The Martin Duberman Reader (34 page)

I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale and near the top of my class. It was clear where I was going to find applause and the self-esteem that purportedly follows in train. I had all the important traits for a successful life in scholarship: a huge capacity for isolation (to endure all those mandated hours alone in the archives), a deeply perfectionist nature (to persevere in tracking down every last fact), and a well-developed sense of fairness (to prevent me from reducing complex evidence to cartoon heroes and villains).

The particular appeal of history as my chosen field for scholarship hinged somewhat on my relish for having the last word but was more centrally related to the need (which I couldn't have articulated at the time) to find some balance for a life heavily tipped toward the present and almost devoid of personal memory. It was as if, in my own life, I had an enormous blackboard eraser suspended down my back to the floor, which, as I walked, instantly erased all trace of my footsteps. To compensate for that blank, I could turn to the comparatively painless collective memory we call history.

In blocking out my own past, I was following the example of my parents. Both of them, but especially my mother, seemed to regard any lingering on yesterday as an encumbrance to getting on with today, the source of useless anguish rather than useful experience. My mother was second-generation Austrian American, but
neither she nor her parents ever passed on to me family tales they may have heard about life in the old country, and certainly no one made reference to upholding a Jewish religious tradition, in which they themselves had been barely schooled. My mother's family, with their determined lack of interest in all that had preceded, seemed hell-bent on outdoing the citizens of their adopted country in the national trait of present-mindedness. It was part and parcel of their conformity to mainstream values. But whereas my father, a Russian emigrant, submitted with gratitude, my mother did so with an underlay of resentment.

Like her two sisters, she was urged to go straight from high school into secretarial and sales jobs—to “go to business,” to meet eligible men, to assimilate as fully as possible into the American Way. That driving passion to become just like everybody else predestined my mother to a traditional life as wife and mother, although her striking beauty, high spirits, and intelligence might, in a later generation, have led to a life far more vivid and satisfying. She passed the goal of fitting in down to her son, along with the high spirits that would keep us both in a state of repressed rebellion, and this side of total capitulation. My athletic carriage would help me conceal my sexuality as successfully as my mother's feigned ordinariness had masked her own instinctive strength.

My father, more than ten years older than my mother and mad about her when they first married (“Marry him, Josie,” her mother had urged, “he'll be a good provider”), was far more obviously foreign. One of seventeen children born to peasant parents who worked on a large farm in the Ukraine, his had been the only Jewish family in the area. The epidemic of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century made survival, not assimilation, the paramount issue. Passing reference was once or twice made by my father's sister to narrow escapes from the Cossacks, but no elaboration was ever forthcoming.

Though my father had little formal education, he'd risen, while still a teenager, to the rank of foreman on the farm. In his early twenties, he'd been drafted into the Russian army, decided to
desert, somehow made his way to Hamburg, and in April 1913, aged twenty-two, came steerage to the United States. I know that much only because I have his boarding pass and his naturalization papers. All that I ever heard from my father himself about his early life as an immigrant in New York—single, without money, contacts, skills, or English—amounted to an occasional passing reference: that he'd lived in a furnished room with the elevated subway screeching by outside his window; that he'd somehow learned the cutter's trade in the garment industry; that he'd gotten his first job in a factory at a salary of seven dollars a week; that he'd quickly learned English and risen, again, to a foreman's job. My family was as apolitical as it was areligious. The watchwords were the standard immigrant ones: making a good living and protecting the family from a hostile outside world. No energy or inclination remained for civic involvement of any kind—beyond considering Franklin Delano Roosevelt a god (“He's good for the Jews,” my father would say).

In the fall of 1952, I headed up to Harvard to get a doctorate in history. From the first I prospered. Unlike most of my fellow graduate students, who within months were lamenting their fate (my youth! my beauty!—squandered over musty texts!), I was serenity itself. Nothing pleased me more than
not
having to squander my youth in pursuit of wine, women, and song. I'd found scant pleasure in the touted joys of the flesh—and a plethora of it in the praise I'd won for the quality of my mind. Solace lay in the library, not the bedroom.

The more secure I became in my status as an intellectual, the less gloom I felt about being—as the psychiatric establishment then insisted—a disabled human being. I did implicitly accept the culture's verdict that I was defective, but could now somewhat circumscribe the indictment; I no longer felt wholly unworthy—merely crippled in my affective life.

Now and then I even had an inkling that the psychiatric depiction of homosexuals as disordered and diseased people might be suspect. After all, unless one was prepared to argue (as I sometimes was) that pathology is itself the enabling ingredient in human accomplishment,
then something seemed wrong with the characterization; how could a “sick” young man like me be functioning with as much clarity and insight as my Harvard professors assured me I was? My psychic confusion hardly lifted as the decade of the 1950s proceeded and the country's blanket and vehement (one might now say pathological) rejection of political and personal nonconformity deepened in tandem.

If anything resembling self-acceptance was still light-years off, my academic achievements had begun to provide me with a base of self-esteem from which I could begin to venture out. It became possible to explore my sexuality, however tentatively, without the overwhelming fear that failure with women (or success with men) would entirely obliterate me.

I've forgotten how I picked up the information, but I wasn't at Harvard more than a few months when I heard that there were two gay bars in Boston, the Napoleon (“a collegiate crowd”) and the Punch Bowl (“down and dirty”), as well as one or two more that, on the right evening, could be interestingly ambiguous. Slim pickings by today's standards, but for me, having lived so long in isolation, it sounded like a cornucopia. Later on, as my contacts and confidence grew, I would explore the two spots available in Cambridge itself: the riverbank in front of the residential colleges, where I once spotted one of my professors in the bushes and discreetly moved off; and the Common, less appealing because townies looking for trouble rather than sex hung out there, and because whenever I did loiter under one of the historic elms, I couldn't shake my mother's ancient injunction never to walk through a park alone for fear of the sick people who lingered within; I had become the person my mother had warned me about.

During my first year in graduate school, I went almost exclusively to the comparative safety of the Napoleon. It was located in the then-derelict Back Bay area, down an obscure side street where few people wandered. There was no sign (if my memory holds) on the door of a rundown brownstone that seemed indistinguishable from its seedy neighbors; even after one knocked, discreet inquiries,
along with a full visual assessment, took place (the point was to screen for plainclothesmen, not beauty) before entry was granted. Once you were inside, the range of amenities was surprising: two floors, with hatcheck, piano bar (
de rigueur
in the show-tune fifties), and a mostly jacket-and-tie crowd content to conform to the management's efforts at upscale elegance.

On my very first foray, I met a fellow graduate student and, unwilling to jeopardize my miraculous good fortune, agreed to go home with him that same night. Since my roommate was out of town for the weekend, Leo and I had sex in my dorm room. Perhaps because it was so pleasurable, I thereafter avoided him like the plague, rushing in the opposite direction whenever I caught sight of him on campus. Finally he cornered me one day: “Look—can't we be friends at least?” Caught somewhere between hysteria and relief, I managed to mumble yes.

It was the beginning of a long friendship and the beginning, too, of allowing myself to socialize with other gay people. Through Leo [Bersani], I gradually developed a circle of friends, almost all of them graduate students like myself, and entered a subculture that blessedly brought me from individual isolation to collective secrecy—a considerable advance if one can understand, in this day where all furtiveness is decried, the quantum leap in happiness from private to shared anguish.

And anguish we did, though with saving interstices of campy hilarity and genuine camaraderie. Howard, loyal and thoughtful, taught us much about the possibilities of gay friendship, even as Billy, with his malicious tongue, schooled us to be wary of its limitations. Charles, a languid Southerner, provided much of the hilarity. He took every opportunity to refer to, and sometimes display, his enormous cock, which he assured us in dulcet tones, eyes lifted dreamily toward heaven, had become legendary south of Mason-Dixon. Nearing thirty, Charles took advantage of his seniority to lecture us twenty-two-year-olds regularly about the dire perils of the gay life and the need
at once
to bind ourselves to a lover with hoops of steel as the only possible stay against despair.

Sharing Charles's view, in the couple-oriented fifties, that a lifetime partner was indeed essential for human happiness, we pressed him for an explanation of his own single state, offering the needling suggestion that perhaps an overdependence on astonished praise for his remarkable member might have kept him from settling down with one, perhaps jaded, fan. Charles would sigh loudly, call on heaven to forgive our youthful philistinism, and regale us with gothic tales about how the treacheries of Good Old Boys had turned him into a crumpled rose (an invaluable asset, he added, in his chosen field, the study of literature).

Leo and I were the specialists in anguish. Being Jewish—which is to say, inclined to feeling guilty about being alive and at the same time to feeling superior in suffering—predisposed us to the psychiatric notion of homosexuality as curse and apartness. (It was preferable, perhaps, to feel guilty rather than powerless.) As the most earnest and ambitious of our group, we were tormented by the notion that life's deepest emotions and highest prizes might be forever outside our grasp. We seemed to have but two choices: to conclude that psychiatry was wrong about us or, that failing, to accept our fate as diminished creatures.

We could do neither. Though the culture had taught us to think badly of ourselves, our families (not yet aware we were gay) had raised us as princes of the realm, entitled to all we surveyed. This flawed upbringing, which ordinarily would have doomed the little princes to lives of presumptuous arrogance, in our cases provided needed ballast; having been valued at home, we could never
entirely
succumb (though we leaned) to the cultural view of us as disfigured and depraved. But the only integration of two such disparate self-images that we could manage in the fifties hardly made us candidates for serenity: we were pieces of shit around whom the world revolved.

It might have been easier had I
not
been intellectual. Priding myself on being the kind of rational person who based his opinions on so-called objective evidence (rather than popular superstitions or slogans), I put my faith in social science, hardly doubting that its
products were “value-free.” And in the fifties, the evidence generated by the social sciences continued overwhelmingly to corroborate the orthodox view of homosexuality as pathology.

Kinsey's work had, to be sure, provided a notable, if disputed, challenge to that orthodoxy. But most of the data that would later confirm Kinsey—the work, especially, of Evelyn Hooker, Thomas Szasz, and Judd Marmor—lay in the future. Only one significant book emerged in the early fifties to bolster Kinsey's minority views on homosexuality:
Patterns of Sexual Behavior
by the anthropologists Cleland Ford and Frank Beach. Using data from the Yale Human Relations Area Files on seventy-six cultures, Ford and Beach concluded that nearly two-thirds of those cultures sanctioned, and in some cases mandated, some variant of homosexual activity. But Ford and Beach also concluded that in most cultures homosexuality was considered inappropriate for
every
stage of life, and in no culture was it the sole form of sexual activity for adults.

Since Leo and I were, and had always been, Kinsey 6s (exclusively gay), and since we had trouble seeing the bright side of anything, we looked on the Ford and Beach data as mostly negative confirmation of our benighted status. We even managed to twist it into a new instrument of self-torture; in portraying homosexuality as a “stage”—of adolescence, that is, not adulthood—the anthropological evidence (we decided) seemed to confirm the psychiatric view that “fixation” at one stage of development precluded progress to the otherwise natural culminating point of human maturation: heterosexuality. We would never, it seemed, have “complete” lives; we would always be some ungrown, truncated version of humanity.

That the conclusion did not overwhelm us was attributable partly to our upbringing (which had stored in us an irreducible amount of self-regard that transcended intellectual debate); partly to our confidence in our intellectual abilities (perhaps all great minds, or talents, we would argue, were housed—nature's way of balancing out traits—in otherwise deformed personality structures); and partly to the fact that we had found solace in a community of like-minded
souls and, in the shadow of the hangman, were managing to have a fair amount of fun with our lives.