Originally appeared August 31, 1992, in National Review.
Review. In refreshing contrast to the ideological and personal axe-grinding found in so much gay history, Eric Marcus's Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights allows his subjects to speak eloquently for themselves. One lesson: A free-market democracy like America's, though it may officially have inculcated moral teachings that were conservative in the extreme, has unleashed practical social dynamics that were revolutionary in allowing millions to come to terms with their sexual natures.
THE WORD "important" is dropped into reviews as pretentiously and often these days as phrases like "hugely entertaining" and "profoundly true." I have hardly used such expressions before, and never together. But Making History is true, entertaining, and important in most unusual measure.
Interviewing 45 utterly different Americans, who since 1945 have been involved in utterly different ways in raising the status of homosexuals, Eric Marcus has used his background in television journalism to good effect, but combined it with a patience and an honesty for which only written literature has time. The reader is permitted to sit down quietly with each individual and listen to him, or her, telling his own story in his own words.
We are allowed entirely to forget Marcus, yet his labor has been enormous. Each of his subjects is briefly but beautifully described in an introduction which sets the individual in context and gives us a simple sketch of the person and scene. Thus:
The room ... was filled with the delightful songs of her many pet birds. Shirley's hair is mostly grey and cut in a flattop style. She looked out from behind thick, black-rimmed glasses and spoke in a deep, smoky voice. As she talked about her past, her eyes often filled with tears.
My admiration for the way Marcus introduces us to his acquaintances, then leaves them alone with us, is enormous. He does not try to be smart and he does not judge. In a field riven by personal bitterness, stupid ideological disputes, and the sound of grinding axes, this educated neutrality - judicious almost to the point of being curt - is water in the desert.
We talk to a woman who, as a young secretary in 1945, aware of her feelings for other women but quite unaware how far she was part of any great category or movement, started to type her own little "newsletters" of a rather innocent kind, making as many copies as the carbon would permit, and sending them to friends, who would send them to others.
We talk to ex-nun Jean O'Leary: "I was always in love at the convent... I had eight relationships while I was there. God was an innocent bystander ..."; to drag-queens and Communists; to a conservative congressman and a sports coach whose careers were wrecked by their homosexuality; to schoolteachers who do not want to be named; and to a black attorney, alone now and elderly, playing the organ in his living room: "He talked about his past shyly and always with a mixture of pain and wonderment." Some are strange, some so very familiar. Some are cocky and carefree; others speak through clenched teeth. There is a sort of pervasive melancholy, but also an unfocused hope for the future.
You will see from the handful mentioned above how various are Marcus's choices. He has most emphatically not made this a Who's Who of self-appointed gay "community" leaders, thank God, and many of his choices are individuals quite unheard of. What separates them, in age, background, and outlook, gives sparkle to these pages. But what links them? What thoughts emerge with any insistence from so unusual a miscellany?
To this reader, the first lesson is the utter inefficacy of education, propaganda, newspaper headlines, and received wisdom in changing what people are. Readers of a conservative disposition will share my delight in the way the collapse of Communism has shown George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four thesis to be untrue: Half a century of ruthlessly concerted mind-control never went (we now realize) more than an inch deep. Well, my conservative friends, it turns out that what is true in matters commercial and political is true in matters sexual, too. This book will remind the middle-aged how nothing we were allowed to read or hear when we were young portrayed homosexuality as anything other than the wicked and destructive perversion of a tiny minority. Every contributor to this book was immersed in that. And do you know they never believed a word of it?
That is the second lesson of this anthology: Though the moral teachings of a free-market democracy were conservative in the extreme, the practical dynamics of the society it created were revolutionary. Virtually every speaker in the book agrees that it was the freedom to leave home, to make your own living in your own way in the place of your choice, that allowed him to come to terms with his homosexuality. In the West, Marxist voices were siding with sexual freedom, conservative voices with sexual orthodoxy: yet in the East, Marxist systems were imposing that orthodoxy. Western conservatives were fostering societies in which what they called perversion could flourish. The irony is delicious. In the West we see the importance of allowing anti-gay sentiment its own institutions, its own voices: we hear it, and choose our response. Under Communism, silence: no voice, no choice, just the most terrible repression.
A third lesson concerns the disgraceful record of medical and psychiatric science in this evolving story. Marcus interviews Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who reminds us that in the Fifties every authority in psychology and medicine agreed that homosexuality disordered the personality - and nobody so much as bothered to test the assertion. She did, and with a very simple method. Using her profession's own tests for 'balance" in personality, she presented to a panel of professional colleagues the profiles of each of sixty cases. Thirty were homosexuals, thirty were heterosexuals. She asked the panel to "score" each case, without telling them which were which. The resultant scores showed no difference between the two.
What is so worrying here - and other interviews in the book confirm it - is not that scientists' beliefs are influenced by the mores of their age, but that their science is so supine in the face of them. Many will conclude from Marcus's story that scientific truth has finally triumphed over the conventional moral wisdom. My own conclusion is that the conventional moral wisdom has changed, and science has followed it. I draw from this story the moral not that medical science was a slave to fashion, but that all science is.
This bears upon another observation. Insistent throughout these vignettes is the wish to believe that one was "born" homosexual. Again and again that conviction is stated. I make no judgment on the facts: research has yet to determine the controversy. I remark only on the wish of many of us who are gay that it be determined one way rather than the other. Why one should want to conclude that any trait "couldn't be helped" I leave it to others to speculate, myself suspecting that it has something to do with defensiveness. Medical science has begun to find "evidence" of sexual predetermination. Distrust it this time, as you should have done last time.
Justifying his admirably non-celebrity-oriented selection, Eric Marcus quotes Lytton Strachey:
It is not by the direct method of scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places. ... He will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses. ... He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.
In this, Mr. Marcus has succeeded. Both in its field and among a wider audience this book will prove compulsive reading.
As will Neil Miller's impressive Out in the World. This is not a homosexual guide to foreign holidays, but a dipping down of that same little bucket into scenes of homosexual life from countries all over the world.
Miller is a journalist and he knows how to write: coolly, sometimes skeptically, often humorously, with an eye always to the salient. His description of the blank incomprehension he met in Egypt when he tried to suggest there was such a thing as "a gay man," to men for whom sodomizing each other was one of the commonplaces of life, lives in the memory. His account of a gay bar in Tokyo in which a customer sat, coat and tie adjusted, while a hospital-ward-style screen was placed around him and remained in place for ten minutes while something involving a call-boy occurred, after which the screen was removed to reveal the same customer, coat and tie still intact ... that, too, I shall never forget.
There is much that is serious in this book: most notably Miller's clear evidence that "the homosexual"-as a concept, a type, and an identity - is far from self-evident to most non-Christian and non-Jewish peoples; but it is all written up in entertaining and readable prose. "Gay Studies," it seems, is emerging from a dark age of self-pity, self-flagellation, political correctness, and academic turgidity. This can only be applauded.
Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal
Rights, 1945-1990, An Oral History.
By Eric Marcus (Harper Collins, 544 pages, $25).