When Love Lasts Forever
Male Couples Celebrate Commitment
Released in 1999, this book was one of the first such books designed to share the lives of ordinary couples who had been together for a long time (over 10 years), but who seldom were recognized for the depth of their commitment.
Since that time the entire same-sex marriage and relationship issue has taken off as public policy advocates have take on their challengers and encouraged elected officials to put ideas into action.
This book remains available on sites such as Amazon and even on Wal*Mart, of all places ... one of the companies that historically was not always friendly to these issues.
The following are the introductory paragraphs of Chapter Six (page 59), setting the stage for the story of the relationship between me and my partner of 11 years, Stephen Corpus:
Long-term Young Love
Often the picture of long-term committed gay or lesbian love is of an older couple that met in their adult years and formed a lasting, inspirational relationship. In this way, positive, mature love is broght forth and placed upon a pedestal to be emulated, in much the same way that opposite-gender unions are dreamed as youthfully blissful and desinted forever, starting young and growing effortlessly better.
For gay love, however, it is as if we leave out the process of the growing of the union, of the making of something special out of the unguided, unfocused, and confused reality of dreams meant to be whatever they become. And perhaps we miss out on some of the silliness of the development of caring.
My Stephen died one week after our eleventh anniversay. He was thirty-four and I thirty-seven, and we had an unique journey through a youthful long-term relationship. He was diagnosed about seven years into our togetherness, giving us only four years to factor in a much too predictable ending.
In retrospect, I believe ours was, in fact, an adult kind of youthful relationship. He and I learned and lived and cared within the limits of a dream that would not, could not last forever--at least not in body. No matter how hard we tried, we would miss out on the idealized wonder of the glory of mature love. But the dream was still there: present, visible, pulling, sometimes pushing.
Here is a copy of the cover:
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