JUNE 24, 1994

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

Advancing the movement with an historical perspective

by Barry Daniels

This is the conclusion of a two-part interview with Martin Duberman, 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. 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 Stone-

wall riots in 1969.

In 1991, after sev-

eral years of planning, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies opened at CUNY with Duberman as

its

founding director. (To

be on the CLAGS

what got me through-yes, the movement helped that I had a mother who loved me. I really think that's the answer, that's the energy that kept bubbling in there and kept me pushing against the experts' definitions of what a monster I was.

Would you comment on the visibility the community achieved last year and how that relates to the politics of 1994?

It's probably easier to answer if I focus on the Gay Games and Stonewall 25 which have produced controversy. There was a very cogent article in the Advocate a few months ago that argued we should cancel all this, since it's just a waste of money which could be better spent on organizing locally, fighting the right,

"We're still the one group it's okay to make fun of, even publicly. How many straight liberals or radicals march in our parades? Usually only those with gay children."

mailing list, send your name and address to CLAGS, The Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.)

Barry Daniels: I think your personal history, after you escaped from the control of your psychiatrists, must be an interesting story.

Martin Duberman: I can tell you what didn't happen. I didn't ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Too much damage had been done. I had a lot of hard times ahead. There is still plenty of residue. I got in a fair amount of trouble psychologically in the 1970s.

But your work for the community was important in the 1970s.

Gay politics doesn't save you. Coming out is a beginning, and getting involved politically, but it doesn't solve all of one's personal problems or emotional scars. That is a lifetime's work. We've been done a lot of damage-especially those of us of a certain generation.

What did coming out mean to you? It's impossible to answer. You don't finally know where you would have been if you had not come out. My guess is—and that's the best I can do is I would have been in far worse shape. I would not have dreamed in those years that I would ever have found "true love," or have been able to settle down with someone domestically. I never had in my whole life until seven years ago, when I was in my fifties.

You mean there is still hope! You bet! It's a miracle. I had developed so many ticks and traumas that I was not easy to live with-I'm still not that easy to live with. I had become fearful of intimacy. I had looked for it in all the wrong places. That is very clear in Cures, but it is also clear that by 1991 when it was published, you had changed.

Yes, but there was a lot of residue. It's not like I stopped looking in the wrong places. I had greater awareness that I was, and maybe had developed some more restraints. There were a lot of broken affairs with the wrong people that went marching right on. What I now think, finally, is that I was saved, more than by the movement, by my mother's love. That may sound hideously simple and sentimental, but I really think that's the bottom line. It has a lot to do with who survives and who doesn't. My mother gave me a kind of settled self-confidence that the shit of the psychiatric world somehow never could wash away. That is really

etc.

Basically, I very much agree, but first of all, I think public celebrations are important. Life is still hard for most people, and it's nice to join the tribe and affirm. Celebrate who you are. This will produce a lot of press coverage, a lot of visibility, a lot of public discussion. All that is for the good. I would still

be tempted to cancel it if I thought that most, or even many, gays and lesbians would cash in their plane tickets and give the money to a local AIDS group or invest that week in political organizing, but I don't think they would.

I think it has always been true in the movement—although more people are actually engaged now-that it's still a tiny percentage in terms of our total numbers. Our major organizations, like the [National Gay and Lesbian] Task Force, are terribly short of money to do what they need to do. The right is brilliantly organized, rolling in money, and we're in no position to combat them if we don't have the dollars to help us. We're still the one group it's okay to make fun of, even publicly. How many straight liberals or radicals march in our parades? Usually only those with gay children. So it's still a scary moment, more now than it has recently been. Civil rights isn't enough, we need transformation.

What do you mean by transformation?

I mean too much of the wealth of this society goes into the pockets of too few. It's a simple, old-fashioned socialist argument. A lot of people's lives are a lot harder than they should be in a country of this wealth. The inequities remain entrenched institutionally everywhere. Things are better, but they are still not very good.

In your 1969 essay, "On Becoming an Historian," you say, "Though I have tried to make it otherwise, I have found that a 'life in history' has given me very limited information or perspective with which to understand the central concerns of my own life and my own times." Would you change this statement in terms of your current return to history, your work on the history of gays and lesbians?

It's certainly true that I've come back to history, but there remains this skeptical subset that I don't really want to look at. I would rather settle for some of the clichés about how gay people have been denied their roots and how important it is to reclaim those roots, etc. But how much can a past experience really tell us about where we find ourselves today, I think it remains marginal. That means it's worth having, but finally I don't know how much it will help us. I berate gay and lesbian students sometimes because they are so wholly disinterested in the past. I get angry and say: "Simple justice. You've got to know about your

forebears who stuck their neck out before there was a supportive movement. You know we're all standing on their shoulders, blah, blah, blah." And they say: "Yeah, but their lives have no relevance to us.'

""

Of course every generation feels that. Every new generation feels that it's making a significant break from what preceded. But even our radical elements, like ACT UP, are too arrogant in their assumption that everything they do is brand new. You know GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] was engaged in confrontational zaps in 1970. The Kameny group was picketing the White House. It was not confrontational. It was polite. But it was god-damned dangerous in the context of the times.

You have said in favor of the new radical groups

that at least someone is Martin Duberman doing it again. Wouldn't

the study of history be

useful in generating that kind of positive anger in your students?

Absolutely. Righteous anger. I'll try to remember that the next time I have to defend history.

Do you know about the Chelsea House series of books for young adults? They called me about two years ago when they discovered there was nothing out there for gay and lesbian youth. There will be a minimum of 55 books. It's really two series. One is called "Lives of Notable Gays and Lesbians." I said yes to doing the series because they said you can go to leading gay and lesbian activist writers and scholars: this generation writing for the one coming up. That made it very exciting to me. The combinations I've put together really are very exciting. And though they're not archivally new, they are often very new because these are writers who insist on discussing the sexuality of their subjects and how that sexuality relates to the subject's work. So, often for the major figures, it's the first time that has been done.

It's a risky enterprise for the publisher. They say they've invested two million dollars. It was the idea of the head of the firm, Phillip Cohn. He's had to fight within Chelsea House a strong rearguard action against the series. Everybody's nervous. Nobody knows whether the school board or libraries will buy the series or whether a 16year-old will be able to go into bookstores to buy them for themselves. There will be ten out by September. The second series is called "Issues in Gay and Lesbian Life." Everything from gay history to gay spirituality, coming out, AIDS, etc. I'm hopeful about it now. The manuscripts are so good. Can you tell me a little bit about

GENE BAGNATO

your work as director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY?

One of the things we're doing might interest you. There's no place in the country now where you can get an M.A. or a Ph.D. in Gay and Lesbian Studies, nor should there be, because we're interdisciplinary by nature. And also, if there was such a Ph.D., the person getting it would be unemployable. We're involved in setting up a new Ph.D. called Studies in Multiculturalism. It's made up of Asian-American Studies, African-American Studies, Women's Studies, Cultural Studies, Latino Studies, and Lesbian and Gay Studies. Lesbian and Gay Studies is an equal partner. We have a twoday retreat coming up at the end of [May] in which we're going to start talking about the core curriculum. But what is already clear is that every student entering the program will have to take courses relating to all the constituent units. The Ford Foundation is excited about the program and is backing it in the first stages of planning. The Graduate School of CUNY is excited about it.

A day doesn't go by in the CLAGS office when we don't get 5 to 15 telephone calls or letters from around the world. From people who want to know everything: high school students asking if there are any books in the library they would find helpful; people in Argentina wanting to know if there is any way of getting translations in Spanish of homosexual works. Our mailing list alone is now up to 7,500. All this after only three years of formal existence. It's a remarkably rapid growth. It reflects the rapid growth across the country on campuses of interest in the field. In a real sense it's the hottest ticket on campus these days.

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