The Marrying Kind

by Bruce Bawer

In The Marrying Kind, Bruce Bawer picks up where he left off in his landmark 1993 book "A Place at the The Gay Individual in American Society", providing a window on the changes in gay life in America during the years since his earlier book came out. It’s been a time of extraordinary social transformation for gay Americans – a transformation rooted not in the revolutionary dogmas of the post-Stonewall queer-activist establishment, which, in the memorable words of one lesbian radical, didn’t want a place at the table but wanted to turn the table over, but in the integrationist views promoted by Bawer and others.

This book will be of interest to all serious readers, but is especially directed at young gays, who will get a vivid sense of how the America of a generation ago – the America of the closet, in which gays (with few exceptions) were essentially invisible and gay culture was a marginal phenomenon – became an America of same-sex marriage and gays in the military, an America in which countless celebrities are openly gay and gay characters are all over TV.

179 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 2, 2011

About the author

Theodore Bruce Bawer, who writes under the name Bruce Bawer, is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and novelist and poet who has also written about gay rights, Christianity and Islam.

Bawer's writings on literature, gay issues and Islam have all been highly controversial. While championing such authors as William Keepers Maxwell Jr., Flannery O'Connor, and Guy Davenport, he has criticized such authors as Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow. A member of the New Formalists, a group of poets who promoted the use of traditional forms, he has assailed such poets as Allen Ginsberg for what he views as their lack of polish and technique.

Bawer was one of the first gay activists to seriously propose same-sex marriage, notably in his 1993 book A Place at the Table, and his 2006 book While Europe Slept was one of the first to skeptically examine the rise of Islam in the Western world. Bawer's work is cited positively by Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto.

Although he has frequently been described as a conservative, Bawer has often protested that such labels are misleading or meaningless. He has explained his views as follows: "Read A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus and While Europe Slept and Surrender one after the other and you will see that all four books are motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny."