men suddenly exposed and isolated by a dread disease, and by the obvious injustice of hospital-visitation rules that made no accommodation for an entire subculture.

Then, almost as abruptly as it began, the crisis ended. HIV is still with us, but new pharmaceutical treatments in the early 1990s made it vastly less fatal, while figures such as Magic Johnson did much to dispel public ignorance about the spread of the disease. For gay men, the early 1990s might almost be compared to the Baby Boom years of the late 1940s: A generation of young men who had lived for years in constant fear of death suddenly saw that they had a future again, and were more interested in spending that future in a stable family rather than catting about. (There is, in fact, a long history of sexual morals loosening in wartime and surging again as the men come home.) While majority popular opinion remained firmly against same-sex marriage from then until the middle of the Obama years, there was nonetheless a more sympathetic audience to the argument by 1993–96, when a question that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s became genuinely contested in the courts and Congress.

It’s impossible to know the counterfactual of whether the history of same-sex marriage would have been different without the AIDS crisis. But its effects on elite and popular opinion on homosexuality, and specifically on the legal rights of gay couples to family-visitation privileges in hospitals, were clear enough at the time.