Get Used to It: Ep. 59, "Voices of Our Lives: John D'Emilio"

what [Music] so [Music] hi i'm sheila kuhl welcome to get used to it glad you're back with us for another episode uh today we're very very fortunate to have as our guest john dimigio who is a writer and historian about our community about our history internationally published probably the best known historian although i'm sure there are some others that might vie for the title certainly my favorite historian and a man of really fine intellect and i think great acuity in terms of helping us figure out what's going on these days in terms of our community being suddenly in the middle of the griddle at everybody's attention and many of us without a great deal of knowledge about our own history as a community john has published several books two of which i'll tell you about later but john very very happy you're here i'm glad to be here a long plane ride a long drive and here you are but i made it yes and i'm so glad you did um we are a community often without much sense of our own history though i have a hunch that many people watching the show would have read your name and said i think i read an article wasn't there something in this publication a review of other people's books i know you've done um how did you start out though one doesn't isn't born and historian i think of little boys going gee i think i want to be an historian when i grow up yeah no actually i wanted to be a priest when i grew up but but things got in the way yes really no i uh well you know i went to college in the 60s i grew up in new york city i was at columbia during the height of all of the protests in the 60s the the war uh you know black pride black power um and there was something about those times that were really tremendous and i was very involved in anti-war stuff and i went to graduate school in part because i didn't know anything about the history of this country somehow or another and got through college didn't know anything about u.s history and i figured that i couldn't make sense of what we had been going through if i didn't know some history and so i became a graduate student just at the time that stonewall early gay liberation in new york was percolating and erupting all over the place and at some point early on in my graduate school career my life intersected with gay liberation and it did it in a way that involved other men and women who were either university professors or graduate students like myself or librarians and we came together with the sense that it must be possible to use the skills the intellectual skills of the academy to further the liberation of gay men and lesbians and those early meetings of what was called the gay academic union back then were so exciting it was like like the world just opened up in a completely new way and i knew that everything that i was learning as a historian somehow or another i was going to turn to understanding the gay liberation movement and the struggles of gay people for freedom better and what do you learn as an historian i think before we talk about the content i think it's kind of interesting to try to understand it seems to so many of us that history is written by the winners and so we we learn something you know k through 12 then we go to college and we kind of unlearn it because it turns out that the civil war was fought for an entirely different reason than the one we had been told you know in our little big print history books um what what does it mean to to write history yeah well i mean you know history people fight over history you know people fight over the meaning of the confederacy they fight over the enola gay and the smithsonian uh in washington dc for me history is about two things one is that whatever you're studying history is a story of change you know that is like for me that like the single most important truth of history and for me as a gay teenager kind of coming to struggle over all of this that was happening to me knowing that the world changed was a really important thing to know because if things changed it might not always be the way it was for me right now so i mean that's actually the birth of my love of history it's just knowing that if you study history you're really reading about things that are different than the present which means the future can be different from the present as well i think for for gay men and lesbians especially because we don't grow up in a gay and lesbian community and a gay and lesbian culture history has an another kind of special meaning it's it's we can look to history for the memory that our families don't give us and you know even before some of us started writing gay and lesbian history in the 70s and 80s there was an oral history tradition within our community you know when younger men and women came out uh the generation before them would tell them stories about what it was like for them and that's a kind of history but what some of us have been doing over the last 20 years and at an accelerating rate is really devoting ourselves to uncovering a history and it's a history that can be inspiring it's also history that can be disturbing it's a history that's complicated it's not a simple story of you know great heroes like the people you have you know here uh it's you know it's it's interesting and i think it's vital for our community's future so here you are in the 60s and we're in a time when we're we were kind of rejecting other people's what we had been told a lot about history which was also telling us what america was and we were being told love it or leave it mostly leave it because or line them up against the wall and we'll shoot them because they're saying things different than what we want to hear um you're in the middle of discovering uh that there there is a group of people interested in this gay liberation is beginning my impression of history is that you write something that you've concluded about was it possible in the middle of the beginning of something to write about it or did you have to look pre-stonewall in order to begin to conclude about your life in post stonewall right uh god you ask good questions that's what that's um well the interesting thing about doing gay history in the 70s when i started and and i consider myself very fortunate to have started when i did is that we didn't know any and so there was we had preconceptions we had a lot of mythologies actually uh in the in the early 70s about gay history and the mythology was that it's only a story of oppression and there isn't much history back there to find um you know and i and you know other folks like jonathan katz and joan nessel and alan beraby i mean we knew that this couldn't be true that there had to be a history back there to be found and what i was particularly interested in i you know i wasn't going to do the whole shebang here i was involved in gay liberation the common wisdom was that a bunch of drag queens riot in greenwich village in june of 1969 and out of nothing gay liberation and something told me that that couldn't be the whole story i mean movements do not just spring into existence out of nothing overnight and so i went in search of the you know what happened before stonewall now i'll have to admit to you that when i went in search of what happened before stonewall i didn't actually think that enough had happened before stonewall for it to be a whole book it was just going to be part of a book and then i would go the rest of the way from stonewall to the present but the excitement of doing this research was to realize oh my god there is a whole story to be told that has an integrity completely its own about what happened before stonewall and i'm actually only going to tell part of it i can't i can't tell the whole history i will just tell one piece of what happened before stonewall and what piece did you choose to tell or talk about i wanted i told the piece that was about those gay men and lesbians who said we need to organize in order to make change we need to form organizations reach out to a public and in whatever ways we can challenge the prejudices the oppression the discrimination the lies that are everywhere about us so it's really the pioneering generation of gay and lesbian activists that i i went in search of and the uh your conclusion then about sort of post stonewall i mean is that a real dividing point for us or i mean symbolically it is certainly and i know that people feel there began to be more organizing more understanding of the commonality of issues although it took women and men a little bit of time i think to see that commonality yeah you know it's very funny i mean i wrote the book by the time i had done the research i wrote the book for the purpose of saying the short theme would be it didn't start with stonewall okay but because i stopped the book with stonewall there's a way that unintentionally you can read the book and still come out of it and think well there is a pre-stonewall history but then stonewall happens and that's when the real stuff gets going and i actually don't think that's true i think stonewall was an eruption and after stonewall something is very different but after stonewall many things are still the same that there's there's a continuity from the early 60s into the 70s even as there are certain kinds of breaks that stonewall and gay liberation lesbian feminism create you um you have used a phrase leaping and creeping talking about movements um tell about that well you know we have 50 years now of gay and lesbian politics in the united states it's pretty most people don't realize but that's pretty amazing i mean that's a long enough period of time now to actually speculate about patterns and one of the things if i look at the story from the late 40s when things are just getting started through now the late 90s half a century later it's very clear that the pace of change and the way change occurs is not uniform that independent of what people might like to have happen you can see an alternating cycle in terms of the growth of a gay and lesbian movement and of social change around gay and lesbian issues of leaping and creeping we have these short periods where things come together the way they did around stonewall the way they did in the late 80s because of aids and act up and the march on washington and things like that when in a very short period of time the world seems to change you know you wake up and things are different and then in between and that's really dramatic and it's exciting and some of us live for those moments right but in between there are long period longer stretches in which not much seems to be happening in which we are just creeping along and it's a lot of boring tedious work that isn't dramatic at all and the two things have a close relationship to one another i mean how you creep has an effect on what kind of leap you'll be able to take when the right moment is there so and you can't force i don't think you can force a leap into existence and but well it's sort of like i was thinking of pole vaulting for some reason when you were talking how you have to get the footwork just right on the way though that's not exactly creeping because one is running but still to get that at exactly the right place to take off and i um i i that was an image that came i understand and then you kind of just leap and something big happens it's also i mean i'm i'm also interested in the intersection between our history and what i guess i i would call without much knowledge american history um in um and actually this is a question i didn't ask you when we were talking before but um david garrow wrote um who who wrote the biography of martin luther king and i think won the pulitzer prize for it wrote his next book was called liberty and sexuality right and one of the things although it was it was a giant mosaic of things which i didn't see a real editorial voice in just presented to let you come to your own conclusions about stuff but one of the things that struck me was that it seemed as though until three institutions in america start taking up a more balanced notion of a community things do not move forward and of course in his book as many have he was drawing a line along the anti-contraception pro-contraception anti-choice pro-choice and then a little bit our community the non-reproductive sex line rather than the equality and civil rights line but it seemed like until the press the pulpit and the law begin to reflect a little more of our point of view that you don't see a great sea change in public opinion and i assume that you would say we have seen yeah a great change in public opinion what would you attribute yeah there i mean talking about leaping and creeping actually public opinion is one area in which the shifts have tended to be very slow and it's a kind of slow accretion of change and there may be a moment in time where the polls just change because like a gaze in the military story or something like that but actually that isn't permanent it's you it's still it's it's a slow accretion of change i i think the way public attitudes have changed over the last generation is that there is more of a willingness to live and let live around gay and lesbian people and and people shouldn't be penalized for the way they are there isn't a next step of welcoming and embracing now i don't know if we'll ever get to the welcoming and embracing stage i'm sure we will actually i don't know when it'll be but but that kind of shift has not does not seem to have occurred there are pockets of people you know where where there's more dramatic change but uh but on the other hand if you think about what life was like during the mccarthy era in this country when there were active persecutions all the time by the full force of the government the notion that lots of americans now think live and let live this is their business that's a pretty big change and it's also very threatening um i guess depending on whether people are watching this show in its first run or in a re-run we are either having a current situation in washington or one that has been resolved and we don't know at this moment when we're making the show right kind of what will happen but one thing that struck me john about this a whole brouhaha about the president and in the larger sense the the notion that the right wing has tried to lay out for the country to buy relates to simply defining morality as what sexual behavior you engage in period and you know like a magician saying please only look at this hand while i am over here in other things that others might call morality or immorality having to do with you know hungry children or the the split between poverty and riches or how we treat people in the country it seems to me they've really tried to focus in and that our community has been a major target and i think a somewhat useful tool for them in terms of saying let's focus on this they're immoral because we say they're immoral because they're about sex and the way they do it is immoral and that's the intersection with american history i'm also thinking about we are pretty much defined by our sexual behavior aren't we um it depends who's doing the defining actually that's a really complicated question yeah i know we've got time unpacked it's it's i think well there's there's a rabid anti-gay social group out there that's often associated with fundamentalist religion although it's not entirely that that that defines us entirely by our sexual behavior and and that defines that sexual behavior as immoral and threatening and subversive of all that is good and necessary in a healthy society in a moral society i actually don't think i don't know how i would anyone would even know this but i don't think most gay men and lesbians primarily identify themselves by their sexuality it's more complicated than that it's like sex is caught into a much larger framework of affection and intimacy and love and the relationships that constitute our family in the broadest sense of the word it also has something to do with gender and the fact that we you know because we're same-sex couples rather than opposite-sex couples a lot of us but not all of us have a different angle on gender and you know i mean some of the best humor that comes out of our community from both men and women in the community is usually their ability to play with notions of gender i think it's all those things together that help you know that define for ourselves what it is to be gay and sex is a part of that but it's one of the parts um well in terms of them we define ourselves in some ways in some ways we don't we say i will not be simply defined by this although i know that changes over time when i was in working as a associate dean of students during the early days of the second wave of the women's movement it became important to young women when someone would say tell me three things that you are they would start out by saying i'm a woman and i know in my generation if you had said when i was in college in the 50s tell me three things you are i would not have started out by saying i'm a woman it was not a consciousness about gender even though there was much more oppression in those days i would say you know i'm uh whatever my sorority or i'm a bruin or you know i'm a english major or things that would define me by what i did um and so we define ourselves but then it seems to me that the tool used against us i guess what i'm asking is in their defining us only about sex and saying morality itself is only about sex seems to me that they use us to serve a larger right-wing agenda right well that i would agree with entirely i mean i think i mean one of the things that's well if we sidetrack to the other drama in america today you know the white house clinton congress it's this is one it's a wonderful example of something that is about sex and is not at all about sex it's sex proved to be the achilles heel of the man but he was being targeted long before sex had anything to do with you know his presidency and in this in a in a different way i mean we get targeted because our sexual behavior falls in that non-procreative you know a non-responsible non-reproductive vein it seems therefore to be completely about sort of pleasure and self-absorption to those who attack us it's those who are attacking us these days are claiming the bible as their text that allows them to say what's wrong with who who we are and what we do but and they whip it helps to whip up a fervor that has created kind of electoral majorities in not only congress but in legislatures around the country and governor's mansions but then if you look at what this new conservative movement it's not so new anymore but this right wing has done actually much of what they've done has not been about gay and lesbian because actually over the last 25 years even as their power has increased it's become easier to be gay and lesbian mostly what they've done with the power that they've gathered partly by attacking us is to move the country more generally to the right make the distribution of wealth worse uh make this a country that's completely about market forces that's about greed that's um and scapegoat lots of other people scapegoat single mothers a sexual connection again uh scapegoat immigrants um you know if you look at some of the rhetoric about immigrants they don't it isn't about sex directly but their children are milking the resources of the state you know they have too many babies you know that's what the right wing would was sort of hint at so sex weaves its way in and out of this conservative movement whose achievements have often been about economics and about a more basic economic inequality it's quite interesting actually well i guess that's what i mean by the you know the watch this hand because we're really talking about them and and the yuck the sort of high yuck factor that we have at this particular moment in time and other uh problems or concerns have had a high yuck factor i mean even contraception it was interesting to me to to find out that the the man in the connecticut legislature in the late 19th century who was responsible for drafting the first anti-contraception law was pt barnum oh you're kidding he was elected to the connecticut legislature and was the chair of the morality committee temperance and morality and thinking that temperance wasn't simply enough he'd have to define morality as again having to do really with the control of reproduction but also making certain that there was plenty of it and of course no one knew when he said a sucker is born every minute he meant to make sure of it right no contraception there will be lots of suckers and of course and the first person to break that law in connecticut was catherine hepburn's mother i think you know history i know nothing but sort of cocktail party conversation but um the the sort of the interesting piece of how things flow along and how your attention is focused in america on an issue and then we'll move on and i very much agree with what you said about the right wing and you know i mean one of the actually in in terms of thinking about the history of sexuality and and specifically about us but not just about gays and lesbians i mean one of the tragedies i think of the present moment you know that we're living through is that the anti-sex anti-gay anti-feminist all of this stuff has become in the popular mind across the spectrum associated with religion and if you look back in time that hasn't always been true for instance in the 40s and 50s when there was you know an intensification of of homophobia and gay and lesbian oppression it wasn't religion that was primarily perpetrating it it was the government under um the label of like national security and fears about subversion it had no religious basis to it at all there have been other periods in american history where religion actually has been of the the primary force moving us in the direction of progressive social change in the decades before the civil war it was a religious impulse that led many people to the abolitionist crusade and other kinds of reform movements and part of what is so offensive to me both individually and as a historian who has a kind of this longer view is how successfully a religious right wing has completely claimed the mantle of religious authority for themselves and not religious authority in 1998 and 1999 but as if it's been for all eternity and it just ain't true you know well it's one of the interesting things about majority about which i've learned a lot uh being in the legislature you know the the law is what the majority says it is not a you don't need a unanimous verdict right and they've managed to accrue a majority in so many churches which has a very articulate minority on our side uh whether it has to do with issues of our commitment ceremonies or marriages or or our ordination uh in the various churches um so but it's so this is a thing then that we we need to learn i guess from history because if we focus too much on religion organizations and religion as the problem uh isn't it true we may miss something i mean like take the government for granted they're the good guys or whatever and we may miss the capacity of religion to be a really progressive force in society something that provides uh not simply a meaning that revolves around exclusion and hatred and anger and and division but religion is a force that actually has been very constructive in the lives of of huge numbers of people past and present so i mean it's just you know we i think we need to be open to a range of possibilities and that's one of the things that history does for you is it allows you to see times when it wasn't the way it is now well then also you can have the same two things i'm sorry two opposite things existing at the same time when you're talking about the role of religion and civil rights for instance at the same time as you saw white pastors standing in the doors of their churches saying you know no blacks can come in you saw others black and white and all different communities marching together for civil rights where was the moral authority of religion in the 60s right it was in both it was in both places it was in both places although the place that had that was dynamic was uh the part the the place that was arguing for social justice and it's the it's the opposite today the place that's dynamic is the place that is speaking from a position of sort of hatred and and social division and it's a matter of where the energy is i mean this is you're talking about history as you said history describes change and that the the impetus has been with the right wing i think not because we stepped aside and led it necessarily because we had a lot of energy and a lot of impetus as well but it's interesting how it a certain message will resonate uh and and and speak to people sort of encode desires to have things just be good or feel good about things so there may be some relationship even to people feeling that their lives are out of control or you know that society is too complicated and needing to get back to this simple stuff will and that's i mean you know one that's part of that that was one of the outcomes of the 60s i mean for me what the 60s was about was the world cracking open and just seeing like a range of possibilities that i never knew existed and being excited about a new sense of community and forward movement uh for many other people clearly what the americans what the 1960s was about was their world and everything they believed in being challenged racial hierarchies were challenged their sense of patriotism my country right or wrong was challenged and then people were challenging family gender sex hippies living in communes i mean there was no secure base nothing that you could turn to and and it's out of you know while some of us were thinking oh my god you know it's like the future is bright and like we can do anything others we're deciding that something is really deeply wrong here and we're going to fix it our way and you know from the mid 60s on a conservative movement began growing in this country that paralleled ironically the growth of feminism the growth of gay liberation uh shifts in uh the structure of race relations in the u.s it was interesting to me i think i heard you say earlier in talking about the attacks on the president being more and earlier and different than the than the current attack which had to do with sex you it seemed to me you tied that in a way that is though he's not the quintessential child of the 60s um he did challenge those same sorts of uh concerns and that must have made him a real focal point right he symbolizes to the right everything about the 60s you know it's like diddy or didn't he inhale you know was he a draft dodger uh his wife is a powerful woman who's a career woman all of the things he likes black he's a southern white guy who is comfortable in the presence of african americans you know he's he's done everything wrong as far as this older view of what the proper social order should be now the irony of this is that you know this is my personal politics coming out i mean he's not exactly the most liberal president you know of the last you know you know of the democratic party's tradition but he symbolizes all those things and and the hatred the hate-driven venom of the of a right-wing social movement has completely attached itself to this man i mean it's it's an amazing and thing to behold well it's interesting how much we have in common with other sort of hated groups or persons which always makes me feel very strong looking around going oh they hit you too yeah you know here we are because everyone who is it's sort of like what's happened in california politically i mean we just swept the elections on the democratic side in 1998 partly because one by one every growing new or gaining power kind of minority had been alienated by the other side with some kind of wedge issue and when you take this community that's been alienated then this one and then this one and this one though they may not see themselves as unified you tend to be able to say i'm you know i'm not going with them they're against me i'll i'll stick with them they're not as bad or whatever and that's really what happened with us um and the gay community has become more politically uh acute and certainly more politically active at least that's what i think i mean i may be quite mistaken about our history but which i know about as little as most regular people except that i've now read your books so i'm much more informed but yeah i mean i don't know politically well let me why do you think that when you say you think that we are much more politically aware politically active what what do you how do you measure that or what makes sense i guess as an elected person it's important to me that people know that the government has power over their lives in a way that matters in a way that they should think about and the second thing i like people to know is that there's no such thing as the government that in a democracy like ours the government's a set of empty chairs and every time you have an election whether you go to the polls or not somebody sits in those chairs and it makes a difference in terms of agenda and in terms of our lives can we adopt or not adopt can we complain if we're discriminated against or not can we keep our job or not is aids important and funded or not that all depends on who's in the chairs and our community to a great extent has sort of dawned uh or awakened to that notion and said gee maybe i should be involved in electoral politics which grew very much out of our movement politics which were kind of anti-electoral right like many of the grassroots movements yeah do you disagree no i don't disagree actually and what although what i was to jump back several minutes to an earlier part of the conversation the leaping and creeping part what i realized was going on in my brain as you were talking is that i was falling into the pattern the leaping and creeping you know opposition that i try to correct in other people that it's okay when we're creeping along good things are happening because i think we're creeping now i mean around gay and lesbian issues we're not making a great leap forward i mean there's too much strong opposition and the country the mood the political structure is conservative enough that there are no great big breakthroughs but but i think you're right that there is more political awareness and activity a lot of it is operating below what i would call the radar screen of history right now it's it's happening in local in local communities through anti-violence projects through community centers that are growing in workplaces and things like that and through individual political campaigns of local elected officials there's you know in every once in a while even in this period of time an event like the matthew shepard slaying will rouse people but but then people just creep forward for a while but the creeping is good you know something something important is happening right now and i think what it is is that we are in a way that wasn't true in the 70s and 80s in more and more parts of american life we're integrating ourselves into how the institutions and practices of everyday life function we're present and visible in the workplace where we are in schools we're in the political parties including the republican party and that's a different basis for making change to not be only on the outside and separate but to have kind of wormed our way or worked our way in or been in and decided to come out which you know well it leads to that question about assimilation because i i sort of have two trains of thought and i hope you'll help me get back to the train i'm not pursuing at the moment which had to do with um what difference it makes if we are defined only as sexual beings and and whether that we should choose to be or not to be i want to get back to that but um it in terms of um now i've completely lost my thoughts assimilation ah assimilation thank you i wouldn't forget that i said the word as we as we become more integrated in regular old american life and we're out the next step for people often is a choice that i assume our community didn't have back when we didn't come out because we could get beaten up or killed uh just for doing that all of us uh we decide are we going to be a a gay or lesbian person that's people will know us that way when i was elected it was lesbian elected to assembly period or are we going to be a whatever doctor or lawyer or whatever who just happens to be gay and would prefer that not to be such you know such a part of us um are we taking in the values around us or i was thinking as you were talking are we impacting the values of america ourselves from our community um are they learning anything from us well oh god there's so much i can say about good okay well first of all you know we've already taken in the values of the culture i mean that's one of the interesting things about being gay is that we each of us grew up within the values of the culture and for whatever reason and nobody knows why each of us individually found ourselves in in some important ways at odds or feeling different but the values of the culture are not foreign and external to us we actually know them very well and and part of what becoming gay has been about for many of us i think is affirming a sense of difference and then trying to figure out what that means because there are i'm sure you feel this too as you know in sacramento or at home in santa monica there are moments there may even be hours and days in your life when what you are is a lesbian you know there are days when i know that what i am is a gay man it's something happens out out usually it's something that happens out there that makes me dramatically aware of it and then much of my time i just go around being john you know and it's okay now the assimilation issue integrate well if integration and assimilation i don't think are the same thing you know it's like it's assimilation to me implies a kind of wiping out you know you just sort of vanish somehow or another and that can't be the equivalent of integration which for me integration means full access you know you have there's there's no place from which you are excluded you you can move in and out of everything that the society has to offer um so it has to be possible at least for me to hold on to an ideal in terms of my values of integration that this is a really good thing and this actually is a route by which one unravels oppression at the same time that it doesn't mean that one completely vanishes as a gay person a gay community a gay movement a gay people and it's also you know i don't think anybody calls themselves an assimilationist have you ever known somebody who has said i'm in assimilation no there's always a not in the sentence yeah and i'm not an assembly right assimilation is something that's only that you accuse somebody of you never nobody ever embraces it so i even wonder if assimilation is is an invention you know like a figment of some of our imaginations by which we express what we're most afraid of well let's take the italian community are they assimilated or not because in my parents generation which was early in this century living in saint louis there was the italian section there was the jewish section there was the black section and they never crossed the line my mother used to say um the uh you know the the italians had light bulbs uh the jews had gas lamps and the blacks had candles and that you know was a level of they were all poor but now people rarely define themselves as italian americans we rarely think of identifying you john first of all as an italian do you say that well now that's a really good question um i mean there are just it's it's not as dramatic as being gay but anymore but when i lived in north carolina i was often aware that i was italian because nobody could pronounce or spell my name you know when i was in new york as a child in adolescent i was really aware that i was italian because we still had ethnic wars in my neighborhood but you know but then it sort of vanishes in the cosmopolitan culture of manhattan or something or in the the sort of the culture of the academy uh but you know there's a way in which i'm still italian and a year ago when i went to my aunt's funeral in brooklyn and like 65 of us were in the funeral home we were very italian and if like somebody if a wasp i don't know if that's derogatory maybe i shouldn't say that if a white anglo-saxon protestant from north carolina had walked into that funeral home they would have known that they were walking into a cultural group that was different from themselves but it's not a difference that makes a difference as much anymore no it's not a matter of oppression it's not an it's not a it's not an identity around which oppression functions very much so is that a loss the loss of oppression that's right i'm sorry is it a loss of culture i guess i'm thinking because you have said there may come a time when people will know i'm gay but it honestly won't matter as much or hardly at all and i'm thinking about western european differences in days when it really made a difference no irish need apply here you can't work in this place like that and these were very strong images to past generations and now it's moved on to other oppressions not as much is that a great loss actually to the community yeah this is really interesting there is a little bit of a loss there this is another kind of big historical question too i mean my grandparents who were italian immigrants at the early part of the 20th century they they were they came at the tail end of the massive waves of immigration that occurred before immigration restriction and and therefore my parents generation and then the grandchildren's generation mine increasingly came of age at a time when there were fewer and fewer immigrants coming into the country and the pressure for americanism and for vanishing into the woodwork of america was very very high one of the things that's interesting about to me anyway about living through a new generation era of large-scale immigration in the united states is to notice that if we can figure it out because this is the era of multiculturalism in a way that the 20s and the 30s and the 40s were not maybe this generation of immigrants can sort of figure out how not to lose the richness of their culture in a way that the richness of many of those say mediterranean eastern european cultures really got lost in the united states in the course of the 20th well we were going to try a little bit with bilingualism yeah and to some extent it was trying to get the children where they were and bring them along in their own language and teach english but still there is also this sense of it and i i don't know if it translates perfectly for our community because again this this other branch that i wanted to explore people have said you know maybe we need to downplay the sexual nature of our community let's not hold hands in public let's not make people uncomfortable by appearing to even remind people that we might be sexual with each other and and yet it is the thing that we have thought of that differentiates us and somehow it is a part of our identity yeah well but it's not even even apart from whether it's the thing that really differentiates us and it's at the core of who we think we are it's it you know i don't even consider myself a militant on this issue but like holding hands in public is part of the sort of the cultural norm you should be you know it's the way people express affection they kiss each other in public um representations of heterosexuality are everywhere in the popular culture and i'm not even talking about pornography i'm talking about ordinary movies and tv shows where we don't i think many people who watch tv in hollywood movies don't even think of what they're looking at is heterosexuality they think of it as life well that has to become accessible to us because to the degree that it doesn't become accessible to us we're being denied something that the culture as a whole says is part an essential part of being human so so if downplaying the sexual part of us means losing that no i mean it's just it's it's it's wrong it's wrong and it's painful that's different from although i don't know what the difference is that's different from putting it in everybody's face all the time i but i don't know what what i mean by that but the other thing is we've claimed that part of of what we have to teach america is to you know lighten up about sex and about sexuality and about and it's fun and um i i mean the joke was of course that's what the men had to teach a little you know about being camp and great uh really enjoying sex and lightening up about it telling lesbians you ought to try this you know it's really sort of fun and lesbians saying you know political organizing is important and suddenly we have political organizing about lightening up about sex which probably turns out to be a good thing um but i want to before our time is up i want to talk about your work and i i brought a couple of examples because i really want you to talk to people about it either either of these here or any others intimate matters and sexual communities okay um what uh what led you to do this work and what you know what do you want us to take from it aside from buying it okay to well to go back to the history thing one i mean you know i started doing gay history in the history of sexuality in the 70s but part of the reason i was able to do that in the 70s was because people were doing all sorts of history that a generation earlier people didn't consider to be history by the by the end of the 60s history was no longer about kings presidents generals war and diplomacy uh it was about factory life it was about the family it was about immigrant communities it was about the slave community it was about women in the home i mean history started to be about everything and and that generation my generation of historians has if i know sometimes we doubt whether it matters go to the museum of american history in washington dc and you will see exhibits there you know about the experience of japanese americans during world war ii or about the migration of black southerners to the north that would have never been there 30 years ago and in time our history is going to get there too one of the things about um well let me take sexual politics sexual communities because that was the first book and there's a way in which it's still my favorite you know it's like when i look at it i get very very happy what's what's interesting to me a generation almost after doing the research is to realize and i think this goes back to something you touched on at the beginning how much gay history is a part of american history like it isn't this thing apart for instance you cannot understand the experience of gays and lesbians in the 20th century if you don't understand world war ii and what world war ii was like for americans because world war ii dramatically affected being gay and being lesbian and what was possible for us in what way it completely disrupted the normal social patterns and statistically normal social patterns you know young people men in terms of the armed forces women primarily in terms of the civilian labor force were ripped out of their towns and families and homes and neighborhoods and put in these same-sex environments you know it's like i mean one of the phrases that i use is that world war ii was a nationwide coming out experience for a whole generation of gay men and lesbians it was easier to just find others and discover who you were you can't understand gay and lesbian history if you don't know something about the mccarthy era and the amount of persecution and fear sense of peril and danger and menace that was in the air in the united states during the 1950s and you know when you realize that and then you can understand how it was we could be targeted the way we were in the 1950s you can't understand stonewalling gay liberation if you don't realize how important the 60s were in terms of as i i've used the phrase but cracking open the world and saying anything is possible it's even possible that gay people could be free so i i i mean this is one of the this wouldn't have been clear to me when i first started doing the research for for this book and other stuff on the history of sexuality but it's you know our history is the history of the nation it's not a history that's a part and irrelevant we only have a few minutes left okay i told you it was going to go wrong that's right you just never know um what would you uh if you were advising gay and lesbian young people even in high school about thinking about if if they are thinking that research or the academic life is a is it possibly a good life for them would you advise them to to think about these areas of history of sociology of i don't know this is kind of cultural anthropology and and taking the risk of doing research about our community i assume it's still a risk to go to your advisor and say i'm going to write about gay people yeah i uh i would advise uh as i do um young folks who are thinking about a life as an intellectual or an academic and who want to do something that's going to mean something for for gays and lesbians to hold on to that dream and that intention and to be strategic and smart about how you do it and to do it completely with your eyes open because there there are no jobs advertised for gay historians there are jobs advertised for 20th century u.s historians so you need to figure out if you're going to do this work in history or anthropology or sociology or political science you need to figure out how to do your work in a way that you're true to your deepest dreams and aspirations but you're also not pressing the buttons that are gonna you know make everybody else around you crazy you know figure out how to do your work in a way that is good for gay people but that also allows you to make the claim that you are within the mainstream of us history or sociology or whatever john thank you so much this was this has been wonderful for me i i do this show really for my own enjoyment and i really hope you got something from it too john demilio has a number of books published i think you should buy them all instantly because john among others has really taught us that our gay and lesbian community has our place and has been a big part of american history and america should just get used to it see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you