Toby Marotta

Draft

1/9/2016

Toby Marotta

Overview

Here I am, 34 years after producing "The Politics of Homosexuality" (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), a popularized version of my Harvard Ph.D. thesis. Next came "Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967" (William Morrow, 1982), my personification of its major themes.

Professors Nathan Glazer and Martha Derthick, then leading national scholars in the fields of ethnic studies and urban politics, oversaw the study of original documents and the face-to-face interviewing I did to research the first book.

Toby Johnson, whom I had gotten to know in San Francisco during the 1970s, when he was working as a therapist at its Tenderloin Clinic while I was co-directing the Tenderloin Ethnographic Research Project for nearby Central City Hospitality House, supplied the multifaceted support I needed to produce both of these books in tandem.

I, in turn, helped him produce his own first two books, "The Myth of the Great Secret" and "In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld," both published by William Morrow.

Jonathan Galassi, then a young editor at Houghton Mifflin, helped me transform my Ph.D. thesis into an authoritative book bearing the same name. Today, I'm proud to say, he is a senior editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux who has also just produced an enthralling novel named "Muse" and a book of his own poetry titled "Left-Handed," both published by Knopf.

Roots of Pride

My "Politics of Homosexuality" begins by chronicling the self-styled "homophile" drive for civil rights and social status that began early in the 1950s when a handful of bold bisexual and homosexual men in Southern California organized the Mattachine Society and several bold lesbians in San Francisco started the Daughters of Bilitis. Chapters of these groundbreaking groups were started in other big American cities and they soon opted to incorporate as independent non-profit organizations.

Then came the so-called Stonewall Riots, which erupted in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan at the very end of June and start of July in 1969 thanks to a handful of young Baby Boomers with self-styled counter-cultural worldviews and New Left political outlooks. These efforts rapidly produced an unprecedented, multifaceted, American drive for GLBT -- their shorthand for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender -- liberation and community.

"Roots of Pride and Power," which I am preparing for publication to help set the stage for Stonewall 50 June of 2019, is a narrative history of these developments, both more personal and more colorful than my "Politics of Homosexuality."

It, too, begins by surveying the two decades of homophile educational and lobbying efforts initially inspired and shaped by "The Homosexual in America." This introduction to what was then the taboo subject of homosexuality was composed by Professor Edward Sagarin of New York University, who published it using the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory.

My prospective "Roots of Pride and Power" concentrates on showing how this then 20-year-old, big city-based, self-styled homophile movement was supplanted by a proliferation of self-styled liberation groups in the wake of "Stonewall."

First came the Gay Liberation Front and its initial spin-off, Radicalesbians, also started by Baby Boomers radicalized by the crude ways in which local police officers had responded to their picketing of the Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. Then came a handful of successive spin-offs, most notably, Gay Youth, STAR, short for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, GAA, short for Gay Activists Alliance, and the ad hoc representative committee that organized the first annual Christopher Street Liberation Day march and Gay-In in Central Park held in June of 1970.

In the rest of this synopsis, I describe each of these groundbreaking developments in a bit more detail. Then I use a brief concluding section to explain the 1981 arrival of GRID, short for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, soon to be renamed AIDS, for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Initially an epidemic of sexually transmitted infections that tended to be fatal, AIDS engendered both genuine heroism in and widespread personal, professional, and public support for what had begun as a small, homespun drive for social status and civil rights.

Homophile Initiative

"Roots of Pride" begins by showing how small, Manhattan-based chapters of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, self-styled "homophile groups" that were organized in the early 1950s by a handful of bold gay and bisexual men and women in Southern and Northern California, evolved during the next two decades into independent, professional, non-profit organizations.

As legally incorporated civil rights groups, so-called MSNY and DOB-New York devoted themselves to educating sympathetic professionals and helping sympathetic lawyers pursue litigation that would secure the rights and boost the status of homosexual and bisexual men and women.

On July 4, 1965, led primarily by Frank Kameny, organizer of the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C., and Barbara Gittings, head of the DOB chapter in Philadelphia, members of the chapters of these homophile groups based in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. personified their pursuit of civil rights and social status by conducting an annual, orderly, sign-pumping, Fourth-of-July picket line at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

All of the men were required to wear suits and ties. All of the women were instructed to appear in business suits or dresses.

During the last half of the 1960s, these "Annual Reminders" became the most public face of a nation-spanning "homophile movement" committed both to educating the public about the similarities between homosexuals and heterosexuals and to lobbying state and local governments for related non-discrimination measures.

Then, at the very end of June in 1969, came "Stonewall," engendered by self-styled counter-cultural and New Left homosexuals based in Greenwich Village who insisted on being called gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered as they went about supplanting this staid homophile pursuit of rights, status, and respectability with an insistent, demonstrative, and self-styled counter-cultural drive for personal and political liberation.

Unprecedented American Liberation Movement

Just before midnight on Friday, June 27, 1969, officers from the Public Morals Division of the New York City Police Department raided and closed the Stonewall Inn, a gay dance bar located near the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village.

"The Stonewall," as its patrons called it, was owned and run by affiliates of the local Mafia who bribed local public officials and presiding police officers to keep it from being closed down for disregarding the state laws and city ordinances that had been passed to prevent local public facilities from accommodating so-called deviants.

A dimly lit dance bar, the Stonewall Inn was favored by young gay men and male transvestites who led what were then called "counter-cultural" lifestyles. Commonly referred to as hippies and drag queens, they grew their hair long, wore colorful tie-dyed T-shirts they made themselves, openly smoked marijuana, occasionally "tripped" on L.S.D., and derided disapproving "straight" critics they called members of "The Establishment."

In the wee hours of this historic Friday night, after patrolmen from the local "vice squad" had barged into the Stonewall Inn, announced they were closing it, and ordered all of its patrons to leave, many of these angry, ousted, counter-cultural gay and transvestite men gathered right across the street in the tiny island of a park named Sheridan Square.

According to the belittling account featured in the next issue of the weekly "Village Voice," then the most liberal weekly newspaper in Manhattan, "The stars were in their element. Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to the applause were classic. 'I gave them the gay power bit, and they loved it, girls'."

When a siren-screaming police van arrived, this article explained, "Three of the more blatant queens -- in full drag -- were loaded inside, along with the bartender and doorman, to a chorus of catcalls and boos from the crowd...The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle...."

A year earlier, Craig Rodwell, just 20 years old, had opened his nearby Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, billed as a groundbreaking gay bookstore. Tonight, after encountering this police raid on his way home from a night of bar-hopping in the Village, Craig sized up what was going on and began loudly to chant "Gay power! Gay power! Gay power!"

Martha "Shelley" -- this last name the literary pseudonym she used when representing the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society's lesbian counterpart -- happened to encounter her old friend Craig at the end of her own night of bar-hopping in the Village, and she immediately joined in his chanting.

Then suddenly, with its siren screaming and its red lights flashing, a police car pulled up, and a pair of officers jumped out and began to help the patrolmen who were trying to squelch this impromptu protest disruption.

Both Craig and Martha disappeared into the darkness. But only for 24 hours.

Start of Community-Organizing

Early the next morning, now determined to publicize the previous night's police raid for the purposes of community-organizing, Craig Rodwell drew up and duplicated a flier headlined "Get the Mafia and Cops Out of Gay Bars."

Its text urged that "homosexual men and women boycott places like the Stonewall." And it called on "gay businessmen to open legal gay bars with competitive pricing and a healthy social atmosphere."

With the help of his lover at this time, Fred Sargeant, who as a boy had posed for the illustrations of "Dick" in grammar-school readers featuring Dick and Jane, Craig tacked copies of this flier onto every telephone pole and notice board in and around Sheridan Square. Then he and Fred stationed themselves in front of the Stonewall Inn and thrust copies of it into the hands of receptive passers-by.

Soon they were joined by their friend Martha "Shelley." And as more early-bird recruits followed their lead, this impromptu picket line grew louder, bolder, rowdier.

It wasn't long before the owner of the Stonewall Inn burst through its front door and threatened to call the police. When Craig, Fred, Martha, and their handful of recruits ignored him, he went back inside and did so.

Minutes later, with its siren screaming and red lights flashing, a police van pulled up. A pair of officers jumped out, dragged Craig into its rear holding cell, and ordered the others to go home.

Upon arriving back at their precinct headquarters, these officers hustled Craig inside and took turns mocking, taunting, and poking him. Then they hustled him back outdoors, shoved him down the stairs, and slammed their door shut.

A few days later, early in the morning of July 4th, 1969, Craig and Martha took a bus down to Philadelphia for this year's homophile-group Annual Reminder. They followed its dress protocol: suits and ties, or dresses and heels. But they abandoned the protocol of single-file circling and personified their quest for liberation by coupling up and marching hand-in-hand.

Groundbreaking Gay Liberation Front

As soon as Craig Rodwell was back in Greenwich Village, he began transforming his humble Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop into a rebel headquarters.

After telling each of his regular customers about how the police had mistreated him and his partner, he urged them to spread the word.

Sympathetic listeners and helpful allies he rewarded with discounts on book purchases and complimentary slogan- and symbol-bearing pin-back buttons that he had designed and had made.

Thanks to this Baby-Boomer generation's heated opposition to the ongoing American war in Vietnam at this time, several of his recruits were already active in local chapters of New Left anti-war groups.

All of them had come to believe that community-organizing was the most viable way to acquire influence and assert power.

At the first of the "community meetings" that Craig arranged to hold at a supportive nearby church, it was agreed that telling fellow travelers about "Stonewall" was the best way to muster and motivate new recruits.

This ad hoc assemblage voted to call themselves a Gay Liberation Front -- GLF for short. And with the help of brightly colored, slogan and symbol-bearing, pin-back buttons that Craig designed and had made to tout GLF, they assembled the core of a snowballing Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender -- GLBT for short -- Liberation Movement.

Specializing Offshoots

At GLF's weekly community meetings, called "unstructured," there were neither officers nor ground-rules. Everyone was free to propose initiatives and to express opinions.

Self-styled GLFers proceeded to band together and operate as a dozen different caucuses.

One was in charge of writing and editing articles for, mimeographing, and circulating a weekly newsletter. Another produced, printed, and distributed a thin biweekly newspaper named "Come Out!"

Self-styled lesbian feminists soon opted to break away and operate independently as Radicalesbians.

A handful of street transvestites dubbed themselves and began meeting on their own as STAR, for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.

Six months later, as 1969 drew to a close, several gay-identified men who were recent college graduates informed their peers that they were fed up with the long harangues, heated arguments, and ensuing chaos they blamed on GLF's "structurelessness."

After caucusing on their own for a few weeks, they launched a reform-oriented, constitutionally structured, alternative, named the Gay Activists Alliance and dubbed G.A.A.

Snide GLFers, alluding to its relative conservatism, called it Gay squared.

First Annual Pride Events

Come June of 1970, as this first year of community-organizing drew to a close, GLF was best known for its in-your-face activism in pursuit of GLBT -- for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender -- liberation.

Radicalesbians were billing themselves as the mothers of lesbian feminist liberation.

STAR remained a tiny clique of cross-dressers.

GAA had become best known for its "zaps," what its members dubbed their brazen, publicity-generating, confrontations of public officials.

On the very last day of this month, a sunny Saturday morning, each of these troupes set out to celebrate the first anniversary of "Stonewall" by assembling on the stretch of 5th Avenue adjacent to Greenwich Village.

Here they were joined by sign-bearing and banner-carrying affiliates of still newer groups, most notably, a handful of openly gay and lesbian teachers who were organizing a groundbreaking association of GLBT educators.

Pumping signs, hoisting banners, and bedecked with liberation-touting pin-back buttons that had designed, acquired, donated, and sold by Craig Rodwell, these pioneering activists held hands, or draped their arms around the shoulders of one or more compatriots, and walked briskly up Fifth Avenue and into Central Park.

Upon reaching its Sheep Meadow, its name a source of countless wisecracks, the founders of this unprecedented, emerging, New York City-based, GLBT community enjoyed a high-spirited and openly affectionate "Gay-In," called the most fitting way to celebrate this first GLBT Pride Day.

My Own Route

Several years later, with the approval of my Harvard thesis advisers, I rented a room in Greenwich Village and spent several months tracking down and interviewing as many of these pioneering GLBT activists as I could locate -- dozens of them.

To establish my credibility and win their trust, I made a habit of explaining how I had won the graduate-school fellowship I was using to finance my study of their groundbreaking politics by coming out personally, politically, and professionally myself.

As it turned out, commuting back and forth between Cambridge and Manhattan, I spent the next year and a half tracking down, conversing with, and learning from the handful of available homophile leaders and the dozens of out-front gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activists who were responsible for these post-Stonewall American politics of homosexuality.

Their generous support included entrusting me with dozens of their homophile movement and Stonewall Era files, newsletters, newspapers, fliers, posters, and pin-back buttons, all of which I have safely preserved.

Come June of 2019, in honor of Stonewall 50, I plan to display the best of this historic memorabilia on the web sites at www.rootsarchive.com and www.tobymarotta.com I have acquired for this purpose.

Significant Sequels

Back in the late 1970s, after transforming my Ph.D. thesis into a commercial book with the same title --"The Politics of Homosexuality" -- I was inspired anew by the idealism and the courage of the dozens of groundbreaking activists I had located, interviewed, and written about.

I was also ready to personify their revolutionary credo -- "make the personal, political" -- by coming out publicly myself.

With the support of my partner, Rusty Kothavala, and the help of a score of my Harvard College classmates who had also come out by then, I complemented my first book with an autobiographical and biographical follow-up titled "Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967" (William Morrow, 1982).

As noted earlier, Toby Johnson, whom I had gotten to know in the late 1970s, when he was working at the Tenderloin Clinic in San Francisco while I was co-directing the Tenderloin Ethnographic Research Project at nearby Central City Hospitality House, helped me transform my doctoral dissertation and its ensuing personification into readable commercial books.

Howard Grant, with whom I became close after Rusty and I moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Berkeley, California, helped me with the far more challenging federally-funded ethnographic research I conducted during the 1980s and early 1990s: studying San Franciscan subcultures that had rapidly filled up with men and women afflicted with HIV infections and AIDS.

Milton Perrin, photographer extraordinaire and master of the World Wide Web, has long gifted me with his talent for making handsome, multifaceted web sites.

The initial stage of my own, which features reproductions of posters from the Stonewall Era in New York City, can be found at www.rootsarchive.com, aka as www.tobymarotta.com.

Preventing Sexually Transmitted Infections

As fate would have it, the ensuing 15 years I devoted to ethnographic research funded by various National Institutes of Health in an effort to curb the snowballing epidemic initially dubbed GRID, for Gay Related Immune Deficiency, and soon renamed AIDS, for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, ended up being why, in 1995, I was ready to join Rusty in moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Tucson, Arizona.

By then, Tucson had become the American capital of integrative medicine, defined as traditional medicine plus so-called alternative and complementary approaches, many of which had originated elsewhere in the world.

Most of these other approaches to healthcare valued prevention as much as treatment.

By now I had become convinced that the officially recommended American alternatives for preventing HIV infections -- either abstinence or condom use -- were not the only, or even, given human nature, the most feasible approaches to stopping their spread.

My extensive reading about the history of various kinds of sexually transmitted infections had convinced me that the longest-lived technique for preventing their transmission was, in both senses of this term, a solution.

For centuries, in other countries and cultures, non-monogamous sexual partners have been taught to conclude each intimate encounter by using soap and water to cleanse and hence disinfect all of their previously engaged and exposed body parts.

For centuries, Europeans and Asians have routinely facilitated such post-sex hygiene with a bathroom appliance known as a bidet -- essentially, a low sink the size and shape of a toilet bowl that came equipped with running water.

On the page I have now maintained for years on the web site named "Library Thing," located at www.librarything.com, I list and briefly comment on each of the most the authoritative, readable, English-language books about protective post-sex washing I have located.

And thanks to "Library Thing," each of these books is accompanied by a tiny photo of its cover.