The Martin Duberman Reader (35 page)

My trips to the Napoleon had quickly given me some much needed sexual experience (though my inhibitions remained multiple) and then, within mere months, an introduction to the still more threatening world of romance. One night in the Napoleon, I ran into a classmate from Yale. We had barely known each other as undergraduates, since I was an ardent student and “Rob,” as befitted his society lineage, had ardently steered clear of scholarly associations. But in Boston, where Rob had returned after graduation to his family, he and I were on a somewhat more equal footing. He was far more sexually experienced than I and also far more determined, from the first, on a love affair. To my skittish hesitations and withdrawals, he counterposed vigorous courting and glamorizing visits to family estates. The most memorable was a trip to Grandmama's Manhattan triplex.

A formidable dowager well into her eighties, she was—Rob was quick to tell me—Herbert Hoover's long-standing bridge partner (expecting him to say paramour, I was puzzled at the triumph in his voice). She received us in her library, seated unmoving in an armchair, dressed in a full-length black gown, a mass of snow-white hair framing a still beautiful face. After allowing the exchange of a few rigorous pleasantries, she had the butler show us into an upstairs bedroom so we could change into “appropriate” clothes for dinner.

Properly dazzled, I told Rob I “probably” loved him. He responded expansively by letting me fuck him for the first time—in the shower, itself a new experience. But I resisted his badgering insistence that I pronounce it the “best fuck” I'd ever had, though I'd had precious few. I had stretched my limits far enough for one day. My father's peasant stubbornness asserted itself; bristling at the hint of
droit de seigneur,
I told Rob the fuck had been “okay.”

Rob and I called ourselves “lovers,” but the affair was a good deal less profound than that, and the actual lovemaking was sharply circumscribed. It wasn't simply that I was a novice. I was also deeply
bound by sex role conventions and by the determination—if I
had
to be gay—that I was going to be a manly (that is, “acceptable”) version. None of this, of course, was consciously worked out; I simply performed according to the cultural script then dominant—though finally, of course, it's mostly a mystery as to who adopts which social cues and why.

A “real man,” as we all knew in those years (and as many continue to affirm), was unyieldingly dominant, the penetrator, the aggressor, someone who took
only
the so-called active role in bed. To help reinforce this neat paradigm, all sexual acts were conveniently labeled “active” or “passive,” and those qualities were presumed intrinsic to the acts themselves. Thus, giving blow jobs and getting fucked were innately passive, female activities; getting blow jobs and giving fucks were active and male. There seemed no understanding at the time—and precious little since—that the muscular contractions of the throat, anus, or vagina could, by several definitions, be considered “active” agents in producing any cohabitation worthy of the name—to say nothing of the psychological truth that s/he who sets and controls the scenario is, regardless of the nature of the scenario, the true “actor.” I was somebody who got blow jobs and gave fucks.

For most of the few months I was with Rob, I was “trade”—I let him blow me. The boundaries suited us both; they assuaged my guilt by reinforcing my “masculine” image, and they fed his preferred view of himself as seducer and guide to the uninitiated. It wasn't until several years later that I could even begin, at first in fantasy, to acknowledge a desired role reversal; only rarely could I put the fantasy into action.

—from
Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey
(1991)

A
s a teenager I had toured in summer stock as “George Gibbs” in Thornton Wilder's
Our Town,
and the director had strongly urged me to think about a professional career in acting. But college—and caution—had intervened.

By the early sixties, though, I'd begun to write plays, and I'd found a (deceptively) early success with
In White America,
the story of being black “in white America” as told through documents, diaries, newspaper accounts, and the like. The play had opened off-Broadway in 1963, run for a year and a half, won a prestigious prize, had two national tours, and a large number of productions.

Edward Albee and Richard Barr produced an evening of my one-acters at the John Drew Theater in Easthampton, and two years later they were done at the Manhattan Theater Club, with two of the three chosen for the annual
Best Short Plays
volumes. PBS commissioned me to write
Mother Earth,
the life of the radical anarchist Emma Goldman; Warner Brothers sounded me out about writing the book for a new Broadway musical and CBS asked me to script the inaugural special “The Presidency,” for their thirteen-part series
The American Parade.

To add still more encouragement, I was told by a producer friend that the eminent theater critic Harold Clurman had confided to her
that he was “putting his money on Duberman and [John] Guare as this generation's best bets.” Jules Irving and Alan Mandell, who were then running Lincoln Center, used nearly the same words in telling me they hoped I would let them have first crack at any new play I wrote.

I was flying. Briefly, that is.
Mother Earth
was ultimately turned down as “too radical and too ambitious”; Clurman got over his purported admiration and gave my one-acters a decidedly middling review in
The Nation
; and when I submitted a new play to Irving and Mandell for Lincoln Center's “Explorations” series, I was told it was “too good—too mature and authoritative” for that particular venue. I learned privately that they had been “dismayed” to see the homosexual subtext in my work becoming increasingly explicit; they regarded that as “the wrong choice.”

Magically, a timely new offer refurbished my fantasies of theatrical apotheosis. It came from the Francis Thompson Company, the firm commissioned to prepare a film to celebrate Philadelphia's 1976 Bicentennial. Thompson himself called to offer me the job of scriptwriter, and our early meetings were intoxicating. The project, I was told, had been budgeted at twelve million dollars (
very
big money in the midseventies). Ten million of that would go to putting up a building (to be designed by Max Abramovitz, the architect of Avery Fisher Hall) suitable for IMAX, the special process that required, among other things, a hundred-foot-wide screen. Now here were gargantuan appetites to match my own.

For the script, the Thompson people had in mind some fairly standard, benign thematic material like the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutional Convention, and so on. I argued from the first against settling for such patriotic clichés; they would do little more than reinforce a long-standing and misguided emphasis on the supreme importance of a few heroic personalities. Francis Thompson, a kindly, courtly man, warned me that the project did have a “commercial component”—meaning, I later learned, that the underwriters, a collection of wealthy Philadelphia businessmen, had to be satisfied. But he did suggest I come
up with a specific counter-suggestion for the historical narrative. This seemed to me tantamount to a green light. I have an optimistic temperament.

I dug out all my old colonial history books from graduate school days, and ransacked them for a resonant political theme and time frame. I finally decided to focus on the story of the Pennsylvania Quakers during the 1750s, when six Quaker members of the colony's assembly had resigned rather than comply with a call for military action against the Delaware Indians, thus ending Quaker control of the legislative body after a rule of some seventy-five years.

I went back to the Thompson people and passionately defended the centrality of what might, I realized, appear to be a peripheral story. Quaker beliefs, I argued, were in fact at the ideal heart of the American story. It was among the radical Pennsylvania Quakers, like John Woolman and the younger William Penn—not the merchant grandees—that “liberty of conscience” had been more consistently stressed than elsewhere in the colonies, God's “Truth” declared directly, equally, to all (with no need for priestly intervention), the profit motive held subordinate to the public interest, war and violence eschewed as instruments of social policy, the Delaware Indians asked for their “love and consent,” and black slavery denounced and abandoned. This egalitarian emphasis was, I argued, the ideal spirit in which to celebrate the
ongoing
Revolution—especially since that spirit seemed notably absent from the countless other Bicentennial projects that had already been announced.

Francis Thompson raised his eyebrows and cleared his throat. “I've
got
him!” I thought, ignoring the assorted frowns on some of the other faces in the room. For the next month, I put all other writing projects on hold and, working twelve-hour days, completed a fifty-page draft film treatment. I entitled it “The Independent Spirit” and euphorically mailed it off to Thompson.

The night before I was due to go back down to Philadelphia to discuss the draft at a meeting that would also be attended by several of the wealthy businessmen being solicited as sponsors, Francis Thompson called me at home. To my dismay, he talked vaguely of
the need somehow to reintroduce the signing of the Declaration of Independence and so on into the script. I reminded him that I thought we'd earlier agreed to eschew such tired clichés, to which he mumbled something like “That wasn't
my
understanding.” In retrospect, I think Thompson was trying to prepare me, in his muted but honorable way, for what I was likely to encounter in Philly the next day.

If so, he failed. I arrived to find that my script had been completely reworked by unknown hands, with no more than five of my original fifty pages intact. Among other things, the rewritten draft now had the Delaware Indians carrying out an unmotivated massacre of settlers and Ben Franklin explaining
to
the Quaker legislators why they had to resign from the Assembly! As I fumed about the misrepresentations, and as several of the bigwig backers smiled contentedly, one of Thompson's people took me aside to hint that once the sponsors had signed on, a good portion of my original material would “probably” be restored.

That wasn't good enough. Unless they would
guarantee
such a restoration—and in full—I threatened to quit the project. They refused, and I resigned. I told them I would sue if my name appeared anywhere on the credits.

Oh, swell—another moral triumph! The accumulation of credits in heaven was not the way to get my handprints in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater. I counseled myself to stay calm: it all ended up with a concrete slab of one sort or another anyway. Film and theater—it was all one, I grumbled; the mission of the entertainment industry was to sell tickets, and that, irreducibly, meant catering to the lowest common denominator in public taste. Print was my medium, and I had damned well better get back to it. At least for a while. At least until my unaccountably delayed passport to the entertainment industry finally got stamped.

The Bicentennial was not yet finished with me. I was asked by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to be part of an ambitious season-long celebration in honor of the nation's 200th birthday. The Center said it planned to produce ten
American plays, six of them revivals (including William Gillette's 1894 comedy
Too Much Johnson,
and Percy MacKaye's 1909 drama
The Scarecrow
), and four of them new plays to be chosen from a batch of six that the Kennedy Center intended to commission. The six playwrights they'd decided on were John Guare, Romulus Linney, Preston Jones (
The Texas Trilogy
), Joseph Walker (
The River Niger
), Ruth Wolff (
The Abdication
), and—me!

To say I was stunned, after my recent string of near—and far—theatrical misses is to understate the case. I was delirious. And when I was further told that I'd have free choice of topic (so long as I dealt with “some phase of the American experience”) and that after the engagement at the Kennedy Center the plays would tour nationally, I thought I might quite possibly be dreaming. A front-page article in
Variety
and a long piece in
Time
on the Center's planned season of plays confirmed that I was not.

I gave euphoria free rein, even after some alarm bells went off in my head during my first face-to-face meeting (in a Manhattan restaurant) with Richmond Crinkley, who, with Roger L. Stevens, director of the Kennedy Center, was going to co-produce the Bicentennial season. Crinkley was a Southern good old boy—charming, smooth, manipulative, unreliable—who
just happened to be
gay. Aside from an occasional dropped hairpin during our first meeting,
that
topic never became explicit between us, not even when we were joined at dinner by his demonstrably affectionate young actor boyfriend. Richmond wasn't
that
kind of gay man. Art and politics were in his view of the world separate realms; art was what the talented few did, politics was the poor substitute resorted to by the benighted many. Richmond was far too urbane ever to caution me directly against introducing gay-themed material into my pending play. But he nonetheless managed to convey the message that “free choice of topic” shouldn't be taken too literally.

In pondering what to write about, I played for some time with the notion of an evening to be called “Unofficial Heroes”: the story of America as seen through the eyes of its radical outsiders—people like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Emma
Goldman. I thought, too, about returning to the documentary form that had served me well with
In White America.
But when I tried my hand at it, the form felt played out for me, and I couldn't come up with an appropriate alternate format.