Reclaiming the Gay Past

Abstract

All generalizations about behavior in the past ought to be tentative, since all are based on limited evidence. The of mores is, at the moment, poorly documented and the documents are susceptible to wide differences in interpretation. Moreover, until the last ten or fifteen years-which as scholarly time goes is scarcely time at all-the study of behavior was not considered a proper subject for professional historians. Perhaps a personal anecdote will illustrate the point. When I was appointed a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York in 1972, I was asked to teach at the Graduate Center. I said I had grown tired in recent years of teaching graduate students-they were too dutiful in my view-and for a while preferred to confine my teaching to the undergraduate level. I agreed, though, to sit on PhD oral exams and to read doctoral theses for the Center. Some five years later, in 1977, after I had begun to research the of behavior in general and the of lesbian and gay people in particular, I told the Center that as a further stimulus to working up this new subject matter, I would be glad, after all, to offer a course at the graduate level-on the of behavior. The response was undiluted horror. I was told that sexual history was not at all, the subject matter not worthy of formal academic study. At one point the discussions became so heated (and homophobic) -it was implied I had become a mere polemicist and had surrendered my right to be called an objective social scientist-that I decided not to subject myself to further abuse and withdrew the suggested course. I simultaneously served notice on the Graduate Center that I would no longer sit on their PhD orals nor read their doctoral theses. If my new field of research was considered suspect, I said, then clearly I was no longer qualified to advise PhD candidates. I want quickly to add that in recent years the climate at the CUNY Graduate Center has changed dramatically. Indeed, last spring President Prohansky welcomed the idea of establishing a formal academic institute at the Center devoted to gay and lesbian studies, an institute which an organizing committee of some dozen scholars is currently in the processing of building.