Martin Duberman - A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY MARTIN DUBERMAN

Nonfiction

Waiting to Land

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein

Left Out: The Politics of ExclusionEssays 1964-2002

Queer Representations (editor)

A Queer World (editor)

Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971-1981

Stonewall

Cures: A Gay Mans Odyssey

Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (co-editor)

Paul Robeson: A Biography

About Time: Exploring the Gay Past

Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community

The Uncompleted Past

James Russell Lowell

The Antislavery Vanguard (editor)

Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886

Drama

Radical Acts

Male Armor: Selected Plays, 1968-1974

The Memory Bank

Fiction

Haymarket

For Marcia Gallo loving friend

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

ADRIENNE RICH, from Natural Resources

Authors Note

The phrase a saving remnant has historically referred to that small number of people neither indoctrinated nor frightened into accepting oppressive social conditions. Unlike the general populace, they openly challenge the reigning powers-that-be and speak out early and passionately against injustice of various kinds. They attempt, with uneven degrees of success, to awaken and mobilize others to join in the struggle for a more benevolent, egalitarian society.

One of my intentions in writing this book is to demonstrate that in the mid-to-late twentieth century in the United States, the saving remnant included, in some cases prominently, a number of gay people. Id initially expected to write about some half dozen of them but ultimately found myself concentrating on only two: Barbara Deming and David McReynolds. Several factors went into that decision. Both were left-wing radicals, not mere liberals, and on most critical issues of their dayincluding nuclear disarmament, the black civil rights struggle, nonviolence, and the war in Vietnamthey were ardently engaged, calling early on, for example, for the United States immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.

On those issues, Demings and McReynoldss views coincided, and they often worked together politically. But regarding several other issuesin particular feminism and the rise of a gay rights movementthey came to sharply disagree. In this they mirrored the congruence and discord that often existed side by side on the Left in general. On the two matters of feminism and gay rights, Barbara would prove more radical than Davidthough she never became the lesbian separatist he would accuse her of being. (I realize that referring to my two subjects on a first-name basisas I do throughout the bookmay antagonize some, and I should explain a bit further. Ive known David, casually, for many years, and though I never met Barbara, shes come to feel like an intimate friendmaking the use of last names seem artificially formal.)

Radicals were not as uncommon in national gay organizations themselves forty years ago as they are today. Currently, the large LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) organizations reflect the outlook of a significant majority of gay people in general, whose politics remain mostly focused on their own issues. This is less truea lot less true, I feel, when in an optimistic moodof the younger generation, especially those involved in political work on the local level. But the two issues that are currently at the top of the agenda for most gay peoplelegalizing gay marriage and abolishing dont ask, dont tellradicals scorn as centrist and assimilationist. The radical goal is to abolish the right of the state to define the terms and procedures that legitimize certain kinds of relationships and not others, and they want to rid the world of armies and warof the killing machine known as the military. Radical gay people engaged with a wide variety of issues besides gay liberation (like the continuing struggle against racial discrimination) do still exist in the gay community, but they lack the influence they once wielded in the half-dozen years following Stonewall.

Another reason that Barbara and David came to seem like ample subjects is that each has large, and (particularly for Barbara) largely unused, archives, which in Davids case include his extraordinary personal correspondence with his parents. (Barbaras papers are housed at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard, and Davids mostly at the Swarthmore Peace Center.) Their archives are so rich in left-wing history that the further I went in my research, the more obvious it became that to do justice to their lives, and to the movements they were involved with, Id have to forgoshort of attempting a multivolume workmy original plan to include other figures as well.

But my intention has never been to portray Barbara and David simply as political creatures. That would be an absurd disservice to their rich, highly individualized lives. Both were deeply committed to the social justice issues of their time, but both also had a complex range of personal interests, relationships, loyalties, doubts, and afflictions. Although their political commitments sometimes invaded and complicated their intimate lives, they never wholly consumed them. To even suggest as much, to ignore or minimize their private histories, would be to risk reducing them to cardboard polemicistswhich they were not.

Im certain that my empathy, both political and personal, for Barbara and David had a lot to do with my being drawn to write about them in the first place and may well have affected how I chose to narrate their lives. Although unsympathetic criticsespecially those with a centrist or right-wing political biaswill perhaps accuse me of whitewashing my subjects, Ive nevertheless done my best to recognize and record their foibles and shortcomings.

Empathy, in fact, often expands understanding, just as hostility can restrict it. Most historians (and even some scientists) have come to recognize that a degree of subjectivity (the influence of ones own experiences and values) willno matter how conscientiously one tries to adhere to the known evidenceinevitably invade and distort their understanding of events. Besides, historians deal only with that portion of the evidence which happens to survive. Past events can never be fully reproduced as they actually happened. Objectivity remains the goal, but it can only be approached, never entirely achieved. Not even those historians with the most clear-eyed awareness can ever produce a complete or value-free accountwhich is one reason why history is continuously rewritten.

To acknowledge my identification with Barbara and David is simply to say that somewhat different accounts of their lives could be drawnbut not necessarily more complete or more accurate ones. The best analogy would be a roomful of artists painting the same sitter; although their portraits would vary considerably, each would nonetheless convey, and often valuably, different aspects of the same subject.

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