WCT: A lot of gay history tends to be located in urban areas. Is there a need for gay history to think more about rural gay experiences?
JD: Gay and lesbian history is overwhelmingly urban. It'd be very challenging [ to consider rural experiences ] . You'd find something very different. It's challenging in part because it'd look less gay or lesbian—and more diffuse. And [ they ] would challenge our identity category, thereby making it scary in a way, to write that history too much. But it'd be wonderful to have it.
WCT: What are you working on now?
JD: I'm wandering through Chicago material; I spend a good bit of time in Gerber/Hart [ library ] . . I've been looking at stuff mostly from the '50s to the '80s. ... No one has been writing much about Chicago in terms of [ gay ] history. And, yet, Chicago functions in U.S. historical writing as the paradigmatic city -- the Italians of Chicago, the Poles of Chicago, prostitution in Chicago. Would this Midwestern metropolis give us a different feel for queer history and patterns of change than we're getting from the Northeast and California? Would it be a different story? And I'm definitely interested now in writing across the Stonewall divide. To see both the continuities and the discontinuities are surprising but you can only see them if you're writing about both before and after. If you stop at Stonewall, where I did [ in Sexual Communities ] , you can't really see the connections. So whatever I do next would go across that.
WCT: Your last book was about Bayard Rustin [ Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, 2003 ] . Were there currents in Sexual Communities that led you to that?
JD: There were two things that led me to Rustin. One, my caring about social activism, especially in the '80s, made me write about the '60s as this period of upheaval. And I thought Rustin would be a good window. And also, gay history has largely been about people who lived gay lives as gay people. How did gay display itself? What happens when you leave the gay subculture? Rustin's life is a really interesting example of putting gay right into the middle of the non-gay world.
WCT: Is there anything else you want to add [ given that the book is in its 25th year ] ?
JD: I feel like the thing I most learned and surprised me in the writing of [ Sexual Politics ] is what comes out in the San Francisco chapter—when a thing called the movement or activism and a thing called the subculture or the community intersect, that's when you have the most powerful results. And that happened in San Francisco in the '60s in a way that had not happened anywhere else. And there was a much more developed politics of change in San Francisco becausee of that. At the time that I was writing, activists tended to be so hostile to the bars; [ they felt ] that these bars were the place of old consciousness and instead [ they ] were creating this new world. When really what San Francisco showed me is that when the world of the bars and the world of the movement come together, that when you have the most amazing results. That was the thing that was most exciting to me. If I were writing a book like Sexual Politics now, I would not stop with Stonewall. Because it distorts one's view of things. You just have to move across Stonewall in order to see how aspects of that pre-Stonewall world continue into the '70s. And it isn't this huge divide between before and after Stonewall.
Gerber/Hart Library, 1127 W. Granville, will honor John D'Emilio on the 25th anniversary of the publication of his Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Sun., March 16, at 4 p.m. Also, the Gerber/Hart gay men's book group will discuss the book at its monthly meeting Tues., March 25, at 7:30 p.m.
For more information, call Gerber/Hart at 773-381-8030 or see www.gerberhart.org .