The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies - Queer Ideas: The David R. Kessler Lectures in Lesbian and Gay Studies

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016

www.feministpress.org

First edition, 2003

Compilation Copyright 2003 by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY

Foreword copyright 2003 by Martin Duberman

Introduction copyright 2003 by Alisa Solomon and Paisley Currah

Copyright information for individual lectures appears on page 215, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Queer ideas: the David R. Kessler lectures in lesbian and gay studies / from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY. 1st ed., 2003.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-55861-416-1

1. Gay and lesbian studiesUnited States. I. City University of New York. Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.

HQ75.16.U6Q43 2003

306.7660973dc22

2003021685

Text and cover design by Dayna Navaro

09 08 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Dave Kessler and I have known each other for some forty years. We met at YaleI was a newly minted Ph.D. teaching in the Department of History and he was getting his credentials as a psychiatrist at the School of Medicine. We were part of a semi-clandestine group of budding gay academicians and professionals whojust by finding each otherhelped to save our lives in those pre-Stonewall years. Dave stood out, and was ahead of the rest of us, in arguing insistently that we were not, as the official ideology of the day had it, sick creatures in need of cure.

When Dave moved to San Francisco, decades ago, he and I saw each other much less often but did manage to stay in touch. In May 1991, I was in California on a book tour and we arranged for one of our periodic get-togethers. Along with catching up on each others lives, I had a specific agenda item I wanted to talk over with him. I wanted to tell him about the newest gleam in my eyea research center to promote and disseminate reliable scholarship about gay and lesbian livesand to enlist his active support.

The gleam had first been sparked five years earlier. Id abruptly realized one day late in 1985 that, despite my resolute inattention to and cosmic ignorance of the world of finance, Id accumulated a quite significant pension fund. Id also arrived at a quite significant age. It was time to take steps, leave a responsible legacy.

Initially I had a general idea only: write a will that would leave the bulk of my estate to the advancement of gay studies, probably in the form of an endowed professorship. But leave it to whom? Or where? My close friend Helen Whitney was at the time married to Benno Schmidt, recently named Yales incoming president. Since Id been an undergraduate at Yale and had taught there in the sixties, the confluence seemed noteworthy.

When I first approached Benno, his reaction was friendly though cautious. He told me right off that I simply didnt have enough money to endow a professorship, and that I needed to come up with a more manageable proposal. I immediately substituted a gay research center, not at all sure whether that was more or less ambitious than a professorship. Benno said he wanted to think about it and to consult with Bart Giamatti, Yales outgoing president, before proceeding further.

Benno soon got back to me to say that Bart (here I quote from my diary of January 19, 1986) had immediately objected to establishing an endowment devoted to gay anything. Gay, Giamatti had announced, was an advocacy word. I tried arguing the parallel with black studies. Would Yale reject a center devoted to research about African Americans because some might argue that black was an advocacy word?

Benno then passed along Barts suggestion that Yale might be interested if I left my estate to promoting, in some form, the history of human sexuality. No, I said, that more generalized subject already had the university-affiliated Kinsey Institute, several established journals, and a significant cadre of researchers. In contrast, gay/lesbian studies had practically nothing.

As a fall-back, Benno next suggested that, to appease Bart, I substitute homosexuality for the incendiary gay; an endowment to study the history of homosexuality stood a better chance of finding favor with the powers that be. No, I said, homosexuality was a clinical term, loaded with negative moralistic judgments. Well then, Benno said, why dont we just put terminology aside for now while you see if you can gather together an organizing committee of bona fide scholars to work out a concrete proposal, complete with a set of by-laws. That seemed a reasonable, even necessary, next step in producing a workable center. And so it was that a diverse and shifting group of scholars began a protracted set of meetings in my living room to talk through plans for the organization that would ultimately become the Center for Lesbian and Gay StudiesCLAGS.

But in the end it was not be situated at Yale. John Boswell, a distinguished and openly gay historian at Yale, ultimately withdrew his support several months into our discussions after we, as a group, rejected his demand that the centers daily operations be controlled by tenured Yale faculty members. Most of the women and some of the men on our committee pointed out to Boswell that acceptance of his proposal would necessarily result in a center controlled by a small group of white mensince Yale then had no tenured out lesbians or people of color, and few tenured women. From Boswells stated point of view, this was perfectly acceptable. Boswell then, in a long letter to mewith a copy to Benno Schmidtdenounced the committees deliberations as unremittingly hostile to Yale and severed all connection with us. Pleading his inability to get our proposal passed without the support of Yales gay star, Benno quickly bowed out.

The group was shocked and angry at what we took as Boswells attempt to sabotage what he could not control. But there was considerable relief, too, at the breakdown in negotiations. Yale would have provided a prestigious legitimizing venue for gay studies, but the women on our committee especially had felt from the beginning that the price might be too high, that as a traditional bastion of white male privilege, Yale, at that time, was too hidebound an environment to harbor and nurture the gay worlds vibrant diversity.

We turned to The City University of New York (CUNY), and what a difference it made! At our very first meeting, Harold Proshansky, president of the CUNY Graduate School, thanked us for bringing the idea of a gay/lesbian studies center to CUNY. If anything, he said, the time for creating such an institution is overdue. He not only offered to work actively with us to prepare strategies for winning approval from CUNYs Board of Trustees, but said he would personally ask a select group of progressive campus presidents (CUNY has some two dozen different undergraduate campuses) to kick in $5,000 each from their discretionary funds so that we would have at least a minimal budget to get us started.