John D'Emilio's book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities was first published in 1983 (1998 second edition, with an added preface and afterword), is the first monograph in gay history. The book showed that gay and lesbian political organizing existed in structured and deeply politicized ways in the era before Stonewall, even as it was continually threatened by surveillance and harassment.
Through interviews with figures like Harry Hay, and documents and records of groups like the Daughters of Bilitis, D'Emilio provides a non-hagiographic study of the tensions around gender, the discourse of respectability and the freedom to express sexuality. Today, the book's template and narrative seem familiar, given how much has been written about modern gay history since then, but that familiarity belies its originality and depth and its contribution to our understanding that 'gay history' is a part of history.
D'Emilio—a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who recently added to his long list of honors after receiving the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award this past January for the book The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture—talked with Windy City Times about sexual politics and identity
Windy City Times: Sexual Politics started as your dissertation project. I've heard you talk about your initial meeting with your advisor. … What was it like writing the first monograph in gay history?
John D'Emilio: I had the most wonderful adviser in the world. It was my coming out, in effect, to him. He was incredibly well-respected and productive and he had agreed to be my dissertation director; I just had to come up with a topic. And I had to go in and say, you know, trembling, 'Well, Professor Leuchtenburg, I think I've come up with my dissertation topic: I want to write a history of homosexuality in America.' And he [said], without skipping a beat, 'Well, John, you're going to have to narrow it down.' [Laughs]
It speaks to the moment when there was no gay history out there, so if you were going to do gay history, you would just write a history of homosexuality. But really, you'd still be writing your dissertation a quarter century later if that was your topic. I was an activist and coming out fo the '60s, and I cared about social movements, so [I thought] why not write about pre-Stonewall activism? An practically out of practicality: I really thought, 'If the history is so deeply hidden, as we're all saying it is, at least writing about a movement that has organizations and people in it and publications could point me in a direction as something that could be documented. Rather than spending twenty years looking for this one document and that one documented.
When I started, I really assumed that the pre-Stonewall stuff would only be part of the story. That would be the introduction, then I would be writing [about] Stonewall, and the '70s and take it up almost to the day before I finished writing. Then the pre-Stonewall stuff had enough of a life of its own and an integrity of its own.
WCT: In your preface to the 1998 edition, you write that, ' … research, writing and scholarship became activities that counted for something, though not in their own right or detached from the world around them.' Could you elaborate on [the link between your research and your activism]?
JD: … When I was doing this in the '70s I was operating with the assumption that I would never have an academic job … And I wasn't committed to finding an academic job. So, number one, [I thought]: well, it's that world, I will never be part of that world. Number two: Most of the jobs I had were jobs connected to community organizing. There wasn't much of a gay and lesbian infrastructure of paid employment in the '70s, other than being a bartender. Organizations were entirely volunteer-run. But my two best friends in the '70s were these somewhat older, experienced community organizers in New York, who served as mentors to me, who I feel I owe everything to. And they would hire me—the impoverished graduate student—but they would hire me because they knew I was committed to my research and my gay activism. My friend Tony did a lot of work around publicly funded day care which mostly rooted him in communities of color and particularly women of color. I worked for him as a 'policy analyst.' I would write up fact sheets on the demographics of family and income and things like that would then get used when all of these day care mothers with their children would invade City Council offices or State legislature offices. And my friend Dorothy worked in East Harlem with teenagers and I would teach Marxism to the staff. I worked on prison issues. I was very close to social movements through my work. I was one of those gay activists who would organize demonstrations. It wasn't really deep and profound gay activism; it was a politics of visibility and disruption.
But it was a sort of activism that reminded you, every day, of what was going on. In that world, doing gay history — it got shared with a community and an activist audience rather than with a classroom or academic or scholarly audience. In those days, gay and lesbian publications really welcomed long pieces about gay and lesbian history. You could write for Gay Community News in Boston, or the Body Politic in Toronto, and many of the lesbian publications also had long pieces about culture and history. And these were read. And then there would be these community venues. In New York, there was a place called the Church of the Beloved Disciple, a gay church. had a place, 14th street maybe, [and] its space would be made available for community events. You could give talks on gay history, so that was history being shared. There was this phenomenon, in the '70s and '80s, [of] … slide talks, where people would put together these lectures on gay and lesbian history and travel all over with them and they would have amazing audiences. People would just eat It up. So it was historical research that was very close to the ground. Its reference points were not other professional historians and scholarly audiences.
WCT: Given that you were among the first to tackle gay history, how did you make decisions about what would count as an event or an artifact?
JD: History is one of the most undertheorized disciplines. The main historical method of historians is: read everything. You just keep reading until nothing new is emerging from what you're reading. And then the organizing framework is: passage through time. That's it [laughs]. History is very constructed as a narrative and I believe in that. The interpretive framework that I created for myself was: What precedes Stonewall? And why is there such a relatively short history of lesbian and gay activism, given that what we think of as oppression existed for such a long time? That second part moved me — and others were saying this, too, in the direction of realizing that you can't actually have a gay and lesbian movement until there are collections of people who really see themselves as gay and lesbian. One hundred fifty years ago, there might have been people who were completely attracted to members of the same sex but there were not gay and lesbian worlds that set the collectivity. So, partly what I was doing was [to ask]: How does it emerge in mid-century and, once it emerges under this very oppressive regime, how does one be an activist and what kind of activism and change [are] actually possible? If you read more of the history that's out there now, one of the debates that's emerged is [that] there's the activism of organizations but what about the resistance of people in daily life—like the butch dykes in Buffalo bars who fight the police? That's really important, but the framework that I created for myself was the history of organizations saying, 'We're getting together because the way the world is, is not acceptable and we're going to figure out how to make change.'
WCT: Do you see a difference, between the Cold War and now, in the political ways in which gay identity comes about?
JD: The [biggest] difference is the way 'gay' is institutionalized now. There is this massive structure of organizations and businesses and personalities that makes 'gay' a version of ethnicity in the way that there were the Irish, and the Poles and the Italians—now, there are the gays.
There is this collective gay life that isn't random, like who shows up Saturday at a bar. [Instead] bars hold benefits for organizations that have members who go to campaign fundraisers and worship together on Sunday. Well, that's completely different from two generations ago, when some people went to bars and never knew if they'd be arrested that night and a small number of people using pseudonyms tried to make change, but [the feeling was], 'How could they possibly make change, given the level of persecution at the height of the Cold War?' So that's the biggest contrast.
But then in thinking in terms of, 'What is queer radicalism today?' I have no idea. One of the things that the record shows me, which disappoints me tremendously because I see it as a critique of myself and my people is that radicals—by which we're meaning leftists—tend not to have staying power. There are moments, like the early Mattachine, like Gay Liberation Front [GLF] and radical lesbians, like ACT UP, where a combination of militancy and radicalism comes together and redefines the world in important ways, for a brief moment. And then where do we go?
WCT: [There are those who would] argue that the queer radical movement now survives in a non-hierarchical, diffuse and ephemeral way. Your book studies homosexuality against more overtly oppressive structures, whereas queer identity now doesn't have that same kind of oppression. Perhaps there's a change in time?
JD: I don't know if it's just a change in times. … These three moments—early radical Mattachine, GLF and ACT UP—all share a suspicion of hierarchy and structure that would continue. And so it leaves this radicalism very vulnerable. The expression of that radicalism is still so historically important. I mean, [GLF] and lesbian feminism changed the world. ACT UP changed the world. But I want to say, 'But why didn't you keep changing the world?' I can remember in the '80s making the decision to get involved with NGLTF [the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force] because it seemed, to me, the structure that was most amenable to something that we might call radical or progressive. It believed in not just inside the beltway lobbying but grassroots organizing and community mobilization. [It also believed in] the importance of acknowledging and stating connections between groups and issues and looking for those connections. But I think it's hard for those of us on the left, who're firmly convinced that we know the truth [laughs], to believe that it's worth our while to engage in the daily flexibility and compromising that working in an organization requires.
WCT: There is that critique of NGLTF, that it creates the status quo; it supports hate crimes legislation …
JD: And I'm against [that], too. Why are we creating more opportunities for people to go to jail longer?
WCT: Right. So [the argument is that] having an organization might end up taking the energy from radicalism, [especially when] it has more leverage with the political infrastructure.
JD: That's right. But how do we figure out how to be engaged in that rather than feel like, 'I can only be corrupted by it, and therefore need to stay apart from it?' I don't know the answer.
WCT: Do you see a difference in students of gay history [and the field]?
JD: … The change that's occurred from those days as a graduate student —where it seemed impossible that you could have a life in the academy—to now, is that now you can imagine doing this work and you can also imagine permanently being part of a university world in a way that, 35 years ago, you couldn't have imagined.
So that's change, but it's not change where gay or queer stuff is integrated into how knowledge is constructed and produced in the United States, in the academy. For instance, the work that's been done in the history of sexuality … has barely made a dent in the mainstream narratives of U.S. history. It's shocking … for instance, in U.S. history, the era of Jane Addams, the Progressive era, the straight era of reform and upheaval and movements and dealing with challenging corporate power or coming to terms with industrialization: That's the period of time in which the richest work in the history of sexuality has been produced. Do you think that major writers on the Progressive Era have made sex integral to how they understand the era? No. And, yet I look at it and think … the state was constructed in part through efforts to control people's sexual behavior!
I'd rather be here with the challenges of today than back then with the challenges of then but, in other ways, there's a lot of work to be done. In some ways, there are fewer resources for doing it now than there were because we live in a non-mobilized, resigned, and despairing world, where the possibilities of collective action [do not] hit people in the face. Each person is working on their own to do their research or their writing, instead of [asking]: 'Where's the movement?'
WCT: Are academics more dissociated from activism?
JD: … Since coming to UIC, it's harder for me to maintain any credibility as an activist because it's so little of how my life is organized right now. In a way that wasn't true ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago.
WCT: What would you write if you had to write a different foreword now, on the book's 25th anniversary? What's different for students now?
JD: I think the thing that has changed in the last ten years, and I say this on the basis of the undergraduates I teach, is that you have to teach them about the history of gay oppression in a way that fifteen or twenty years ago you didn't have to teach that. That was the taken-for-granted starting point. So, the question [then was]: how did people resist? But [now] — even though homophobia and gay oppression still exist, and are structural — when Ellen does the Oscars, and has a morning show; and there are rainbow towers on Halsted Street; and many of them went to school wit GSAs (Gay-Straight Alliances), oppression is the surprising part [for the students]. What life was like in the '50s is surprising [to them]. That's what needs to be taught now: this longer history of oppression and suppression and what function does it play in social organizing? What does homophobia accomplish besides hurting a group of people? That, to me, has become more of an interesting question than: how does one resist the oppression?
Continued at: www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/John-DEmilio-continued/17792.html .
