The Education of Jonathan Ned Katz

Photograph by Robert Giard, Permission Estate of Robert Giard

Modern gay history is too often reduced to shopworn narratives of overturned sexual taboos and a classic street struggle for civil rights. To be sure, it included both — but much else too.

A more-encompassing depiction, with intellectual, religious, aesthetic, journalistic, and other activity, began to emerge in the 1970s as gay studies, which found its first home and thrived outside academe among activists, writers, and independent scholars. The scholar initially responsible for that was a nonacademic who at first simply sought an understanding of his place in the world. Through activism, avant-garde drama, and then traditional historical narrative, and inspired by a revitalized look at African-American history, Jonathan Ned Katz started matching political puzzle pieces with their theoretical and historical complements. In orienting himself, he helped orient an emerging generation of gay people and also helped arm them with a groundbreaking philosophical and intellectual agenda at the height of gay liberation.

In the summer of 1975, Katz was living in a spacious apartment, rented for $150 a month, at Bank and West Fourth Streets. He had grown up a few blocks away in a brownstone, where his bedroom window looked onto a patio and a yard. Twenty-four years earlier, he had become a celebrity of sorts in that yard by directing, at 13, a film version of Tom Sawyer starring the kids in the neighborhood. Life magazine even did a feature story on him titled “Life Visits a Backyard Movie Set.” But by the 1970s his ambitions had shifted to preparing for a revolution. Now, every Saturday night, he met with a group of like-minded companions — members of the Gay Socialist Action Project. Katz waited all week for Saturday night to come. It was thrilling to be in a room with men who shared his vision and hopes.

The tiny sliver of New York City where Katz lived was undergoing a rapid transformation. The Village had been home to scores of intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians since the turn of the century, and in more recent decades it had given rise to the Beat poets and Bob Dylan. When Katz came of age in the neighborhood, his parents both had careers reflecting its literary culture. His mother, Phyllis Brownstone Katz, was a magazine editor, and his father, Bernard Katz, was an advertising art director. When he was a young boy, they’d sent him to the Little Red School House, an independent school that was a refuge for families targeted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunts. He then graduated from the High School of Music & Art in 1956. Now, post-Stonewall, the neighborhood was being shaped by the promise of gay liberation.

On his way to the Gay Socialist Action Project meeting uptown, Katz would walk to the subway along West Fourth Street. Gay men crowded onto the streets where even months before they would have been too fearful to linger. On hot summer nights, some walked around shirtless, while others wore only leather vests, showing off their hairy chests and muscled bodies. He passed by Abingdon Square, where gay denizens watched the weekend tourists arriving wide-eyed, many of them having come expressly to stare at the men dressed in denim. The men sat and waited for night to fall, and for the chance to walk a few blocks west toward the piers and the trucks, where they would have anonymous sex. Katz would brush by them as he rushed to catch the subway. This was not his idea of being gay. “Everyone went crazy in the piers,” he told me during recent interviews.

Instead, he read. In 1975, Katz was a textile artist, but the other artists he knew were “counterculture” and “liberal.” “I was not part of the East Side arts scene, I was more scholarly,” he explained. “The closet fosters reading.”

He read everything he could get his hands on, and Karl Marx became his intellectual and political companion. “I read every page of Kapital and made notes about every sentence. I asked questions. I educated myself by arguing with Marx.” Despite that affinity, he struggled to find political alliances in Greenwich Village or among his artist friends.

But uptown, emerging from the subway at 110th and Broadway and heading to John D’Emilio’s apartment overlooking Morningside Park, he was in his element. The subway was always running late, so the meeting would already be underway, with about a dozen men, including D’Emilio, a Columbia graduate student in history, gathered in the living room and a pot of spaghetti in the kitchen. A beaded curtain hung in the entrance. They sat on twin beds and on couches made of pillows in a living room painted with bright yellow, red, orange, and blue stripes.

Members of the Gay Socialist Action Project were activists, intellectuals, writers, and historians struggling to understand how the past and its politics had shaped their identity. They gathered to read and debate Marx because they were searching for a new theoretical framework for what it meant to be gay and for instructions on how to launch a revolution. They hoped that Marx, as well as the burgeoning literature on civil rights and feminism, would offer guidance. At the time, the power structures that formed the primary opposition to gay liberation were religious and medical. The former demonized them. The latter pathologized them.

From Marx, the group concluded that it made more sense to examine those power structures than to refute line by line the pronouncements of priests and doctors. They learned that homophobia was less about what a priest declaimed from a pulpit than about the priest’s power to make those claims in the first place. It was less about doctors labeling gay people “degenerates” in textbooks than about doctors having the authority to put forth such a theory as truth.

Katz came home from the meetings feeling discombobulated. It was “a huge, amazing change,” he said. “I was experiencing a change in my self-conception and conceptions of gays in a very short time.” Katz wondered if he’d been stupid to fall for the then-prevalent idea that he was sick rather than oppressed. To make that distinction was “mind-blowing,” Katz recalled. “I would get dizzy and have to lie down.”

What mattered was “whose word, whose concept” informed the discussion. To disarm the other models, gay leaders realized, they would need to invent their own definitions of gay identity and culture so that it would be their words, their concepts, that defined them. They drew comparisons among the rising gay movement, the black civil-rights struggle, and women’s liberation. They borrowed the other movements’ frameworks and language.

Katz was fascinated by black history, especially. He did not dwell on the horrors of slavery, which he found “overwhelming and depressing.” Instead, he began to study black people’s resistance to it. He found the stories of Nat Turner and other leaders of slave revolts electrifying and soon began his own original research on 19th-century black history.

He focused on runaway slaves from the South who fled to the North and were deemed “fugitives” by the U.S. government. Drawing on archival documents at the New York Public Library, he wrote a play about fugitive slaves. It was the influence of the Communist plays of a few decades earlier, which used theater to convey political messages, that led Katz to present his findings in a form that would reach a broader audience than an article for a history journal.

The play was the story of one man who escaped from plantation slavery but was eventually captured and returned to bondage. One of Katz’s African-American friends criticized that ending, saying, “We don’t need more of those stories.” So Katz returned to the archives and found what was then a little-known story about some fugitive slaves who escaped to Pennsylvania. When their owner found them, the fugitives rioted and killed him. This incident occurred shortly after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the North to return runaway slaves to the South and became, in 1968, the basis for Katz’s second play, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion. “The importance of resistance — I learned that before gay history,” Katz said. In 1973 he wrote, with his father, Bernard, a historical novel, Black Woman: A Fictionalized Biography of Lucy Terry Prince, about an 18th-century enslaved woman.

When he first began researching gay history, Katz found mostly superficial but entertaining biographies of great figures who were presumed to be gay — Alexander the Great, Walt Whitman, and so on. They made no argument about the past.

But Katz was determined to do just that: make an argument. Sources he found in the New York Public Library — newspapers, diaries, pamphlets, and court cases — mostly reflected the social norms, regulations, and laws that vilified gay people rather than personal details about their lives. As he had with African-American history, he dug deeper.

“I moved through libraries like a detective,” he said, “a tracer of missing persons, following up clues, following trails from footnote to footnote, an explorer in an unknown land.” He “rummaged through library card catalogs and walked through library stacks, pulling out likely books and consulting indexes.”

He began to stitch together parts of poems, personal testimonies, newspaper clippings, sermons, and essays, organizing the materials chronologically. And as he’d done with black history, he decided to use archival documents as the basis for a play, which he titled Coming Out! It would be performed as a series of first-person narratives by a cast of 10 actors, both men and women. Although he wrote the play to provide a historical context for gay liberation, he also wanted, like Craig Rodwell, founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, to provide gay people with a sense of culture and community based on a shared intellectual heritage. And as before, Katz wanted to reach an audience beyond the readers of academic journals.

Activist friends produced the show, which premiered at a rented firehouse in SoHo. On a warm and sticky summer night in June 1972, a predominantly gay audience sat in the tiny makeshift theater with no air-conditioning and not enough seats. Some audience members sat in the aisle, while others crowded together in the back of the room.

Five men and five women walked onto the stage, where 10 boxes were arranged in a straight line parallel to the first row. Each actor took a seat on one of the boxes. The stage lit up. Speaker One stood and announced, “The Stonewall Resistance, June 27-29, 1969,” and read a poetic rendition of The Village Voice’s story of the uprising. Speaker Two provided the police report. Next, all 10 cast members recited the following chant, or, in 1970s gay protest parlance, “zap.”

We are the Stonewall girls,
We have our hair in curls,
We have no underwear,
We show our pubic hairs.

From there, the play unfolded as a series of monologues narrating gay life from the colonial period to the present. Court cases on sodomy came alive as an actor read an excerpt from a minister’s 17th-century journal. An actor offered the etymology of the word “faggot,” charting its first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1300, when it meant a “bundle of sticks,” to its 1591 meaning (“a term of abuse or contempt applied to women”), and beyond. Katz wanted to convey the sheer range of meanings assigned to same-sex desire throughout history. “If you think of yourself as some sort of psychological mutant or biological freak,” he said recently, “you have an ahistorical way of looking at yourself. Gays have a history, a society. And it’s very important to me to show not only the ways in which gays have been oppressed, but the ways in which they have survived and resisted.”

Coming Out! proved a success. In June 1972, a few months after it premiered, it played at the Washington Square Methodist Church in the Village, and then again at the Night House, a small theater a few blocks north in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. The historian Martin Duberman favorably reviewed it in The New York Times on July 22, 1973, which led to Katz receiving an offer from a publisher to turn the play into a book of primary sources.

At first, Katz doubted he could do that. The task seemed too daunting. He recalled sitting with his then-boyfriend on a pier on the Hudson River and asking, “Do I dare call this book ‘Gay American History’? Is there enough material? Can I assert by that title that there is such a thing?”

But he was more fearful about what would happen if he didn’t write the book. Afraid that there might be a backlash against gay liberation that would erase it from history, he felt that he “needed to find as much as I possibly [could].” As a child, he’d seen the damage and fear wrought by anti-Communist hysteria and had witnessed how ideas could be censored and experiences erased from the historical record. His study of black history had revealed that much of it remained unwritten and unknown. And he’d studied how the Nazis wiped out almost every shred of evidence of a gay past in Germany. He had to write the book so that similar erasures couldn’t happen in America. The experiences of so many gay people had already been lost.

In 1976, Katz published Gay American History, which ran to 690 pages and by its very publication and heft offered proof of gay liberation. Katz had unearthed many more stories besides the ones he used in the play. As he saw it, the more sources he could find, the more people he could document, the better the chance that gay liberation would be remembered. “I filled Gay American History with everything I found,” Katz said, “because this might be our only chance.”

During the 1970s, the history profession gradually turned toward social history — or as one historian famously explained it, the writing of history “from the bottom up.” Historians narrated social history from the vantage point of ordinary people — laborers, working-class people, immigrants — and shifted attention to minority groups like women and black people. Gay American History furthered that vision and single-handedly created a subfield of American social history.

Katz approached his numerous historical models and sources of inspiration without a Ph.D. He had no mentor guiding his research or fellow graduate students and professional colleagues helping him navigate the many questions that arose. Although he went on to teach in adjunct capacities at New York University, the New School’s Eugene Lang College, and Yale, and to become the leading voice in LGBTQ studies for decades, he researched and wrote the book armed with only a high-school education and the intellectual nourishment of the Gay Socialist Action Project.

Gay American History embodied the hope and promise of gay liberation, and its path to publication uncovers a forgotten story about the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the 1970s.

Jim Downs is an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellow at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at Connecticut College. His book Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation will be published by Basic Books next month.