GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JUNE 10, 1994

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Continued from previous page

to stop beating each other to death." We waste so much energy, and always have, with infighting instead of mobilizing against the common oppressor. What I've come to understand—maybe I always knew it, but it has been important to me these days-is that it is true we are very diverse as a community. Some people will make contributions in one way and some people in another way. We have to stop berating each other for not doing

the work someone else is doing.

The Civil Rights strategy changing laws, getting shifts in judicial opinion-is an absolute necessity... Let our gay and lesbian lawyers work the courts and legislatures. It needs to be done. It's essential. And let those of us who have a more radical general agenda try to pursue that.

Don't you think that attitude has stopped?

I hope so. It's true I haven't heard much apology lately.

In 1988 you wrote, "I still think sexual liberation was right-and I still think it's needed." Would you still say that now?

Yes. Absolutely. I have only obvious things to say on this. Sex means different things to people at different times in their lives. I still think it is important, especially

"I am convinced that most white gays and lesbians fit the mainstream mold. They are conformist and conservative. Gay and lesbian people of color know better. They" re born into the inequities of the system.”

That is easily said; it's difficult to do because we're operating in a country which is irreducibly conformist. I am convinced that most gays and lesbians fit the mainstream mold. They are conformist and conservative. They don't believe there is anything significantly wrong with our system. I mean, of course, most white gays and lesbians, because gay and lesbian people of color know better. They're born into the inequities of the system. You don't have to tell them about it. But most white gays and lesbians really feel this is the best possible place already and a little tinkering around the edges is all we need. Because of that the radicals in the movement, as in any movement in American history, have usually initiated a protest, but they're quickly removed from the leadership.

Under the threat of the radical right agenda, we're in for a terrible shock in the fall. A civil rights strategy seems even more urgent now than it once was. We've got to defeat these referenda. We've got to win a few, hopefully. I'm all for the lawyers mobilizing and coming up with arguments at this point. I don't mean we should stop thinking about how different we are and how important our special perspective is.

In your writing you stress the importance of sexual liberation. There was a tendency to step back from that after 1983, and a lot of guilt for almost ten years. It seems to me there is a kind of return to the celebration of sexuality.

That I don't know about, because I've been domestic and monogamous for seven years. But the little that I hear is troubling— a lot of unprotected, unsafe sex.

I'm thinking more of the political position you took with respect to sexual freedom; the specialness of gay people and their position outside the conventions of white middle class heterosexual society.

After the AIDS crisis, I found it appalling that so many in the community were again apologizing for our immature behavior in

the 1970s.

NOW LEASING

for people who are young to be... sex is more than a tool for pleasure; it's a tool for exploration. Young people are trying all kinds of acts and roles. The monogamous domestic life would not provide the kind of necessary adventure. Later on, needs shift for some people. They certainly did for me. But I can still see the importance of sexual adventure. Both Stonewall and Cures only take

us up to the early 1970s when you came out publicly. Are you planning to write another autobiographical work on the period 1972 to the present?

I'm working on something about the 1970s. The first pass has not turned out terribly well. I've written about 150 pages. The problem is it doesn't have the thematic coherence of either Stonewall or Cures. I knew what the central theme was in both cases. Maybe it is like the 1970s themselves; there are so many diverse threads, I'm having trouble finding an appropriate

structure.

I'm not certain New Yorkers understand how so much of our country still believes in the negative attitudes you wrote so eloquently about in Cures.

Some New Yorkers do. This came up on the panel last night. I think we're well aware that outside the liberated urban zones, life is essentially like what it was in the 1950s for a lot of gays and lesbians. There was a book by a gay journalist who got in his car and drove around the country. His reports back from the interior are pretty grim. A lot of the changes have only happened in the big cities. He did a second book on the world, and forget it.

France essentially believes in maintaining the closet.

I had a big fight not long ago with a French intellectual who was very patronizing and disdainful: "Why do [you] feel the need for improvement and politics? In France all that was resolved long ago." Sure! That is absurd. So long as you don't make waves-like in the 1950s-so long as your private life is never brought into view so that heterosexuals have to see it. God forbid! Then they will accept you as some kind of diminished creature: that's enlightenment in France. But that is still Western Europe. Look at the rest of the world where people are in utter terror.

This interview will conclude in the next issue.

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