Memoirs of an Ancient Activist

In essential ways, homosexual needs have made me a nigger. I have of course been subject to arbitrary insult and brutality from citizens and the police. But except for being occasionally knocked down, I have gotten off lightly in this department, since I have a good flair for incipient trouble and I used to be nimble on my feet. What is much more niggerizing is being debased and abashed when it is not taken for granted that my out-going impulse is my right; so I often, and maybe habitually, have the feeling that it is not my street. I don’t mean that my passes are not accepted, nobody has a right to that; but that I’m not put down for making them. It is painful to be frustrated, yet there is a way of rejecting someone that accords him his right to exist and is the next best thing to accepting him; but I have rarely enjoyed this treatment.

Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael how we were niggers but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our dispositions and pass. That is, he accorded to us the same lack of imagination that one accords to niggers; we did not really exist for him. Interestingly, this dialogue was taking place on national TV, that haven of secrecy.

In general, in America, being a queer nigger is economically and professionally less disadvantageous than being a black nigger, except for a few areas like government service, where there is considerable fear and furtiveness. (In more puritanic regimes, like present-day Cuba, being queer is professionally and civilly a bad deal.) But my own experience has been very mixed. I have been fired three times because of my queer behavior or my claim to the right to it—and these are the only times I have been fired. I was fired from the University of Chicago during the early years of Hutchins, from Manumit School (an offshoot of A. J. Muste’s Brookwood Labor College), and from Black Mountain College. These were highly liberal and progressive institutions, and two of them were communitarian. Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom. Nevertheless, I am all for community because it is a human thing, only I seem doomed to be left out.

Harold Rosenberg and the late Willie Poster that my sexual behavior used to do me damage in precisely the New York literary world; it kept me from being invited to advantageous parties. I don’t know. What I observed in the ’30s and ’40s was that I was excluded from the profitable literary circles dominated by Marxists and ex-Marxists because I was kind of an anarchist. For example, I was never invited to PEN or the Committee for Cultural Freedom. Shucks! (When CCF finally got around to me at the end of the ’50s, I had to turn them down because they were patently CIA.)

To stay morally alive, a nigger uses various kinds of spite, the vitality of the powerless. He can be randomly destructive; he feels he has little to lose and maybe he can prevent others from enjoying what they have. Or he can become an in-group fanatic, feeling that only his own kind are authentic and have soul. There are queers and blacks belonging to both these parties. Queers are “artists,” blacks have “soul”—this is the kind of theory which, I am afraid, is self-disproving, like trying to prove you have a sense of humor. In my own case, however, being a nigger seems to inspire me to want a more elementary humanity, wilder, less structured, more variegated, and where people have some heart for one another and pay attention to distress. That is, my plight has given energy to my anarchism, utopianism, and Gandhianism. There are blacks in this party too.

My actual political attitude is a willed reaction-formation to being a nigger. I act that “the society I live in is mine,” the title of one of my books. I regard the president as my public servant whom I pay, and I berate him as a lousy worker. I am more constitutional than the Supreme Court.

In their in-group band, Gay Society, homosexuals can get to be fantastically snobbish and apolitical or reactionary, and they put on being silly like a costume. This is an understandable ego-defense—“You gotta be better than somebody”—but its payoff is very limited. When I give occasional talks to the Mattachine Society, my invariable pitch is to ally with all other libertarian groups and liberation movements, since freedom is indivisible. What is needed is not defiant pride and self-consciousness, but social space to live and breathe.

In my observation and experience, queer life has some remarkable political values. It can be profoundly democratizing, throwing together every class and group more than heterosexuality does. Its promiscuity can be a beautiful thing (but be prudent about VD). I myself have cruised rich, poor, middle class, and petit bourgeois; black, white, yellow, and brown; scholars, jocks, and dropouts; farmers, seamen, railroad men, heavy industry, light manufacturing, communications, business, and finance; civilians, soldiers and sailors, and once or twice cops. There is a kind of political meaning, I guess, in the fact that there are so many types of attractive human beings; but what is more significant is that the many functions in which I am professionally and economically engaged are not altogether cut-and-dried but retain a certain animation and sensuality. HEW in Washington and IS 210 in Harlem are not total wastes, though I talk to the wall in both. I have something to occupy me on trains and buses and during the increasingly long waits at airports. I have something to do at peace demonstrations—I am not inspirited by guitar music—though no doubt the TV files and the FBI with their little cameras have probably caught pictures of me groping somebody.

For Oedipal reasons, I am usually sexually anti-Semitic, which is a drag, since there are so many fine Jews. The human characteristics which are finally important to me and can win my lasting friendship are quite simple: health, honesty, not being cruel or resentful, being willing to come across, having either sweetness or character on the face. As I reflect on it, only gross stupidity, obsessional cleanliness, racial prejudice, insanity, and being drunk or high really put me off.

So I cannot take the GNP very seriously, nor the status and credentials, nor grandiose technological solutions, nor ideological politics, including ideological liberation movements. For a starving person, the world has got to come across in kind. It doesn’t. I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself, things like clean air and water, green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one’s abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfactory nooky.

A happy property of sexual acts, and perhaps especially of homosexual acts, is that they are dirty, like life: as Augustine said, Inter urinas et feces nascimur. In a society as middle-class, orderly, and technological as ours, it is essential to break down squeamishness, which is an important factor in what is called racism, as well as in cruelty to children and the sterile putting away of the sick and aged. Also, the illegal and catch-as-catch-can nature of many homosexual acts at present breaks down other conventional attitudes. Although I wish I could have had many a party with less apprehension and more unhurriedly—we would have enjoyed them more—yet it has been an advantage to learn that the ends of docks, the backs of trucks, back alleys, behind the stairs, abandoned bunkers on the beach, and the washrooms of trains are all adequate samples of all the space there is. For both good and bad, homosexual behavior retains some of the alarm and excitement of childish sexuality.

It is damaging for societies to check any spontaneous vitality. Sometimes it is necessary, but rarely; and certainly not homosexual acts, which, so far as I have heard, have never done any harm to anybody. A part of the hostility, paranoia, and automatic competitiveness of our society comes from the inhibition of body contact. But in a very specific way, the ban on homosexuality damages and depersonalizes the educational system. The teacher-student relation is almost always erotic; if there is a fear and to-do that it might turn into overt sex, it either lapses or becomes sick and cruel. And it is a loss that we do not have the pedagogic sexual friendships that have starred other cultures. Needless to say, a functional sexuality is incompatible with our mass school systems. This is one among many reasons they should be dismantled.

I recall when Growing Up Absurd having had a number of glowing reviews, finally one irritated critic, Alfred Kazin, darkly hinted that I wrote about my Puerto Rican delinquents because I was queer for them. Naturally. How could I write a perceptive book if I didn’t pay attention, and why should I pay attention to something unless, for some reason, it interested me?

The motivation of most sociology, whatever it is, tends to produce worse books. I doubt that anybody would say that my observations of delinquent adolescents or of collegians in the Movement has been betrayed by infatuation. But I do care for them. (Of course, they might say, “With such a friend, who needs enemies?”)

An evil of the hardship and danger of queer life in our society, however, as with any situation of scarcity and starvation, is that we become obsessional about it. I myself have spent far too many anxious hours of my life fruitlessly cruising, which I might have spent sauntering for nobler purposes or for nothing at all, pasturing my soul. Yet I think I have had the stamina, or stubbornness, not to let my obsession cloud my honesty. I have never praised a young fellow’s bad poem because he was attractive, though of course I am then especially pleased if it is good. Best of all, of course, if he is my lover and he shows me something that I can be proud of and push.

Yes, since I began this article on a bitter note, let me end it with a happy poem I like, from Hawkweed:

We have a crazy love affair,
it is wanting each other to be happy.
Since nobody else cares for that
we try to see to it ourselves.

Since everybody knows that sex
is part of love, we make love;
when that’s over we return
to shrewdly plotting the other’s advantage.

Today you gazed at me, that spell
is why I choose to live on.
God bless you who remind me simply
of the earth and sky and Adam.

I think of such things more than most
but you remind me simply. Man,
you make me proud to be a workman
of the Six Days, practical.

Paul Goodman, Hawkweed: Poems (New York: Random House, 1967)