Stonewall Triptych

When the four principal characters of Adam in the Morning, who are, many of them, connected through a local repertory production of The Tempest, come off what is for them a world-transforming moment, they sit on the roof outside Bo’s bedroom window and watch the sun go down, talking, considering what they want the world to be like now. They’ve fought the New York cops to a standstill for two nights running, even if they don’t know what they want yet.


Bo and Andrew, who are lovers, have been experimenting, since they first met in a class on What is a man? at Alternate U on 14th Street. Andrew had said in that class, “The gender roles most of us have been taught enslave us to ways of thinking and acting that aren’t native to us. We want to be free. I want to be free, but I am not free, and that is why I am here at this class. I want to be in a room with other men, and I want to talk about how it feels, not to be free.” This suggests their method: ask questions, discuss possibilities with each other, take risks, reject the orthodox, see what works. 

But this isn’t easy, and Bo shows how hard it is. It is really natural to want the other man to make a promise. “I don’t know. I think it is hard because I want to control the future, be together always, have this always. I want you to promise me that this will never change.” They resist the effort, because it is their freedom that defines them.

Bo and Andrew gather friends, an actor who plays Caliban in The Tempest, another who plays Ariel, a woman, Belle, who wants a baby, and a street kid, who hasn’t had a home since she was kicked out when she was thirteen.

They press on. They have another night of fighting the cops, and then they have huge questions to answer. How are we to conduct our relationships now? What do we attack first, the NYPD? the SLA? the federal government? Or do we attack the idea of monogamy?

What we see, during the five days of the Stonewall Riots, is four men and two women beginning the process of constructing a new world.

Barney Frank thinks gay marriage is a wedge issue for the Democrats, and ABC reports that 52%  are in favor of gay marriage. People say this is a water-shed moment for gay people.

So, we sleep well at night, believing as we do that if you hang in there long enough, the worm turns. Has this worm turned? What are the first signs?

If the goal is to get to a politically-protected class for gay people, then that worm does seem to have turned. There are high-profile indicators, DADT the best one. Gay marriage would be another. The lifting of all inequalities in the INS is another.

But the bigger goal is to get to a point where we don’t have serious need for protection, that is, when we are more fully accepted. How close are we to that? An indicator would be the decline in the anti-gay violence statistics. Short of that, we are given polls regularly. What do people think, first, about the various laws and regulations which delegitimize gay people, and then about the more difficult-to-measure issues like attitudes. How do they feel about us?

What is happening here, I think, is the gradual getting-into-alignment of our legal system and our biological and social reality. This is true: our choice of gender object is not a significant factor in defining who we are for the legal system, but right now it still matters a lot to a lot of people, how many we don’t know. And of course it matters to us. At some point down the road, it will be possible for us to look at the kinds of differences we bring to the table—everything the gay community has learned about marriage, for example, during its several hundred years in the wilderness—and to see how much respect those differences are given when we begin to talk about them. We are not near there yet.

I read it again last night on Towleroad. The story is about Adam Lambert’s track “Aftermath” and quotes Adam’s words “about finding the courage to be honest with yourself.” We hear this so much that it doesn’t raise any comment. We even say this, without thinking what it means. The language—the courage to be honest with yourself—has been around since the earliest days of gay liberation, and it means that, if you had courage, if you were honest with yourself, you would come out now. This implies that the person you’re speaking to is not being honest with himself, and the only possible meaning for that is that this person is pretending to himself that he is not gay.

I don’t know anybody like that. I think people who hear lines like this know well enough that they are gay. Their question is What do I do about it? For many people, perhaps for everybody, doing something about it means dealing directly with a dangerous world—in your family and in your community—and that is what is problematic. A kid may not be old enough or strong enough to deal with that dangerous world. Even older boys and men or girls and women could get killed out there or could become so stressed by what is out there that he or she wants to kill himself or herself.

If you had courage. If you were honest. Even though we hear it everywhere, this is totally inappropriate language to apply to teenagers who are struggling and who deserve our support.

There are two great areas that are subject to the changes brought by the ebook. First, we now have the ability to publish books without moveable type and without paper, which means we don’t need the elaborate methods of shipping and storage that paper books need. We also don’t need warehouses, distributors, booksellers in their stores, and paper journals and reviewers. Second, and this is a consequence of the first, we are now liberated from the control of the publishing houses, for now we can buy our books directly from the writer herself, without an intrusive intermediary.

For gay people, these transformations are stupendous. During the last forty years, New York publishers have gradually narrowed our reading to a small range of subjects, and gay people in consequence have stopped buying gay books. A gay man, a “finder” for a literary agent, wrote me last summer that the market for gay literature has “vanished.” I don’t think gay people are any less interested in gay literature than they used to be, nor are they any less intelligent, but I do think that their refusing to buy gay fiction is a result of the damage that publishers have wreaked on our literature in the last forty years. There is just not a lot of interesting fiction out there.

But now we are free. A writer can write the book he wants to write and, with a minimum of expense, can reformat the book into ePUB or DOCX, thus making it readable on all ereaders. We know how to put these books on the web, and we will find on the web the books we want to read, and sites will grow up to provide us with reviews of new ebooks. This will happen because the ebooks will be there, and the readers will be there, and the need for a site for reviews is already extant, so we will have them.

What we see right now at the beginning of 2011 is the old publishing model trying to retain its old power over the publication of books. Random House just made the news signing a contract with Apple to present its books on iBooks. Neither Random House nor Apple understands the future like we do. We already know we can buy books from anybody. And Apple and their iPad are going to learn to sell books by any writer, too, and not just those under contract with Random House. Any book by anybody. We don’t have much to wait for, either. Certainly not as long as Johannes Gutenberg. I don’t suppose paper books will completely go away, nor will bookstores for the purchase of paper books. But I suspect they will gradually come to be seen as a niche market, there for a certain kind of book or a certain kind of collector. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the future is already here.