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The Book Nook Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context, edited by Vern L. Bullough; Harrington Park Press, 424 pages; $49.95 hardcover; 27.95 softcover.
The best thing about Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights In Historical Context, is that it brought Vern L. Bullough back into the cultural limelight. Professor Bullough inherited Before Stonewall from Wayne Dynes (The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality), who withdrew from the project for various reasons. John De Cecco of Haworth Press then asked Bullough, who expanded the scope of this book beyond Dynes's modest proposal. "I have included many more individuals than he [Dynes] would have, but in spite of this it is by no means all-inclusive," he wrote. "The purpose of the book is to cast as wide a net as possible, and suggestions and nominees were made by many people who played significant roles in the organization or emergence of the gay and lesbian community. It also includes a number of individuals who have not self-identified as gay or lesbian but who made significant contributions and were active on the firing line, which, in the long run, is what counted. . . The hardest decision was to cut out those who were more or less quietly in the struggle before 1969 but only later emerged as prominent in the cause." "Although there was no single leader in the gay and lesbian community who achieved the fame and reputation of Martin Luther King, there were a large number of activists who put their careers and reputations on the line. It was a motley crew of radicals and reformers, drawn together by the cause in spite of personality and philosophical differences." Before Stonewall is divided into four parts:
Unlike most biographies, which are the work of detached professionals, the lives in Before Stonewall were mostly written by those who knew their subjects best. (I was an exception; I never met Mr. Inman.) In some cases, the task was truly a labor of love. For example, DOB co-founders and life partners, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, wrote about each other; Kay Tobin Lahusen wrote about her life partner, Barbara Gittings; and Jack Nichols penned a touching memoir of his late camerado, Lige Clarke. What these pieces lack in objectivity they gain in intimacy, and we learn more about their subjects than we would from a more conventional biography. (Again my Richard Inman piece was an exception.) As Professor Bullough admits, Before Stonewall "is by no means all-inclusive." He mentions Martin Block as an omission, to which we should add Foster Gunnison, Clark Polak and the poet Robert Duncan, whose essay "The Homosexual In Society" predated Stonewall by a quarter-century. Some of the biographies, like James T. Sears's otherwise excellent lives of Bob Basker and Jack Nichols, barely cover their subjects' lives after the mid-1970's, though Basker had a fruitful career until his death and Nichols is still contributing to the cause as a writer and the editor of Gay Today.
"The issue of pederasty or ephebophilia has been a hot issue in any discussion of male homosexuality, and it was with considerable trepidation that Breen's biography was included in this book," notes Bullough. In any case, Breen's "research on the topics are a valuable source to the whole question of same-sex relationships in a historical perspective." Though I certainly do not agree with Breen's views, I found his biography (by Donald Mader) more interested than the better-known lives of Harry Hay, Franklin Kameny or Barbara Gittings. In fact, some of the most interesting lives are the least expected ones, as in the case of "Boston Brahmin" Prescott Townsend (1894-1973) or Warren Johansson (1934-1994), whose eccentricities could fill a book. The most amazing individual in the book is Reed Erickson (1917-1992), "an extremely wealthy transsexed man who lived a colorful and eccentric but very private life. In June 1964 Reed Erickson launched the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), a nonprofit philanthropic organization funded and controlled entirely by Erickson himself." Its biggest beneficiary was ONE, Inc., and it is hard to imagine what the GLBT movement would have been like if Erickson did not send some of his money in ONE's direction. Like the other people in Before Stonewall, Reed Erickson was a uncommon person doing uncommon things. Jesse Monteagudo is a writer and activist who lives in South Florida with his life partner. He can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com. |
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I must start this review with a full disclosure: I am one of the contributors to this book. My personal involvement began a couple of years ago when I received an e-mail message from Vern L. Bullough, the leading authority on the history of sex (Sexual Variance in Society and History and Homosexuality: A History), asking me to contribute to a collection of pre-Stonewall lives that he was editing. After I picked myself up from the floor, I agreed to write a chapter about Richard Inman, Florida's first activist. Working with Vern Bullough was a honor, as was appearing in the same book as the likes of John Lauritsen, Charles Shively, James T. Sears, Felice Picano and Jack Nichols.
Randolfe Wicker is one of the activists featured in Before Stonewall 
Before Stonewall has been edited by
Vern L. Bullough, RN, PhD