Audio Interview, Peter Fisher, 1974

BRUCE JEWELL: In the gay community

for your book, The Gay Mystique, which

was published about two years ago.

PETER FISHER: Yeah, it was published in 1972.

BRUCE JEWELL: And could you tell me

something about what you intended

to accomplish with that book?

And I know it's now being used as a textbook in one

college in Rochester.

Seems to be a fairly--

PETER FISHER: It's being used in a number of places.

Basically, what the publishers, Stein and Day,

wanted me to write-- they came up with the idea of the title,

The Gay Mystique.

And then proceeded to look for somebody to write the book.

And I was in GAA at the time, organizing a demonstration

against Harper's Magazine.

BRUCE JEWELL: That was for their article--

who was it that--

PETER FISHER: Joseph Epstein.

It was a very anti-gay article.

BRUCE JEWELL: Joseph Epstein, when

he wished us all off the earth.

I think that was the one.

PETER FISHER: Exactly.

So we held a demonstration in their offices, part of which

was presenting them with several articles by gay people,

asking them to print the opposing view, which

they refused to do.

And one of the articles was mine.

And George Caldwell, who was the managing editor

of Stein and Day, saw it.

So he suggested to me that I submit an outline,

because they were interested in doing a book like that.

And basically, their concept of the book

was a book that would be written to sort of explain

the gay world to straight people.

They didn't want a thing that was merely

from the movement perspective.

They wanted a more general book that

talked about some of the myths and misconceptions

that the straight world and even many gay people

have about homosexuality.

So I tried to write a book that did that.

But I also tried to write it--

I tried to show it from a human point of view,

by writing about my own life, my own experiences.

I think so many of us gay people go

through almost a standard pattern of experiences because

of growing up in a society that has been

so negative about gay things.

I know when I was a teenager, first wondering if I was gay,

I went to the library.

And all I could find-- homosexuality

was listed under psychosis.

And the books were filled with these descriptions that

called me sick and twisted and this and that.

And it was very damaging.

And so one of my own goals was to write

a book that would sort of tell it like it is,

and a book that would be there for young people who wondered

if they were gay to read and maybe get

a less frightening and less disturbing

picture of what sexuality was about.

BRUCE JEWELL: I've sometimes found

people are remarkably insensitive to things

like those book titles.

For a long time, I felt that myself.

Like announcing that I was a homosexual would be like saying

I was a psychotic, sick, perverted deviant.

And you don't exactly tell your friends

and family things like that.

It was pretty bad.

I guess Barbara Gittings is changing

the library scene a bit.

PETER FISHER: Yes, she's been a remarkable person.

She organized a group called the Gay Task

Force within the American Library Association.

This was gay librarians who examined the books that

existed and criticized many of the very anti-gay ones that

were in libraries and criticized basically the fact

that all things that were positive about homosexuality

had been carefully screened out of most libraries.

And the Gay Task Force--

I was very fortunate to receive, to be

a co-winner of their award of the Gay Book of the Year

in 1972, with Lesbian/Woman-- along with Lesbian/Woman by Del

Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

And I think that by each year focusing on gay books

and also by providing a gay bibliography,

the task force of the librarians does a remarkable job for us.

They were the first professional association to organize.

Now there are gays organizing within the medical profession,

lawyers, sociologists, psychologists.

There are gays organizing within all professions.

And it may be that we will get employment protection

this way faster than by work on the type of civil rights laws

that we're also pushing for.

BRUCE JEWELL: Well, covering information about homosexuals

is not--

we're not the only ones, you know.

Helen Keller was a lifelong Socialist Workers Party member.

And she used to, almost every year,

deliver speeches at their rallies.

And of course this never came out about Helen Keller.

PETER FISHER: I never heard it.

BRUCE JEWELL: It was--

the medias often do a pretty effective job

of keeping the facts away from people about lives.

Though that seems to have changed.

I noticed when WH Auden died, one magazine, either Time

or Newsweek, I forget which one, did

mention that he was homosexual.

Though when they went on to talk about his lifelong interest

in freedom and justice for people and the inspiration

for his poetry and so on, they never

made any connection whatsoever.

The homosexuality was just something

that happened and had no relationship to his work

as an artist.

And I don't think that's very often true.

It's like looking at the Sistine Chapel and all

those male figures and assuming that Michelangelo's sexuality

had nothing to do with the type of paintings he painted.

Well, we've been in the gay--

PETER FISHER: That reminds me of something, in that we

had hearings just recently.

It was the third or fourth round of public hearings, third round

of public hearings on our civil rights bill

in the New York City Council.

And as usual, the testimony in favor of it was overwhelming.

Many, many prominent people from all areas, all

walks of life, all professions and everything.

But there were, as usual, a few people coming down

to testify against it, religious cranks and people

with hangups about homosexuality.

There was one man who came down and first of all,

he went through an incredible trip

of saying that ours was a love so evil that it was hate.

And that if the bill passed, America

would be taken over by psychic mutants, which

is how he viewed gay people.

But the thing that brought it to mind

was that he then went on to say how homosexuality was just

a sign of decadence.

And as an example, he used Greece and Rome.

Two civilizations, he said, that were

built entirely by heterosexuals and destroyed by homosexuals.

And that's-- everybody in the audience there in the City

Council Chamber laughed.

But there is an incredible pattern

where the gayness of, you know, major historical figures

has just been sort of hidden away

and pretended that there really weren't

any gay people in history, or that there aren't

any prominent gay people today.

BRUCE JEWELL: I'm often amazed by

the Greek and Roman business.

Because in both civilizations, so much of it, in fact,

reached its height under the ruling of homosexuals.

PETER FISHER: Exactly, and the Renaissance also--

BRUCE JEWELL: Not-- if we were going

to attribute declines of empires,

we could just as easily attribute them

to heterosexuals.

We might even think of our own country in that,

in its present period.

PETER FISHER: It was during the period

when Rome was declining that Christianity became the Roman

power.

And it was then that gay people were

put to death in the coliseums.

And it seems to me that that was a sign of decay,

rather than the gay people.

And I think that the pattern has been in history that,

when there was the freedom for wide diversity of lifestyles

including homosexuality and a flexibility,

a fluidity of roles, that these were the most creative periods,

such as the golden age of Greece and the Renaissance.

And I think that if we're really entering a period now where

gay people are allowed to exist as part of the rest of humanity

and there is that kind of freedom,

we may be going into a new period

where there will be a real renaissance and a new burst

of creativity.

I think we certainly need it.

BRUCE JEWELL: How do you--

Intro 2 is now being discussed again.

It's old Intro 475.

PETER FISHER: That's right.

BRUCE JEWELL: And the chances have seemed fairly good

for that bill to pass here in New York City.

It's gone through what--

I don't quite understand the mechanism of city government

here.

PETER FISHER: Well, the process is

that a bill gets introduced at the city council

and it's placed in a committee to be considered.

And when it's voted upon, if the committee passes on it,

it then goes before the full city council for a vote.

And the way the city council operates

in practice rather than principle,

a bill never leaves a committee unless the major powers

in the city council are behind it.

And if a bill is voted out of committee,

it will automatically pass the city council.

And no bill has failed in the city

council that was passed by committee in thirty-four years.

And so we were assuming and had been told by our people

in the political system that are helping us with this bill,

including its sponsors, that if the bill passed out

of committee, we were really guaranteed

that it would pass the council.

And it took us three years.

It was on-- no bill in the history of the City Council

has ever been bottled up in committee as long

as the gay bill.

No bill had four votes on it before coming to the floor.

But finally, we had the fourth vote just a few weeks ago.

And the bill was voted seven to one

out of the General Welfare Committee,

now to come before the full City Council.

And the stories in the press the next day

all said that, in political circles,

it was assumed that the bill would pass with no difficulty.

But a few days later, a full page ad

appeared in The Daily News, calling for a mass rally--

called by the firefighters officers union,

or the uniformed firefighters officers association,

interestingly enough, which is headed

by one of the men who was accused

of beating gays at the Inner Circle event last year.

Anyhow, the union took its funds and placed these ads

in The Daily News and in the Long Island Press, where

many firemen lived, calling for a mass rally

against the bill at City Hall.

And they had a lot of sort of ugly language

in their advertisement.

The bill would force employers to hire perverts,

expose our children to the influence of sodomites, et

cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

All typical hate rhetoric, in which

if you were to substitute the word negro or the word Jew

or the word Catholic into any of these places

instead of homosexual, it would read like a manifesto out

of Nazi Germany.

But we always encounter a little bit of this.

We were just surprised to find it so well-organized.

And then, upon the heels of that, the Catholic archdiocese

of New York, put an editorial on the front page of The Catholic

News in a long article urging defeat of the bill,

and sent letters out to all the priests in the city,

urging them to read the letter opposite of the bill

and to preach sermons urging their people to write

letters and defeat the bill.

And as a result, apparently there's

been an outpouring of hate mail into the City Council.

BRUCE JEWELL: That's practically a tradition within the Catholic

Church.

PETER FISHER: Well, yes, it's been done on abortion

and a lot of other issues.

The New York State penal code which was revised--

I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was about a decade ago,

I guess--

had removed the provisions for sodomy.

But from what I was told, the lobbying

of the Catholic Church in Albany had it--

sodomy law put back in.

That's why we still--

BRUCE JEWELL: It was a trade off--

PETER FISHER: On abortion?

BRUCE JEWELL: On abortion, yes.

PETER FISHER: And of course, this

is all in spite of the clear law which

prohibits tax exempt institutions from engaging

in political lobbying.

The Catholic Church, of course, is tax exempt.

But that hasn't stopped them from opposing our bill.

And the sad thing is that it's not the position

that all or probably even most Catholics take today.

From the surveys that have been taken,

there have been many prominent Catholics

who have supported the bill right from the start.

In addition, there are--

well, one of the sponsors, the chief sponsors

of the bill, Carter Burden is Catholic, and Meade Esposito,

who is one of the powerful political leaders

in the city, who has thrown his weight behind the bill.

And if it passes, it will be probably

because of his support.

He's Catholic, and after the diocese started this campaign,

we were very gratified to see him come forth again

and repeat that he was a Catholic.

But this was a moral position, that people have a right

to their civil rights.

And it was sort of stunning, again,

to find that religion was not on the side of a moral issue.

You know, what kind of a gap has happened in religious life

when the church is taking immoral stands

and urging discrimination against people

and promoting hatred?

It's very sad.

And, of course, it's hardest on people

who are Catholics and gay.

One person who has been working closely

with the gay organizations is Bob Carter,

who is a member of an organization called Dignity,

which is a group with chapters in many cities of gay Catholics

and also people of other faiths.

But basically, people who've been rejected

by their religion, but who do feel

they have a right to retain their relationship to God.

And there also has formed in New York

City another gay organization called Catholics

for Gay Rights.

But it's very sad.

But I think in a way, if some of these people

would read their own scriptures, or read

the simplest, basic messages about loving their neighbors

and judging not, lest they be judged,

they would probably do better than

with launching these kind of campaigns

to create a climate of morality in the country.

BRUCE JEWELL: I've heard some people comment

that here in New York City, if Intro 2 is defeated,

it doesn't seem likely that any kind of legislation

will pass within the next few years.

This would require then a whole new turn

of movement activities, a change in the outlook

of the gay movement here in the city.

What kind of turn would you foresee?

What kind of movement activity?

PETER FISHER: Well, we haven't really grappled with this yet.

It's just beginning to happen to us.

No matter what happens with Intro 2,

it's going to mark the beginning of a period of great change

for the movement and the gay community in New York.

Because the struggle for Intro 2 has really sort of given

shape to the movement here.

And if Intro is passed, we'll have to decide whether we--

what we want to do.

The original concept of why a gay civil rights

bill was needed was not so much that it would really

change things or really, you know, make things magically

easy for gay people overnight.

Nobody expects that to happen.

But it was felt that in terms of consciousness raising,

the work to pass such a bill would alert gays in the city

to their rights and to the need to stand up against oppression.

And that it would alert--

it would also educate straight society.

And I think it's having a very strong educative

and consciousness raising impact already.

If it passes, it'll be just even better.

On the other hand, maybe that's all we need--

GAA and the other groups need to do.

Maybe we can just leave it there and let the Human Rights

Commission start protecting gay people's rights,

and we'll turn to other things.

On the other hand, it may be that GAA

might want to start actively looking for test cases,

as the women's movement has done.

Once they got protection under human rights laws,

now has brought many cases against companies and agencies

that discriminate against women.

It may be that GAA or other groups

will want to start looking for cases like that

and bringing them.

But I think that another possibility that

we have to face, in fact, I think that basically we

have to consider it a probability,

is that the bill will fail because

of the opposition it has received

and the kind of fear that has engendered.

In which case, we'll be faced with the question,

do we start all over again?

I know most of us who have worked closely on the bill

feel we've been through this so many times

and really been hurt by it so many times,

defeat after defeat.

And time after time have people vote

that you're not a human being, that you're not

entitled to the basic human rights

that everybody else is entitled to--

it's a very, very painful thing to have

happen after you've put in months and years of work

and devotion towards a bill.

And the last time the bill was defeated, some of us

felt that maybe the movement in New York,

we should just turn away from it and leave it and devote

ourselves to something else that--

that maybe it was just tying us down too much

to one issue and one area of work, and that we'd done all

we could there.

And also that it had just taken too much out of us.

I don't know what will happen if it's

defeated this time, in terms of people working more.

I also don't know what will happen

in terms of the tone it gives to the movement.

I think that for four years now we have diligently and--

we've worked within the system.

From petitioning to writing letters, to going and visiting

politicians and lobbying--

of course, it took us a long time

before they would even agree to meet with us.

But we've worked and worked and worked within the system.

And time after time, at the last minute,

the promises that politicians gave us fell apart,

and the bill was defeated again and again.

People didn't show up for votes.

People changed their votes.

And the way I feel about it is that there's

a danger that if the bill is defeated, then

it's just going to sort of have made people

feel the system isn't worth working in.

I don't see the movement turning into violence because I just

don't think that that's the climate.

But I do see gay people becoming much more alienated

from straight society.

I know it's very hard to feel friendly to a society that

keeps dumping on you.

I find it very hard myself.

BRUCE JEWELL: Well, you know, I think

there is an emphasis on politics which perhaps is in a sense

too great.

The legislators and the city councilman

actually did not create the laws which discriminate

against gay people.

And now, for reasons of their own,

they're afraid to change them frequently enough.

However, the society, it seems to me, as a whole,

has not shown itself that unresponsive.

PETER FISHER: No, you're really right there.

You're right.

Because I think, in city after city,

as this kind of legislation has come up,

when the hate mongers have turned out

and started their propaganda, it has turned out

that the average citizen was pretty decent

and was not about to treat gay people that way.

And this is the amazing thing here,

which the firemen called their rally for last Tuesday.

And they were saying it was going

to be a rally of 5,000 people and that they wanted all

organizations and all people--

all straight people, they specified in the ad--

to support it and defeat this abominable bill.

So we were expecting a really hideous scene

down at City Hall.

And we had decided that we would have no--

we were not going to seek any sort of confrontation

by sending a group of gays down to demonstrate or anything.

We felt we'd just let them do their ugly trip.

But many of us did want to get down just to see what happened.

So we went down and looked around.

And it was really so refreshing.

Here was this small band of firemen in uniform,

fire officers with white hats, trying

to get people to sign their petition against the bill,

trying to give out leaflets.

And people didn't want to be bothered.

They weren't listening.

They couldn't even draw a crowd.

Finally, at the peak of it, about forty fire officers

appeared on the steps of City Hall with flags

and spoke over a microphone.

You couldn't hear a word they said.

And they marched down to the City Hall parking lot

and milled around for about a half hour.

And that was the rally.

And if they had, at a maximum, maybe 300 or 400 people--

probably half of whom were gay people

there just to see what was happening, you know?

It was just a total flop.

And so they immediately announced,

when the press was interviewing them that they had canceled it,

that that was why there was nobody there,

which was totally untrue.

And it made us all feel so good, because we really

felt that it was something that New York City could be very

proud of, that when there was a call for hate,

people didn't turn out.

And I thought it was something that the fire department could

be enormously proud of, too.

BRUCE JEWELL: You know, my feelings

are contrary to some degree to yours.

I don't-- as I said, I don't feel that people by and large,

have been unresponsive.

I don't feel there's a basis for alienation

from the general society, other than for the reasons

that other people seem to get alienated as well.

It seems to me that one of the problems the gay movement has

yet to meet at all successfully is setting up

some kind of alternative models, as we

were discussing about earlier.

And we find-- at least I find-- many of the meeting

places that gays still go to are the same things that

have been around for ten or fifteen years.

The attitudes within these places

are just as repressive as they ever were.

The general styles of social interaction

are just as unbecoming.

And this is something that gay people

could deal with, insofar as it involves relationships

among ourselves.

And as a step towards this, a certain number of us

are more or less out.

A certain number of us have demonstrated, by being out,

that you can be out without facing enormous problems.

I'm interested to know, you know,

what you think we might be doing in that type of area.

We're already getting into areas like music

again, with albums being released.

Clearly there's been a big impact here.

Sometimes you wish that some people

hadn't taken up the theme.

I'm thinking of somebody like the New York

Dolls, who are, I gather, straight,

and really no credit to anyone.

And so how do we take advantage of what is now a society which

is becoming more responsive?

PETER FISHER: Well, I don't know how we take advantage of it.

I think it's just sort of-- it's happening as a large process,

that very slowly, we're being accepted into the mainstream

of American culture.

Oh, I shouldn't say slowly, really.

I think it's--

I'm surprised at how fast it's happening in some ways.

Something like popular music--

it's so important to me there be gay music, because the songs

that are played on the radio day after day shape

the consciousness of the people who listen to them, I think.

And I think it is very important that gay people have gay music

to listen to, that they be able to tune in to a station

and hear gay music that expresses their reality

and their consciousness and their experiences,

and not just in the guise of heterosexual terms.

So many beautiful love songs that have become old standards

were written by gay people about people they loved and yet they

were always assumed to be--

they were always taken in a heterosexual context.

BRUCE JEWELL: One of the things that I

find saddening is that there are a great many writers

and playwrights in this country who are gay.

More and more of them are coming out.

And yet they're really still writing

for a heterosexual audience.

And I think there's a big difference between gay people

who write or do work for heterosexual audiences

and gay people who are doing it--

doing their artistic activities for gay audiences.

It shapes-- I find usually that the material that

comes out for straight audiences is, to my mind, unsuccessful.

And in fact, usually fails to convey very much of what

gay life is really like.

You have to speak to people who you assume

have some understanding of what you're speaking about in order

to really say very much.

And I'm wondering, here again, if we can't look forward

to more activities, theatre, literature.

There has been some literature.

There was a book-- what was it called The Lord Won't Mind.

It was a perfect piece of trash, as a matter of fact.

It was pro-gay, but still--

it was trash.

PETER FISHER: It presented a world that was so unreal.

BRUCE JEWELL: Yeah, it was just incredible.

And that was on the best seller list,

I think, for weeks and weeks.

PETER FISHER: If it had said the Lord won't mind if you're gay,

it wouldn't have sold, because gay people would

have been afraid to buy it because the word gay was on it.

And this is one, you know, the oppression works two ways.

For one thing, straight business people, publishers,

music people in the music industry,

promoters, whatever, don't want open gays,

or haven't until very recently.

They wouldn't go near an openly gay person for any sort

of artistic endeavor.

And the other thing is that gay people themselves,

for fear of being thought to be gay,

have often shunned anything that was openly or proudly gay.

And it's a real shame, because there's so much

gay talent that has just been--

BRUCE JEWELL: Well, I--

PETER FISHER: --stranded.

I've seen like several gay cultural ventures here

in the city have just folded because no financial backing

could be gotten.

Everybody's working on a volunteer

basis, people writing for magazines,

nobody getting any pay.

And yet you couldn't find a single gay businessman

or businesswoman in this city-- you have so many successful

gays in it--

who would put anything behind it.

Venture after venture has gone under like this.

There are a number of really fine gay plays

and musical revues around which should get a wider hearing,

which should be recorded.

And I think that there are a lot of wealthy, closeted gays

who are afraid to go near it for fear

that somehow it will rub off on them.

And it's a shame, because these people are probably

in a better position than anybody else

to be out of the closet.

BRUCE JEWELL: I don't know.

It's difficult for me to say what's going on.

Or even-- there was, in Rochester at the Kodak,

a gay play was put on at the Kodak buildings there.

And it played for two days, a Saturday and a Sunday,

and it was absolutely packed.

It was put on by Kodak employees.

I guess they were gay Kodak employees, which

is very interesting.

Here the company is actually supplying

the facilities for the production of a gay play

by gay men.

PETER FISHER: That sounds like a first, as far as I know.

BRUCE JEWELL: And it was packed, you know.

It went over very well.

I've often been surprised, though,

that for example, gay organizations have never

really opened up, let's say, a gay bar.

We know that that's a service that gay people use.

Yet I have noted that Bruce Feller and some other people

from GAA opened up a restaurant, and it's

turned into a place where Westchester matrons come to--

PETER FISHER: Oh, not at all.

It's a lovely place.

It's a very mixed--

you have gay people and straight people.

I think mostly-- it's more from the Soho area than Westchester.

The times I've been there, we've just

loved the whole feeling of it.

That's one of the few gay ventures

that seems to have gotten off the ground.

But in terms of opening up a bar, this is a kind of problem

that GAA grappled with.

Because we felt very much, say, back in the first two years,

and most of us still feel very strongly,

that the movement provides alternatives and should

provide alternatives.

It provides all sorts ways for people

to meet each other aside from having to stand packed in a bar

or get loaded before ever getting to know one another.

And for a lot of people, like myself,

who don't feel comfortable, don't

know how to go up and strike up a conversation in a bar,

it's much easier to get to know people

within the movement at meetings and cultural events and things.

It's providing that.

But in terms of providing an alternate,

providing a good version of the bars, that's been really hard.

GAA thought that its dances could, you know,

be a good positive alternative to the bars.

And that was one of the reasons for getting the Firehouse.

Once we had the Firehouse, we had a rent to pay,

which meant we had to hold the dances every single week

and had to make such and such an amount of money

on them, which meant that we had to ask a donation

rather than have them be free.

It also meant we had to run them in such a way as

to draw a big enough crowd to make money to pay the rent.

And so the dances became more and more indistinguishable

from the way the bars were.

They became packed.

They became less and less human, less and less,

you know, the kind of thing that we had

wanted to be an alternative.

And I fear that the same sort of thing

would happen with an attempt to open a liberated gay bar.

I think somehow, I don't know.

It's really hard to run a money making proposition

without, you know, closing off a lot of the alternatives

you want to keep.

One place that has been rather successful in this

is a gay bar in midtown in Manhattan called

Brothers and Sisters, which was started by a number of people

who had been in the movement and on the fringes, people

connected with the theater, people who are now involved

in a group called The Other Side of Silence, which is doing

some very, very creative, fine things about gay people now.

But they formed this bar, and it has been--

it has a very nice sort of feel to it.

It's been a place where gay women and men mingle.

Which is kind of rare in New York City, where

most of the bars are either--

most of the bars are men's bars and a very few of the bars

are women's bars.

BRUCE JEWELL: Peter, I know you're interested in the phases

that movements go through.

Sociologists have outlined some of them,

and we can observe them ourselves

as people who have been active in one movement or another.

What kind of phases do you think the gay movement

has gone through, is going through,

and can look forward to?

PETER FISHER: Well it's really--

it went through an initial stage where

there were a few organizations working very quietly sort

of behind the scenes.

The early Mattachine Society was really revolutionary

for its time, but it was a much more quiet operation

than gay organizations are today.

It worked behind the scenes providing legal services

and attempting to use educational means

to change society.

And with the Stonewall rebellion in 1969,

the movement really entered a new phase of activism.

It started off with GLF, the Gay Liberation Front, militantly

visible, politically committed.

And in the course of the next year,

GLF spun off the Gay Activist Alliance,

which was also militantly visible and political,

but it was a single issue organization.

The Gay Liberation Front had basically

been working on the theory that all minority groups had

a common struggle and so that the gay fight, the gays

should align themselves with other struggles.

What ended up happening, at least

in the opinion of many people, was

that although gays turned out in support of many other issues,

none of the support was returned.

And gay people were usually left off the lists

of oppressed minorities--

blacks, women, Chicanos, Indians, I mean,

you can tick them off down the list.

But they never quite got to gay people, or if we were included,

we were always the last on the list.

And when there were rallies, nobody

wanted to have gay speakers speak along

with the other ones.

So there was a feeling that the gay movement

needed to at least go through a period of being a single issue

movement, where we worked on our own issues,

on issues concerning homosexuals,

and we didn't focus on other issues.

Of course, and so, an organization like GAA

was formed, which was a single issue organization.

And its members could participate

in other political causes outside of the framework

of the organization, but the organization itself

was only to work on issues affecting gay people.

And that gave us the kind of focus, I think,

that made successful activism possible.

And I think it launched the era we're now

seeing all across the country of gay activism.

You see it in major cities virtually in every state,

in every single state.

You see it on the campuses of most large universities.

And the single issue concept is very strong in the country now.

Some groups adhere to it more firmly than others.

But I think that era will eventually pass.

I think the era of activism will eventually pass

and there will probably a quiet era.

When you think of the gap in time between feminist work

at the turn of the century and throughout the century,

then the real rebirth of the women's

movement in the last decade or so.

We may have a long period of quietness also.

I don't know.

I think that today movements evolve and grow and die

and are reborn much faster because of the operation

of the mass media.

I think we've gone through stages

of getting into the media a lot faster than earlier

civil rights movements.

I think we'll also probably, you know, evolve and pass

on to another stage faster, too.

One possible direction that I think we'll eventually be going

is based basically on the way I perceive the world.

I think that one of the major problems facing the world

is overpopulation.

And that if the world is not to become just a nightmare,

we're going to have to come to grips with that problem.

We're already on the brink of very terrible famines

in the coming years in Africa and other parts of the world.

We have a terrible imbalance in the distribution

of wealth and resources.

And every year the population increase goes on,

it's just going to be made worse.

I think that what will have to come

will be a reinterpretation of the nature of sexuality.

So that sexuality is not viewed primarily

as a reproductive function, but rather

as a social one, an expressive function.

And I think that gay people and other sexual minorities

will necessarily have to get their rights as this new view

of sexuality comes in.

For that reason, I think that the gay movement

or the gay cause is intimately and theoretically and basically

linked to women's liberation, to other movements, conservation,

ecology, zero population growth.

I believe that ultimately--

and really also-- but really in the very near future-- already

we're working very closely with the other minorities in city

politics.

There isn't anything like a common front,

but we are now beginning to get support

from black politicians, Puerto Rican politicians.

The women's movement that has been

very supportive of the gay movement recently.

It started off initially with a lot of fear about gay women

and purges of lesbians.

But I think that by and large they've gotten past that.

They've been very, very helpful in organizing hearings

and the testimony that we've had in relation to our bill,

and they've been supportive in other demonstrations

and other programs.

I think that the two movements are very, very

basically linked.

It's--sexual freedom for women and for gays are inseparable.

But we're still at the point where, for example, GAA

is a single issue organization.

And NOW is a feminist organization.

And the issues have not merged together.

But I think in the long range, they may.

BRUCE JEWELL: Do you think, if we do have a quiet period,

then this might provide an opportunity for more grassroots

work within our own people?

The gay movement came very suddenly.

I'm not really sure that we have ever

been too successful at explaining issues

that exist to gay people.

One of the comments that I've often heard

is, well, it's my private life.

And I don't want to involve myself

with my private life in public matters.

Actually, the underlying tone there

is that the person is afraid of his private life.

In fact, it's not a private life--

PETER FISHER: Or that it's a separate compartment, isolated

from the whole rest of their existence.

BRUCE JEWELL: But it's really not a private life when

you have to be afraid of it.

Privacy is something that has to be built.

When it isn't existed, then you become afraid

of your activities.

And that is the tone I get to those types of comments

about "my private life," that it's really not private

because they're afraid that it will become

a basis for other types of action, their work or something

like that.

PETER FISHER: Well, I don't think that the movement will

become quiet all of a sudden.

I think there are many years of gay activism left.

It's still working itself out all across the country.

I think that the era of gay activism

will probably be over when the sodomy laws have been repealed

in the states of the nation and there are fair employment

laws protecting gay people, human rights

laws protecting gay people throughout the country.

But I think that what we move on to then

is what you're talking about, which is the need

to translate these political changes into a much more

meaningful change in the kind of situation

gay people live in, the way gay people perceive themselves,

to bring these changes home to the gay population.

And I don't think politics can do that.

At least, that's been the experience in New York.

The movement has touched only a tiny part

of the gay population.

And that lots of--

not that-- I shouldn't say that there

haven't been some influences.

But most gay people don't identify with the movement,

don't identify themselves as open homosexuals.

And I think that that won't happen.

You won't find people coming out in large numbers

and adopting proud, self-confident lifestyles

until there have been cultural changes.

And this is why things like gay music, gay literature,

gay films, all these different gay ventures

are very, very important.