The Everyday Lives Behind Social Evolution

Chuck White and Bob Cross met in Boston on July 2, 1958, coming out of a performance of light classics by the Boston Pops. They were ex-soldiers, Bob just out of college on the GI Bill, Chuck a sound man doing films for Encyclopaedia Britannica. The night smelled of cut grass and blossoms. “He came up behind me and said, ‘Lovely evening, isn’t it?’ ” Chuck remembers. “And it was.”

Life was not what it is now. Expectations did not include young men approaching other young men on summer evenings. A young man was expected to find a wife. And if he could not--if the hand of a girl made him feel like a fraud and a liar--the expectation was that he would leave New Hampshire or Idaho and bury his desire in, say, literature or sound equipment. “I tried everything not to be who I am,” Bob sighs in his New England accent. Says Chuck: “In Boise, I’d been an only child, and for a lot of my life until then I thought it was that I wanted a brother. That I was looking for a brother somehow.”

That was nearly 42 years ago, and some might say the young men did, in a sense, marry. This conversation takes place in a house with three dormer windows, the house where Chuck White and Bob Cross have lived for the quarter-century since they moved together to Greater L.A. They are retired now, two guys in cardigans and sneakers with Medicare cards in their wallets. Their hillside home stands between a row of “Leave It to Beaver” houses and the Hollywood sign.

It is storming outside, and the rain on the porch rattles Chuck’s petunias. He is 67, with thinning hair and aviator glasses and a plaid sport shirt and age spots on his hands. He is HIV-positive and stable thanks to medication, as is Bob, a frail, lively man with cropped white hair and a dark beard (“Old Bristlecone,” Chuck kids him.) Bob is 69. Because what they had was said not to be a marriage, they crafted this parallel compact: no falling in love--no matter what else transpired--with anyone else.

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What is a marriage? This, it would seem, is the urgent question of the season, and not just because today is Valentine’s Day. From the tax committees of Congress to the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 22 on the March 7 California ballot, the contract for companionship is suddenly in the throes of renegotiation. So it goes, in societies as in couples, when people stop being what they used to be.

The politics get the attention, but they’re fueled by the evolution--by the millions of couples who aren’t picketing or grandstanding, but just quietly living their lives. Though the straight mainstream remains as leery of gay marriage as it once was of marriages across lines of race and religion, the real news is the way the mere fact of same-sex commitment has slowly shaped hearts and minds.

A Gallup poll taken last year, for instance, found that public acceptance of homosexuality as a “lifestyle” (whatever that means) has grown since 1982 from 34% to 50%. Eight in 10 Americans back equal employment rights for gays and lesbians now; in 1977, it was only 56%. The unsung backdrop to the Orange Unified School District’s venomous fight over a gay-straight alliance is that the dispute isn’t all that groundbreaking; some 600 such clubs already exist nationwide. News accounts of the Alaska Airlines tragedy reported the deaths, among many others, of two men and their “life partners” with a matter-of-factness that was itself a kind of headline.

This is the true engine of revolution--the day-to-day existence of intertwined lives. So we return to the home of one of those couples, whose days together--like so many raindrops--have been moving mountains over time.

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Here’s a tape of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, in which they have sung for many years. Here’s Bob’s grand piano, and Chuck’s Emmy for sound in a National Geographic special, and a silver plaque from their 25th year together--with wedding bells! Here they are with their dogs, Jetta and Tippy. Here they are the year they met. They are as handsome as Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler, clowning for an arcade camera. Chuck takes down the framed photo, a black-and-white blowup of two young men, laughing. He tells how they talked until 4 in the morning the night they met.

Within two weeks, Bob laughs, “I moved in. Aggressive!”

“Forty-two years,” says Chuck. “And we’ve been together. . . .

“Slept in the same bed every night, no matter what!”

“No matter what,” Chuck agrees. It is no longer clear who is finishing whose sentence as they savor a memory that, 42 years ago, you could not have read about here, of a summer evening and what a lovely evening it was.

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].