分享这篇在纽约时报的文章是 Rutgers University(以性别研究闻名的学校)历史系的
助理教授写的，
他的专长是研究美国的同志发展史。
http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/timothy-stewart-winter
这篇文章中也提到美国同志奋斗的历史，如果有高手愿意翻译的话就太好了
The Price of Gay Marriage By TIMOTHY STEWART-WINTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/the-price-of-gay-marriage
.html
The Supreme Court’s decision affirming the right to same-sex marriage across
the United States is a joyous moment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender Americans. Recognition of our equal dignity, and of our right to
the same legal protections straight couples enjoy, is a civil rights
milestone. But it could also be the swan song for the movement for gay
freedom that began after World War II.
It is unfortunate that the movement’s two great victories of the last decade
— the right to serve openly in the military and the right to be married —
have come as progress has stalled or reversed in so many other areas of
civil rights: equal pay and reproductive choice for women; housing and school
segregation; police violence against minorities; and the prospects of a
decent wage and a modicum of job and retirement security for all.
It is no accident that the one civil rights law that would likely apply to
the greatest numbers of gays — a ban on discrimination in employment and
housing on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity — continues to
elude us. An anti-discrimination law creates substantial costs not only for
the government, which must enforce it, but also for corporations, which must
comply with it; letting gays into military service and into the institution
of marriage does not. Indeed, 379 employers, including many of the nation’s
largest airlines, banks, health insurers and manufacturers, filed a brief in
support of same-sex marriage, arguing that inconsistency in marriage laws
created an onerous regulatory and financial burden and hurt their efforts to
recruit talent.
After Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, in
2003, a backlash of ballot initiatives and referendums banning such unions
swept much of the country. In response, many lesbians and gay men who were
uninterested in marrying put aside their doubts for the cause.
But such unity of purpose comes at a price. Freedom to Marry, the advocacy
group that has led the marriage equality movement, was in 2013 the largest
recipient of money from foundations that focus on gay causes. Will even a
fraction of the energy and money that have been poured into the marriage
fight be available to transgender people, homeless teenagers, victims of job
discrimination, lesbian and gay refugees and asylum seekers, isolated gay
elderly or other vulnerable members of our community? Around the same time
New York State legalized same-sex marriage, in 2011, it was slashing funds
for services to homeless youth, who are disproportionately gay or transgender.
The movement for gay rights that began after World War II was waged from
society’s margins; its most outspoken proponents sought to overturn social
convention, not join it. It was not at all inevitable that the movement would
one day coalesce around marriage.
In 1953, the first year of its publication, the national gay magazine ONE
dismissed the idea that gays might one day be allowed to marry. “Rebels such
as we, demand freedom!” one article declared. “But actually we have a
greater freedom now (sub rosa as it may be) than do heterosexuals and any
change will be to lose some of it in return for respectability.”
Of course, this freedom was precarious; the following year the Los Angeles
postmaster refused to deliver an issue of the magazine on the grounds that it
contained obscenity. Though the Supreme Court ruled in the magazine’s favor,
many gay publications, businesses and bars were forced to close in the 1950s
and 1960s.
After the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Manhattan — a response to a police raid
on a gay bar — the movement quickly built on the demands of feminists and
black radicals. In 1972, one activist wrote in a lesbian newspaper that she
and her comrades “stand as the greatest threat to this society, far more
than gun-carrying revolutionaries or bomb-scare groups blowing up the White
House or the Chase Manhattan Bank.”
Coming out back then was itself a radical act. Those whose sexual identities
were revealed paid dearly for it. In 1975, a Vietnam veteran, Oliver W.
Sipple, thwarted an attempted assassination of President Gerald R. Ford, yet
his life was destroyed when the press found out that he was gay. When the
tennis champion Billie Jean King was outed as a lesbian in 1981, she lost
many of her commercial sponsors.
The AIDS crisis of the 1980s devastated the gay community, but also mobilized
it.
Activists found solidarity with other victims of the epidemic — including
intravenous drug users, sex workers and homeless people — to demand federal
funding for drug research and approval, and to protest the Reagan
administration’s cuts to the social safety net. In 1991, the activist
organization Act Up demonstrated at a meeting of the American Medical
Association to demand universal health care. The crisis demonstrated, in
matters like child custody, hospital visitation and end-of-life care, the
impact of excluding gays from marriage.
But even as AIDS renewed mainstream fear of gays, it also propelled them into
the political mainstream. AIDS service organizations became part of a growing
nonprofit sector. In the two decades since pharmaceutical advances made AIDS
less lethal in the United States, the gay rights movement has increasingly
made alliances with government and even corporations to press its demands.
Until very recently, most gay victories were won at the local or state level;
the federal government lagged. Prodded by activists, President Obama changed
this dynamic. He joined Democratic lawmakers to repeal the ban on gays’
openly serving in the military, a legacy of President Bill Clinton’s
administration. Mr. Obama’s Justice Department refused to defend a key
provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (another Clinton-era legacy), before
the Supreme Court struck that provision down two years ago.
This Gay Pride Month won’t soon be forgotten. Many of us are thinking of
friends and lovers who did not live to see this day. Cake will be eaten,
flowers strewn. Brooms will be jumped over, and glasses smashed. Some of us
would not have chosen to put the marriage fight ahead of others, but none can
deny that there has been a widespread hunger for this right.
There will be pockets of backlash: resistance by a few local clerks, and
so-called religious liberty laws to exempt businesses from having to comply.
But the graver danger comes not from the religious right, but from the risk
that our newfound clout will blind some of us to the struggles of others.
More gays are insiders than ever before; a gay man leads Apple, one of America
’s most valuable corporations. A lesbian, Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of
Wisconsin, was elected to the Senate in 2012. Prominent Republicans,
libertarians, financiers and chief executives have given their names, time
and money to the cause of same-sex marriage.
But many more gay and transgender Americans are permanent outsiders. Some
churches are doubling down on anti-gay rhetoric, which fuels family rejection
and contributes to youth homelessness. Violence against transgender Americans
is on the rise. Gay people in prison remain subject to rape and abuse. Rates
of new H.I.V. infections are rising among young black men.
Just as feminists learned after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, a
social movement that throws most of its weight in pursuit of a single policy
may falter and stagnate when it achieves a resounding victory.
Gays must now devote to the fight for protection from discrimination the same
resourcefulness and energy with which we fought for the right to marry. We
should keep in mind that our struggle began as a fight against police
harassment, and “Black Lives Matter” is our cause, too. Befitting its
status as the 20th, not the first, country to legalize same-sex marriage,
America should preach equality abroad humbly, acknowledging that it does so
with the zeal of a convert.
The gay movement has stood for valuing all families — including those led by
single parents, those with adopted children, and other configurations. It has
stood for other ideas, too, that risk being lost in this moment’s pro-family
turn: that intimacy, domesticity and caretaking do not always come packaged
together; that marriage should not be the only way to protect one’s
children, property and health; that having a family shouldn’t be a
requirement for full citizenship; and that conventional respectability shouldn
’t be the only route to social acceptance.
Many of the undergraduates at the college where I teach cannot remember a
time when same-sex marriage was unthinkable. But for most Americans alive
today, to come out as gay meant accepting that we would never wed. It meant
that we who chose to be out had little choice but to empathize with the
excluded. We were not, for obvious reasons, the marrying kind; that was part
of what made us special.
For some of us, marriage will be a ticket out of the margins. But it would be
a tragedy if, vindicated by the Supreme Court, many of us proclaim a
premature victory, overlooking those of us who are still left out, and many
more people around the world for whom the quest for basic recognition is much
in doubt. Betraying our history — forgetting what it has meant to be gay —
would be a price too high to pay.