Becoming Myself: Discovering "The Social"

I was dyslexic and unable to read until I was ten years old. That year, I read my first book and reading became an important source of pleasure for me. Coincidentally, that was the same year I first experienced vivid homoerotic fantasies.

In my late teens, after my first sexual experiences, I tracked down everything I could read on homosexuality. I constantly sought information about homosexuality and worked hard to develop intellectual justifications for my own sexual orientation. In my freshman year at college, we read Plato's Symposium . On my own I read Baldwin's Giovanni's Room , Gide's Corydon and If It Die , Cocteau's The White Book , a life of Rimbaud, Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers , Sartre's Saint Genet , Petronius's Satyricon —anything that offered a view of homosexuality as important, good, and normal.

I had my first homosexual experience at sixteen during the summer of 1959. After that, I thirsted for wild adventure. Growing up on Staten Island, realizing my queerness in its sleepy working-class communities, I viewed Greenwich Village as Shangri-la. I cut classes to go cruise in the Village. During the summers while I was in college, I'd pretend that I was working all night at my job as a security guard and cruise Washington Square Park for the strangers who introduced me to gay life. One-night stands, first names only, kissing and jerking off in the dark corners of parks and promenades, lonely train rides in from Brooklyn at two in the morning. These night classes provided me with a "sentimental education," but it was my experience of the 1960s that gave me a political education.

The 1960s arrived on my college campus in the fall of 1963, when I was a senior. The freshman class seemed to have brought with it marijuana for everyone, along with peyote and other drugs. The previous

summer, I had hitchhiked to Mexico through Louisiana and Texas in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, bringing back bottles of amphetamines and sexually explicit books such as Genet's Thief's Journal .

That fall, I returned to college fired up with a new cause—I had been converted to Herbert Marcuse's and Norman O. Brown's bold vision of sexual revolution.^[18] My friends eagerly listened to my accounts of Brown's and Marcuse's theories. My friend Tom even made a little jingle to promote Brown's vision of the redemptive power of polymorphous perversity—"Polymorphous perversity / That's why we came to the university." I drew hope from Brown's vision of polymorphous perversity and Marcuse's identification of the homosexual as a revolutionary figure who refused to endorse repressive patriarchal reproduction. These ideas reassured me that, as a queer, I was not destined for a socially meaningless life. Few of my friends knew that I was queer because I was still in the closet. Although we discussed other people's sex lives all the time, most people had no idea about my sexuality. I also lied about it.

The fall of 1963 brought political turmoil—the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the wild political fears and fantasies that were disseminated across America. That summer, hitching from New Orleans to Laredo, Texas, I had seen the pervasive hatred of Kennedy and of blacks. Outside Baton Rouge, I rode with an old guy who drank mintflavored gin as he drove, stopping in every bar on the way to the Mexican border. In these bars, angry white men watched a televised civil rights march in Washington. I heard them mutter, "Look at all them coons," and threaten to kill President Kennedy.

Mexico City was my Paris. I went to boxing matches, bullfights, and cafés that promised a bohemian atmosphere. I read William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller. Although I cruised constantly for sexual adventures, I never found my Verlaine or my Genet.

My first great love was someone with whom I could lie in bed after sex, smoking a cigarette and talking about ideas and philosophy. It was a tortured relationship so familiar in that period—he claimed that he

was straight, I knew that I was queer. We remained sexually involved off and on for six years, even as he drifted toward heterosexuality. We both moved to New York, where I enrolled in graduate school at Columbia. Over the next four years, I had a series of closeted homosexual affairs, usually with other graduate students but eventually with an artist in Andy Warhol's circle. On the hot days of 1967's Summer of Love, I roamed the East Village holding hands with a man, spent long nights at Max's Kansas City, went to freak bars, smoked marijuana and hashish, and listened, often stoned and practically in a trance, to the Rolling Stones, and for a while to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . Life seemed to promise a utopian moment: "free" stores (in which things were given away at no charge), free rock concerts, and free universities were sprouting up all over. The counterculture with its bohemian flavor was much more my milieu than the antiwar movement, where I was put off by the macho style of many of the movement's men.

Amid the chaos, cultural turmoil, bad drug experiences, riots, and demonstrations, I (like the rest of my generation) read like crazy: Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Leroi Jones, Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin, Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Paul Sartre, Randolph Bourne, Christopher Lasch, Harold Cruse, Susan Sontag, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Eldridge Cleaver.

Somehow we suddenly knew something in our guts that we hadn't known before, or at least hadn't known as assuredly or profoundly: "Human beings make their own history," as Marx wrote in 1852. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, we realized that whatever had seemed "natural" in the 1950s, such as war, race relations, gender roles, sexuality, and capitalism, had in fact been shaped by social processes. The utopian promise of the 1960s was that we could and would change society. Years later, we learned the lesson embodied in the second half of Marx's famous formulation: "… but [they make their own history] not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen, but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of

the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living."^[19]

Nonetheless, the years between 1968 and 1971 were a utopian moment in American culture. Black power, feminism, and socialism were on the agenda. When the account of the Stonewall riots appeared in the Village Voice in June 1969, my life changed all at once. I had long known that I was queer—that is, a homosexual —but I had never applied the word gay to myself. (Gay was the word used by homosexuals themselves.) Although I did not immediately join the gay liberation movement that emerged from the riots, within months I had consciously begun the process of coming out.

I moved to Philadelphia in the fall of 1970, and I arrived there as an openly gay man. Soon I heard about the Philadelphia chapter of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). I joined and, not too long afterward, became its president. But I knew nothing about gay life; I had just begun going to gay bars and did not really have a gay social life. In addition, although I had immersed myself in the radical political theory of the New Left, I was a closet activist and had not participated very much in the antiwar movement. I was suddenly a "leader," but I was pretty ignorant about political organizing. I imagined a political vision by adapting theories and political strategies from the black liberation and women's liberation movements. My comrades and I in Philadelphia's GAA also took guidance from the ideas and strategies of several groups, including the original GAA chapter in New York; activists in New York and Philadelphia who had been involved in the Gay Liberation Front (the organization that had preceded GAA); and the older members of the Homophile Action League, Philadelphia's pre-Stonewall homosexual civil rights organization, particularly Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin.

Like many people in other 1960s movements, we thought only of the future. We had little interest in the gay and lesbian culture that already existed, except for relying on it to find sexual partners. Instead, we set out to create a liberated gay culture. Those of us in GAA constituted a new generation. We were often more contemptuous than we had any right to be of the older lesbians and gay men who participated in the

"old" world of gay bars, butch/femme roles, and drag balls. At the same time, we dismissed a little too glibly those who, as "homophiles," had sought to prove that homosexuals were not sick and were, in fact, just like other Americans, aside from having sex with members of their own gender.