"Being told we can't is making a lot of homos wanna"

Savage's books tend to be ungainly constructions, and "The Commitment" is no exception. It dawdles, it feints, it repeats itself. The personal and political don't so much interweave as collide. Far too much time is spent on baldly Socratic dialogues between Savage and his siblings. We get long vacations in Saugatuck, Mich., dips into the old gene pool, digressions on cake, sexual-fetish anecdotes -- there are times you'd swear that the only thing driving the book was the book contract. (Savage might be the first to agree.) But, as he always does, Savage locates his target -- just when you thought he'd forgotten it. The fact that he's funny helps. "Anyone who denies the existence of the obesity epidemic in the United States," he writes during a trip through the heartland, "hasn't been to a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota." On a New Age wedding: "The only thing worse than organized religion. Disorganized religion." On the music in a Chinese restaurant: "It sounded like a live cat in a George Foreman Grill."

He also has a vein of tenderness, more appealing for being tapped so sparingly. It comes out particularly in his descriptions of D.J.: "the rich, humid scent of your child, the way your child's hand feels resting in your own, the trusting, contented weight of your child sitting in your lap while you read or watch TV." Without revealing too much of the climax, I will say only that it takes place in Canada, that D.J. plays a prominent and hilarious role in it, and that he undertakes the same useful function that 6-year-olds have been performing since the dawn of Family: mocking the po-faced adults who have inexplicably been put in charge of them.

"The Commitment" was written, of course, at a time of unprecedented political retrenchment. Gay-marriage opponents, energized by the Karl Rove goon squad, have rammed through constitutional amendments in more than a dozen states. They've deleted homosexuality from textbooks, pulled gay books from library shelves, torpedoed domestic-partner benefits, denied gay parents the right to adopt. (My own neighboring state of Virginia has banned not just civil unions but any "partnership contract or arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges and obligations of marriage.") The proliferation of these "Nuremberg-lite laws" imparts an even whiter heat than usual to Savage's prose. And unlike the resident scolds of the gay movement (Larry Kramer springs to mind), Savage's rage actually makes him a better, more coherent writer. He's especially good at isolating the bait-and-switch tactics of the religious right: "From Anita Bryant through early Jerry Falwell, gay people were a threat because we didn't live like straight people. Now we've got Rick Santorum and late Jerry Falwell running around arguing that gay people are a threat because some of us do live like straight people."

"The problem for opponents of gay marriage," Savage writes, "isn't that gay people are trying to redefine marriage in some new, scary way, but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples. Gay people can love, gay people can commit. Some of us even have children. So why can't we get married?"

No reason, but as Savage knows, reason doesn't enter into it. You can beat the opponents of gay marriage on every conceivable debating point, and they will retreat behind the carapace of "faith," which is really their projection of how things should be -- their prejudice. And since there is prejudice enough on both sides, we have arrived at an age of really horrifying division: people shouting across a gorge and hearing only the echoes of their own voices. And ultimately, Savage's book, far from changing any minds, will become just part of the noise.

Time, I suppose, may erode the animosities, the certainties. Until then, orthopraxy will have to do what orthodoxy can't. Which is to say, gay men and women will have to go on making their private decisions in the hope of someday reaping a public concession -- which we may not live to see.

A few years back, Don and I bought rings at a Provincetown, Mass., gift store. Titanium bands with a narrow gold stripe. We put them on without a word of explanation to anyone. We went to dinner at Bistro Bis and we murmured a few silly words -- nothing resembling a vow -- and we said nothing more.

I'll add only this: Don never takes that ring from his finger. (Economics, partly: He lost the first one and doesn't want to have to buy another replacement.) I feel it sometimes in the middle of the night, when he rolls toward me in bed. A chaff of metal against my cheek or my shoulder. It never scrapes too hard, but even in a state of half-consciousness, I marvel at the thing's resilience. That it can go on, even in our deepest slumbers, attesting to us.

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