The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family

This latest from syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage is essentially a sequel to his 2000 memoir, The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant. In the first book, he and his boyfriend Terry adopted a baby boy they named D.J. In addition to being funny and touching, The Kid was also wonderfully effective in normalizing the notion of gay people as adoptive parents—I personally know several people who discarded their previous reservations on the subject after reading it.

Like The Kid, The Commitment addresses the subject of gay marriage with a winning blend of bitchy wit and cozy domestic sentiment. Savage is frequently, and not unjustifiably, compared to waspish essayist David Sedaris, but there's a whole lot of Erma Bombeck in these pages as well.

The force that sets The Commitment in motion is Savage's mom's conviction that, after staying together for ten years, Dan and Terry owe it to each other, themselves and D.J. to tie the knot. Six-year-old D.J. philosophically opposes his two dads getting married on the grounds that boys do not marry boys. Dan and Terry embrace the idea of gay marriage in principle but recoil from it in practice for a variety of reasons. Primarily, Terry says he doesn't want to mimic straight people, while superstitious Dan fears that any ceremony of commitment will jinx the relationship and precipitate its end.

The couple hashes out possible alternatives to formal marriage, and Dan uses his own extended family as a wide-ranging exhibit of the various ways the allegedly monolithic and unchanging institution of marriage plays out in the lives of straight people nowadays. Along the way he also offers up some potted social history, a love letter to the progressive utopia that is Canada, and some scathing but remorselessly logical ripostes to the pols and moralists who decry gay marriage as a menace to heterosexual unions—but can never quite explain from where the harm would come.—Cliff Doerksen