BY 1969, Martin Duberman had spent nearly two decades in reparative therapy, desperately trying to stamp out his same-sex desires. it took a 
critical moment in gay American history, the Stonewall riots, to persuade Duberman, then 39, to reject the psychological establishment’s “cure” for homosexuality once and for all.
Through that turbulent awakening, duberman grew into a formidable intellectual and activist, writing about and advo- cating on behalf of the disenfranchised in every corner of soci- ety, sounding the alarm on the AidS crisis, and founding one of the first gay studies programs in the u.S. The latter was achieved after a five-year struggle, in 1991, at City university of New York (CuNY), where the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) is still going strong today.
Despite his enduring commitment to gay rights and lifelong dedication to queer scholarship, duberman is deeply disappointed in the contemporary GLBT movement, noting that for the past twenty years the focus has been on marriage equality and repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” His view is that the goal of assimilation runs counter to the spirit of Stonewall and Gay Liberation, which sought to affirm, rather than minimize, the differences between mainstream and queer culture.
To commemorate the 44th anniversary of Stonewall in June, as well as the publication of the new anthology of Duberman’s essays in The Martin Duberman Reader, I sat down with the author in his art-filled, book-stacked apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan’s gay enclave. There he shared his thoughts about the state of gay politics and reminisced about those heady days in the 60s and 70s when various social movements—Black power, women’s Liberation, the Antiwar Movement—took on the status quo and paved the way for the gay rights struggle. This interview was originally conducted for The Slant: There’s Always More to the Story, an on-line magazine of which i am the co-ed- itor (visit www.slanthere.com).
Stephanie Fairyington: Let’s go back to your youth. Tell us a bit about how your gay consciousness emerged and how it might compare to what gay kids go through today.
Martin Duberman: I suspect it depends on where the kids are located. There is a huge difference between the large cities and small towns or rural areas. Well, let’s see. I’m so old. It’s a long story. The gay consciousness has had many decades to evolve.
SF: Start with those early days, when you were first grappling with your sexuality.
MD: When I was growing up, the psychiatric profession overwhelmingly believed that homosexuality was a pathology: you were sick; you were disturbed; you were ill. The good news was supposed to be that you could be cured by presenting yourself for psychotherapy and cutting off all your escapes hatches. When I first went into therapy, I was told that if I wanted this to work—if I wanted to end up straight—I would have to stop having any kind of sexual contact. If you tell this to somebody in their twenties, when they’re at their horniest, it’s not easy. And yet, I was so brainwashed that I tried. At the time, I had just begun graduate school, so I was 21 or 22, and I was in a five-year relationship. It was a good relationship. I was told by the therapist I had to give him up, never see him again, let alone have sex with him.
Then, a later therapist—I’m embarrassed to tell you how old I was at that point because by then I should certainly have known better—blamed my mother. It was the standard psychiatric theory then. If you’re looking at a gay boy, you can be sure he has come out of a family configuration in which the father was either absent or hostile and the mother was overwhelmingly present. The boy ends up identifying with the mother, who is a constant presence, and being antagonized by the father. I can’t remember all the details of the theory, but God knows most of us believed it.
A lot of people feel that once you come out, everything’s going to be fine. That may well be true of Jason Collins, the basketball player who just came out. My partner and I saw Oprah interview him, and he seems like a lovely guy, although an utterly traditional one. Everybody was instantly supportive and all the publicity surrounding his coming out has been glorious. It’s a whole different world today. I never came out to my parents.
SF: Did they have an inkling that you might be gay?
MD: Yes. My father died when I was 26, but even if he had lived, I wouldn’t have told him. I never told my mother, but through my sister I kept hearing that my mother was pestering my sister, saying: “I have a horrible feeling that Martin is homosexual. If you know, you have to tell me. We have to get him into therapy.” My mother was in fact a very good and tolerant person. I don’t mean to demean her. She was simply parroting back what society was telling her at the time.
SF: So you came out to your sister?
MD: Yes, she was a close friend of mine when we were growing up. I told her when I was in my late teens or twenties. There were very few gay bars then, but I’d take her to one of the earliest dance bars—the Grapevine—which was [open to]both men and women.
SF: In New York?
MD: Yes. I think it was pre-Stonewall. I don’t know for sure. At the time, we all regarded Stonewall as the only place where you could dance, and that was almost exclusively a gay male bar. An occasional woman would appear, but she was probably attached to somebody working there. At the time, Stonewall was my bar of choice because I loved to dance. I was there two or three times a week, at least.
SF: At what point did you give up on “reparative therapy”?
MD: It was around the time of the Stonewall Riots. After the rioting, the first gay organizations sprang up: the Gay Liberation Front and Alternate U. I immediately knew once I started participating in all the activism around gay rights. I went to a GLF meeting. Then, around 1971, we founded the Gay Academic Union. I also got on the first board of the National Task Force and on the advisory board of the Lambda Legal Defense. As soon as all these organizations popped up, I affiliated and resigned from therapy immediately.
I had been described by a therapist I had for a decade as the most defiant human being he ever met, because I “would not get on the side of my own health,” he said. I kept giving up sex and then not giving up sex, back and forth, so I was ready to let go. People have said to me, “How in God’s name did you stay that long, and how were you brainwashed by this nut to such a extent?” And I say, “Take it as an index of just how deeply those of us of that generation had internalized homophobia.” And the truth is, we’ll never get rid of it.
SF: How do you mean?
MD: Once you declare for gay liberation, you’re not liberated. You’re simply saying, “I’m beginning the process of liberation now.” If you’re of a certain age, that process is never going to end because there’s just too much to work through.
SF: Like?
MD: Recently, I had an episode. I won’t go into the details, but I got very upset over what had transpired between me and a friend, and I realized my feelings went way back to those years of being put down the whole time I was growing up as a pathologized creature, a second-rate life, a deeply disturbed human being.
SF: But you’ve also learned to see your position as an outsider as a strength. In a chapter of your latest book, The Martin Duberman Reader, you cite Herbert Marcuse, writing: “Because of our rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, ‘homosexuals might one day provide a cutting-edge social critique of vast importance.’” To what extent has this turned out to be true?
MD: Oh, boy, you’ve pushed the red button because I have very strong feelings about this. That quote from Marcuse has long been my mantra. I really do believe that because of our special experience, we do have a set of perspectives about gender, monogamy, family, friendship, parenting—which the mainstream would deeply profit from, if only it would open its ears. It won’t open its ears unless we continue to demand that it does. But instead of demanding it, we say, “Oh, we’re no different from you. All we want are all the rights and privileges that the rest of you have. See, we want to have children; we want to settle down into monogamous marriages.” Oh, and we have Republicans! It drives me mad.
SF: Do you think gay people are inherently different or just culturally different? In other words, once gay people receive wide acceptance in society, will we cease to be different in a culturally interesting way?
MD: There’s long been a parallel discussion in the black community about exactly these issues. Blacks too have a different historical experience, and politically-minded radical blacks don’t want all of that dissolved into some middle-class, white version of who they are. James Baldwin put it this way: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Let’s just build our own house. A whole raft of studies demonstrate that gay people tend to have better, more egalitarian relationships, in which both people are of equal importance and make equal contributions to each other’s well being. This is an ongoing struggle that every minority faces: How do we hold on to our different perspective?
SF: You seem to hold a lot of hope for the radicalizing power of transgender people. You write: “the transgender movement’s challenge to a binary notion of gender is of potentially huge importance.” But how can they avoid reinforcing the binaries you claim they challenge? The need to occupy a male or a female body seems to reinforce the binary nature of gender. And it seems that many FTMs identify as “heterosexual men,” and all that that implies in terms of power relations.
MD: That’s a good and troubling question. It gets at Marcuse’s point. The potential in the transgender movement is enormous because what it’s saying essentially is, there isn’t anything essential [about gender]. These individual configurations are all that we should be concerned about. It’s back to the old androgyny model: that all the characteristics and qualities that traditional culture parcels out to one gender or the other should henceforth be combined in everybody. I think that that’s what’s revolutionary about the transgender movement. But I think the parallel is again the same with the gay movement. A lot of gay people just don’t want to accept the potentially revolutionary nature of their personhood, and a lot of transgender people don’t want to accept it either. We want to fit in. We want to belong. We want to be just like you. Life is a struggle. It’s understandable that people would want to belong so they won’t have to fight battles every single day in order to be accepted or appreciated.
SF: Too bad we as a society can’t help people feel the power and beauty of their outsiderness.
MD: That’s where we should be headed. Affirm who you feel you really are. Get rid of all that excess cultural baggage that’s been laid on you, telling you who you are. It’s very difficult.
SF: Will you talk a little about the influence of queer culture on mainstream America?
MD: So far, I don’t think the effect on mainstream culture has been significant, and I think that’s the fault of both the gay movement and the mainstream, which is willing to accept and tolerate us to the extent that we act like good, middle-class white people. They have no tolerance or understanding at all toward, for example, transgender people. I don’t know what else I can say. Push me a little.
SF: Do you think same-sex marriage can influence the institution for straight people?
MD: No, I don’t, and that’s why I’m against it. Besides, why should married people, gay or straight, get all these special advantages in terms of gift taxes, social security benefits, and all the rest of it? It just underlines still further the inequality of the culture.
SF: I wondered what you thought about feminism in relation to men’s liberation. Are you sympathetic to the struggles that some men’s rights activists have identified, citing a family law system that privileges mothers in child custody cases, the cultural vilification of male sexuality, and social customs that impose crippling expectations of masculinity on men?
MD: I think that’s a good point. Men have problems, too; it isn’t only outsiders who have problems. But I think if men’s roles were less rigidly defined, they’d benefit—if they weren’t defined, for example, as the breadwinner, as the authority figure, and so on. All of us forget that the privileged don’t have unclouded lives. Hardly. Life is tough, and unfortunately we’re born with the consciousness that we’re going to die, and that alone is enough to prevent us from being constantly joyous.
Stephanie Fairyington is co-editor of The Slant: There’s Always More to the Story (www.slanthere.com).
