When Being Gay Is ‘Not a Big Deal’

Earlier this year, Andrew Sullivan, one of the earliest and most influential intellectuals to advocate for gay marriage, argued that “a gay politics was necessary only so that we could eventually get beyond politics, and live as our straight brothers and sisters do, with our sexual orientation being a nonissue in our wider lives.” He urged a posture of “just getting on with our lives, without our sexual orientation getting in the way,” calling that “the sanest approach to being gay, seeing it as an integral but by no means exhaustive way of being human.”

Those words came back to me this week as the producer Richie Jackson told the origin story of his forthcoming, while being interviewed at The Atlantic Festival. He began writing after his son came out as gay at age 15. “One of the reasons I wrote the book is that he thinks being gay is not a big deal. And I think he doesn’t think it’s a big enough deal. That’s where our tension is,” Jackson said. “I think being gay is the best thing about me. It is the most important thing about me. It is the blessing of my life. And I want that for him.”