Meet the New Human Family by Jill Neimark
The gleam in Martin Duberman's eye commencement appeared in nearly 1986: why not establish a center for the study of homosexuality? The Distinguished Professor of history, who arrived at Lehman College in 1972, reasoned that, given the explosion of serious research and publication on the subject in the post-Stonewall years, the time was ripe to call for "the perks and encouragement and support and legitimacy that a university setting would provide" for the burgeoning field.
Duberman's brainstorm was also built-in of frustration. Feeling his own "illuminations" every bit the tide of Stonewall rolled in, the noted scholar of 19th-century American history and Bancroft Prize-winning biographer of such mainstream figures as James Russell Lowell and Charles Francis Adams felt an urge to indulge in a "shift in expertise."
Role of that shift was a want to explore gay history, so in the early on 1970s he offered to teach a Graduate School course on sexuality in history, his form abstract carefully worded not to frighten the horses. "There was instant consternation," Duberman recalls. "Incommunicable! It's not a recognized topic for scholarly investigation! It's not a recognized discipline!"
Disgusted, Duberman cut his ties with the Graduate Centre entirely and settled in to encounter how long it would take for the Ivory Tower to catch upward with the real world. He also got actively involved in the old Gay Academic Union, which mounted a well-attended "watershed" briefing at John Jay College in 1973.
As it turned out, Duberman and several like-minded academics had to wait almost 15 years for the prospects for a Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies—or CLAGS, as it is at present universally known—to seriously jell. The sine qua non, of form, was a change in attitude within the suites of higher provosts and presidents. And that happened, afterward a false start in which Duberman approached Yale University with a proposal to house the nation'south kickoff such center there.
Esther Newton, an early CLAGS Board director, says, "I vividly remember the meeting of our Commission for Lesbian and Gay Studies with former Graduate Center President Harold Proshansky. Having been subjected for many years at my higher to sometimes outright homophobic administrators, I was prepared for the worst. Instead, Proshansky treated the states with respect from the commencement. Without minimizing the financial and political difficulties, his attitude was: How tin we practise information technology? Thanks, Hal!" Duberman, also present, agrees: "It was stunning. Proshansky said, 'I really desire to thank you for coming to me with this idea. It's long overdue.'"
Proshansky, however, did set a bar of $50,000 in funds to exist raised in order to requite the heart fiscal brownie, and Duberman says gathering that sum "was no easy thing."
But slowly, over several years, the seed coin was gathered—sometimes from unusual sources. Joseph Wittreich, Distinguished Professor of English language at the GC and a long-time and generous supporter of CLAGS, likes to recall the chestnut of 2 CUNY graduate students dining with an elderly neighbor in San Diego and talking excitedly about the plans for CLAGS. "That human being—his proper noun was David Clarke—before long died, and a bequest from him provided some of CLAGS's seed coin. Clarke's merely stipulation, Wittreich adds, "was that, when the two graduate students were able, they should make a comparable gift."
At long terminal, in April 1991, the Heart for Lesbian and Gay Studies was formally established, and immediately began to thrive with Duberman as founding executive manager. Wittreich attributes this in part to "the unflagging commitment of those beginning board members, notably Sam Phillips, who was then university director of personnel, and the steady support of Chancellor Due west. Ann Reynolds." (The skillful offices of Phillips and Reynolds, Wittreich points out, led to the establishment of domestic partnership benefits at CUNY at nigh this time.) Duberman also acknowledges Frances Horowitz for existence "wonderfully friendly and helpful" to CLAGS throughout her Graduate Center presidency.
Two impressive declarations of conviction in CLAGS came very early on. First was a donation of more than $100,000 from Dr. David Kessler, a San Franciscan, that gave the Middle its first endowment fund. It supports the almanac Kessler Lecture, which honors "an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the expression and understanding of lesbian and gay life." Since 1992, the Kessler roll call has brought to the University such movers and shakers as Joan Nestle, Edmund White, Barbara Smith, Monique Wittig, Esther Newton, Samuel Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, John D'Emilio, Cherríe Moraga, and Jonathan Ned Katz.
Some other substantial CLAGS supporter from afar over the decade has been Honolulu resident Ivor Kraft, whose donations have fifty-fifty extended to shipments of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts (see "The Pleasures of CLAGS" sidebar).
Also in 1992 came what Duberman calls "the tremendous heave" of a $250,000 grant from the Humanities Fellowship Program of the Rockefeller Foundation. The 3-year grant—which was most unprecedentedly renewed for three more years—allowed twelve scholars-in-residence to come to the Graduate Eye betwixt 1993 and 2000. Among these (and their topics) were Jeffrey Edwards (City Politics and the Trajectory of Lesbian–Gay Political Development: S.F. and N.Y. 1969–Nowadays), Janice Irvine (A Place in the Raimbow: Cultures,Identities, and the Controversies over Teaching about Gay and Lesbian Issues in Public Education), and Jasbir Paur ({Same} Sex Tourism: Consumption, Nationalism, and Queer Human Rights).
CLAGS at present has the funds to offer fellowships and prizes of its own. Duberman has endowed a fellowship in his own proper noun which gives $7,500 annually to applicants without respect to nationality or academic amalgamation. A $5,000 CLAGS Fellowship goes yearly to scholars early on in their careers. The Monette-Horowitz Dissertation Prize honors the distinguished gay author Paul Monette and his lover (both AIDS victims), and the recently established Sylvia Rivera Award, honoring the transgender activist, will become to the best book or commodity in transgender studies.
From the early years, CLAGS has raised the profile of gay studies and facilitated national and international commutation of ideas through a monthly colloquium series, panels, and conferences. Sparks flew at ane early conference on "The Gay Encephalon," during which Simon LeVay presented his theory of a connexion betwixt brain construction and the diversity of homo sexual feelings and was sharply critiqued by such skeptics as Carole Vance and William Byrne.
One-time Lath member Oscar Montero says the "highlight of my tenure was working with Elena Martinez and many others" on ii Latino/a conferences. "Beingness around and so many committed, articulate, energetic folks was tough just tremendously rewarding," Montero says, adding, "it was keen fun!"
In March 1995, more than than 500 participated in a three-day event on "Black Nations/Queer Nations," and its many intense and passionate moments were filmed with support of the Ford Foundation. Just a month later on, 400 people with thespian tendencies were attracted to CLAGS'due south conference on Queer Theater. Among the participants were Holly Hughes, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, and Everett Quinton.
Jill Dolan, one of the Queer Theater keynoters and a leading scholar of feminist and queer functioning, became the 2d CLAGS managing director, on Duberman's retirement in 1996.
The proof of scholarship is finally in the publishing, and the influence of CLAGS members who are authors, and of CLAGS itself in facilitating research in the field, has been enormous. Duberman is practically a 1-homo Bronx cheer at that ridiculous notion of thirty years ago that gay studies "is not a discipline." Predating CLAGS was his of import Subconscious From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, which was followed by a memoir titled Cures: A Gay Human being's Odyssey; a study of the ruckus on Christopher Street, Stonewall; another memoir, Midlife Queer; and, most recently, a collection of vigorous political essays, Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion.
But, as far equally CLAGS is concerned, the jewels in Duberman's publishing crown are two titles he edited: A Queer Life: The CLAGS Reader, and the massive Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures (both appeared in 1997). The latter, which gathers together the work of countless scholars from a wide range of disciplines that were touched in some way by CLAGS, is possibly the definitive demonstration that the discipline of gay and lesbian studies is not only thriving, just hither to stay.
CLAGS also created a productive customs of gay and lesbian writers within CUNY. Allen Ginsberg, the 20th century'due south Walt Whitman and for many years CUNY Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College, was an early on supporter and was on hands for the first CLAGS fundraiser in November 1991, forth with Alice Walker.
Among many other present and past CLAGS Lath members who take published in the field are Mark Blasius (Political Scientific discipline at LaGuardia and the GC), who co-edited We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook for Gay and Lesbian Politics, and Steven Kruger (English, Queens and the GC), author of AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science. Elena Martinez, Chair of Modern Languages at Baruch Higher, is the author of Lesbian Voices from Latin America; Representacion en Julian Del Casal. And Esther Newton has to her credit Mother Camp, a study of Female Impersonators in America, and a history of 60 years in the gay customs on Burn down Isle.
James Saslow, of Queens College and the Graduate Heart, was on CLAGS's founding committee and has almost single-handedly joined the disciplines of gay studies and art history, notably with Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society and Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. Saslow is currently helping CLAGS to plan an art history conference in 2004.
Robert Reid-Pharr, newly arrived in the Graduate Heart's English program and now a CLAGS Board member, is the author of Black Gay Human being. Robert Kaplan, a CLAGS Lath fellow member from 1999 to 2001, is currently working on a dissertation with a tantalizing same-sexual practice angle: "The Federalist Papers and the Bonds of White Men in the Vision of a New Nation."
He is particularly happy that, of late, CLAGS has been focusing more attention on quality-of-life-and-learning inside CUNY. His fondest memory is of the "sunny Sat morning time in May 2000 when lx queer students, kinesthesia, and staff from around the University met for the starting time annual Queer CUNY conference to talk over the joys and travails of being out—or not out, or semi-out—on campus." It was expert to experience "exhilaration that CLAGS was outset to get more involved in the life of its home establishment," Kaplan says.
Among CLAGS projects aimed at fertilizing LGTBQ—Lesbian/Gay/ Transgender/ Bisexual/Queer—pedagogy nationally was the institution in 1995 of a systematic collection of college syllabi (it went online a few years later on). Calls from around the country about these syllabi are now coming into the CLAGS office, which is staffed by several part-time graduate students.
In 1999 two new media for the dissemination of work in the field arrived: an e-mail discussion listserv (gendersexstudies-fifty) and a book series collaboration with Due north.Y.U. Press, Sexual Cultures: New Directions from CLAGS. Jump 1999 also brought the announcement that Jill Dolan was leaving CUNY for the Academy of Texas. Alisa Solomon, a Baruch Higher professor of English language and Journalism and iii-term CLAGS Board member, was her successor. She is also the author of Re–Dressing the catechism: Essays on Theatre and Gender.
In the spirit of the founder's articulate political activism, CLAGS has oftentimes focused its energies on political and cultural issues of the moment. In response to argue over the Defense of Marriage Deed and the Employment Non–Discrimination Deed, CLAGS offered a program called "Relatively Speaking" that addressed issues of domestic partnership, kid custody, and adoption and family unit police.
In 1998 CLAGS initiated an Advancement Committee charged with strengthening the span between academe and activists. Panels were presented on the volatile politics of race and civilisation, and a roundtable on arts censorship was held apropos of the famous "NEA 4" instance that was heading to the Supreme Court. CLAGS members became involved in the defense force against attacks around the nation on LGTBQ study programs.
Fall of 1999 brought a move to new quarters in the old B. Altman building of the Graduate Center and an emphasis on more global perspectives, which reached a climax terminal Dec with a CLAGS-hosted organizational meeting—funded with $100,000 from the Ford Founda-tion—to create an International Resources Network among LGTBQ researchers. It was attended past 100 people from 35 countries.
Alisa Solomon recently announced her retirement afterwards 4 years equally CLAGS director. Her successor volition be Paisley Currah, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and long-time CLAGS Lath member, whose scholarship is on narratives of transgender identity, specially as deployed in U.S. courts. His Not the Usa of Gender is forthcoming.
Solomon sums up, "Over the last 12 years, CLAGS has produced more than than 100 public events, at which more than 1,000 people have presented their work. We have awarded some 70 fellowships and prizes, collaborated with dozens of academic, customs, and activist organizations—local, national, and international. Nosotros have conversed with countless LGTBQ researchers who have dropped by our office or sent united states of america e-mails. And we have worked closely with dedicated and brilliant board members and staff on nitty–gritty tasks and lofty ideas."
"LGTBQ Studies has grown tremendously since Martin Duberman hatched the thought for CLAGS," she adds. "The Eye is proud to have been a part of shaping and expanding the field. In today's conservative and economically hard times, we face up tough challenges—which makes our work more than important than ever."
Source: http://www1.cuny.edu/portal_ur/news/cuny_matters/july_2003/parades.html
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