COMMUNITY VOICE HIGH GEAR/MAY 1977

ALLEN YOUNG ON THE ADVOCATE

The controversy over the Advocate and its new publisher, David Goodstein, has been given ample coverage in the gay press, but I would like to add a few points, both from a political. and a journalistic point of view.

I wonder if it is beside the point to argue that the Advocate is a capitalist enterprise. It is the nature of the product and the amount of the profits that is really the issue. The original owners of the Advocate founded their paper as a business, but with a primary commitment to gay people and the gay struggle. For them, money came later -the profits they garnered were fortuitious. Although the first owners initially objected to militant gay liberation, they did gradually become mor sympathetic. I think that radical gay politics threatened them and Scared them, but they also saw how much more effective it was than the old homophile movement they identified with.

It is unfortunate that the old owners chose to sell their paper to single individual, when they erhaps could have negotiated for the sale of the paper to a cooperative of six or eight persons. The lure of big bucks apparently means too much to just about everyone.

When David Goodstein 1ssumed ownership of the

aber, he was able to develop a mch more precise notion of whom the Advocate would serve. The old owners became rich by accident; the gay liberation movement made them rich. Goodstein, however, is a businessman, and he comes to the gay community as a businessman. He became rich through business skill, and, he hopes, this will make him even richer. His ideas for the newspaper, it seems to me, have to do primarily with marketing the paper and selling ads to advertisers.

For example, check out the outrageously high rates for "Trader Dick" ads. Do a little quick mathematics, and you will see that the Trader Dick section alone brings in thousands of dollars each issue.

The new Advocate and Trader Dick (have you noticed how they are beginning to define Trader Dick as a separate publication "included with" The Advocate) are reflections of an overall approach to gay life. This approach is severely restricting the kind of news, columns, and commentary that appear in the Advocate. For example, the prison notes and prison column have been eliminated. The Advocate believes that too many of the prisoners who wrote to the Advocate were rip-off artists (many of them straight), but it also believes that prisoners, after all, are not the "cream" of the gay community. The paper refuses to

develop in print a consciousness or understanding about why gay people end up in prison (even in the case of crimes against property or crimes of violence). One can only assume that this is a reflection of the Advocate as a defender of property above all. "Those kind" of gay people can rot in jail, as far as David Goodstein is concerned.

Is there nothing nice to be said about the new Advocate? Bruce Voeller of the National Gay Task Force, in defending Goodstein, recently pointed out to me how the Advocate was no longer writing highly sensationalized crime news. True enough. The old Advocate had a tendency to write about crime in the gay community in a sensationalized manner designed to titillate the readership and sell newspapers.

The new Advocate carefully avoids crime news altogether. It wants to keep its readers happy and comfortable, cushioned from social upheaval, ready to plan a trip to the Caribbean or the purchase of new fashions.

The new Advocate has also cleaned up the news to help us forget that some gay men like

Advocate's policy permeates the news judgment of the paper, to the detriment of the reader's need for information. Last year, boy-lovers in Baltimore and Troom habitues in Wayne County, Mich., suffered severe repression at the hands of local police. Scores of men were arrested. I know of no gay paper that has published anything on the Baltimore situation (I heard about it from a friend), and I learned about the Michigan situation from the Detroit Gay Liberator's final issue.

Gay "moderates" such as Bruce Voeller frequently criticize gay radicals for bringing up divisions in the gay community, for stressing issues of class and race and gender, for discussing the role of the U.S. government as a militaristic oppressor. These moderates speak of the unity of gay people, and want to deal only with "gay issues." In fact, the evolution of the Advocate and its attempt to forge a political line for the gay movement, making it an arm of establishment America, are proof that it is not the radicals who are creating divisions in the gay community. Those divisions

"There has been a tremendous grassroots revulsion with THE ADVOCATE, and this is certainly a sign of hope."

cruising in public toilets and that some gay men like boys (very illegal, even in the states and nations that have legalized sodomy). Public sex and boylove are two areas that The Advocate would just as soon forget about. I find this sanitizing job particularly interesting in the light of the Advocate's relatively favorable attitude toward prostitution. Even though straight society does not look favorably upon prostitution, this seems to be a battle that the Advocate is willing to fight. Actually, allies among straight people on the prostitution issue are easier to find, while the public sex and boy-love issues can only serve to spoil Goodstein's romance with the Democratic Party anyway. Prostitution, furthermore, fits into the scheme of "consenting adults in private" neither boy-love nor public sex meet those criteria. And prostitution has an additional virtue -it provides ad revenue for The Advocate. (I have nothing against hustlers or their customers, but I think the Advocate should be leading gay people in protest against all oppressive anti-gay laws.)

It is important to note that the

already exist, and gay capitalists like David Goodstein wish to exploit those differences for private gain by shutting up those of us whose instincts are more egalitarian. As far as Goodstein is concerned, if middle-class behave gays properly, they will be rewarded.

There has been a tremendous grass-roots revulsion with the Advocate, and this is certainly a sign of hope. The rest of the gay press has been virtually unanimous in criticizing Goodstein's assault on the gay movement, and only a hardened cynic would say this is because putting down the Advocate is good for the other papers. I have heard the Advocate's name mentioned at gay conferences recently, and each time there have been many people in the audience booing and hissing. I suspect that even among middle-class gay people who subscribe to the Advocate, few really support Goodstein's particular brand of politics. Many are too deep in their closets to even care about these issues, and I wouldn't be surprised if buying The Advocate is the most "up front" gay thing that they

BUT RUDI SAYS NOT SO BAD

Is The Advocate's money dirtier than yours, Allen, because they make more of it? As a person who makes $2.00 an hour unloading trucks and who writes for free, I feel I am grass rootsy enough to help referee this issue. Frankly, Allen, you criticize The Advocate for all of the wrong reasons.

The gay experience in China and Albania suggests that classlessness is certainly not a panacea for gay or other forms of oppression. What you and much of the romantic Euro-American left fail to perceive is that poor people like wealth. We like beautiful things, comfortable things and lots and lots of things.

Jews who were forbidden to own land in medieval Europe were forced into mercantile and

do. And I would not be surprised if many readers get the Advocate primarily for the sex ads. It is definitely wrong to define the Advocate as a paper for people in the closet most gay people in the closet come from working-class or third-world communities where closetry is demanded by the cultural values of the community. Many of the closet cases Goodstein is protecting are quite different -they remain in the closet to protect their high incomes.

The radical thrust of the gay liberation movement has touched the lives of many working people. I think that widespread criticism of the Advocate has permitted us to see how deep grass-roots socialist and feminist sentiment run in the gay community. We sell our movement and our community short when we over-emphasize the strength of the middle-class male chauvinist and establishment tendencies in the gay movement. (Even some conservatives, such as Dignity, the gay Catholic group, expressed revulsion at the elitism of Goodstein's Chicago conference.) Working people, many of whom have a deep commitment to opposing injustice and oppression, remain at the core of the gay liberation movement, even if this consciousness is not always a well-articulated. On the ohter hand, David Goodstein and the Advocate seem to have found a comfortableniche in the gay world. A boycott of the Advocate led by radicals would be a waste of time. Creative energy, I think is best directed into alternatives. The Advocate will probably thrive and make a lot of money. he circle of readers around the Advocate will probably have fewer and fewer connections to the gay movement and to the readers of gay liberation journals such as this one. Hopefully, new voices will be raised and other publications will be printing the thoughts and the facts that we need to know about.

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industrial pursuits. As a group, they benefitted from what was intended to be a restriction by finding a secure niche in modern technological society. Gays deserve no less. Our vicious recent persecution entitles us to a piece of the cake, if in fact, we have that,

As a radical gay person, I am gay first. Empowered socialists and home-grown liberals seem to be egalitarian until it comes to gay people. We are an embarrassment both to Hua and to McGovern. Consequently, if I must be a second or third class citizen, I would like to be a rich one. Egalitarianism, yes, but for our caste, only.

You bewail The Advocate on non-gay issues such as money but completely bypass crucial questions such as sexploitation. The Advocate is a leading pusher of a male sexual monolith. It idealizes the youthful, white, athletic body at the expense of gay women, blacks, over 40's, over 175 pounders and the physically "defective," making gays ever more selective as to their sexual partners and consequently ever deprived of satisfying sex.. In a youth-oriented society it is not difficult to be attracted to young boys (which you, Allen, suggest is positive). How about old-man love?

Gays have engaged in T-room sex because traditionally this has been one of the few alternatives for gay sexual expression. Many of us in Gay Liberation consider public sex not a virtue, but a fetter. As to prostitution, I believe my body belongs to me and if I wish to sell it, why not? We pay for food, don't we? What is villainous is not that sex is paid for but that certain people, namely older or "unattractive" people MUST pay for sex..

And who the hell wants to read about sensationalized gay rip-offs and murders in a gay publication? If that's your delight, pick up the straight press which has plenty of it. Gay newsprint is far too precious for us to engage in journalistic wrist slashing. Let Randolph Hearst pay for this kind of "reality."

Although I am partial to earthiness, I do not begrudge The Advocate for using "respectability" as a tool for extracting gay civil liberties from a "respectable" straight power bloc anymore than I decry street chanting.

No doubt about it. The Advocate is a classy publication and we need that. On the other. hand, David Goodstein is a "self appointed" gay leader, a gay spoiler" and a scoundrel.

by Rudi Haaken