The nightmare imagined by every author is that her book will go entirely unnoticed when it is published, but the opposite experience — of sudden, impassioned, relentless attention — can be unsettling too. Last week, the political journalist Jo Becker published Forcing the Spring, an account of the iconic marriage-equality court case Hollingsworth v. Perry, and almost immediately found her book under vigorous attack from many of the most prominent figures in the gay rights movement. This was surprising, especially to Becker, in part because her book had been reviewed very prominently and very positively in the mainstream press, but even more so because her account was obviously on the side of the advocates for gay marriage, whom she had described in heroic terms. Still, Andrew Sullivan accused Becker of “jaw-dropping distortion,” and there were similarly sharp critiques from Michelangelo Signorile, from Dan Savage, from Chris Geidner. They accused Becker of …
