The Martin Duberman Reader (49 page)

This was far truer of straight white male scholars than female or minority ones. The latter, after all, knew a great deal about being
kept outside the centers of power—and how being on the margins often provided insight into the psyches and behavior of the Big Boys. But if we knew something about their lives, they wanted to know as little as possible about ours. The liberal mantra “What gay people do in the privacy of their own homes is no concern of ours” masked inherent disdain for the notion that the patterns of our sexuality, relationships, friendships, and families might contain information relevant to their own lives. The liberal adoption of “the privacy principle” is an effective shield against letting too much subversive information get through, the equivalent of building a wall between gay and straight that not only perpetuates the fallacious hetero/homo binary but conveniently protects the straight world from questioning some of its own assumptions about human behavior. Even male scholars further to the left of “liberalism” (Eric Hobsbawm, say, or Bogdan Denitch) seal themselves off from the realities of gay experience—or as Todd Gitlin scornfully put it, “what they imagine to be their identities.”

Many left-wingers, on campus and off, position themselves as radicals on race and class issues but are utterly traditional in regard to feminist and gay concerns. Zealous in challenging the economic status quo, they're no less zealous in defending the status quo when it comes to cultural issues. Michael Tomasky, to give one example, has cavalierly dismissed “supposedly oppositional” gay culture with its “superficially transgressive ideas.” Supposedly? Superficially? None of these left-wing traditionalists could conceivably express such views if they'd read a word of Eve Sedgwick or Judith Butler. If they had, they'd have to take seriously some of the basic insights of queer history and theory: the performative aspects of gender, the viable parameters of friendship, the shifting shape across time and culture of such purported universals as the nuclear family, monogamy, lifelong pair-bonding, and the uncertain linkage between love and sex—as well as the omnipresence in all of us of a wildly anarchic, unorthodox range of erotic fantasy and desire.

When I accepted an offer to join the CUNY system back in 1972, I'd been asked to teach at the Graduate Center as well as on one of the undergraduate campuses. For the time being I'd declined, preferring for a while just to teach undergraduates. I'd grown tired in recent years of the dutiful way graduate students wrote down everything I said as if it was Truth. But I did offer to sit on PhD exams and read PhD theses until the urge to produce scholarly offspring returned.

By the midseventies, I'd become increasingly involved in the brand-new field of the history of sexuality and at that point I went back to the Graduate Center and said that I'd be willing, after all, to offer a course on that subject—that I needed older students with more information and experience to bounce ideas off. The reaction was immediate: no. Gertrude Himmelfarb, chair of the Graduate Center History Department at the time, acerbically told me that the department felt that sexual history wasn't “real” history at all; it had been spawned by political polemics, not scholarly necessity. My standing as a legitimate scholar, she told me, might well be at stake. As if activism hasn't always ignited scholarship—the feminist movement and feminist studies, the black movement and black studies. As if a scholar's political and social views don't always, consciously or not, color their narratives (Himmelfarb herself, a right-wing conservative, being among the more notorious current examples).

I wasn't entirely surprised. Back in 1974, Dennis Rubini, an openly gay historian at Temple University, and I had submitted a proposal for a panel on “the history of sexuality” (not the more inflammatory “lesbian and gay history”) for the American Historical Association's annual convention; not getting any response, we'd inquired and had been told that the proposal “seems to have gotten unaccountably lost.” We'd resubmitted the following year, and that time were formally rejected.

I was prepared for Himmelfarb's reaction, but it nonetheless angered me and I reached for the only card in my deck. If my scholarship was now regarded as tainted, I told the history faculty, then surely it wouldn't want me contaminating its innocent students:
surely it would be best if I no longer sat on PhD exams or read PhD theses. Should the faculty decide at some future point that the history of sexual behavior was a legitimate subject, I'd be glad, once more, to serve as a PhD examiner and mentor.

And there the stalemate held for some fifteen years, as the national, and Graduate Center, climate slowly changed. Finally, in 1991, coinciding with the establishment of CLAGS, my graduate seminar on gay and lesbian history was formally approved. I pick up the story in my diary for that year:

With CLAGS now formally established, we steadily expanded our public offerings, even as we continued to search for the funds to support them—the Graduate Center still not providing a dime in direct financial support. Ironically, the more frequent and elaborate our offerings became, the more the impression grew that we were rolling in money—what else could explain our productivity? Similarly, when we won the $250,000 Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship it was widely assumed that the award was meant for the Center for Urban Community Services. We were as astonished as everyone else at receiving the prestigious grant—even if, in fact, we got to use a mere $15,000 for operating expenses.

By 1992, CLAGS was increasingly producing a number of major (one- to three-day) conferences, and maintained a monthly colloquia series as well, an informal gathering at which scholars presented works-in-progress. A scholarly directory—the first of its kind—of university faculty offering courses or doing research on lesbian and gay subjects was, after two years of gathering and checking listings, about to go to press. Also, through specially earmarked gifts, we were now able to offer an increasing number of grants and awards that ranged from $500 grants-in-aid for CUNY graduate students to two $5,000 research grants in lesbian and gay history, to the broad-gauged two yearly Rockefeller Fellowships of $35,000.

Yet perhaps predictably, criticism of CLAGS continued from various quarters, and included a range of grievances. One prominent lesbian psychologist, for example, wrote to me early in 1992 to complain that our public programming inadequately reflected lesbian perspectives. This, I thought, was patently unfair, though I adopted a gentle tone in response. Our governing board, I pointed out, had absolute gender parity, and both its co-chairs were women; the first Kessler awardee had also been a woman (Joan Nestle). In
regard to our public programs, our most recent conference, “The Brain and Homosexuality,” had four female and four male panelists. Our upcoming two-day conference on “AIDS and Public Policy” would devote one full day to “Women and AIDS.” Seven of the nine speakers at our panel “Feminism and Lesbianism,” organized by Judith Butler, were women. “In this male-haunted world,” I wrote the psychologist, “I think we're doing pretty well. I hope you'll eventually come to agree.” She didn't respond.

There's much, in retrospect, to feel good about. Today, CLAGS, though always in need of money, has a large mailing list and has become well-known as a centerpiece and clearinghouse for the burgeoning new field of lesbian and gay studies. And the center had kept to its original mission and principles. Through a series of fellowships, publications, and a remarkable (especially for a new organization) number of colloquia and conferences on major issues relating to gender and sexuality, we've increased the amount of reliable scholarship on the LGBT experience, and disseminated it to a general public. And—despite some brief periods of imbalance—we've basically stuck to our principles of gender parity, multicultural perspectives, and the inclusion, in terms of both fellowship awards and board membership, of scholars who aren't academically affiliated.