Wanda Sykes on "That's So Gay"

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John Gruber, One of Gay Movement’s Unsung Founding Fathers, Dies at 82

by Brent Calderwood, republished with permission from the Lambda Literary Foundation 

John Gruber (b.1928), the last surviving member of the original Mattachine Society, died peacefully at his home in Santa Clara on Monday, February 28, 2011.

The Mattachine Society, often referred to as the first successful gay rights organization in the United States (a group called the Society for Human Rights was founded in Chicago in 1924 but folded the following year), was formed in Los Angeles in 1950 by Harry Hay along with his lover Rudi Gernreich and other founding members Dale Jennings, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Konrad Stevens, and Stevens’ then-boyfriend John Gruber.


Initially, due to laws prohibiting homosexuals from gathering in public and private spaces, the group met under strict anonymity, using pseudonyms even with each other.

In Eric Slade’s 2001 film Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay, Gruber discussed the Mattachine Society’s first public act: in February 1952, after Jennings was arrested by an undercover police officer in a Los Angeles park and charged with lewd behavior, the group launched a successful defense, at a time when most homosexuals entrapped by police simply pled guilty and quietly paid the fine. “In those days if you were a homosexual,” Gruber said, “it was your problem and you knew it.”

Although Gruber’s initial attraction to the Mattachine Society was social, camaraderie quickly evolved into loyalty and political consciousness. In an unpublished interview with Slade from 2000, Gruber described his introduction to the group:

I really didn’t think of myself as a homosexual man.  I thought of myself as a guy in college, an ex-Marine….  I wouldn’t have called it group therapy in those days, but that’s really what I meant, a kind of family, a family that I never had at home, a family that accepted me, and that … was a brand new thing to me.

Gruber and the other Mattachine members, in order to garner financial support to hire a defense for Jennings, adopted the name “Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment” and began distributing flyers excoriating the Los Angeles Police Department for its longstanding practice of homosexual harassment, in the process attracting volunteers and swelling attendance at the society’s meetings.

However, the strength that comes with numbers came at a personal price to Gruber, as he explained to Slade: “The new people who came in were… very much… mainstream and… nonpolitical… But everybody loves a winner and we were winners at that point, and they joined us.”

As the Mattachine Society grew, the new members became worried about the leftist political causes, including Communism, advocated by Hay, Gruber, and other founding members. Due to these differences, all the founding members, including Gruber, resigned in 1953.

A rare photo of the Mattachine Society. LR: Dale Jennings, Rudi Gernreich, unidentified-member, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Paul-Bernhard. Photo: John Gruber

By the mid-1950s, the Mattachine Society had grown into a national movement, finally supplanted by a host of direct-action antiassimilationist groups that sprung up in the wake of the Stonewall Riots of June, 1969.
Of the original members, Jennings (who died in 2000) and Hay (who died in 2002) are best known today. In 1953 Jennings cofounded the gay political organization One, Inc. in Los Angeles, publisher of the seminal One Magazine; he also authored several novels. Hay went on to cofound the countercultural Radical Faeries in 1979, a group still going strong today with branches throughout North America, as well as in Europe and Asia.

Despite his unsung status, Gruber’s role as one of the founding fathers of the modern gay movement cannot be overstated. By helping to write and distribute some of Mattachine’s earliest literature in order to publicize Jenning’s entrapment case, Gruber not only helped secure one man’s release from jail, but also contributed to a burgeoning public awareness of homosexuality and antigay discrimination, the ripple effects of which are felt even today in issues ranging from marriage equality and youth suicide to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Gay historian Stuart Timmons, who interviewed Gruber for his books The Trouble with Harry Hay (Alyson) and Gay LA (Basic Books), said, “I will always remember John fondly, as the self-described gargoyle on the cathedral of the Mattachine, no pushover. He was a sweet and generous man.”
——
Additional research provided by Eric Slade and Jim Van Buskirk. Photos courtesy of Eric Slade.

More on the Mattachine Society Here:  

‘Dustan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master'

 Ed. by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer

Reviewed by Brent Calderwood for LambdaLiterary.org

We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but just look at the pillow-lipped, sleepy-eyed poet gazing out from a soft-focus 1940s sepiatone on Dustan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master and your hunch is bound to be right. What’s inside is just as out of the ordinary as it looks: quirky, rarefied, romantic, and unabashedly epicene.


For this first offering in Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series, esteemed poet-editors D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer have unearthed a rare gem, and in the process rescued Thompson from becoming a literary footnote. As they explain in their introduction—which gamely balances academic rigor with engaging narrative—information about Thompson was hard to come by. He had virtually dropped off the literary map by the 1950s, even though his World War II-era work was well-published alongside that of Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden and others.

Powell and Prufer offer valuable insights into why Thompson remains elusive: the burning of literary bridges, a midlife conversion to Catholicism, and his own stipulation against posthumous republication of his first two collections of poetry—the poetry that was best-received and also most homoerotic.

Thankfully, the editors, by means of scholarly detective work and presumably a healthy dose of charm, have gained permission to publish a modest selection from those two volumes, as well as from his later narrative and poetic work. Their assiduous selections make a persuasive case for the inclusion of Thompson’s work among the best in mid-century gay poetry, as well as among the best of WWII-genre poetry (Thompson, in spite of his trust fund and apparent fragility, fought with the U.S. Army).

Rupert Brooke, who drove Cambridge boys, and modern reviewers, wild

Thompson’s work compares well with contemporaries like Rupert Brooke and Stephen Spender; and for a niche modern readership, which includes this reviewer, those comparisons alone make this book worth a look. For many others, though, Thompson’s adherence to form and meter and his frequent Classical allusions may at first glance seem old-fashioned or twee. However, his consistent musicality, his clever use of internal rhyme, slant rhyme, enjambment and campy, odd imagery transcend era and convention, making Emily Dickinson an even more apt comparison.

In “This Loneliness for You Is Like the Wound,” Thompson uses eyewitness war imagery to address his lover—ostensibly the girl at home, but more likely the boy on the next cot:

This loneliness for you is like the wound
That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,
Smiling to soothe the general on his round
Of visits to the somehow not yet dead …

The sonnet teems with clever loaded images like “bullet-bearing heart” and “fever chart,” concluding with the heroic couplet “Yet now, when death is not a metaphor, / Who dares to say that love is like the war?” In building a love sonnet around homosocial and homoerotic imagery and ending with an almost postmodern consideration of use of metaphor within the poem itself, Thompson blazed the trail for later New Formalists like Thom Gunn and Randall Mann, whose work is anything but twee.

Like many writers before him and since, Thompson frequently locates his poems in Classical or military settings to allow for an otherwise unconventional emphasis on masculine sexuality. “Tarquin,” for instance, is a vague-ish Roman title, but the poem reads as an au courant lament for a lost trick, or else as an ode to a newfound bad-boy: “The red-haired robber in the ravished bed,” “the sinner who is saint instead,” “bellboy beauty, this flamingo groom.”

Thompson’s work, overflowing with double entendres and winking metaphors, will no doubt provide poetry lovers with the same giddy, titillating awe that film buffs get from watching classic Film Noir (which similarly gained traction during the war years). It’s an awe that comes from seeing artistic work whose innovation, naughtiness, and depth not only survived, but were born of, the conventions and limitations that threatened to censor them.

Powell and Prufer capstone these tantalizing glimpses of Thompson’s oeuvre with wonderful essays by other poets and critics, including Edward Field—himself an early acquaintance of Thompson’s—and Dana Gioia. There is also a middle-of-the-book folio of images—a privilege most often reserved for Hollywood sirens and literary giants.

Edward Field in U.S. Army, where he met Thompson

The schoolboy and soldier snapshots are a delight for the reader who’s already gotten a taste of Thompson’s elegant, ribald sensibility; the photo reproductions of pages from Thompson’s short-lived lit journal Vise Versa will give the reader a further taste of the kind of campy, envelope-pushing poems and reviews Thompson wrote—work that we hope will one day be republished in full, but, were it not for this new and valuable volume, might never have been known about at all.

On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
Dunstan Thompson
On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
Edited by D. A. Powell and Kevin Prufer
Pleiades Press
9780964145412, Paperback, 190 pp

And while we're on the subject of hot gay poets—or was that just me?—here are a few more for your viewing pleasure: 

Lord Byron

Charles Jensen

"We Were Here": Film Moves Entire Festival Audience to Tears

Every year, at least one film in the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival garners so much audience support and community spirit that I'm reminded not only of why I love film but also why I'm grateful to be a part of this eccentric and beautiful multi-lettered community. This year, one of those films was We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco, which previewed yesterday to a full house at the Castro Theater.

Director David Weissman and his editor/codirector Bill Weber, the documentarians who brought us The Cockettes nine years ago, that dizzying paean to early '70s hippie genderqueer gay counterculture, have created an entirely different animal with We Were Here. While The Cockettes hinted at the epidemic to come—many of the Cockettes and their collaborators, like disco diva Sylvester, were felled by the disease—We Were Here is at times a eulogy to the decade that followed, looking at AIDS head-on. It's a perspective our community as a whole has been slow to adopt, but one that this film may well ready us for.

In the 30 years since AIDS first made its appearance in San Francisco's gay community (back when I was starting kindergarden in the East Bay Area), much has been learned about the virus's treatment and prevention. But despite all this acquired knowledge, young gay men are still acquiring HIV at alarming rates in 2010. Many my age and younger seem totally unaware not only of the history of the "lost generation," but also unaware of the prevention methods our community learned in the intervening 20 years. To many men 35 and under, it's a laughing matter, or at most a faint spectre. Many men over 35 who lived through the crisis are also either unaware or in post-traumatic denial about the lingering epidemic, but to most of my friends just 10 years older than me, it's a very real part of their daily lives, as well as a haunting memory.

This topic, with its galaxy-sized weight, can get overwhelming in the blink of an eye, so We Were Here tackles it slowly, building on a brief visual history of the burgeoning post-Stonewall gay community in San Francisco, and settling into interviews with just five well-chosen, eloquent individuals who survived the '80s and have come out with a goldmine of wisdom to share.

And to me, that's the greatest gift of this film. Sure we've acquired medical knowledge that can help with prevention—and certainly, that knowledge needs to be deepened and shared until HIV can be sent backstage to join polio and the bubonic plague—but more than medical knowledge, the film seems to ask, what wisdom do we have to share? What did the AIDS crisis teach people that can now be passed on to the next generation of queer men, and, more broadly, to the culture as a whole? If there is any meaning or utility to be had from all these horrific deaths—deaths that glutted the obitiuaries sections of gay newspapers worldwide for well over a decade—that usefulness has to be more than simply teaching young men: "Wear a condom" and "Don't do what we did" (the only messages I received when I first came out and began visiting the war-torn but reemerging Castro scene of the early 1990s).

"Don't do what we did" is an especially pernicious message. After all, so much of what queer people in the '70s, '80s, and '90s did was wonderful, and shouldn't be cordoned off into the same dark recesses where grief and survivor's guilt still linger. We Were Here offers hope that a change is coming: Weissman's film helped bring a whole audience out of the closet about their own grief, guilt, and wisdom.

Wisdom, more than anything, is what we need to heal—and to conquer the virus. And this film has more wisdom than just about any I've ever seen. Wisdom about loving ourselves enough to value our own lives as well as the lives and well-beings of our partners. Wisdom about queer men and women working through their differences and even taking care of each other. Wisdom about valuing our families of choice at least as much as we're taught to value married couples and nuclear families. Wisdom about knowing how and when to fight, and when to let go. Wisdom about how to turn anger into action. Wisdom about living with grief and loss, and the love and hope that seem to survive and return even after and within the worst of circumstances.

I'm grateful that I was there yesterday at the Castro Theater, but I hope We Were Here reaches a much wider, worldwide audience, so that the healing and dialogue can continue.

If you want to learn more about We Were Here, or if you want to help it reach more people, please contact David Weissman through the film's website, wewereherefilm.com.

The Swish Beneath the Swagger: Liberating Our Queer Selves

Fans keep asking, "Brent—why no blog entry last week?" 


Actually, no one asked. But I create these little scenarios in order to justify writing another post at midnight when I should be sleeping. The answer to this koan is, I've been busy looking for full-time work, like a lot of folks these days. My hippie friends (that's most of my friends) insist it's because of Mercury retrograde. According to them, computers and other tech devices fail when Mercury seems to move backwards (as seen from Earth) several times each Earth year. 

It's a bad time to use electronic devices or sign contracts they tell me. I tell them I need to find a job.  Did Mercury make my computer crash, really? I tend to think it's because I make computers break by looking at them. Either way, I'm grateful to some wonderful friends for their help and support in getting back online. 


Owing to all this busy-ness, I haven't had time to report on some of my recent wanderings yet, so in the meantime I'm trotting out an older essay of mine. It made waves when it first appeared in the Bay Times in 2008 (I received more angry letters to the editor than just about any other editorial that year!) and led to my participation as an interviewee in the film The Butch Factor, now on DVD and appearing on the LOGO Network.

Christopher Hines, the multitalented director of The Butch Factor, a documentary about gay men's relationship with masculinity and with themselves, first saw my article in its longer form, "Queer Liberation? No Thanks, We'll Pass." The think piece first appeared on queer scholar and dandy phenom Trevor Hoppe's fabulous academic/populist online journal, Beyond Masculinity—which is also well-designed, clean and pretty, especially when you compare it to other academic-type sites. I  then went on to present "Queer Liberation?" at Hunter College in New York City at the "Twilight of Queer" conference in 2008. (Trevor, BTW, also appears as an interviewee in The Butch Factor, bringing a refreshingly un-butch irreverence to the doc.) 


An mp3 of me reading the essay (at about 15 minutes—not for sissies!) is available for free download here.

Or, you can read the shorter version here, edited by Lewis Nightingale, who coordinates the Bay Times' "Sparks!" column through his association with The Community Initiative, a local nonprofit whose mission is to help gay and queer men find community and thereby lessen depression, HIV risk, and the many other deleterious effects of isolation. The Community Initiative regularly sponsors support groups, retreats, political actions, and panel discussion. This Thursday, the Community Initiative is hosting a panel discussion titled "The State of Gay Media in SF" at 7pm at the GLBT Historical Society, 657 Mission Street #300 (between 3rd and New Montgomery). It's sure to get lively.

And now, here's that article I promised...

The Swish Beneath the Swagger: Liberating Our Queer Selves

Published: January 3, 2008 in the San Francisco Bay Times photo by Rink for SF Bay Times

Having grown up in the Bay Area, I've witnessed many of my gay brothers metaphorphose over time. Now 32 [34 now] and having been outand politically active in the gay community here for half of my life, I often run into the skinny, soft boys I knew from queer youth groups in Hayward, Berkeley and Oakland, newly transformed into hulking Adonises. I even occasionally see some of them at the gym, where I seem to spend as much time as they do. We’ve abandoned our dreams of turning heterosexist norms on their heads and embracing our deviance. After years of trying to be accepted by our straight peers, we gave up and ran for the hills of San Francisco. There, we learned the same lesson over again that was drummed into our skulls as kids: If you want to make it in the world, kid, you’d better turn that swish into a swagger. Despite living in what many refer to as the “Gay Mecca,” I still feel an intense pressure to conform, and the rules eerily resemble the ones that the jocks used to enforce in gym class. Don’t move your hands too much when you talk. Don’t lisp. Don’t smile or make eye contact with other boys (well, with one new proviso: only if you want to have sex with them). And don’t let anyone accuse you of being a 90-pound weakling. Get big, big, big. Size matters. The Castro is full of men who are on their way to or returning from the gym. A lot of these guys would get winded just from walking to their mailbox, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. They’ve made a career out of pumping iron, all in the ironic effort to emulate the thugs who pantsed them in the schoolyard. Don’t get me wrong - I’m certainly not immune. I understand the desire to be considered attractive and healthy, but there’s something frightening about a community of men who are bulking up their bodies to achieve some predetermined definition of masculine perfection, meanwhile neglecting the fragile psyches that drove them there in the first place. When I visit the Castro, I see a lot of hurt little boys hiding inside the suits of armor they’ve created. As gay men, I think it’s time we ask ourselves: What is the armor for? What, or whom, are we protecting ourselves from? From gay-bashers? Doubtful. If Stonewall taught us nothing else, it taught us that an artfully thrown beer bottle is far more effective at deterring physical assault than a high-definition six-pack. No, we’re protecting ourselves from one another - that is, we’re protecting ourselves from being rejected by other gay men. Having left our homes and old lives behind, we need desperately to find love and acceptance, and the possibility of being rejected yet again, by yet another community, for being soft and effeminate - or even sick, dirty, or contagious - is too much to bear. So we head to the gyms, there to sculpt physiques that look strong and healthy. Then we go to the locker rooms, where we keep our heads down and hone our finely tuned peripheral vision, just as we did in high school. If we make connections there at all, it is in the steamrooms, where faces and eyes are obscured. It’s a sad tale, I know, and one I fear will add a new label to my already-chafing nape: cynic. Am I risking ostracism yet again? Who wants to be around a cynic, after all? After all those hours I’ve spent in the gym, the last thing I want to do is earn the scorn of other gay men. But if I am critical, it’s because I’m an idealist. It’s because I love men, and gay men in particular. And I think we can contribute more than we currently do - to ourselves, to each other, to the broader culture. I believe our presence as queer outsiders in a heteronormative world is illuminating. But we can only bring our own kind of light to the world if we are, in fact, present - here, now. Present to the reality that we will never gain political, social, or personal acceptance by disappearing ourselves, subsuming ourselves to bland, outmoded notions of masculine identity. Queer liberation means being accepted as we are. For that to happen, we must each start by accepting, and being, fully ourselves - masculine, feminine, somewhere in the middle, or maybe somewhere entirely outside of the gender binary. We’re almost there, too. In coming out of the closet, we jettisoned expectations about who we were supposed to be in order to find out who we really were. Along the way, many of us gathered with other gay men in urban enclaves. And although it’s understandable that once there, we reverted to imposing those old, familiar expectations on each other, that strategy hasn’t brought us any closer to personal or political liberation. It’s time to make a change. It’s time to let go of those tired old expectations and give ourselves permission to be who we really are. This will require letting go of a lot of fear, the fear that drove us into the closet in the first place: the fear that we would be punished for failing to be just like the other guys in the locker room. But guess what? Now we are just like the other guys in the locker room, in the gyms we’ve made for ourselves in places like the Castro - so why are we still afraid? If we let go of the fear and look each other in the eye, we will see ourselves in each other. We will see the beautiful, queer, imperfect boys - and men - that we were meant to be all along.