The Martin Duberman Reader (40 page)

This seemed to me beyond cranky and I decided to respond in
a letter. I suggested that instead of “investigating” Charlotte, he might try investigating her writings. If he could “get beyond his own pre-judgments,” I wrote, he'd find a wise and humane attempt “to point out how much
all
of us still adhere, at some semi-conscious level (to put it in the most favorable light), to patriarchal and hierarchical values—the very values that stand in the way of the psychosexual ‘revolution' we call for out of the other side of our mouths.”

Vitriol has always, it seems, been a staple of movement politics (gay and otherwise). How to account for the endemic cut-and-slash style of movement work, the penchant for converting
each other
into the Enemy, is an ongoing puzzle, even as it takes an ongoing toll on oppositional strength. Does it reflect accumulated anger (and even psychic damage) resulting from entrenched oppression and from frustration over the failure to win long-overdue substantive change? And is the anger more “safely” (if inappropriately) discharged against one's own, much as an abused child's rage will often turn not against the offending relative directly but toward some infinitely more benign adult authority figure in their lives?

I've never been sure what is at the root of the penchant for movement infighting and invective. Nor have I (or apparently anyone else) figured out how constructively to rechannel such vehemence. Though I see myself as a skilled conciliator in some situations, I know perfectly well that in others I can be thin-skinned and defensive—which usually surprises those who confuse a controlled exterior with internal serenity. If someone comes at me with what I take to be an unfair accusation, I go right back at them, punch for punch. It wasn't always that way. Earlier in my life, I “made nice” when assaulted. But that, I painfully learned, only incites the bullies of the world to pummel you more. Yet if I've found self-assertion to be necessary self-protection, it can sometimes get triggered too quickly or expressed too fiercely, bringing it regrettably close to that very machismo I theoretically deplore. My defenses, alas, were developed long before my ideology—and have proven far more intractable.

Although intensively involved in the first two formative years of GAU, by the time the third annual conference came around in 1975, I moved myself to the sidelines. Indeed, along with almost all the women and radical-minded men, I was more than halfway out the door, distressed at the increasingly mainstream (male) tone and goals of the organization. Perhaps those of us who dissented from that trend should have stayed and fought the good fight longer. But the odds seemed poor, our energy limited, and the need to get on with other work compelling.

—from
Midlife Queer
(1996)

M
y primary movement work shifted from GAU to helping establish the National Gay Task Force. It should be kept in mind that in the midseventies the gay movement in the United States may have been the strongest in the world but involved only a small fraction of the LGBT population as a whole. The vast majority of gay men and lesbians, if visible at all, were struggling primarily with issues relating to their individual decisions about how best to come out—or how successfully to cover their tracks and remain in the closet; they had scant remaining energy for or interest in political activism. The few who did participate in the fledgling gay movement were sharply divided over agendas and strategies.

Additionally, gay men and lesbians found it increasingly difficult to work together politically during the seventies. The reasons were multiple: the waning of gay male militancy, as characterized by the decline of the Gay Liberation Front in the immediate post-Stonewall years, 1969–1972; the indifference of even many activist gay men to feminist politics and values; and the emergence instead of a gay male style that aped machismo (even if it marginally and, for most, unconsciously, simultaneously parodied that style). To many lesbians, the lives of gay men seemed chiefly devoted to rampaging sexual consumption in bathhouses and backroom bars, to
sex disconnected from intimacy—suggesting that their values were closer to those of straight men than to women. Though subsequent studies have shown that only a small minority—no more than 20 percent—of gay men ever frequented bathhouses and backroom bars, the perception of some lesbians, especially those committed to a more traditional set of values centering on nurturance, sharing, and community building, led them to feel increasingly alienated from their purported “brothers” and to turn to creating a separatist movement. Yet others continued to feel that they shared a common enemy with gay men—homophobia—and remained willing to work with them politically.

These were the women who proved available for joining the National Gay Task Force. The organization—its name subsequently changed to National Lesbian and Gay Task Force (NLGTF)—emerged as an offshoot of the growing dissatisfaction some of the leading figures in the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) felt with that organization. GAA had become the dominant gay political group in New York City in the early seventies (superseding the Gay Liberation Front); its creative “zaps”—militant street confrontations—on behalf of gay civil rights, fair housing, and job equity had managed to draw considerable media attention and even some public policy changes. Despite these achievements, GAA's practical-minded emphasis on “changing laws” had drawn fire as “mere reformism,” especially from those who measured the organization's “limited” agenda against the earlier attempt by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to treat gay issues in conjunction with those relating to racism and sexism. From the radical GLF perspective, the goal of getting sodomy statutes off the books, or putting antidiscrimination laws on them, could never end the oppression of gay people; homophobia was embedded in the minds and hearts of mainstream Americans, and antigay statutes and court opinions merely reflected the negative national bias. What had to be ended, the radicals argued, was the mind-set that equated heterosexuality with “normalcy,” the nuclear family with optimal human happiness, and dichotomous gender roles with divine intention.

But the radical-minded had a limited constituency and no clear-cut strategy of their own for ending the institutionalized heterosexism to which they rightly called attention. And even less apparent in those years—to radicals and reformers alike—was the understanding that there might not be one strategy, one path, one kind of politics or temperament that would put an end to what we now call heterosexism, let alone general inequalities of opportunity and wealth.

Even today not enough people (in my view) seem willing to acknowledge that our movement needs to make room for—and applaud—diverse contributions on a variety of fronts. Social transformation requires a range of efforts and a plethora of skills: lawyers, lobbyists, media experts, scholars, cultural workers, youth advocates, sexual liberationists, community organizers, mainstream politicians, and so on. “Let each contribute according to his or her abilities” rings like stale Marxism; yet the sentiment serves a goal at the opposite pole from sectarian rigidity. A bit less insistence on the absolute rightness of this path, and a bit more openness to the possibilities of that one, might cushion (although it could not obliterate, since diversity does require expression) some of the more bruising divisions, past and present, that have diluted the strength of the gay movement.

None of the three principal figures who put NLGTF together—Nathalie Rockhill, Ronald Gold, and Bruce Voeller—were radical ideologues; they prided themselves on being (in Gold's words), “incremental pragmatists.” Which is not to say that they were devoid of strong convictions, or had feather-duster personalities. Hardly—of the three, only Rockhill was able to hold firmly to a position without becoming abrasive. Indeed, her even-tempered good sense, her ability really to listen to opposing views without defensively flaring up, made her, in the eyes of many, something of a movement saint.

Bruce Voeller, a handsome thirty-eight-year-old once-married father of three, had a doctorate in biochemistry and until recently had been on the staff of Rockefeller University. He thought of
himself as a tough-minded, efficient professional with enough accumulated experience in a variety of worlds to play a leading role in the burgeoning gay movement. Articulate, smooth-tongued, and shrewd, he knew how to cut through, co-opt—or, if need be, circumvent—opposition, though when it persisted, he could become testy and authoritarian.

Ronald Gold, roughly the same age as Voeller, had been an antiwar protester and a member of CORE, the civil rights organization. A Brooklyn native of independent means who'd also been a reporter for
Variety
and a longtime editor at
TV Guide,
the outspoken, opinionated Gold was both admired and feared for his sharp intelligence, his rapid-fire speech, and his caustic, sometimes overbearing manner. But he was also a modest man with a capacity for hard work matched by a willingness to let others take credit for it.

Gold, Voeller, and Rockhill had all been active in GAA but had become increasingly fed up with what they characterized as its self-indulgent, sophomoric talkathons, endless countercultural chatter about peace and love, and tedious “consensus building”—all of which in Voeller's view had turned GAA into an obstacle course impeding the ability to get concrete tasks successfully completed. Yet none of the three could be accurately characterized as establishment squares or over-the-hill spoilsports. Voeller insisted that “we gays have some unique contributions to make to the world
from our experience of being gay
.” And among those contributions, Voeller gave high priority to the way gays and lesbians had pioneered non-traditional families, and egalitarian, nonmonogamous relationships. This was not the standard we're-just-folks argument favored by gay establishmentarians.

Gold saved some of his strongest views for his private correspondence. “Let's not be afraid to be angry at the immorality of the ‘establishment' we face,” he wrote in one memo. “I think we ought to be saying it is a moral question. . . . We must push the parallels with Jews . . . and with blacks, who said, ‘We demand your acceptance, but we don't need your approval. . . .' ”

During the 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter had said that he
opposed discrimination based on sexual orientation and would support and sign a federal civil rights bill to that effect, but had then withdrawn his support for a gay rights plank in the 1976 Democratic party platform (the plank was adopted at the 1980 convention) and admitted on television that homosexuality “puzzled” and “troubled” him. Not a bad state of mind, to be sure, when measured against the overt, unapologetic homophobia of the Republican party's leaders. But not exactly a clarion call to end antigay discrimination, either.

Not the least of the Task Force's accomplishments during the seventies was the mere fact of its survival. A national gay and lesbian political organization with a paid professional staff demonstrated, by virtue of continuing to stay the course, that a certain level of visibility had been achieved and could be built on—and that gay people could no longer be
entirely
ignored. By 1978, five years after its inception, the Task Force could boast eight thousand members (though not even a third were women) scattered in all fifty states, a steady rise in revenues (though still not sufficient to establish hoped-for regional offices, let alone to provide the staff a decent wage), and a board, initially reliant on East Coasters, that by the end of the decade included representatives from around the country. And throughout the seventies, the Task Force worked hard to exert pressure on large corporations to examine their antigay bias in hiring—and succeeded in getting such giants as IBM, American Airlines, and Citicorp to put antidiscrimination policies into writing. The Task Force also created a Gay Media Alert Network (a listing of local gay organizations paired with local television stations in more than a hundred cities) to protest negative media representations of gay life; the Network won an especially notable victory in pressuring ABC to soften an episode in the popular
Marcus Welby
television series that stereotypically portrayed gay men as child molesters.

Which isn't to say that the initial doubts I and others had had about the Task Force had been laid to rest. We'd still involuntarily twitch at the periodic charge that NLGTF was an “elitist” organization
out of touch with the needs of ordinary lesbians and gays and their grassroots communities, and unwilling or unable to embrace nonwhite or working-class cultures. In this regard, nothing made us more uneasy than the favorable opinion West Coast millionaire David Goodstein (who had purchased the
Advocate
in 1974) expressed about the Task Force. Middle-class respectability was his totem; he wanted those of us who might qualify (namely affluent white men) to take their place on the assembly line of the American Dream, and those of us who couldn't qualify, to get out of the (his) way. By 1979 Goodstein was claiming that “moderates” were responsible for all the movement's successes to date, and the “left-wing radicals” responsible for nothing but “noise . . . an enormous amount of friction in the gay community and a lot of unhappiness.”