Audio Interview, Fred, November 28, 1973
- BRUCE JEWELL: (Static) If you could describe something
- of the structure of the commune, and how it was conceived.
- FRED: The commune was set up on a political basis,
- originally, by people who were mainly, though
- not all, students at State University at Stony Brook,
- and people working on such projects as day care center
- and on a newspaper, which is an ongoing phenomenon
- and is still going on, and other projects.
- We were straight people, gay people.
- The gay people had previously been
- involved in gay consciousness raising sessions,
- and the straight people mainly not involved in that.
- As it turned out later, well, everyone
- was to be involved in that.
- BRUCE JEWELL: What kind of a political viewpoint
- dominated or was predominant?
- FRED: If you had to classify it, you
- would call it an anarchist perspective with just
- very definite radical political terms
- and terminology and beliefs and ideas,
- and with an activist ideology.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Did this type of overall political framework
- help bring the commune together and give it a sense of
- FRED: Yes, it did.
- BRUCE JEWELL: --communality?
- FRED: Yes.
- The need for a commune was felt after about six or seven months
- of the group's functioning together as a collective.
- And what we meant at the time by a collective
- was that whoever wanted to work on the projects
- that we did did so and brought their perspectives
- and their analyses and their ability
- to raise our and their own consciousness with them to us.
- And hopefully, it would be a give and take.
- But often as not, we found some people were tending to dominate
- and some people were tending to accept the domination rather
- passively.
- We were also into breaking down sex roles, which
- somehow never got done.
- And it wasn't a question of well, here it
- is and we're going to break it down, chop,
- and there's the ax, and--
- but how the commune came about is
- people felt it was necessary for other people to share skills,
- amongst other things.
- There was one person who did most of our typesetting
- and was really rather authoritarian and possessive
- in the use and distribution of his skills.
- And he was also a very--
- well, a person prone to sexism.
- Like a good deal of it-- when this was dismissed pointed out,
- he would say, "Yes I, agree.
- OK.
- Let's go on."
- Except we felt that that wasn't sufficient.
- So we decided to, well, form a living commune
- which would put out the paper and basically would--
- I suppose it was, in a sense, a coup, because a lot of people
- just weren't into it.
- And as it ended up, around six or seven of us
- ended up as the Red Balloon Commune,
- and the collective remained peripheral.
- We kind of took control of the newspaper and of our own lives
- together.
- BRUCE JEWELL: From what you've said,
- I gather you decided that such issues as sexism
- could be more readily handled within a communal setting.
- Is that it?
- FRED: We felt that in a non-communal setting,
- issues such as sexism and commitments
- to, well, anti-sexism were not being made.
- And they should have been made.
- But people felt that well, we can
- get that done when we don't have a newspaper to put out.
- But unfortunately, it's a part of all our lives,
- twenty-four hours a day.
- We were doing organizing a little later on with Eastern
- Farmworkers Association on Long Island,
- organizing migrants into a union wherein they had previously
- been living under totally substandard conditions.
- And people in the collective were just really feeling
- kind of liberally to the migrants-- like,
- OK, we'll strike support and we'll do this and that.
- But don't expect us to join you or feel your consciousness
- or have your consciousness expressed to us
- or try to talk about ours to you.
- And in the commune, like, we talked about that a hell
- of a lot and related to the work we were doing and each other,
- consequently-- well, I don't know which was a consequence
- of which--
- but related to one another totally differently.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Was the newspaper that you put out
- a communal effort?
- FRED: Yes, it was.
- The way the newspaper got put out--
- well, even when we were in the collective--
- was that everyone who was identified as part
- of the collective-- it was called the Red Balloon
- Collective--
- everyone had a say in what went into it.
- And everyone had an equal say.
- And we operated on a consensus and consensus minus one
- or two principle, such that-- well, I
- would go and write a paper.
- And then I'd bring it to the group.
- And I knew that that was no longer my paper.
- And I didn't conceive of it as my paper,
- so that possession was broken down there.
- People, they just tore it apart and put it back together
- in a way that was suitable and fitting.
- And the criticisms were delivered,
- and the criticisms were meant to be-- weren't always,
- but were meant to be-- constructive.
- And I think it helped both the content
- and the form of the paper.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Who was the newspaper for?
- What was your audience?
- To whom were you trying to distribute it?
- FRED: Well, the audience kind of varied, because at one point,
- we put out a paper calling for a national conference
- to recreate SDS.
- And we put out 150,000 copies.
- And then we took two weeks off from school.
- And well, we got together bread.
- And the way we got together bread was we
- sold advertisements and we, each of us,
- worked and gave a percentage of what we made for our sustenance
- to our political sustenance.
- And also, we had, well, some support from--
- that bread, we could rip off from the student government,
- which wasn't much.
- But we sent people out all over the country
- distributing the paper and getting people
- to come to the conference.
- As it turned out, the conference was a flop.
- But it was a flop only because we
- had conceived of the structures that we were
- putting together too rigidly.
- Usually, our audience, however--
- the audience that came to the conference
- came from all over the world, frankly.
- We had people from North Korea.
- And we had people from Japan.
- And we had a Provo contingent-- well,
- what was left of the Provos from Amsterdam.
- And--
- BRUCE JEWELL: I'm not familiar with that group.
- What are the Provos?
- FRED: The Provos are kind of like the Diggers
- who functioned around the late and mid '60s in California
- and Arizona, New Mexico.
- The Provos set up the government in Amsterdam.
- They had at one point gained control of the city council,
- and instituted projects like, well, free transportation.
- Like they bought or got or put together about 1,000 bicycles,
- painted them white.
- And you could use a white bicycle and leave it there.
- And someone else would come around
- and go to where they had to go.
- And this worked fine for three years,
- until well, the conservative branch
- of the government there--
- I don't know the name, I didn't speak Dutch that well--
- gained control again.
- Their projects were mainly towards well,
- implementing the power of the imagination.
- Like they adopted the 1920s Situationists' cry
- of "L'imagination Pouvoir," which means
- all power to the imagination.
- BRUCE JEWELL: (Laughs)
- FRED: And they were really a fantastic group.
- They eventually, well, were just repressed politically
- from the powers that be--
- BRUCE JEWELL: I can imagine.
- FRED: --in Amsterdam and in the Netherlands.
- And they turned into a movement called the Kabouters, which
- is still very much alive in Amsterdam and in the Hague.
- BRUCE JEWELL: OK.
- Now, the type of communal setting
- that you had there-- you had a clearly political action,
- anarchist political action.
- You worked together, pooled money together in order
- to facilitate newspaper distribution,
- and I assume the publishing of the newspaper.
- You also wrote the newspaper.
- FRED: I personally did writing and photography and poetry.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Mmhm.
- And I assume you also rented or bought
- a house to live in together?
- FRED: Well, when we were a collective, most of the people
- were living on the campus of the University at Stony Brook.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Could you define a collective?
- What is a collective?
- FRED: A collective is a non-working--
- well, it's a non-living unit which is held together
- by certain common aims and common goals,
- and usually a common personal or social or political background.
- BRUCE JEWELL: A group people who share common goals--
- you define it thusly?
- Or--
- FRED: Yeah, but it's more a political definition.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Mmhm.
- FRED: It's a definition wherein people say to one another,
- "Hey, we're not only a group of people or a mass of people
- or a social club or a partying group.
- We're a collective."
- It's kind of a way to identify a kind of way
- to get reinforcement from people, when people identify
- as just individuals, that reinforce or not reinforce you,
- or at their leisure.
- But when you've defined yourself and are functioning
- as a collective, what you tend to do
- is have people make a certain amount of commitment, which
- is a very important word, in the running of their lives
- and the running of yours.
- And it's kind of a responsibility term
- more than anything else.
- BRUCE JEWELL: OK.
- You got the collective together.
- FRED: Yeah.
- BRUCE JEWELL: And you turned that
- into a commune, which means that you would
- have a particular location where you
- live and out of which you work.
- FRED: I suppose I should explain the differences more fully.
- The way it changed our lives was that we
- had to make an economic commitment to a group of people
- who we knew previously and to whom we were--
- well, with whom we were very personally involved,
- and in some cases sexually.
- And well, what we were trying to do
- is create a unit wherein not only some people were sexually
- involved in little monogamous units,
- but where people related sensually to all the people,
- and sexually if possible.
- And we kind of knew that that was going to be impossible,
- due to the varying personalities in the commune.
- That's one way that we changed.
- Another was the fact that this was a total living unit.
- You ate here.
- You slept here.
- You related to people here.
- This, in a sense, was your family,
- except it was a family by choice, not a family by birth.
- And there was a very conscious effort and very conscious need
- from each person and for each person
- to perpetuate that family.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Did you live off the land at all?
- Or were you completely dependent upon outside jobs or money
- to buy things with?
- FRED: The money came totally from our working
- and from selling ads in the newspaper
- and from previous savings of people.
- It didn't come from, as many communes have depended upon,
- welfare checks and parental stipends and things like this.
- We were self-sufficient insofar as that is concerned.
- We did not farm.
- And we could not farm, having no knowledge
- of farming and having, well--
- BRUCE JEWELL: Were you able to settle
- disputes that arose between people
- who had different incomes?
- Let's say one person has an income of $10,000 a year
- and one person has an income of $2,400 a year.
- How do you decide who donates how much?
- FRED: Well, it was based on people's needs, basically.
- And we had talked about this and planned this out
- before we started the commune.
- The commune was a consequence of our years
- of working with one another and personally
- relating to one another or not relating
- and three months of intensive planning for the commune.
- And one of the things that we did was, at one point,
- one of our commune's members, Stephen,
- had been, for some time, expressing a desire
- to go to Europe.
- And one of the things we did was about for six months,
- we just worked and put aside a portion of the bread
- that we made that wasn't vital elsewhere
- to send Stephen to Europe.
- And I mean, it kind of operated like that.
- BRUCE JEWELL: What happened when you sent Steve to Europe?
- FRED: He didn't come back.
- BRUCE JEWELL: He didn't come back.
- FRED: And we didn't really mind that at all.
- And it wasn't a question of (audio cuts out).
- It was just a thing that, wow, he's
- finally gotten into something.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Okay, good.
- So it sounds like, as far as finances went,
- you had evened out problems.
- They weren't a great many problems about money.
- FRED: No, this is not at all a frequent phenomenon
- with communes.
- I've lived at and researched at and done a lot of things
- with many communes over a period of about four or five years.
- And most of those which I've been at or read about or heard
- about or spoken to people about, bread and sex
- and specifically monogamous sexual relations
- and gay-straight conflicts have been the main problems
- hardest to work out and hardest to get people even
- to talk about.
- BRUCE JEWELL: What kinds of--
- since your commune was both gay and straight,
- what types of problems did you run
- into in sexual relationships or any kind of relationships
- that mattered?
- FRED: Well, one person, male, who was gay,
- didn't want to relate to the males in the house,
- most of whom-- well, all except for one--
- were heterosexual in a way which, well, he felt
- would be aggrandizing to his personality,
- rather than have him repress himself.
- And I mean, at one point, he just exploded over this.
- And people generally didn't know what to do.
- And we just sat down and talked it out.
- And we talked for about a thirty-six hour period
- straight.
- And people fell out and rewoke and got
- back into the conversation.
- It was really a very strange trip.
- But he just expressed what he was feeling
- toward some of the people.
- BRUCE JEWELL: And what was he feeling?
- What was going here?
- FRED: He was feeling as though he wanted
- to have sex with some of the men in the house,
- and that some of the men in the house--
- and they weren't just saying, "Well, no, I'm heterosexual.
- Go away."
- They were, however, putting up defenses and playing
- little games that did indicate that to him,
- and did indicate that when we analyzed it to us as well.
- And well, the way we finally broke it down
- was to just set up sensitivity sessions.
- And they were based on the work we were doing, but mainly
- on the people that we were in the house,
- mainly based on what everyone was feeling
- and how people related to one another
- and to the socializations that we had been subject to.
- BRUCE JEWELL: What would lead anyone
- to believe it would be otherwise?
- That always surprises me.
- FRED: Nothing, of course.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Yes.
- FRED: Nothing.
- I mean, the thing is that I, as a heterosexual male,
- have been subject to an incredible amount
- of cultural brain damage.
- And the socialization that I've been subject to
- has been gearing me in such a way.
- Fortunately, for me, at one point, while I was growing up,
- I came in contact with and was very dear friends
- with a woman who was gay.
- And I mean, we talked extensively about this.
- So I wasn't coming from nowhere about it,
- and had thought a great deal about it previously.
- But other people in the house, to a large extent,
- and most noticeable amongst the women in the house, weren't--
- hadn't thought about the--
- well, yeah, alright we've been sexually
- socialized and culturally.
- And we relate in a certain way.
- And our brains function in a certain way.
- And we feel it's just an absolute block,
- a threatening type of thing when we're approached by someone
- who's gay and who says, "I want to bed with you,
- and I really love you."
- And the people didn't know how to relate.
- BRUCE JEWELL: What conclusions or what kind of arrangements
- were worked out?
- I'm interested to know how thirty-six hours or a hundred
- hours of talking can change that?
- FRED: It was changed in that people finally
- began to see how--
- well, straight people began to see
- how the gay people in the house were feeling
- and began to feel what they were feeling.
- And--
- BRUCE JEWELL: In what sense?
- FRED: In the sense that these straight people had
- been oppressing the gay people in the house.
- And that, I mean, there were just
- some really heavy crying scenes and some really heavy things--
- I don't do that, but you say I do that, so I must do that.
- The thing that was set up was not a--
- we tended not to deal with these things structurally.
- We tended to deal with them personally.
- People just talked.
- And it's really hard to explain.
- But suddenly, at one point, during that thirty-six hour
- period, the straight people--
- the straight men in the house--
- began to understand what the gay men were saying
- and began to question in themselves their homophobia.
- And it took a lot of time to break down.
- And there were many such sessions that followed.
- But we set up a study group just to deal
- with what differences and problems there
- were between gay and straight people in the house,
- and in society in general.
- And we invited-- since there was this tyranny of numbers
- involved, we did invite several gay people who were not
- political and weren't involved in anything
- that we were doing into the house
- to get a fresh perspective.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Well, I'm interested in hearing what kind
- of conclusions did you come to?
- People talk about homophobia.
- It's a new and increasingly stylish term.
- But what is it in day to day behavior?
- FRED: What it was to us, essentially,
- Bruce, was that it was something which
- prevented us from feeling.
- It was something which said, you have to feel this way,
- because the society is such, and it's morally or socially wrong.
- BRUCE JEWELL: But the way you just described it, it also
- had other types of behavior.
- It wasn't just prevention of a certain type of behavior.
- There was actually another kind of behavior associated with.
- Now what were people doing?
- FRED: Well--
- BRUCE JEWELL: How were their day to day actions?
- How did they-- did it involve how people touched one another?
- Was it the tone of voice?
- Was it who was assigned what types of tasks?
- FRED: There were many manifestations.
- BRUCE JEWELL: How did it manifest itself?
- FRED: Yeah.
- Well, it wasn't the tasks so much,
- because everyone shared that equally.
- And that was a problem we had previously worked out and come
- to understand in terms of male-female roles,
- but not in terms of gay-straight roles.
- BRUCE JEWELL: You were still working along the traditional
- male-female--
- FRED: No, we were not.
- BRUCE JEWELL: No, you were not.
- FRED: We were not.
- And how the gay-straight problem breaking down manifested
- itself was that the gay men no longer had
- to draw out, to evoke reactions from the straight men.
- The straight men no longer felt threatened by the gay men.
- And the straight women also no longer
- felt threatened by the gay men's presence there.
- There were no gay women in the house, unfortunately.
- In terms of actions, how did this manifest itself?
- For me, it meant that I was going--
- I was really fearful as to, well,
- just expressing any sentiment for a long while.
- And I really didn't know how to relate
- to the gay men in the house.
- And I did not relate sexually to them.
- I didn't feel turned on by them.
- And I did, however, feel very closely emotionally
- attached to them.
- Now, the difference to me at the time,
- and still now, was that I could act sensually
- with the gay men in the house up to a point.
- And they knew this.
- And they were trying to break it down and--
- BRUCE JEWELL: That's called seduction, it seems to me.
- FRED: I don't think it was seduction.
- I think it was not a domination type of thing,
- which seduction implies.
- It wasn't a possession.
- It wasn't a rape.
- It wasn't a denial of feelings either way.
- But all the time that we hadn't been talking about this,
- it was a denial of feelings for the gay men.
- And--
- BRUCE JEWELL: Well, what I'm trying to get at,
- my own experiences have been that when I tell people
- that I'm gay, generally, there are subtle changes
- in the relationship.
- Most people I know are not aggressively anti-gay.
- But the relationships change.
- Men who would normally like to touch other people
- stop touching me.
- FRED: What is said and what is done
- is just completely far afield from one another.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Yeah.
- There is situations in which they
- don't want to be seen with me, or other situations
- in which some straight men have behaved
- towards me as if it was just--
- if they wanted to get their thrills for the evening,
- I was available, like some kind of prostitute, quite frankly.
- FRED: Mmhm.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Now, these are real behaviors.
- And I'm interested in real behaviors.
- How would you describe the real behavior of the straight men?
- And how did it change?
- I think this is very fundamental.
- I can't say I really believe--
- we like to talk about emotional states
- as if they were contained inside something.
- FRED: Yeah.
- BRUCE JEWELL: I don't really believe
- in an inside and an outside.
- I think that in the organism, an emotional state
- is a behavior, the organism doing something.
- And that, in turn, affects the entire milieu in which
- the organism find itself.
- That's what I'm trying to--
- FRED: That's a sentiment which was brought up by one
- of the gay men in the house.
- And I suppose it's not an odd thing.
- But it's just very good to hear the thing again.
- And how it affected my behavior, how
- being told that I was being extremely sexist
- and being oppressive to the gay men in the house
- made me try to relate more openly to them.
- And this meant that I would not try
- to conceal the fact that I was heterosexual
- and not try to conceal the fact that--
- BRUCE JEWELL: Out of your closet, huh?
- (Laughs)
- FRED: Well, in a sense, I suppose
- you might put it that way.
- BRUCE JEWELL: OK.
- FRED: But I never conceived of myself in a closet.
- I suppose that's from experience outside of my own.
- The way I related to the gay men changed insofar as I
- was able to touch and be touched by them.
- I was able not to continually qualify what I said.
- I would make a statement to the one of the gay men,
- and then realize an implication which might be misconstrued.
- And well, that was bullshit.
- I just stopped that completely.
- And I tried to relate to each of the people there
- as a total comrade, basically.
- BRUCE JEWELL: I've found that men in general--
- particularly clear about yourself--
- are interested in intellectual matters.
- And if one states he's gay, one's intellect
- is immediately suspect somehow.
- That is, gay men are not--
- straight men do not want to be challenged
- on an intellectual level [INAUDIBLE]..
- FRED: I know what you're saying.
- I know what you're saying.
- BRUCE JEWELL: I'll give you an example
- of a survey that was taken.
- Recently, a national survey was done
- and it was found out that, oh, 78% or 80% of the population
- did not mind homosexuals being in hairdressing or floristry
- or something like that.
- FRED: (Laughs)
- BRUCE JEWELL: And the clearest and most obvious thing
- is that straight, competitive men are generally not
- in those fields.
- But in areas such as law, medicine,
- the professions, and so on and so forth,
- they didn't want to see gay men there.
- FRED: Yeah.
- It's like blacks during the Second World War.
- There was a real need for manpower,
- but when blacks volunteered for wartime defenses,
- the southern rednecks would sometimes kill them.
- BRUCE JEWELL: So it strikes me as a matter
- of competitiveness-- that straight men are not
- really prepared.
- They don't want to compete with gay men.
- And when they have to, they tend to put you down in their area.
- What I'm saying is how were the gay men treated?
- Were they treated as intellectual equals?
- Or were their views regarded as somewhat less than sound
- as those of straight men?
- FRED: Well, for a long, long, long while,
- they were treated as intellectual superiors.
- BRUCE JEWELL: Oh, really?
- FRED: Because they were able to see things
- that we weren't able to see, and that they could express it
- and could justify it and could give examples of it
- and could put it down.
- Whereas we had no idea where they were coming from.
- And we constantly went to them to ask
- them questions about this, that, and the other thing.
- And I mean, there were two gay men and two straight men
- and two straight women in the house.
- And especially the straight women went to the gay men
- and were asking all sorts of questions involving sexism,
- like well, if I relate to you in such and such a fashion,
- I mean, how do you feel?
- I don't know how you feel.
- I can't begin to see how you feel or feel how you feel.
- And the gay men were mainly considered as-- if anything,
- they were mentors of the house.