by Denise Sudell

When Karla Jay and Allen Young were approached by Summit Books about compiling a report on gay male and lesbian sexuality, the writers were a bit taken aback. "I wasn't sure that I wanted to write a book that had so much to do with sexuality, and I know that Allen felt the same way-we sort of think of ourselves as being political," relates Jay. "I said, 'What is this? Did they get my number out of a telephone booth? I'm not a sexologist -I'm just an ordinary queer."

But on consideration, Young and Jay realized that the concept of collecting and publishing the responses of individual gay men and lesbians to questionnaires on their own sexuality was merely an extension of their philosophy of allowing gay people to speak for themselves-a philosophy that. they had followed in compiling their three previous anthologies, Out of the Closets and After You're Out-(both of which are considered required reading for people interested in the progress of the gay liberation movement by some), and the most recent, Lavender Culture.

So they agreed-and the result was The Gay Report, a monumental collection of the thoughts and feelings of thousands of lesbians and gay men about their sexuality, their lifestyles, and their dreams.

"In some ways The Gay Report is an extension of our commitment to anthologizing, because you can look at it as an anthology in which five thousand people have contributed--the world's largest anthology," says Jay.

Young and Jay first began working together because of their mutual desire to publish an anthology which would reflect the varied perspectives of people in the early gay liberation movement, a movement in which both were involved. Young had come to the gay movement through journalism, the antiwar movement, and the underground press in the late '60s. "After the Stonewall Rebellion," says Young, "I felt like I couldn't very well be involved in working for a group called Liberation News Service without dealing with my own liberation." He joined the Gay Liberation Front in New York, where he met Jay in early 1970.

Jay had come to GLF and to writing through the women's movement. She had worked as an editor and as a literary agent, and had written for encyclopedias; but, as she tells it, "I joined women's liberation in late 1968, and one of the things that happened to me from it was a release of things that kept me from writing. I think that women are brought up not to write, or if you write you have to learn how to think like a man in order to do it. Since I couldn't do those, I had thought that I wasn't cut out to be a writer."

The women's movement liberated Jay from her reluctance to write; but she had negative experiences with straight women within the movement who "didn't deal with my lesbianism." She left the women's movement and began working with the Gay Liberation

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Karla Jay and Allen Young:

Front, at the same time compiling works for an anthology of radical lesbian writings. She soon discovered that Young had started a similar project on writings of the gay movement in general; they decided to join forces, and Out of the Closets was born.

"And the anthologies seemed to flow one from the other," explains Jay. "We work very organically. We write an anthology, we collect the material, we put it together, and when we go on the road, like we're doing now, we try to get a feel for what it is that the people need, and what the people want next. And so After You're Out came after Out of the Closets, because people were asking, 'Well, what do you do after you're out?' And there we were."

Their first three books took the traditional anthology form; all three are collections of articles reflecting diverse viewpoints on varying issues within the gay and lesbian communities. Some of the contributors are professional writers; others have never written at all before. I don't believe that, gay journalism should be left to a group of professionals called gay journalists, any more than I think gay activism should be left to a group of activists called gay activists," explains Young. "I feel that a grassroots participation from the people in the community, in our journalism, in our activism, in our social services, all these things, is important."

The two anthologists cull articles from these "grass-roots participants" in many ways. Some contributers are contacted by Jay and Young because of the quality, or consciousness, of their writing in gay publications; other contributors respond to advertisements placed by the two editors explaining a particular planned book's theme and asking for contributions. Still others are friends of Young and Jay. "One of the writers in After You're Out is somebody who I got through a personals ad," Young relates. "We had a brief relationship, and he was a high school teacher; when he told me about his life as a high school teacher, and I was in the middle of working on this book, I said, 'Look, you should really write this up. Do an article for our book.' And he did, and I think it's one of the fine articles in the book."

Jay and Young are careful to establish a balance between the number of articles written by les-. bians and gay men; this commitment to parity means that the number of articles written by gay men that are rejected is slightly higher than the number of those written by women that are rejected.

"I feel that we live in a male-dominated culture, in general," says Young. "This means that men have more money, men have more access to the media; the total amount of verbiage printed in the gay media by gay men is probably 80 per cent or 90 per cent of the total amount. And so it would basically be a surrender to the male-dominated culture to reflect that inequality, and so I feel, along with Karla, that we have to take steps-in a sense, it's a kind of affirmative ac-

tion, really, to create that parity. Also, I feel that it's one way of keeping open lines of communication between gay men and lesbians."

Most articles collected by Jay and Young agree with their general perspective, which is, as the latter describes it, "pro-gay and pro-feminist, pro-liberation." They are carefully edited for sexist and racist references. "We don't allow sexism or racism to be in the bocks, says Jay. "They're not piggy.' But within those criteria, the antnologies include a wide range of viewpoints, not all of which Young and Jay agree with. "We have published some far-out stuff," admits Jay. "We might have published some even further-out stuff if publishing were up to it. Sometimes the publishing house pulls things out. In Lavender Culture, there was an article that we liked about shit, that was about a gay man's relation to his asshole-it wasn't about shit per se, but about how you should go out and go under a cherry tree, and how gay men were more ecological, and had a better relationship with their assholes. And we thought this was a good article, but I think our editor blanched when she read it."

The two anthologists say that overall response to their material from editors and publishers' has been good. "They have encouraged us, and they've given good editorial advice. I don't feel that we have been censored. I would not put my name in a book that I felt was censored, and not representative of what I or other people believed," says Jay firmly. "And I feel the same way," adds Young.

The authors are displeased, however, over some aspects of the handling of their books by publishers. An excerpt from The Gay Report in which lesbians described in detail their most pleasurable sexual experiences with other women was published in Penthouse, a sexually oriented magazine directed toward straight men and featuring centerfolds of nude women. "I'm not pleased that that piece was in Penthouse," says Jay. "I think that people who are not writers do not understand the lack of control that writers have over their product. For example, we do not control the jacket. We cannot control now where this book (The Gay Report) is sold abroad. So it's very possible that it could be sold to some pornographic publishing house in Holland or something. And all I can say about the Penthouse piece is I'm sorry that the article's in there, and I apologize to any woman whose material was in there. And that's all I can say about it."

Another problem Young and Jay have encountered in compiling their books is the limitation of space. A large percentage of articles which the anthologists consider good enough to be published must be eliminated because of the wealth of available material and the dearth of available space; preserving the diversity of viewpoints. while eliminating perhaps a third of the best submitted articles is a difficult task. "One of the advantages of The Gay Report," says Young, "is

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Karla Jay and Allen Young will earn 50 cents an

that it's set up in such a way that we have lots and lots of selections from many different people, including very short ones (selections). So there's opportunity to present many different people and many more voices."

The Gay Report is considerably different from Jay and Young's other anthologies; it is a compilation of answers to an extensive questionnaire on sexuality, relating to lovers, families, friends, and society, political views, and personal lives. Separate questionnaires were prepared for lesbians and gay men, with Jay compiling the questions for the women's forms and Young those for men. The two writers consulted with each other and with panels of what Jay calls "quote, 'average lesbians' and 'average gay men'" on suitable questions to be included. "We tried to get people who were not specifically movement people," explains Jay. "We each have a number of friends who are not your radical gay person. And we tried to get a range of ages and political perspectives." The panels suggested a modification of the original format, which consisted entirely of essay questions, to include short questions to which the answers could simply be checked off; they felt that such a modification would attract more respondents.

Young and Jay also consulted market researchers and psycholo-

gists for advice in preparing the questionnaire. "I think that we tapped professional resources," says Young, "but we tapped them as far as we wanted to go. We set the limits; we didn't go and say, 'How would a professional market researcher write this questionnaire?' We used our own judgment in terms of the choice of words, how questions should be worded, the order of the questions, and so on. So we used professional resources, but we retained the decisionmaking; and I think that people who are very experienced in questionnaires will give us a B-minus.

"Sure, we made a few mistakes," adds Jay, "but I'm often surprised at how few mistakes we made."

The completed questionnaire contained over a hundred questions, both short and essay, and was 16 pages long. Jay and Young distributed it through innumerable channels, including gay organizations, gay periodicals, gay bars, allmale movie theaters, therapy centers, sex shops, adult and regular bookstores, and even restaurants, spread across the U.S. and Canada.

"I think we managed to reach people from every walk of life and from every situation," says Jay. "We got a number of replies from lesbians or gay men who were married to straight people, and their spouse did not know that they're gay; and, I mean, this is a sign that

GAY NEWS-Sept. 21, 1979