Badpuppy Gay Today |
Monday, 23 June 1997 |
The Stonewall Inn was a fun place. Even the morose historian Martin Duberman (See this week's Reviews feature) while seeking a cure for his homosexuality, sought refuge and solace from himself there. I liked the Stonewall Inn too. I liked its free-wheeling anarchy, a colorful democratic scene attracting a great variety of types, especially long-haired youths who were lifted there out of an otherwise staid and "proper" environment, one that had too long prevailed throughout Manhattan's generally unappealing bar scene. Only a few years before I'd frequented the Ce Soir, one of the city's two gay "dance" bars where, in a back room, a light bulb hung ominously from a single cord and was ignited whenever an unknown customer entered the front door. The lighting of the bulb signaled that dancing couples must separate. In June, 1969 The Stonewall Inn was light years away from this furtive past, attracting the arrival of what media called "the new homosexual," emboldened by the 60's counterculture, by new standards challenging gender roles. Pot--"the good weed"-- was, in those days, the drug of choice. It was under the influence of this organic nature-gift, in fact, that many contemplated the social revolution going on around them, inspiring the bold to denounce a frigid past, and to look toward the creation of a new world. Hippies, a gentle, loving, environmentally conscious, Zen-reading, LSD-gobbling, sexually communal, non-judgmental, non-violent critical mass, had upset the apple cart of social decorum. There was hope in their eyes, hope for a better future. When straight hippie males made love to women in each other's company, touching other males became less fearsome, producing, for an extended time, a phenomenon the media called bi-sexual chic. Gay-baiter Joseph Epstein, writing in Harper's (1970) told of his shock after he'd asked his long-haired seventeen year old straight hippie stepson what he knew of "the new homosexuals." "If you mean guys buggering each other," replied the boy, "it goes on all the time, and drugs don't necessarily have to be involved. 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours,' is kinda how guys see it." My own late-Sixties early-Seventies experience confirmed the boy's perspective. At the time I hoped--in contrast to ghetto separatists-- for a final crumbling of gay/straight divisions and the creation of a sexually integrated society in which everybody would free to love and make love without self-identifying through specialized sexual labels. I hoped that the developing demand for the equalization of the sexes would help bring such a world into being. |
The counterculture revolution was seen by gay assimilationists and by the conservative politicos as a threat to the social order. The assimilationists sought a world in which previously acceptable heterosexual standards were to be implemented in gay circles, and they established gay Christian churches, sought to have their own children not through adoptions but through artificial inseminations, suggested imitation establishment marriages, and asked, along with heterosexual males, the right to fight and kill for a belligerent Vietnam-punishing Uncle Sam. But the straight counterculture, and "the new homosexuals" were going, during the Vietnam war, in another direction, declaring themselves "gay" at the draft boards to muddle conscriptions and to denounce the war. In our SCREW column Lige Clarke and I called for "buggering up the barracks" and "clusterfucking for peace." The pioneering Lige Clarke was, like me, a gay counterculture figure. His observations on matrimoniacs and the crumbling institution of marriage, his concerns for suffering, starving children in an overpopulated world, his disdain for the prudish Richard Nixon and established powers like the churches, his experience of the wasteful Pentagon (where he'd previously edited, with 11 security clearances, top secret messages in the office of the Army Joint Chief of Staff), made his views quite different, as were mine, from that of the assimilationists. Although our militant gay activism had preceded the Stonewall uprising by nearly a decade or more, it was a foiled police raid on the Stonewall Inn in late June, 1969, that first caught media attention. Perhaps this was because of the drama: youths fighting back against police corruption, that the Stonewall moment shined. |
But almost immediately, arguments broke out between those who would integrate gays into the mainstream culture and those who believed that culture to be unredeemable. As gay journalists in SCREW, an otherwise straight tabloid, and for the gay newspaper, The Advocate, Lige Clarke and I wrote the first published accounts of the Stonewall rebellion and, because of our counterculture underpinnings, we not only celebrated it, but called on the youths of our time to press the Stonewall uprising beyond its narrow boundaries. On July 8, 1969, sounding the counterculture's view we wrote: The homosexual revolution is only part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that "Gay Power" will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all of the facts which will help them to carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of lovemaking a crime. It is time to push the homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment. We spoke, at that time, not so much of a homosexual revolution but of a revolt much larger in scope, one that addressed underlying problems like America's general difficulty facing as an extremely positive phenomenon, sexuality of all kinds. We hoped to see (fulfilled non-coercively) every person's natural sexual curiosity instead its of being a source of embarrassment and titillation. Pornography and possibly rape, we thought, could only thrive where sexual repression was rampant. "Make Love Not War," was more than an empty slogan of the times. As a major counterculture theme it said that the time for sexual repression was at an end because frustration resulting from such repression was a root cause of war. |
But America's conservative establishment would not, in spite of many startling changes, be easily swayed. Conservatives, whether gay or straight, would go, with all their financial resources, on the offense, re-grouping against this splendid challenge to their traditional values, and would work to discredit and muddle the counterculture visions and everything for which they stood. Following upon the heels of avant gaard feminism and of the successes of the black civil rights movement, gay liberation began, with Stonewall, to gain some measure of recognition from an established media that had deliberately ignored a series of peaceful gay picketing demonstrations at the White House, Independence Hall, the Pentagon, the Civil Service Commission and the State Department four years earlier. Michael Bakunin's anarchist slogan, "None of us are free till all of us are free," reverberated in the meetings of the Gay Liberation Front, established on the heels of the Stonewall revolt. I was heartened by this, but soon became disheartened when I saw GLF fall prey to dogmatic leftist rhetoric, splitting the energies of its idealistic membership. The Gay Activist Alliance, (contrary to the revisionist, error-riddled histories like Martin Duberman's Stonewall) inherited the energies vouchsafed by the Stonewall legend, and GLF largely disappeared from the New York scene. The recent re-issue of historian Donn Teal's The Gay Militants and the immanent publication of more carefully researched histories of the times will make this clear. GAA, on the other hand, focused on the gay issue alone, and in a series of daring "zaps" served notice on media and government that a new era was at hand in their treatment of a major American minority. (See GayToday's People features for this month.) |
I made my peace with this gay-issue-only-development by saying that the gay counterculture, on the one hand, and the gay assimilationists on the other were, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, one that would pave the way for the homosexually-inclined toward greener pastures. But I have remained, through the years, even in the face of the gay and lesbian movement's major successes, sorry that the clear voice of the counterculture--a dissent against established mores--has been drowned out by a more vocal gay establishment seeking acceptance into a rotten culture rather than working to change that culture itself. Only on the fringes of the gay and lesbian movements do we see small groups and publications--like the Radical Fairies( founded by gay liberation pioneer Harry Hay) and RFD magazine--carrying on the traditions of the Sixties counterculture, though not with the impetus and directions I might wish. Instead of questioning and abandoning the failing institution of marriage, gay men and lesbians are flocking to it. Instead of showing concern about the overpopulation crisis, gay men and women are flirting with artificial insemination, producing more children. Instead of hating the Pentagon and an economy based on what Eisenhower called "the dangerous military industrial complex," gay men and women are begging to be a part of that insidious complex. Instead of denouncing St. Paul, gay churches spring up in support of his twisted theories, subverting morality with doctrines like the atonement. |
A negative view of sex is back in force as a result of the AIDS crisis. An entire generation of the most beautiful young gay men has been wiped out as a result of this plague, a plague which some suspect to have been man-made, or, rather, Establishment-made. The counterculture had heralded a sexuality that re-invented traditional American values. It had little of the old American culture's goal-orientedness which leads to anatomical or genital-overfocus and which downplays affection, failing to encompass, as the new culture demanded, the whole person. Rolling, licking, kissing, stroking, and touching, were included in the counterculture's non-penetrative word for sex: balling. If this counterculture view had triumphed, I often argue, penetrative sex and dominant-submissive role playing (top-bottom) ala hetero-sexism, would have been easier to ease out following the arrival of AIDS. Outercourse, as opposed to intercourse, might have been celebrated by the spilling of seed on the ground. Humanity's martyr-hero, Onan, who died for Jehovah's sins, would be resurrected, and there would be made palatable and popular a re-directing (outside the body) of most reproductive seeds. Still, I shed tears of appreciation when I see what has been accomplished in a mere quarter century since the Stonewall uprising. Having organized the first gay march at The White House in 1965, when only ten people --three women and seven men--took part, I have watched our capital city's gay and lesbian demonstrations grow --over the decades-- beyond my wildest dreams. I have seen a U.S. President speak out on our behalf, and I have seen a giant community of gay men and lesbians rally to care for the sick and the wounded in this World War Three against AIDS. Even if it is, in certain ways, a segregated community, I still look for a much integrated future where, as prophesied by Walt Whitman, men will walk hand in hand in American city streets because, as he well knew, the gene is not ours alone, no, "the germ is in everybody." ________________________________________________________________________ Jack Nichols' controversial new book, The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists, has been published by Prometheus Books. hardback, 228 pages & 8 pp. photos, $24.95 Order: (1-800-421-0351) ________________________________________________________________________
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