The Martin Duberman Reader (41 page)

Friction within the Task Force was a constant—friction between Voeller and certain staff members, between the staff (which often felt underappreciated) and the board (which usually felt underconsulted). The Task Force's real accomplishments always seemed to be accompanied by serious personality conflicts, turf wars, and angry divisions based on gender, race, and—less, or less visibly—on class. (After all, most of us were squarely—in both senses—“middle.”)

The Task Force had been barely three months old when board member Frank Kameny—who in the pre-Stonewall years had played a heroic, militant role—shot off a furious letter to the staff and board declaring himself “dismayed and, in fact, appalled” at the lack of leadership and systematic planning thus far apparent. Frank wanted a formal constitution, a firm statement of purpose, and a clear-cut demarcation of lines of authority between board, staff, and executive director. He wanted the board to govern NLGTF “rather closely and in considerable detail,” and believed the role of the membership, no matter how large it eventually became, “should be close to, if not actually, nil.”

Frank's view that the board should set policy and priorities and not be, as some boards are, simply a high-profile, fund-raising body was shared by most of us (but not his view of the membership) and,
after considerable debate, this was established as a guiding principle. But in practice, policy decisions during most of the seventies were primarily made by the staff; and to maintain that control, the executive director usually presented the board with only a carefully limited set of agenda items to debate. The board, however, had more than its fair share of tough and independent-minded characters; it frequently rebelled against playing a secondary role and insisted on reasserting its policy-making power, even as the executive director tried, with minimal success, to get the board to take on more fund-raising responsibilities instead.

All of which produced frequently fractious board debate, with Frank usually the most fractious of the lot. Anyone who had known Frank earlier in the movement had grown familiar with his penchant for emphatic, and sometimes throbbingly self-righteous,
diktats.
In the face of one of his repetitive tirades, most of us on the board would try to keep our eyes on the floor and our tempers cool, repeating over and over a silent mantra: that only someone with Frank's truculent personality could have had the guts to take on the federal government and the psychiatric profession in the sixties, at a time when the gay movement was little more than a gleam in the eye. And so we tended to let Frank vent, to think of ourselves as high-minded for doing so, and to resign ourselves to the interminable discussions of structure that made us almost as irritable as they did him.

It became apparent early on that others besides myself on the board were uneasy about the Task Force's (mostly) reformist orientation. Several resignations hinged on racial issues. The first African American member of the Task Force board, Jon L. Clayborne, stayed but a short time, making clear his view that the elimination of racism in the gay world “should be as much a consideration” as the elimination of sexism. And Clayborne was certainly right that to date it hadn't been.

Just as in the early feminist movement, the gay movement could not seem to focus its attention on issues relating to race and class. Its inattention kept most nonwhites (and most nonurban working
class whites as well) unwilling to set aside their own agendas and their sense of multiple identities and loyalties, in favor of a single-issue political movement. Besides Clayborne, who stayed briefly, the only other African American on a Task Force board that by 1976 had thirty members was Betty Powell, an instructor at the Brooklyn College school of education; she was soon elected co-chair. And before the end of the decade, the board had implemented as formal goals that a minimum of 20 percent of the body should consist of minority members and that the ratio between men and women should be fifty-fifty. But the awareness that such goals were desirable was not tantamount to meeting them; as regards minority inclusion, especially, the accomplishment was (and in most gay organizations remains) woefully incomplete.

I had myself formed friendships and a loose political alliance with several of the women on the board, especially Betty Powell and Charlotte Bunch. Our alliance was based on the shared perception that NLGTF's continuing focus on winning powerful mainstream allies in order to foster a civil rights agenda was insufficient. We felt (as I wrote in my diary) that “a radical commitment should underlie our reformist activities”—and felt that most of the male board members disagreed.

But as I was told at the time (and since), I have a way—a deplorably “essentialist” way—of overcategorizing and overcriticizing “middle-class white men” (that is, people like myself) and, in contrast, overgeneralizing about the superior political insight and all-around wisdom of lesbians. I persist in this, I'm told, even while well aware that the lesbian community has itself been racked with factionalism and ideological warfare through time. And so I try, like a good analysand, to work on my bias about the superior virtue of lesbians—of women in general. Yet it stubbornly holds.

By the midseventies, the women on the Task Force board had formed a women's caucus and had made it clear that the organization would henceforth function on a coalition (“women
plus
men”) not a unity (“people”) model. That might not represent the optimal hopes some—including some of the women—had, but it did
represent the current reality of how gay men and lesbians could best work together. Though not separatists, the Task Force women understandably concluded that they couldn't sanction a male-dominated political movement. Too many male members of the board had from time to time made it clear that they lacked sympathy for a feminist perspective and held centrist political views. Also, this was a time period when cultural feminism, with its insistence on the fundamental differences between women and men, had eclipsed radical feminism, and its adherents considered the “lurid” gay male lifestyle as at odds with their own values. This didn't mean that the lesbian-feminists of the midseventies were antisex prudes. But it is true that they defined lesbianism less as a
sexual
identity (in contrast to the way most gay men regarded themselves) and more as one centered on their gender interests as women. The women who participated in NLGTF in the midseventies were somewhat unusual in their continued willingness to work with gay men, but they weren't willing to keep letting lesbian-feminist issues take a backseat to gay male ones.

This outraged Frank Kameny above all others. By the time of our weekend-long retreat in June 1976, Frank had already exploded several times in board meetings over the “intrusion” of feminist values. At the retreat, the heat went up several notches. As I wrote in my diary afterward, “Every time one of the women talked of the need to end lesbian invisibility or insisted upon the semantic propriety of ‘gay men and lesbians,' Frank, leaping to apoplectic cue, would either shake his head with vigorous displeasure, mumble something about the ‘fanaticism of revolutionaries,' or do some of his furious (and infuriating) speechifying about the need to maintain a clear separation between the feminist and gay movements.”

In any case, the hoped-for transformation of the Task Force proved tough sledding. And probably because, at bottom, transformation, personal or social, wasn't what most gay Americans (any more than most straight ones) have in mind. Voeller's we-want-in politics were [and still are] far closer to what the majority of gays
and lesbians desire than are the policies of us self-styled radicals. Most gays, after all, see themselves—and want others to see them—as good mainstream Americans, and Voeller's strategy of working through established channels for piecemeal change was, and is, entirely consonant with their own views. Thus it was in the seventies that tens of thousands read David Goodstein's
Advocate
and far fewer the radical
Gay Community News.

Beset on the one side by lesbian separatism and on the other by the mounting gay male conviction that discoing till dawn was certainly more fun and infinitely more chic than politics, the organized gay movement seemed badly positioned for the onslaught from the religious right that swiftly gathered momentum in the midseventies. The bell in the night sounded in 1976, when the Supreme Court, refusing even to hear oral argument, voted six to three in
Doe v. Commonwealth
to let stand a Virginia statute (and by implication laws on the books in thirty-four other states) punishing sodomy
between consenting adults
; that law, the Court declared, was not an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.

Signs of a backlash had been evident for at least a year: the New York City Council had again defeated a gay civil rights bill, with the Archdiocese of New York proudly leading the fight against what it liked to call the “sexually disoriented.” City Council member Matt Troy had, during a television show, scornfully referred to gay people as “lepers.” William F. Buckley Jr. had written a vicious “let's face it, they're
sick
” column (in the eighties, during the AIDS epidemic, he seriously advocated tattooing HIV-positive gay men on the buttocks). And the psychiatrist Charles Socarides had been pressing hard for the American Psychiatric Association to repudiate its 1973 vote dropping homosexuality from the category of illness.

The sweeping 1976 Supreme Court
Doe
decision felt (as I put it in my diary) “like a snake breaking suddenly, hungrily, through the crust of the earth.” And what could we do about it? Should we try to organize a mass rally in protest? That would at least provide an outlet for anger, but low attendance could prove an embarrassment.
Should we have a teach-in on homophobia? But wouldn't we end up preaching to the converted? How about tax refusal, like that practiced by a segment of the opposition to the Vietnam War on the grounds we wouldn't support a government that denied basic rights? Would even a handful mobilize behind a measure so unorthodox? Should we put our energy into lobbying for the gay civil rights bill recently introduced into Congress? But was there even the remotest chance we could collect the needed votes to enact such legislation when the Court had just announced that it was constitutional to discriminate? In fact every tactic we could think of, from militant zap to quiet plea, had already been tried, and none seemed able to touch the country's entrenched—and seemingly deepening—homophobia.

I tried remembering two things: that movements for social change are always subject to fluctuating fortunes; the graph never traces linear upward progress but rather peaks and valleys of varying, maddeningly unpredictable duration. And that for all the “one step forward, one step back” nature of the gay (or any) advance in the United States, progress here seemed infinitely greater than elsewhere in the world. In Barcelona in 1977, the police fired rubber bullets into a gay pride march; in London that same year, the editor of
Gay News
was convicted on charges of blasphemy. In 1978, when Australia finally managed to field a gay rights march of two thousand people (more than a quarter million turned out that year in San Francisco), the police moved in and made arrests for “indecent behavior.” And in Iran in 1978, six men were executed by firing squad for the crime of homosexuality—with thousands of additional executions to follow under the Khomeini regime.

In 1977 Anita Bryant announced her Save Our Children campaign to repeal the recently passed Dade County, Florida, law that forbade discrimination in jobs and housing based on sexual orientation. The Dade County law was one of some three dozen such ordinances that the outraged singer (and Florida citrus pitchwoman) characterized as protecting the rights of “human garbage.” By the following year, California legislator John Briggs had introduced a
state bill—for which he'd collected some half-million signatures—calling for the expulsion from the classroom of not only gay and lesbian teachers but also any other teacher who presented homosexuality in a positive light.

The hard-fought Briggs amendment ultimately went down to defeat by the considerable (and unexpected) margin of 59 to 41 percent. But Anita Bryant's forces, after a vicious campaign that portrayed gays as recruiting and molesting children—and aided by a pro-Bryant letter from Archbishop Coleman Carroll, read aloud in Catholic churches on the Sunday preceding the referendum—succeeded in rescinding the Dade County ordinance by a vote of more than two to one. The readers of
Good Housekeeping
that year named Bryant “The Most Admired Woman in America.”

The rising tide of social conservatism in the late seventies saw the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, attacks on affirmative-action programs and social welfare legislation, and the popularity of “right-to-work” laws aimed at diluting the strength of labor unions. Not surprisingly, gay rights—the newest kid on the block—suffered its own share of setbacks. In 1978 alone, gay civil rights ordinances went down to crushing defeat in St. Paul, Minnesota; Eugene, Oregon; and (by a three-to-one margin) Wichita, Kansas.

To build a movement of larger numbers and impact, we needed to demonstrate to a diverse and mostly still closeted gay population that the movement was concerned enough with the difficult realities of their daily lives to be worth joining. And beyond all that was
the
problem: how to build and sustain a collective struggle in a country that emphasizes radical individualism. We (especially the already privileged) are constantly reinforced in the notion that the cultivation of one's own precious personality is more important than binding oneself in common cause to others.