The Male Couples Guide
Finding a Man, Making a Home, Building a Life
HarperPerennial
1999
From Eric Marcus:
It all started with a simple comment: “I wonder if there's a book out there for male couples?” It was 1983 and my then partner and I were at dinner with another young gay couple. We got into a conversation about who did the dishes, life insurance (this was at the start of the AIDS crisis), legal papers, and so forth. That's when I quite innocently wondered out loud whether the answers to our questions might be addressed in an existing book.
This was pre-Internet so there was no instantaneous way to check whether such a book existed, but a visit to the library and my favorite gay bookstore turned up one sociological study of male couples, but there wasn’t a practical guide to be found. At the time, I was a relatively recent graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and was working in magazine publishing. So while I didn't have any experience with book publishing, I knew people who did.
To make a long story short, I spent eight months working on the book proposal (my bible was How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen) and then quickly sold the book to Harper & Row (which is now HarperCollins). It took seven months to write the book—which covers all the practical aspects of couple life, from finding a partner to building a life together—and it was then published in early 1988. There have been two editions since, most recently in 1999.
In my mind, The Male Couple’s Guide was a rather innocent and conservative “how to” book (although in its matter-of-factness, an admittedly subversive one). But because of the era in which it was published and because there was nothing like it, both the book and I got lots of media attention.
It was both fun and terrifying to suddenly find myself a public spokesperson and instant expert on everything gay. It took a little while to get my sea legs, but I remember my uncle telling me after seeing me on CNN for the first time, that I seemed to take to it like a duck to water. And he was right. I can't quite say that I embraced the “activist” label in those early years, but I certainly enjoyed the fight and now proudly think of myself as a gay activist.
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