Reading these excerpts from an interview done with me a decade ago, I was surprised at how much anger I felt over the state of our purported Gay Nation in 2004. Anger at the current political focus of our national organizations on the issues of marriage and military service, and ever further away from the emphasis of the radical early gay movement on redressing class and race-based grievances. Most of our people are working-class, and many are from minority groups. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to our “leaders” or scanning their agendas.
Sure, I want us to have the same range of rights as other citizens. But I’d rather see us challenging our lethal foreign policy than joining the killing machine that implements it. And I’d rather see us challenging the hoary assumption that monogamous lifetime pair-bonding is the optimal path to human happiness instead of clamoring for its iron embrace—and by implication denigrating singleness or serial partnering.
In general, there seems to be little sympathy in our community for radical analysis—and that worries me. The country is going to hell in a hand basket, and most of us are devoting our energies to assuring mainstream Americans that we’re “just like you,” “just folks,” just as committed to a shallow, callous, and dumbed-down national set of values so perfectly exemplified by our Neanderthal president.
Why aren’t our leaders and organizations loudly condemning imperial arrogance, endemic poverty, joblessness, soul-destroying minimum-wage work, racism, gender inequality? Why are our leading publications far more concerned with floor shows in Las Vegas than with homelessness among the transgendered? Why do we seem so grateful for Will & Grace, when queer people of color go largely unrepresented in the media? Why would we rather be seen as patriots than as truth-tellers? Where is the Gay Liberation Front of 1970 now that we need it?
New York, November 2003
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FROM Summer, 1994
An Interview with Martin Duberman
The Making of a Myth
HGLR: The decade leading up to Stonewall, the 1960’s, takes up almost two-thirds of your book [Stonewall, E.P. Dutton, 1993] and provides the backdrop against which the Stonewall Riots occurred. Perhaps you could describe in capsule form the cultural and political situation that provided the background for the events of June 28, 1969.
MD: There was nothing inevitable about the Stonewall riots. They did not have to happen in June of ’69 in Greenwich Village, New York. What had happened by the end of the 60’s was that conditions had finally become ripe for Stonewall. It could have happened in any number of large cities—but only in a large city, where a critical consciousness and mass had been achieved. On the other hand, it could not have happened in 1959. The country had to have lived through the decade of the 60’s, meaning the challenge to authority in a wide variety of areas of American life—whether emanating from the struggle against the war in Vietnam, the emergence of the feminist movement at the end of the decade, or, of course, from the granddaddy of all movements, the black struggle for civil rights going back to the 50’s.
It seems to me that the common message of all these movements was not to trust the experts. It’s okay to be different. And that message began to resonate. I, for example, had turned over my life during much of the 60’s to the professional experts of psychiatry in order to cure my sexual orientation, and this message began to percolate in me. Also, I was very outspoken about the Vietnam War and on the side of the student radicals. And finally it began to seep into my defended brain that, “Hey, this applies to you, too, and to your own life. Here you are deferring to experts. You are believing all the psychoanalytic bullshit about how you have a character disorder and how homosexuality is always pathological. Time to open your eyes to your own situation and apply these messages to your own life.”
The second message was essentially the message of the black struggle: that black is beautiful, beautiful in and of itself and not just as a second-rate version of white. And that message, too, began to percolate for a lot of gays and lesbians: We don’t have to go on apologizing for who we are and trying to conform to standards outside of ourselves, middle class standards of what is viable behavior or a “decent” lifestyle.
What had also preceded was at least an incipient gay and lesbian struggle per se. I myself didn’t get activated until 1971. But those people in the 60’s, that literal handful of people who stood up, who joined the Mattachine Society or the Daughters of Bilitis, these were people who were in a real sense “unsocialized.” People like me had been properly socialized. We had been taught that gay is bad, disturbed, second-rate. Somehow there were a few hundred people who didn’t get that message. God bless them; we all owe them a great debt. And so they carried their picket signs in front of the White House in 1965 demanding rights for gays and lesbians. They actually used the slogan “Gay is Good,” which was invented by Franklin Kameny.
So many of today’s activists—much as I admire them—do sometimes give off the attitude that what they are doing is being done for the very first time, that they had no precursors; whereas in fact all of us are standing on the shoulders of these giants from the 60’s. Where they are acknowledged at all, it is usually in patronizing terms: “Yeah, there was this primitive little gay political movement before Stonewall, but these people were essentially assimilationists and apologists.” And to some degree they were, but they were also saying some very subversive things, and engaging in some very dangerous political actions—like picketing various federal agencies, demonstrating annually in Philadelphia in front of Independence Hall (an event which Craig Rodwell invented). Those were remarkably brave acts in the context of those years. Those people could easily have been beaten up on the street; they could easily have lost their jobs and apartments. There were no support groups.
There tends to be a lot of East Coast provincialism surrounding all this. SIR, the Society for Individual Rights, was by far the largest pre-Stonewall gay organization, with thousands of members. And it was a West Coast group. The history of SIR has never been written. There were some West Coast riots, such as Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, that preceded Stonewall. Compton’s could easily have become the mythic symbol of the modern gay movement. Why it didn’t and Stonewall did, will always be a mystery.
HGLR: Stonewall took on all kinds of symbolic significance after the fact. Is that all that Stonewall was, or did the character of the event itself exert an influence on the history of the movement? I know it’s a matter of speculation: what would the world be like if there had been no Stonewall?
MD: I think it would have happened somewhere, and probably soon. It wasn’t as if the one and only chance took place at the Stonewall Inn. There were significant numbers of young gays and lesbians who were already working in assorted radical organizations, groups, movements. These young gay and lesbian radicals had been turned off by what they viewed as the bourgeois nature of the gay and lesbian political movement, such as it was: Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis. These young radicals were interested in a basic assault on American values and institutions. They were not interested in being integrated into the mainstream. So they had tended to dismiss the organized gay movement, pre-Stonewall—without fully understanding its subversive significance—investing their energy in those organizations that seemed to have the potential to change the larger society.
The rioting at Stonewall, which lasted for five days, excited a lot of these young radicals, and they seemed almost literally overnight to have shifted their energy into mobilizing for their own cause. They came out of the feminist movement, the black movement, the antiwar movement, the campus protest movements, and almost within days they had formed whole new organizations, pre-eminently the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which was from its inception characterized by a radical analysis of American life, quite different from Mattachine or Daughters of Bilitis. From the beginning GLF wanted to form an alliance of the oppressed. They weren’t focused solely on gay civil rights. […]
HGLR: What about the political and social potential of the gay and lesbian movement? What would you see as the ultimately favorable outcome of the current struggle, the utopian end for gay people in our society?
MD: As they used to say in the 60’s, “More will be revealed.” Through the process of struggle, we learn what further struggle is necessary. I think the central potential in the gay movement relates to definitions of gender: Are there any intrinsic properties to maleness or femaleness (other than the obvious physiological differences), any innate psychological or intellectual or emotional differences, capacities, qualities? I’ve never been persuaded that there are.
Gays have long experimented with different ways of being “male” or “female.” But the whole glorification of machismo that began to typify the gay male style in the late 70’s, and is still very much with us, is based on a scorn for “effeminacy.” This reification of masculinity destroys our potential as a movement to redefine gender. The same with sexuality. During the 70’s, before AIDS, the movement had begun to offer some very radical redefinitions of sexual behavior. People had stopped using the pejorative word “promiscuous” and had substituted the more affirming notion of “sexual adventuring.” They were validating back-room sex, and bathhouse sex, and sex in the backs of trucks, on the piers, any and all kinds of unconventional ways of coupling and having orgasms. They were celebrating that experimentation as a pathway to enlightenment, trying on all kinds of roles sometimes in the course of a single evening, and through that role-playing finding out a lot about themselves emotionally: where their fears were couched, where their ecstasy resided, and so forth.
But with AIDS we began to hear a lot of apologies in the gay male world. They weren’t saying what the right wingers were saying, that AIDS is God’s punishment. But a lot of people—and I would include Larry Kramer—were deploring the “destructive” nature of gay male sexuality, saying it was time to “grow up,” time to recognize that every human being really does long for the same thing, namely a committed, sustained, intimate relationship. That last may be true. But people are different. Even the same person at different ages requires different things. Though at this stage of my own life, for example, I want nothing other than the comfort and dailiness of an ongoing, committed relationship, at earlier periods in my life I didn’t want that at all. I wanted a lot of excitement and variety. Apologetics for what we once were is in essence a denial of our own passionate, youthful truths.
Martin Duberman, a historian at CUNY and author of twenty books, has recently published his first novel, Haymarket (Seven Stories Press).
