Together Forever
Gay & Lesbian Couples Share Their Secrets for Lasting Happiness
Anchor Books
1999
Amazon.com Review by Michael Bronski
Just because gay men and lesbians are denied the right to get married under the law does not mean that there have not been gay “marriages”: committed, sustained, emotional and physical relationships.
In Together Forever, journalist Eric Marcus interviews 40 gay and lesbian couples who have maintained decades-long relationships and presents us with a complex tapestry of love, desire, and friendship that is as stirring as it is heartwarming, as invigorating as it is moving.
While Together Forever contains much of what you might expect—coming-out stories, meeting-cute stories, tales of horrific homophobic cruelty, and just-folks-at-home images—Marcus is an astute enough writer and interviewer that the individual tales are always surprising. He is also not a single-minded booster for idealized, perfect relationships. Many of the couples here talk about their hard times with one another as well as their struggles with work and family.
A compelling theme running through the book is how sexuality shapes and informs long-term relationships. Questions of fidelity, open relationships, and monogamy surface in these interviews, discussed with honesty and a rare understanding and compassion.
Written with a incisive eye for detail and an ear for the quirky phase and insight, Together Forever is a welcomed addition to the ever-increasing wealth of materials on the complexity and courage of gay and lesbian relationships.
From Eric Marcus:
Imagine having the opportunity to ask forty couples every question you could possibly imagine. For someone who is chronically curious, it was an opportunity too delicious to pass up.
So over the course of a year, I had the pleasure of traveling the country - from Florida to Oregon - to interview forty self-identified happy gay and lesbian couples, who had been together from nine to fifty years, about their lives together.
What I learned was in some ways not at all surprising. After all, gay and lesbian couples are not so different from heterosexual couples. Still, we know plenty about how heterosexual couples live. But for me, this was the first time I had the opportunity to meet and speak with such a diverse range of gay and lesbian couples.
But rather than use these interviews to come up with a "how to" manual like The Male Couple's Guide, I decided to simply write about what I found. Together Forever is a loosely chronological look at how the couples I interviewed conduct their lives, from how they met to how they've coped with life's many challenges.
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