The Godfather of Gay Studies

Martin Duberman, the historian and gay-studies pioneer, has had a few things on his mind lately — three books’ worth of things this year alone, in fact. One volume takes a fresh, hard look at gay activists’ recent narrow focus on marriage rights and asks, Has the Gay Movement Failed? A second, The Rest Of It, extends three earlier installments of autobiography by covering the years 1976-88, and by including a number of now-long-ago details he’s not proud of, such as a cocaine habit and a surfeit of hustlers. The third book, titled Luminous Traitor and due out next month, is what he calls a “novelized biography” of the gay Irish diplomat and patriot Roger Casement, hanged by the British for treason in 1916.

Meanwhile another manuscript is already at the University of California Press, and he’s finishing up the introduction to a book of feminist essays by his friend Naomi Weisstein, a psychologist and neuroscientist who died three years ago. After that, “something’s cooking about getting old,” he says, “but I don’t know what form it will take.”

Duberman, by the way, recently turned 88.

He swims and works out with weights, and he safeguards time to write in a sunny front room of the Chelsea apartment he shares with his husband, Eli Zal, 63. Two big windows overlook the quiet street they’ve lived on for decades, and above his desk is a collage called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, purchased years ago from an artist friend. “I’ve lived a long life and I’ve been lucky enough to have written about most of the things that I wanted to,” Duberman says in the course of a good-humored two-hour conversation, “though things like Roger Casement popped into my head quite late. Who the hell knows what might yet pop into my head?”

That’s hardly an unreasonable question, given the breadth of his interests. Duberman’s career as a published historian began in 1961, when Houghton Mifflin released his book about Charles Francis Adams, a politician and historian who was the grandson of John Adams and son of John Quincy Adams. The book won the Bancroft Prize the following year. His next big success, in 1964, was a play, In White America, followed by a biography of the poet and critic James Russell Lowell in 1966. All told, he’s written or edited more than 30 books, including a 1972 history of Black Mountain College, the progressive North Carolina arts institution that lasted from 1933 to 1957; an acclaimed 1989 biography of the singer Paul Robeson; and volumes about the politics of the left and about gay history, including a 1993 account of the Stonewall riots.

While he was doing all that writing, though, he was also playing an ever-larger role in academe. After teaching at Yale and Princeton, he was lured to the City University of New York’s Lehman College with a distinguished professorship. In 1972 he came out publicly, first in an aside in his Black Mountain book and then in an essay in The New York Times Book Review, and the following year he was one of the founders of the Gay Academic Union, the first organization for lesbian and gay faculty members and graduate students.

“It was mostly graduate students and junior faculty,” he remembers. “I had gotten tenure, and they all wanted to know, ‘Is it safe to come out?’ And I would say, At this point I don’t really think it is safe.” Even the protection offered by a distinguished professorship and a Bancroft Prize was not ironclad, he knew. “They could only fire me for moral turpitude, and depending on the animus, you could define moral turpitude as homosexuality. But it was some protection, anyway.”

Beginning in 1986, he and a handful of other scholars began discussing the possibility of a center for lesbian and gay studies. “The time was right. We really needed to foster scholarly inquiry into LGBT lives so that a lot of the myths that were current could be tested, and in almost all cases destroyed,” he says. Duberman initially proposed it to Yale, and a group began meeting in his apartment to organize it. But several Yale professors in the group, including the star historian John Boswell, insisted that the center be overseen by tenured Yale professors.

“The women who had been meeting with us — and they were a very distinguished bunch of women writers and artists and scholars — they were outraged,” says Duberman. “They said, John, do you know of a single tenured out lesbian at Yale? Of course nobody could name one.” Acrimony ensued, capped off by a letter Boswell sent to Benno C. Schmidt Jr., then Yale’s president, recommending that the university not go forward with the plan. “His actual phrase, burned into my brain forever, was, ‘These people are grudgingly envious of Yale,’” Duberman says.

Minus the Yale contingent, the group took the proposal to CUNY, which welcomed the idea but said $50,000 would have to be raised for the first year’s operations. Assembling the funds took five years, with the $20,000 capstone being a bequest from a man who died of AIDS. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies — CLAGS, for short — opened in 1991 with Duberman as its founding director.

“It’s indisputable that he has been a substantial and central figure,” says Catharine R. Stimpson, dean emerita of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science and past president of the Modern Language Association. His work as a historian and his autobiographies are important, she says, but just as important have been his contributions to creating LGBTQ studies as a discipline. “I remember being in the very early meetings in his Chelsea apartment,” she says. “As in any new field, there were ripples and currents, but CLAGS is there, and it is a pioneering and persistent center of study of gays and lesbians and queer experience.”

“When I was a graduate student in the early 1980s,” says Michael Warner, a professor of English and American studies at Yale, “almost all the [gay studies] scholarship, such as it was, was done by independent scholars, such as Jonathan Ned Katz, people who were not in universities. There was no home for it in the university. Marty and George Chauncey and John Boswell and the others who kicked off the conversation were mostly in history departments, but there was really no place to have a conversation across disciplines about what gay culture might be or what gay sexuality might be or how to imagine gay history.

“I think Marty did more to open that space than anybody else,” Warner says. “I can tell you from personal experience that he’s always been the soul of politeness and generosity with younger scholars. He brought me on board at CLAGS events early in the ’90s, and I had a chance to moderate a panel that Allen Ginsberg was on. He really does clear space for other people.” The discipline’s exponential growth serves as proof that Duberman and the other early advocates for LGBTQ studies were right. “Now there are entire bodies of literature and conferences and conference circuits for all the different subfields of queer studies,” says Warner. “It’s hard to keep up.”

The center’s opening became something of an intellectual turning point for Duberman himself. After he proposed a graduate seminar on LGBTQ history and culture, administrators predicted that it wouldn’t reach the minimum number of students and would have to be canceled. “On the first day of classes, I went to get the enrollment, and it was something like 40,” says Duberman. He had to add a second section of the seminar to accommodate everyone.

To his surprise, though, it was not an easy course to teach. The early ’90s marked the beginning of a generational split in the gay world, he says. and academically, the fault line was queer theory. “Almost all of my students were in their early 20s, and for them Foucault was old-fashioned. They deliberately tested and badgered me, because they wanted to see how much of an old fogey I was. I could hardly get five words out of my mouth without one of them challenging it. ‘Love? What do you mean by love? Are you talking carnally, Professor Duberman?’

“I would come home at night so upset at what I took to be my miserable performance that I would stay up writing, responding to things that they had asked that I had bungled. I would go back the next session and say, I thought all this over and I really didn’t represent my own views well and here’s what I meant to say. This went on and on, and it drained me. But it also made me well aware of the fact that I needed to bone up, and fast, which I did. I was reading almost nothing that whole term except queer theory.”

But in 1991 he also published what remains his most striking book, Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey. It traces his efforts to overcome, or at least resist, his homosexual urges, efforts that spanned years of individual and group therapy, endless conversations with friends, a number of boyfriends, and other encounters too numerous to count. Much of the book’s detail comes from the diaries he has kept for most of his life. The volume, which he says was the first gay-themed book ever offered by the Book of the Month Club, covers what he describes as “the years when I was most self-hating.”

“Most of us internalized the going cultural definition of who we were — sick, criminal, deformed, psychiatrically disturbed. Whatever the terminology, it was always negative. I don’t think people growing up today, at least in the big cities, are aware of how much that kind of steady treatment damages you. Even after the progress we’ve seen, people who grew up in the ’50s and the ’60s — we are a pretty damaged bunch.”

The first therapist he saw, in 1955, confirmed for him “the hopelessness of homosexual life” and also “managed to underscore all my pre-existing doubts about my — or any homosexual’s — capacity for love and commitment.” Cures tracks Duberman’s personal struggles, and his professional successes, alongside psychiatry’s slow move away from branding homosexuality as a pathology, and also alongside such cultural mileposts as the 1968 New York production of The Boys in the Band — to which Duberman gave a negative notice in Partisan Review because, he recounts in the book, the play might “help to confirm homosexuals in the belief that theirs is merely a different not a lesser way.” The review, he notes, “amounted to nothing less than a ferocious attack on my own humanity.”

Writing Cures, Duberman says now, helped him relive such searing moments “and get rid of at least some of the detritus which continued to haunt my life from having been brainwashed by the culture about how sick I was.” The book made an impression on many others as well. “Whenever I am trying to explain to someone why we have a resistance to using the word homosexual, I send them to Marty’s book,” says Warner, the Yale English professor. “If you tell people now, as we often do in the wake of Foucault, that the word homosexual is a kind of pathologizing, clinical, medicalizing term, they hear that as a kind of abstract point. They say, Doesn’t it mean what we want it to mean? Then you send them to the history of people who were treated as patients and thought of themselves as patients because of the force of this word, and it’s very gripping. It brings that abstract point home to the experience of someone who had to go through that torturous attempt at a cure.”

It’s been a dozen years since Duberman retired from teaching, and he says he’s stopped following scholarly discourse as closely as he once did. But he remains deeply interested in the broader political conversation. One of his new books takes on LGBTQ advocacy groups, in particular the Human Rights Campaign. Has the Gay Movement Failed? begins by recalling the sweeping, idealistic goals of the 1960s Gay Liberation Front, which, he writes, sounded “a messianic note when discussing the need to wholly transform society rather than pleading for unconditional admittance to it.” The front’s members, he notes, thought of it “as part of the broader movement for social change then convulsing the country and typified by the antiwar, black, feminist, indigenous, and New Left protests.”

Duberman goes on to ask questions that tend to stick in one’s brain — particularly, perhaps, if one is old enough to remember the 1960s: “How is it that the GLF’s radical agenda morphed, more than 40 years later, into a movement that stresses above all else the importance of the right to marriage — and secondarily to participation on equal terms in killing our country’s enemies?” The Human Rights Campaign, he writes derisively, proved itself “ready and eager to lead the battered and besmirched gay community out of the wilderness and into the Eden of white picket fences and the miracle of monogamy.” Meanwhile, he notes, 45 percent of straight marriages end in divorce.

Duberman does admit that while early gay radicals were espousing goals that were “at times downright Panglossian,” most gay people stayed in the closet — including himself. Still, he says, “I’m not alone in feeling limited satisfaction with what most gay people are hailing as the speediest success story in all of our country’s long history of social protest.” He also regrets the current emphasis on persuading straight Americans to think of gay people as just like them, ordinary folks down the block with “nothing special about our experience or our insights or our perspectives.”

“In a way it’s wiping out our whole historical experience,” he says. “Because our historical experience has been different, we’ve developed — necessarily, in self-defense — a somewhat different set of values and perspectives. We have a lot to tell the mainstream. But the mainstream doesn’t want to hear.”

Nonetheless, plenty of people have listened to Duberman over the years — just recently, for instance, Masha Gessen wrote glowingly about him in The New Yorker on the occasion of Has the Gay Movement Failed? But William Stockton, a Clemson University professor of English, wrote in a Lambda Literary review that Duberman’s criticism is, at this point, “a bit predictable,” and doubting that it would find much of an audience. Warner, at Yale, thinks that the book will be picked up for many LGBTQ-studies courses, and that students “will find in Marty’s book a road map for a lot of questions and a lot of histories and a lot of problems that they aren’t familiar with.”

“Like everybody with a huge oeuvre, some people may say this is more substantial than that,” Stimpson says of Duberman’s books. Her own favorite remains his Black Mountain College history — “a terrific contribution to our understanding of the great, rebellious, flamboyant, progressive trend in American higher education.” Whatever one thinks of a particular volume, she adds, “there they are and he doesn’t stop. I have a sort of vision that when he’s 120, out will come another 20 books.”

Duberman, too, ranks the Black Mountain history highly, placing it along the Robeson biography and Cures as perhaps his proudest accomplishments. But then, as befits someone who has made so much of his life public, he adds that he’s also proud of his relationship with Zal.

“I didn’t think I would be a good candidate for a relationship, since I loved sexual variety and I was very absorbed in my work. I remember getting my chart done by a Tibetan astrologer back in the ’60s or the early ’70s, when everybody was doing it. He read my chart and he said, Unless you find a partner who is very much like you, it would be very hard to form any kind of domestic arrangement. Eli, my partner of 31 years, is not very much like me, but we have dovetailed. We’ve had some really tough times, as all couples do, but especially as I have gotten older it’s been a huge source of comfort and stability for me.”

Indeed, they got married two years ago. “I did it under protest,” Duberman laughs. “To me it was an attack on my political principles. But it’s the usual story — the economic considerations. I think it’s an outrage that married couples have all these added benefits that single people do not, but there it is.”

They did not, however, send fancy invitations or worry over who would bake a wedding cake. “We went down to City Hall,” Duberman says. “I said, We are not celebrating — we are going through with this as mechanically as possible. We will bring the one friend required as a witness. We will take one picture. And we’re going home to watch television. And that’s precisely what we did.”

Lawrence Biemiller is a senior writer at The Chronicle.