JUNE 10, 1994

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

GENE BAGNATO

Advancing the movement with an historical perspective

by Barry Daniels

Martin Duberman is a Distinguished Professor of History at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York (CUNY). Both an historian and playwright, Duberman has published more than a dozen books including In White America (1964), Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972), and Paul Robeson (1989).

After coming out in 1972 at the age of 42, he has been active in the gay political community. He was one of the founders of the Gay Academic Union and was on the originating boards of the National Gay Task Force [later NGLTF] and Lambda Legal Defense. Starting in 1986, he has published a remarkable group of books in the area of gay and lesbian history, all of which are currently in print. About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (1986, rev. 1992) is a collection of historical documents and a selection of Duberman's essays. Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey (1990) is a compelling autobiographical narrative of his growing up in the closeted 1950s and his traumatic encounters with psychotherapists who tried to cure him of his "disease." He coedited a collection of scholarly essays, Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1990). His most recent work, published last fall and now out in paperback, is Stonewall, a history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement in America told through biographical portraits of six people who participated in the Stonewall riots in 1969. He is currently editing for Chelsea House a projected 55-book series of gay and lesbian titles for young adults. In 1991, after several years of planning, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies opened at CUNY with

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Duberman as its founding director. (To be on the CLAGS mailing list, send your name and address to CLAGS, The Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.)

We met in the late afternoon of a beautiful spring day [May 20] in Duberman's apartment, a fourth floor walk-up in a 19th century building in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, which he shares with his lover, Eli Zal, a young man starting his career as a psychotherapist. Duberman, in his early sixties, is a handsome man, tanned and with thick silver hair, dressed in elegant, but comfortable, slate blue slacks and shirt. In addition to teaching, writing and his work at CLAGS, Duberman maintains a fairly heavy schedule as a speaker. The night before he was on a panel of gay and lesbian graduates at the Yale Club, and the next day he was to be the main speaker on a panel at the Museum of the City of New York, "Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past." Although protesting he was tired, once the interview starts his enthusiasm takes over. He conveys a sense of warmth and kindness and is passionate about his work. What follows is part one of our discussion.

Barry Daniels: Would you comment on the meaning of Stonewall for us in 1994?

Martin Duberman: In part, the meaning of Stonewall for me is that we have really progressed. On the panel of six gay and lesbian Yale graduates last night at the Yale Club there was some disagreement about this. There were two graduates from '84 and '85 whose whole presentation was a sort of bitter complaint about what was still wrong at Yale in terms of gays and lesbians. Lis-

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tening to them I thought, "Honey! Let me tell you about the early '50s at Yale. What you're talking about is Nirvana compared to that." And I read a little bit from Cures about my life at Yale as an undergraduate. The changes are overwhelming but, of course, because we still have such a huge way to go, people are measuring us by some ideal future rather than this real past we've emerged from.

Martin Duberman

That past is what I knew growing up. And that is part of the meaning because that is what Stonewall, in a way, has come to symbolize: that moment in time when, for all kinds of strange reasons, gays finally fought back. Then immediately thereafter gay organizations emerge which were radically different from what had preceded, affirming the rightness of our being different and the specialness of our lives instead of the endless apologetics. Something like an affirmation was born, and that is what we've been building on ever since. So, that would be one answer.

One theme in your writing is the shift from radicalism to reformism or a shift from the need to rebel to the need to belong. You've been critical of the loss of radical energy in the gay and lesbian community.

It is a debate that has existed ever since I've been active in the movement, which is coming on 25 years or so. I think it will remain a debate.

Has your attitude changed in the past few years? I'm referring to things

you published in the late '70s and early '80s.

That was, from my point of view, the low point of the movement. When I left it in 1977, I left because I was angry and disgusted with how the radical energy of 1970 had gotten dissipated into what I viewed then as merely a self-protective organization for middle and upper middle class gay white men who were wholly indifferent to the needs of gays of color or, indeed, lesbians. Though I'm an utterly middle class white man, I've always been, and I always will be, that is how I was born and bred. For various reasons I became more radical in the 1960s, and that has stayed with me.

But what has changed around me and maybe modified my views some is that I'm now, I think, more tolerant of the need for diverse strategies. My new cry is, “We have

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