BETWEEN THE SUMMERS of 2007 and 2009, I traveled the country interviewing a diverse group of prominent, interesting, and accomplished gay Americans. Out of those interviews—102 in all—came a book, Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans, which was published this spring by the University of Wisconsin Press. Throughout the project, diversity was my guiding principle. I wanted not only a range of ages, ethnic backgrounds, geographical regions, and professions, but also a diversity of opinions about the importance that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender had in these folks’ lives and work.
My odyssey took me through an America that historian Neil Miller recently called “unimaginable 25 or even ten years ago.” People opened up to me about their queer lives with a candor and pride that was often astonishing. Initially, I thought that would be the power of the book—the sheer range of people and stories I had collected. I had no overarching thesis to promote, not even a hunch that I would find a common thread amidst all this beautiful multifariousness. Only after the book was released did I stop to ask myself if it sounded any unifying themes, and my answer was yes and no.
We are accustomed to thinking of homosexual culture as an urban creation. My travels largely confirmed that. Well before the days of easy access to information about gay life, cities like San Francisco and New York had word-of-mouth reputations for being, as poet Judy Grahn told me, “gay-friendly.” In fact, many of the participants in my project told me that as young people they couldn’t wait to escape what they perceived as the stifling effects of small-town and rural life. Time and again, they bewailed the lack of diversity that characterized the places where they had grown up. Raised in New Jersey, lesbian rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum was seventeen before she even heard the word lesbian, at which point, she remarked, things “started clicking.” Jennifer Chrisler, the head of Family Equality, who grew up in “an all-white, pretty much all-Protestant, working-class community,” told me with embarrassment: “I went through a phase in high school when I wanted to work for Martha Stewart and plan weddings.” Even those who recalled their small-town childhood more happily reported that they eventually had to move away. Southern writer Dorothy Alison put it best when she rehearsed for me the turbulent, often conflicting emotions that her rural North Carolina childhood left her with: “Beautiful and empty and dangerous and scary. You love it, you want it, and you hate it at the same time. And you’re mad as sin.” No wonder that many of these emerging gay leaders yearned “to get out,” as gay novelist Scott Heim, who grew up on the plains of Kansas, told me. Jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton, faced with the choice of two music schools for his college career—Berklee and North Texas State—quickly decided that the Texas campus was “more desolate than my little Indiana town” and, sight unseen, left for Boston, where he ended up staying for most of his career. In fact, for many of the people I interviewed, the move to college was the critical step in the development of their gay self-awareness. “A real opportunity to reinvent myself,” filmmaker P. J. Raval told me of his college years. Gay playwright Paul Rudnick, speaking of his time at Yale, told me that the university was “so inherently gay, completely open. There was a sense of not just acceptance but of absolute ordinariness. It was everything I had dreamt of. I thought of myself as in a tryout before I got to go to Manhattan.” And during his sophomore year at Harvard, Kevin Jennings, who would go on to found glsen (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), a national organization for high school students, discovered a gay periodical on the coffee table of his graduate student proctor. “And he wasn’t ashamed! It saved my life,” Jennings told me. “The world went from the world as a bad place, to a world of possibility.” When college was not an option, others I interviewed told me that they literally got on a bus and headed for the big city. At eighteen, Durk Dehner, the future president of the Tom of Finland Foundation, a major archive of gay erotic art, hightailed it out of his backwater town in Alberta for Montréal. South Dakota native Charles Leslie, another curator of a major gay art collection, told me that when he wasn’t ogling Native American physiques, he was pouring through his parents’ encyclopedia, mesmerized by photographs of Græco-Roman statues. At age seventeen, with $34 in his pocket and a one-way bus ticket, he headed off to Los Angeles to find the real thing. Los Angeles surfaced again and again in my conversations. I learned from lesbian historian Lillian Faderman that more lesbian and gay institutions got their start in L.A. “than anywhere else on the planet.” Perhaps L.A. has attracted so many gay people because, in the pre-Stonewall 50’s and 60’s, it offered, in her words, “a possibility of anonymity.” That being the case, by the mid-70’s L.A. had become “pagan and glorious,” as Richard Rodriguez told me of his four years there. Los Angeles is also where the teenage Tim Miller, a future queer performance artist and one of the plaintiffs in the 1993 NEA Four lawsuit against federal censorship of the arts, saw his first gay pride parade. “I remember,” Miller related, “seeing a very camp drag queen who waved at our bus as we drove down Hollywood Boulevard. It was exciting, scary, repulsive. It definitely wasn’t my Mary Renault Apollonian ideal at all.” Another American city that has attracted gay people of all stripes is, of course, San Francisco, the place where, as Edmund White noted years ago in States of Desire, “gay fantasies come true.” As with other large cities, San Francisco offered new options to several of the people I interviewed, including Korean–American novelist Alexander Chee, who decided to relocate there after college because it was “a city of men who hadn’t met me.” Moving to San Francisco was “a great gift,” Armistead Maupin told me the day I interviewed him. “It liberated me sexually. The bathhouses did it. That’s one of the more democratic experiences on earth. When you’re groping around with strangers, class and race fall away pretty quick. The sheer joy I found in that experience—the innocence it gave to me again—made me examine not only my own oppression but the oppression of all the other people who had been demonized.” Being “aloose in the big city,” as Randall Kenan put it, allowed many of the people that I interviewed to blossom. Perhaps no city has provided that kind of opportunity more than New York. Ned Rorem told me that when he was a young gay man, New York was the place “to get drunk and get laid.” For graphic artist Alison Bechdel, her first trip to New York, when she was fifteen, opened her eyes to an “arresting display of cosmetized masculinity.” As important as hedonism and outspoken gay self-display have been for many GLBT people, New York has meant a lot more than that. The city was, according to Lillian Faderman, “the place to go” if you wanted to live a gay life. “I had to move to New York,” insisted comedian Bob Smith, co-founder of Funny Gay Males. “I randomly picked a date—September 15, 1984—and worked to make as much money as I could in order to move there.” Hillary Goodridge, the future plaintiff in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the landmark lawsuit that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, exuberantly recalled the “vibrant community” that was the lesbian scene in New York in the early 1980’s. For poet Joan Larkin, New York came to be “a Bohemia that I was in love with.” Recalled Russian émigré and future porn film industry magnate Michael Lucas: “I loved the energy in the streets. I loved the people. This country in two hundred years built the most intellectual city in the world. The redeemed proletariat built it.” Until the advent of Internet dating and cruising, no institution has been more characteristic of urban queer life than the gay and lesbian bar. A number of the people I interviewed fondly recalled how a bar figured importantly in their lives. For poet Judy Grahn, alone and afraid after being kicked out of the Air Force in 1960, it was a bar called Rendezvous in D.C., which she described to me as “integrated, very wonderful for just how mixed and working-class it was.” For master gardeners Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck, Sporters at the foot of Boston’s Beacon Hill functioned as “the place you went if you were brainy.” And for the brainy young Frank Kameny, who would spend his life fighting gay discrimination in the government, Boston’s Napoleon Club and the Punchbowl were the bars of choice. For black lesbian activist Mandy Carter, it was Maude’s in San Francisco; for Lillian Faderman, the Open Door in L.A. “It was absolutely amazing,” Faderman told me of her first visits there. “Suddenly, I saw that this is what I wanted my life to be. Of course, now I look back on it and I’m horrified at the kind of place it was. But what I saw was that you could make your life with women. You didn’t have to find a man in your life. It made absolute sense to me.” Small towns had their gay bars, too. Comedian and jazz singer Lea DeLaria, who grew up in the Midwest, told me she survived the provincialism by getting into gay bars on a fake ID. The day we spoke, she mentioned the bar frequented by Eric, the teenage protagonist in the1998 film Edge of Seventeen, a movie DeLaria appeared in. “I liked that he had a bar to go to, and that the dykes and fags were all together. Same with me. That’s what I grew up with in the Midwest.” Poet, therapist, and Radical Faerie Franklin Abbott recalled that in the early 70’s, Macon, Georgia, had a gay bar, the We Three Lounge, a “shot-gun place” that served both men and women. “It was rough,” Abbott recalled. “The lesbians were all armed and dangerous. One night, there was shootin’ in the bar. I ran up on stage. There were two big fat drag queens up there. I hid behind one of them. I tried to escape out the bathroom window. The police found me in the alley and took me back inside! It was very colorful.” Gay life was so closely identified with the bar scene that lesbianism “just seemed like a drinking thing,” in the words of Judith (Jack) Halberstam, currently a professor of English and gender studies at USC. Indeed at least one person I talked with, Mandy Carter, told me that she needed to get out of San Francisco because she was drinking too much: “It says a lot that the women’s movement was based in these bars.” Cities have also served as crucibles of gay activism. For Judy Grahn, the San Francisco of the late 60’s and 70’s was a place where a number of lesbian-feminist organizations got started, including Gay Women’s Liberation, which Grahn helped to found (as well as the Women’s Press Collective). The Boston of the early 80’s is where the self-described “scruffy street radical” Urvashi Vaid, the future head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, cut her activist teeth. New York did the same for Mark Segal, the founder of Gay Youth and future publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News. Many others recalled cities where they turned out activist newsletters, joined gay and lesbian rap groups, or helped out at gay and lesbian centers. Urban areas provided other opportunities that were still not part of mainstream culture. In her twenties, Judy Dlugacz, the founder of Olivia Records, became an electrical construction apprentice, the first woman in the D.C. area to do so. For Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Minneapolis, with its vibrant butch-femme scene, proved to be “a lucky move.” She described meeting women who played rugby, who rode motorcycles, who had working-class jobs as carpenters, electricians, and firewomen. “I just slotted in,” she told me. “It was great.” Taken as a whole, these interviews convinced me that cities are what have allowed queer people to experience and express what writer Richard Rodriguez calls the “complication” of gayness in the world. If, as Rodriguez noted to me the afternoon we met at a café in San Francisco, there is a “willingness within homosexuality to violate custom,” then cities have functioned as the incubators in which gay people have found the permission, the encouragement, indeed the anarchy that could embolden them to violate custom and forge new ways of thinking, living, and constructing worth and meaning in their lives. Diversity, pluralism, vibrancy, complication, cosmopolitanism—these were the themes my interviewees emphasized again and again, and it was in cities that those themes largely found their voice. Cities have allowed GLBT people to be “comfortable with being different,” as filmmaker P. J. Raval told me. “Queer people live beyond what is already known, established, sanctioned, familiar,” he told me at his home in Austin, Texas. “I have license to explore. I feel that I’m excused from having to be a certain way.” At the same time, a few people I spoke with acknowledged the risks that gay people, especially gay men, face in large cities, where HIV rates are higher than in non-urban areas. As horticulturalist Wayne Winterrowd remarked of his and his partner’s decision not to settle in San Francisco: “Too many seductions. We’d be dead.” Novelist Scott Heim echoed this sentiment when he told me of the “impulsive decision” that he and his boyfriend Michael Lowenthal made to move to Cape Cod for a winter. “That was the first long stretch of time that I didn’t have anything chemical in my system.” A few, like novelist and lawyer Michael Nava, who lives in a suburb of San Francisco, were downright hostile about the “ghetto mentality” that urban gay enclaves can engender: “I find the gay male subculture to be for the most part puerile and spiritually empty, so I steer clear of it. Where there is a ghetto mentality there is a certain degree of isolation and acting out that I don’t think is healthy, and I don’t participate. You’re not going to see me at a circuit party!” Concomitant with this skepticism about the value of urban gay communities, I found an openness to celebrating the pleasures of suburban living. Filmmaker Arthur Dong, who with his partner is raising a son, described his suburban L.A. neighborhood, Silver Lake, in glowing terms: “We’ve been embraced by the heterosexual community in ways we never thought we would. What’s wonderful about living in Silver Lake, we can walk to school, and there are other same-sex couples. It makes it very natural for [my son]to know that there are other daddies.” Twenty years ago, the word “daddy” in the context of gay L.A. would have had a very different meaning and referred to a very different neighborhood. Another suburbanite, Zoe Dunning, the only openly gay person since “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to have remained in the military, emphasized values, not geography, as the most formative aspect of her life. “Authenticity, intentionality, integrity—if those are your guiding principles, then everything else falls into place.” Another relatively young gay man I interviewed, the VietnameseAmerican writer Andrew Lam, went so far as to question the importance of gay identity at all. “What I’ve come to realize,” he told me, “is that identity is an issue that is never ending, simply because, as a human being, I keep growing. I take on new layers, shedding old layers. Identity is never fixed in stone, but something, constructed, earned, garnered. That’s what Buddhism teaches us, that there is no true self.” But these are the prerogatives of people who were nurtured in the gay matrix of one city or another. Opting out of a life in the city, as a number of people I spoke with have done, was a step they took only after years of developing their gay consciousness in an urban environment. I came to see that for most queer folk—at least in my random and anecdotal sampling—a period spent in a major gay-friendly city was as important to their development as the Grand Tour once was to the molding of an 18th-century English gentleman. Playwright Jamil Khoury, the co-founder of Chicago’s alternative theater, the Silk Road Project, summed it up in this way: “Once I became more aware of what it means to be gay, the city took on this whole other significance.” Philip Gambone’s latest book is, Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
