Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography

Born in the Forties: Finding a Voice

64 3 Born in the Forties Finding a Voice We have found ourselves . . . we stand forth as homosexual members of that generation of Americans who came of age after World War II. We had our elementary and secondary school years in the fifties and early sixties, when there seemed no limit to what America could accomplish. We went to college and usually graduate school believing that we could make the American dream ours, and everybody else’s. Not least because we grew up in such affluent, peaceful times, we were unusually well-educated, idealistic , ambitious and self-confident. Toby Marotta, Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967 Acknowledging that you’re gay, if you are, and coming to accept it is only part of the challenge. Learning to have reasonably uninhibited, mutually satisfying sex is another part. Making and keeping great friends is even more important . . . the real trick . . . is finding someone to share your life with and making that work. Andrew Tobias, The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up Creating an Identity at the Beginning of the Gay Rights Movement The decade of the 1960s marks a turning point in American history. There was a sense of renewed energy and social commitment marked by the Kennedy inauguration and the idealization of Camelot in Washington. Kennedy’s command, “ask what you can do for your country,” fostered a broad social awakening. This increased social awareness was nowhere better reflected than in the creation of the Peace Corps and in the recruitment of young adults into the emerging civil rights movement. Alas, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream” was shattered by the murders of President John Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and King himself, and by the violence of the Mississippi summer of 1964 that led to the death of three civil rights activists (Gitlin 1987). In the wake of these tragedies and the controversy regarding the Vietnam conflict, the nation turned toward brooding introspection. Indeed, we are still “getting over the sixties” (Tipton 1982). The intellectual outlook of this generation is well summarized in Toby Marotta’s (1982) afterword to his report on his gay Harvard classmates . Marotta dwells on the soul-searching of this generation, its psychological mind-set caught between the conventional and liberal attitudes of the postwar years, and seeking a new and more honest morality in personal and civic life. Coming Out in the Sixties and the Emergence of Gay Rights The civil rights movement fostered political opposition to suppression of political and social minorities. This opposition was evident in the raid on New York’s Stonewall Inn in June 1969, which marks the beginning of a visible gay rights movement in the United States (Carter 2004; Duberman 1994; Kaiser 1997; Loughery 1998). At the same time, the Stonewall rebellion was itself a result of social and political ferment within an ever more cohesive gay and lesbian community, which had emerged in the later half of the 1960s (D’Emilio 1983/1998; Loughery 1998; Shand-Tucci 2003). Marotta (1982) maintains that gay men of this generation deliberately promoted social change through their disclosure of their sexual orientation. As he observes (1982, 285): What most makes us a new breed of gay men is less our liberation than our desire to let others know about it. It is our conviction that by being open and outspoken about our homosexuality, we can contribute to a reduction in suffering . . . and the advance of both humanism and productivity. This generation of men becoming adults in the 1960s created a new conscious gay identity, a courageous social and political activism, and public discourse inspired by this activism. For those participating in alternative sexual lifeways (Herdt 1997; Hostetler and Herdt 1998), this activist discourse brought about a dramatic change in self definition from the term “homosexuality,” regarded by the rising generation as a stigmatized medical-moral discourse, to the term “gay.” While older men and women Finding a Voice 65 still preferred this more traditional definition of their sexual orientation and identity, younger men and women embraced the new label as a reflection of changing shared understandings of sexual identity and social life. During this decade the “homophile” movement, seeking acceptance of gay women and men as legitimate members of society, turned away from the secretive world of the Mattachine Society to an activist stance. Among the activists...