The Martin Duberman Reader (48 page)
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Authors: Martin Duberman
About all of this we still knew little in the mid-1980s. The book of same-gender relations was so filled with entirely blank pages that in truth we knew very nearly nothing at all. The time seemed obviously right to encourage reliable additional scholarship and to disseminate that scholarship to a wide audience. And thus it was that,
late in 1985, I came up with the idea of a university center devoted to LGBT studies. A longtime friend of mine, the documentary filmmaker Helen Whitney, was then married to Benno Schmidt, who'd recently been named the new president of Yale University (my own alma mater) to replace the outgoing Bart Giamatti. Benno hadn't yet formally assumed his duties, but the time seemed ripe to approach him with my new idea.
The diary I kept at the time picks up the story from there:
JANUARY 19, 1986:
A very friendly, helpful call from Benno. He takes well to my letter and has already sounded out Bart on preliminaries. Bart, predictably (given his antigay reputation), immediately objected to establishing a center devoted to “gay” anything: “gay,” according to Bart, is an “advocacy” word. Benno says he hasn't yet made up his own mind on that issue. I drew the parallel with black studies. Would Yale insist on a center devoted to research about
colored
Americans, because some might regard “black” as an advocacy word? Don't people have a right to name themselves? Benno said that Bart suggested I shift from “gay” to “human sexuality.” No, I said; along with the Kinsey Institute, there's plenty of grant money and research already devoted to that subject. There's none for gay studies. How about using the word “homosexuality?” Benno suggested. No, I said, that's a clinical designation, loaded with moralistic implications. We dropped the subject of terminology for now. . . .
Pending any decision from Yale, I invited some half-dozen gay and lesbian academics, a group that gradually expanded in size, to meet monthly in my apartment to begin discussing what our ideal qualifications were for such a center.
APRIL 8:
Pretty much everyone asked to the April meeting about the possible new gay studies center has accepted enthusiastically . . . though many of the women are rightly leery of the male bastion
Yale. It's a toss-up between attraction to Yale as a prestigious legitimizing agency and repugnance to it as a traditional dispenser of elite male privilege. . . . The primary goal is to gather a group of people and create the kind of structure that will serve
gay
people; to use the opportunity Benno's administration represents for
our
purposes. . . . If Yale should try to impose conditionsâfor example, requiring a high percentage of PhDs or full professors on any governing boardâwhich would run counter to our vision of what is appropriate (in this instance, those
without
“proper” academic credentials who have nonetheless made significant contributions to gay studies), then we would have to try to establish the center elsewhere.
APRIL 19:
Thirteen of us gathered in my apartmentâthe “Organizing Committee” for the gay center, as we have now designated ourselves. . . . On the whole it went well . . . though John Boswell [the Yale historian, and author of the pioneering
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality]
started huffy, “warning” us that Yale would insist, rightly in his view, on laying down essential guidelines for any center sporting its name. Carole Vance [co-author of
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality]
issued an eloquent counterwarning that in the search for the legitimizing of gay studies, we have to remain vigilant that a rapprochement with traditional academia does not end in an accommodation to
its
norms. I sided with Carole, though I think Boswell's traditionalist values (shared by Ralph Hexter and Al Novick [professor of biology at Yale], but not by Tony Appiah [then a professor of philosophy at Yale and the author of a number of important books, including
In My Father's House],
will aggressively reassert themselves in what is bound to prove an ongoing struggle to maintain the integrity of gay differentness as we push for mainstream institutional affiliation. It's the old American story of balancing a radical
vision against the urge to operate in a broader arena (the vision invariably diluting as dissemination spreads). . . .
JULY 9:
Benno invited me up tonight to talk over prospects for the gay center. We spent less than two hours, and no more than half that time was on the center, but a lot got said. Benno reiterated his enthusiasm for a
research
centerâ[as distinguished from] an undergraduate major in gay studies or a policy-oriented public affairs institute. That's precisely our committee's chief interest, so I had no trouble reassuring him that we were proceeding on parallel paths. (Benno is not naive: he fully recognizesâand welcomesâthe intrinsically
political
mission of any center devoted to disseminating information, increasing understanding, changing minds, about gay people). He expressed awareness that the alumni, or segments of it, will likely chew his ass out for sanctioning even a purer-than-Caesar's-wife scholarly think tank devoted to gay subject matter, but seems prepared to face down that storm. I think he can be taken at his word; he seems genuinely committed to the proposal. He offered to appear at select fund-raising events as a further indication of his commitment.
SEPTEMBER 29:
Boswell, it turns out, is prepared not only to resign from the center, but to destroy it. Today's letter from himâa copy of which he sent to Bennoâeffectively seals the prospects of negotiation. Benno feels he can't proceed without the support of Yale's “gay star.” Since Boswell has characterized the committee's deliberations as “unremittingly hostile” to Yale, Benno can be pardoned for forgoing an affiliation that promised in any case to bring him maximum trouble with the alumni. I'm shocked and angry at John Boswell's behavior; isolated at the last meeting, failing to secure control of the center for himself, he sets out to sabotage itâat Yale, anyway. . . .A
now-consolidated organizing committee can at least try to set up shop elsewhere. . . .
MAY 8, 1987:
A wonderful outcome to our meeting today about the center with Harold Proshansky [president of the CUNY Graduate School, where I taughtâas well as at CUNY's Lehman campus]. He's for it, straightforwardly for it! He thinks the time is if anything overdue, thanked us for bringing it to CUNY (what a happy contrast to Benno's hesitations and retreats), and will work actively with us to prepare strategies for getting the Board of Trustees' approval. . . . it was nice not to have to justify our lives for once, to have the legitimacy of who we are and what we're trying to do taken respectfully for granted. . . . Proshansky emphasized that a great deal of hard work lies ahead. He plans to approach Chancellor [Joseph] Murphy first (he's widely viewed as a great champion of minorities) and then to ask a select group of the campus presidents each to kick in $5,000 from their slush funds. That way, should our own fund-raising falter, we'll still have a minimal budget to get started with. . . .
MAY 11:
Murphy has turned Proshansky down for money and forbidden him from approaching any of the campus presidents. Here we go again: a “radical” being radical on every issue but ours. . . . Well, the project hasn't been smooth up to now, so why should it suddenly become so? (Except that it seemed for a moment that it might). . . .
Our committeeâits personnel shifting somewhat through timeâcontinued to work hard to make the center a reality. But by the spring of 1988, the center had been turned down by all the foundations we'd applied to for grants, and was still nowhere near raising the $50,000 Proshansky had set as the start-up budget needed to establish our viability. As a result of passing the hat at
two public events we'd heldâboth of which drew standing-room-only crowds, thereby demonstrating the strong need that existed in the community for such a centerâas well as small donations from individual contributors, we did have nearly $10,000 in the bank. But that had taken us two-and-a-half years to raise. At that rate, we'd still be at it in the twenty-first century.
We tried not to think about that, taking heart from the fact that here and there a course or a conference relating to lesbian and gay studies had started to surface. Nowhere in the country did a department or a scholarly research center exist, and only rarely could a brave student find even minimal fellowship money to pursue a topic in LGBT studies. On the few campuses where a course had been offered, it stood alone, wasn't always repeated, or had trouble finding students brave enough to enroll.
The organizing committee of what would ultimately become the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) continued to plug along. In 1989, out of the blue, David Clarke, a gay man who died of AIDS in San Francisco and who none of us knew, left the center a $20,000 bequest. That same year we finally hit pay dirt with a foundation; the executive director of the Rapoport Foundation (the legacy of another gay man dead of AIDS), gave us a $10,000 grant (and continued to support us for years to come). Then, in November 1989, our first benefit netted us an additional $11,000âand suddenly, after five years of trying, we'd reached the stipulated goal of $50,000.
I started in on the rounds of calls and meetings requisite to getting CLAGS put before the CUNY Board of Trustees. They eventuated, in April 1991, with CLAGS being formally designated an official research center of the CUNY Graduate School. Having climbed that hill, we were, predictably, immediately confronted with another: persuading the authorities to give us an actual office. Ten months after becoming formally established, my own graduate school office was still doubling as the CLAGS office; space, I was told, was “tight.” When one was finally found for us, it proved literally unusable. Containing one desk and one chair, it had no lighting
in the ceiling, paint peeling off the walls, a single window so covered with filth that one could just about make out the brick wall it faced, ancient (and limited) file cabinets, loose wires scattered all over the floor, no typewriter or computer, no working phonesânot even a key to the bathroom.
When my complaints went unheeded, I finally did a one-man sit-in outside the office of the vice president of the graduate school. After an hour's wait in the corridor, he finally agreed to see me in his elegantly appointed office, swiveling luxuriously in his Eames chair, puffing cigar smoke in my direction. I should have laughed, I suppose, but my anger won out: “We don't, of course, expect fancy chairs, like yours, but it'd be nice to have two beat-up old ones, andâperhaps you'll think this excessiveâone 40âwatt bulb so that when a visiting scholar comes to call, one of us wouldn't have to stand throughout and we could at least make out the contours of each other's faces.” The vice president showed no sign of chagrin, though in the following weeks, the needed ingredients to make the CLAGS's office habitable did slowly appear.
As a result of articles in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
and the
Advocate,
word had earlier spread that we were about to open our doors, and for some time I'd been getting a steady stream of letters from would-be graduate students eager to enroll in what they presumed was a doctorate program in lesbian and gay studies. Alasâas I tried to explain to the many people who wrote to meâwe'd barely gotten a leg over the barricades, and the only way CLAGS could have gotten formal accreditation at all was as a research center, not as a department that could hire faculty and offer courses or degrees. One undergraduate major in lesbian and gay studies did exist at the City College of San Francisco; and San Francisco State, in 1990, soon hoped to offer a minor in the field. That was it. Gradually CLAGS would be able to offer research grants and to employ a tiny, part-time staff, but even today, more than twenty years later, no PhD in LGBT studies exists anywhere in the country.
More and more activists and academics in a growing number of localities began to explore available source materials. As a result,
long-buried and uncataloged archival sources began to surface in manuscript libraries, providing needed research materials for an emerging generation of LGBT scholars. The 1990s would see a proliferation of books and articles, as well as new academic journals (
Genders; The Journal of the History of Sexuality; OutLook; GLQ
).
There had, of course, been a few precedents: as long ago as 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld and associates had established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Berlin; and in this country, the late 1950s had seen the creation in California of ONE, Inc., which had developed a research facility. Still more recently, the Canadian Gay Archives had opened its doors. And as the view of homosexuality as pathology began to subside, increasing numbers of graduate students and faculty came out, and gay-themed course offerings in a wide variety of fields began to be offered at the university level. Stimulated by the existence of CLAGS, the CUNY Graduate School became a focal point for LGBT studies, and a critical mass of openly lesbian and gay students was soon enrolled. A considerable number of them, on reaching the dissertation level, would opt for writing their doctoral theses on gay-themed subjectsâeven while being fully aware that they were limiting their employability. To this day, some of those who do manage to find full or part-time academic jobs do so under general rubrics like “cultural studies” or “gender studies.”
The presence on many campuses of a significant number of liberals (“Of course gay people are entitled to the full rights of citizenship”) proved critical in allowing lesbian and gay studies to gain a toehold. But as I kept discovering, unpleasantly, a willingness to grant us basic rights wasn't remotely the equivalent of actually wanting to know about our livesâlet alone of believing that our distinctive insights might have anything of importance to say to
them.
Even as these liberals announced their own tolerance of our existence, they seemed clueless about the limitations of their openness to our knowledge and perspectives.