The Martin Duberman Reader (39 page)

—from
Midlife Queer
(1996)

A
s a founding member in 1973 of the Gay Academic Union (GAU), we took as our tripartite mission protecting the rights of openly lesbian and gay students and faculty on campuses, pinpointing needed areas of research on homosexuality, and originating pilot courses in gay and lesbian studies. We worked for months putting together a two-day inaugural conference, “The Universities and the Gay Experience,” sometimes frantically stitching together the mundane pieces, from workshop titles to registration forms, that go into creating a conference of any kind.

But this was no run-of-the-mill event, and until the day of the conference itself we were never sure we could pull it off. Most lesbian and gay academics had previously stayed firmly bolted in their closets, understandably fearful of the consequences of coming out in a university setting that despite its purported liberalism was likely to be nearly as pervasively homophobic as society at large. With the modern gay movement still only a few years old, and with lesbian and gay academics never having previously made any effort to band together, we were afraid few would actually risk showing up for the conference.

To our stunned delight, more than three hundred people ended up registering (and another hundred or so milled skittishly about);
the atmosphere was abuzz with excitement and enthusiasm and the plenary sessions and workshops alike proved vividly alive. Barbara Gittings and I were chosen as the two keynote speakers. I labored long and hard over my speech, eager to strike a chord of cautious utopianism. What I hadn't foreseen at the 1973 GAU conference was that infighting within our own ranks would take as large a toll as would the struggle against homophobia in the outside world. GAU's second conference, in 1974, drew some six hundred people, and by 1975 the organization had broadened from its New York City base to additional chapters in Boston, Philadelphia, and Ann Arbor (as well as, subsequently, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco). All the standard signs of success were present. Yet within a year of GAU's founding, I'd developed a queasy feeling that the victory might be pyrrhic. From the beginning, the organization drew many more men than women, and the women, early on and frequently, expressed disappointment in the lack of feminist consciousness among most of the men.

Some of the GAU men, myself included, self-identified as radical; we not only agreed with feminist analysis, but also with the criticism already being sounded by radicals outside the university that the middle-class white-male mentality dominant in GAU meant the organization was in danger of replicating rather than challenging the academic world's patriarchal attitudes, hierarchies, and rituals—right down to constructing its conferences around “panels,” a format likely to perpetuate suspect divisions between “experts” and audience, teachers and students, haves and have-nots. Instead of working to broaden standard definitions of what intellectual work was, and to break the connections between academic research and established bastions of power, GAU was, so the critique went, in danger of becoming such a bastion itself (or at least it seemed to be earnestly trying to).

Sympathetic to these warnings and complaints, I decided, when asked to give the concluding speech at the second GAU conference in 1974, to use the occasion as a vehicle for talking openly about my own fear that the organization was moving in dubious directions.
I expressed disappointment, first of all, that while GAU was largely male, few tenured male faculty had affiliated. I suggested that we probably needed to face the fact “that in a very real sense a generation of gay men has largely been lost to us—that they've been superbly, probably irretrievably, indoctrinated and cowed by the patriarchal culture. If community is to come, the work and rewards alike are going to belong to the young.”

What I didn't point out, and probably should have, was that there weren't enough nontenured faculty involved with GAU either. Anyone who wanted to attend a GAU function was welcome—there was no other way to build the organization—so as time went on, GAU became increasingly attractive to well-educated gay white men looking for a congenial environment in which to come out and to find partners and friends. After the first year, these men probably outnumbered the graduate students and junior faculty who actually had university affiliations. Which meant that GAU was handicapped nearly from the outset in its specific mission to change the climate on the country's campuses.

In my closing speech in 1974, I also expressed discomfort over how much of the organization's energy during the previous year had gone into social events and consciousness-raising sessions. I realized how necessary such activities were: “For most people consciousness-raising is a needed prelude to active political commitment. And continuing social contact is a valuable device for keeping that commitment humane—oriented to the needs of people rather than to the dictates of ideology.”

But the
amount
of time invested in social events and consciousness-raising sessions, I argued, had been excessive to the point of self-indulgence. True, much of the consciousness-raising work had come about in response to criticism from GAU women that many of the gay men were sexist; yet sexism hadn't been consistently addressed during most of the consciousness-raising sessions. And beyond the issue of sexism, I wasn't convinced that we needed as much consciousness-raising as we were lavishing upon ourselves.

Most of us were college-educated, middle-class, and white—in
other words, as I pointed out, “already overprivileged when compared with the majority of our gay brothers and sisters.” And most of us, I added (probably overstating the matter) “are in better shape psychologically than we sometimes care to admit to ourselves. The argument that we ‘have to get our heads together before we can do any political work' can become a standing rationale for doing nothing: our psyches are somehow never quite ready, our motors never quite tuned up. I think a lot of this has to do with American perfectionism, and even more to do with male selfishness.”

We were in danger of talking too much and doing too little. And talking, moreover, about a limited set of issues. We'd heard almost nothing during the second conference—indeed, during the whole second year—about the class and race divisions that characterized the gay community no less than the society at large. It was time to face those divisions, I argued, and to do something about their root causes. As matters currently stood, we were in danger of becoming an organization that gave a conference about middle-class white male issues once a year. “And at that, a conference modeled rather closely on those genteel gatherings we're already familiar with in our respective professional caucuses.”

I also voiced concern over the contempt I'd heard expressed for those whose style differed from that of the gay mainstream—for bi-sexuals and the transgendered, and for those involved in S/M. That intolerance, I said, was to me tantamount to playing “a version of the same game the larger society plays with us. Namely: ‘either do it
our
way or be prepared to find yourself ostracized.' It smacks of the same contempt for individual differences that we deplore in the culture as a whole. If we castigate those who deviate from our norms, how do we protest when those who adhere to the heterosexual norm choose to hound and humiliate us? To my mind, we have to oppose
any
prescription for how consenting adults may or must make love.”

I strained to conclude the speech on a more upbeat note, praising us for coming together and staying together, for at least beginning the work of combating homophobia and sexism in society at large, in a college setting—and within ourselves. Using my own
experience as an example, I spoke about how I'd learned more about myself through involvement in political work than I'd ever had through formal, obsessive psychoanalysis. I'd also gotten to like myself better. The still-common psychoanalytical view of me, of all homosexuals, as truncated human beings had come to feel stale and mistaken when measured against the competence I'd displayed and the respect I'd earned from my work in the movement.

I then went on to discuss the shifting political climate within the country as a whole and within GAU in particular. I myself still held, I said, to the vision of a broad-gauged movement devoted to substantive social change that had been forged during the radical optimism of the sixties. Globally,
the
issue for the vast majority of the world's population was still the one that had engaged socialists for generations: how to ensure freedom from material want, how to improve the terrible conditions of daily life endured by most people. Richard Nixon may have been forced from power but, as I saw it, his arrogant assumption of American entitlement to dictate the affairs of the globe remained alive and well in national councils, accompanied, as it had long been, by a firm commitment to the “traditional” values of male power, black inferiority, and homosexual pathology.

Mean-spirited, vindictive bigotry was flourishing anew in the land by the midseventies. Los Angeles police chief Ed Davis showed neither embarrassment nor hesitation when he spoke out against law reforms that would extend rights to those “predatory creatures” called “gays.” And
Chicago Daily News
columnist Mike Royko seemed equally assured when, in a 1974 column entitled “Banana Lib,” he described how “men in love with monkeys” were winning acceptance by “coming out of the cage.”

The picture wasn't all bleak. Even as L.A.'s Davis spewed his antigay bile, San Francisco's police chief signed an order prohibiting his officers from using the words “fruit,” “queer,” “faggot,” or “fairy.” Even as Royko mocked homosexuals, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution urging states to repeal their antigay sex laws, Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania issued the first state executive order banning employment discrimination against
gays, and a national Council of Churches of Christ conference concluded that antigay discrimination was “immoral.”

Despite these seesaw political developments, overall the conservative trend had become ever more pronounced by the mid-seventies. And GAU wasn't immune to that trend. A growing number of men with less than progressive views became more visible and active in the New York chapter of GAU, with the result that most of the men (myself included) who self-defined as radical and who'd founded the organization began to drift away. Almost all the women—who from the first had thrown in their lot with GAU uneasily and tentatively—became disaffected (as, with the growth of lesbian separatism, they were simultaneously withdrawing from other co-gender gay organizations as well).

As early as the second GAU conference in 1974, one conservative gay male professor locked horns with Charlotte Bunch, a leading lesbian-feminist writer and organizer (she was a founder of D.C. Women's Liberation, of the Furies Collective, and of
Quest: A Feminist Quarterly
). In her speech to the conference that year, Charlotte had expressed the view that gay men insufficiently acknowledged the rights and needs of women, and she spoke movingly of the value of the burgeoning separatist movement in providing lesbians with respite from being constantly on the offensive and with the needed time and space to build a community congenial to their needs. To end separatism, Bunch said, we had to end the reasons that had made separatism necessary: the failure of the gay movement to fight male supremacy.

The conservative professor indignantly replied that Charlotte's speech was nothing more or less than an invitation to male self-flagellation. He was tired of being told what was wrong with him, he said, tired of “obligatory therapy” that at bottom undermined the self-esteem of gay men; and, he added ominously, he rejected any purported self-examination that came at the “expense of mind”—whatever that meant. He insisted that GAU's proper mission was simple and straightforward: to pursue cases of antigay discrimination
in academia and to increase the amount of reliable scholarship on gay lives.

Barbara Gittings, the longtime lesbian activist, also took issue at the conference with Charlotte, though the cordial tone of her criticism and her underlying wish to build bridges were light-years away from sardonic divisiveness. Gittings deplored the growing mystique about “vast differences” between gay men and lesbians, fearing it would minimize our very real commonalities and thereby our ability to join forces against shared oppression. “Nothing would suit antihomosexual bigots more,” Gittings said, “than that we fragment.” Separatism, she added, “seems to me uncomfortably close to the notion that anatomy is destiny.”

Though I basically agreed with Charlotte, I shared some of Barbara's fears. In particular, I felt that Charlotte had failed to acknowledge that some gay men—not enough, certainly—had been trying to incorporate feminist values in their lives and work; almost certainly more gay men than straight men. Yet basically I believed, with Charlotte, that fighting sexism had to become central to our movement work. Gay men and all women
were,
I'd become convinced, natural allies in the struggle against a politically powerful—and emotionally constricted—machismo that the culture had long enthroned as the noblest form of humanity. Only an infusion of radical feminist insights, I believed, could keep the gay male movement from edging ever closer to a narrowly gauged agenda that would simply allow gay white men to take their place beside straight white men at the apex of privilege.

The gulf between many of the men and women continued to widen. In a letter to me in 1975, a gay man characterized feminism as “a rickety ideology . . . playing a parasitic and negative role in the gay movement,” and he characterized Charlotte as “virulently homophobic and man-hating,” insisting that she had a “considerable history of antimale thinking,” and even suggesting that “her activities would make a good subject for investigation.”