Martin DubermanRezensionen
Autor von Stonewall
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Got it from the used book store; definitely worthwhile, although I don't know why it took me so long to finish the last chapter!
In contrast, Duberman's memoir is alternated and interlaced with the broader historical context of gay activism, even where he didn't know or purposely avoided what was going on at the time. I mean: he went to the Stonewall Inn at least once a week in 1969! wasn't there on the night of June 28th! places himself in his apartment a few blocks away! shut away from it all behind his academic work and internalized homophobia and political disdains! Wow.
Duberman's past self is super self-critical and anxious in a way I found almost triggering; looking backwards he doesn't let himself off the hook but balances the hook with compassion. (WOW I am so glad I grew up long after psychoanalysis had fallen out of fashion, because being expected to tear yourself apart that way sounds like my absolute worst and most counterproductive instincts.) He talks a bit about his failure to see or understand lesbian issues and the criticism he sometimes received for it at the time, and he doesn't have much to say about racial or class oppression intersecting with homophobia. Still: do recommend, especially if you're interested in a less-typical view on gay history.
It wasn't bad though, if a bit boring, and I'm really glad I read it. Even if Duberman's prose feels a bit juvenile (which I don't blame him for, coming from decades of history work), I did find myself in the minds of the men and began to understand who they were as people. This is especially true of Magnus Hirschfeld, who I'm so glad I was introduced biographically to by the book (what a cool, cool, modern guy). The transition from traditional history to prose was a bit awkward at times and the prose never really came alive for me, but I mean heck — the subject manner is niche and probably the more interesting biographies of these men.
So for that, it's four stars. I wish more books showed history in this capacity to bring it alive for readers and even if this book fell short of it, the passion was there. Depending on my mood, I'd maybe even read it again.
There's a lot of great detail in the book, but one scene really stuck with me and it goes some way to characterising Robeson's journey. He returned from Europe to the US, amid withering tirades of criticism thanks to inaccurate reports of treasonous disloyalty, after he had the gall to complain about the conditions of people of colour in his home country. Instead of hiding, Robeson performed a concert with Pete Seeger in New York State. Rednecks lined the road and leered at concertgoers as they arrived, descending on them with billyclubs, afterwards, as they left. The police stood by and watched for the most part. Despite being warned of the danger Robeson fearlessly took to the stage. The cops, only with the greatest reluctance, circled around behind the audience and shooed off the snipers who were settling in on the hill and waiting for a good shot.
Before reading this book I didn't know enough to place Robeson in the pantheon of civil rights heroes, but of course he is there. A man with enough talent to have done anything, lived a life of carefree wealth and acclaim, he stood on principle and never retreated, even as it destroyed his health, his work and his life.
The crux of Duberman's argument is that LGBT rights groups were far more radical in their goals in the days of yore than they have become. The focus on marriage equality, Duberman argues, has come at the expense of more radical ideas and the movement has become far more narrow in terms of the rights LGBT people seek to gain.
This book opened my eyes to queer history and to the flaws in out current advocacy system. Even if you find Duberman hard-line in his stance, this book exposes you/me/the reader to unconventional takes on the LGBT rights movement that will ultimately broaden your understanding of it.
(Note: While the title and the scope of the book focus primarily on the gay movement I have opted to refer to "the movement" as LGBT as a nod to the fact that not only gay people exist under this umbrella)
I should probably admit upfront to having appreciated Dworkin's work for a long time so I came to this with a positive opinion of her and her ideas. I didn't always agree 100% with her thoughts but she never failed to make me reconsider my position and often shift it or outright change it.
Duberman did know Dworkin so his analysis and narrative are not strictly from his access to archives, though mostly so. It is subtly mentioned in the book that they met during the days of the Vietnam protests, but if someone just cherry-picked long quotes rather than read the book they would miss that. But such is what passes for certain types.
Duberman has written a critical biography here, not to be confused with a biography that is critical of Dworkin. He presents her ideas and tries to explain what she was arguing for and what she advocated for. In such a biography it is not necessary to present every counter argument, this is not a book of theory, this is a biography, so an explication of Dworkin's ideas to correct misunderstandings (all intercourse is rape, for example), intentional or not, is part of telling her story. Biography, yes, book of theory, no. The only people who will be upset that counter arguments weren't presented in greater detail will be those who likely disagree with Dworkin. Understandable but disingenuous as well.
This work presents Dworkin as an often difficult person though generally not from being mean or uncaring but from her approach to feminism and life itself. She sometimes saw things as easily distinguishable between right and wrong and gave no harbor to those she believed advocated, even unconsciously, for wrong. Yet reading her with an open mind, trying to understand what she was saying on her terms, was always a rewarding experience, even when she didn't persuade you. And if you're not reading any thinker to understand them on their terms, then you're really just halfway reading, you're looking for little bits that you can counter regardless of the accuracy of those bits to the larger argument. Dworkin did, and still does, make many readers take that approach because her truths are often uncomfortable.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants to better understand both the person and her ideas. Whether you're new to her or have read all of her work, this makes many connections that have previously been hidden.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
The book kicks off by showing Dworkin’s fierce sides as she, nineteen years old, joined a sit-in at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to protest the escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam:
Minutes later, the police suddenly descended, and Andrea was among those carted off to night court. Her legal-aid attorney tried to persuade the presiding judge to free her on her own recognizance, arguing that she posed no danger to society during the period that would precede sentencing.
The judge rejected the plea, fixed bail at $500 and, when Andrea said she couldn’t pay, remanded her to the notorious bastille in the heart of Greenwich Village known as the Women’s House of Detention. After being showered and searched, she was subjected to a “vaginal exam” by a prison nurse, then taken up to her cell and locked in. The following afternoon she was brought back to the examination room for another “inspection”; when an alarmed Andrea asked a policewoman why, the reply was another question: “Are you a virgin?” Andrea refused to answer.
At that point two male doctors entered the room, one explaining loudly to the other that he suspected venereal disease. Andrea was ordered onto the table and told to put her legs in the stirrups. While the one doctor stood by, the other applied pressure initially to Andrea’s stomach and then to her breast. “You’re hurting me,” Andrea protested. Ignoring her, he put on a rubber glove and inserted his hand first into her rectum, then into her vagina. Removing his hand, he explained to the other doctor that he would now probe further with a speculum. Andrea had never heard the word before.
As the exam proceeded and her pain mounted, the second doctor plied her with questions: How many girls at Bennington are virgins? I don’t know, Andrea said. How many freshmen at Bennington are virgins? I don’t know, Andrea said, as the pain from the forceps grew worse. “That’s what you should know about,” he barked, “not Vietnam.”
When Andrea started to bleed—it would continue for the next two weeks—the doctor withdrew the forceps and ordered her back to the cell block. On the way, Andrea asked the accompanying policewoman if she could make a phone call. “It’s Friday,” the officer said. “No calls are allowed on weekends. Monday is George Washington’s birthday. You can call on Tuesday.” Released within a few days, Andrea decided to write to every newspaper listed in the Yellow Pages describing conditions at the House of Detention (built to house 400, it currently held 657 inmates) and her own mistreatment there.
This is not a wishy-washy biography about a simple bougie girl but a nuanced book about a person who desperately fought against injustice, be it real, imagined, against herself, or others.
Duberman does the reader a service by contrasting how Dworking was treated with disrespect and even hatred with how she treated others, both with love, hatred, and everything inbetween. She worked and lived in a time and place where feminism was not rated highly, in an extremely patriarchal society.
Dworkin met Cornelius Dirk de Bruin, a.k.a. Iwan, who abused her terribly:
The beatings escalated to the point where Iwan was kicking her in the stomach, banging her head against the floor, even hitting her with a beam of wood that bruised her so badly she could hardly walk for days. She managed, once, to get herself to a doctor; he told her he could write her a prescription for Valium or have her committed; she chose the Valium. Sometimes Iwan beat her into unconsciousness.
Her pain and fear became so great that she would scream out in agony, but no neighbor appeared to check on her. “If you scream for years,” she later wrote, “they will look through you for years.” They “see the bruises and injuries—and do nothing. . . . They say it’s your fault or you like it or they deny it is happening . . . you begin to feel you don’t exist . . . you begin to believe that he can hurt you as much as he wants and no one will help you. . . . Once you lose language, your isolation is absolute. . . . I wanted to die. . . . When I would come to after being beaten unconscious, the first feeling I had was a sorrow that I was alive.”
At age twenty-five, the brilliant, dynamic Andrea had become (as she subsequently described it) “a woman whose whole life was speechless desperation. . . . Smothering anxiety, waking nightmares, cold sweats, sobs that I choked on were the constants of my daily life. . . . I was nearly dead, catatonic, without the will to live.”
To read of de Bruin’s horrific abuse and harassment of Dworkin is harrowing. The pain she suffered is described via her own words, in explicit detail.
Gradually, very gradually, the forgotten emotion of anger began to resurface. And “the anger of the survivor” (as she later wrote) “is murderous. It is more dangerous to her than to the one who hurt her. She does not believe in murder; she wants him dead but will not kill him. She never gives up wanting him dead.”
Clarity also began to return, and with it the knowledge that in the future (as she wrote) “it will be very difficult to lie to her or to manipulate her. She sees through the social strategies that have controlled her as a woman, the sexual strategies that have reduced her to a shadow of her own native possibilities. . . . The emotional severity of the survivor appears to others, even those closest to her, to be cold and unyielding, ruthless in its intensity. She knows too much about suffering to try to measure it when it is real, but she despises self-pity. She is self-protective, not out of arrogance, but because she has been ruined by her own fragility.”
Dworkin read a lot of modern feminist theory, formed her own theories, and put her words into action. As Duberman writes, ‘Andrea’s transition from abused hausfrau to formidably independent feminist, had been rapid—and astonishingly absolute.’
'Woman Hating' contains stories about the history of anti-feminist abuse and Dworkin’s vision about the future. She worked furiously from thereon, establishing herself as a key figure in the American 1970s feminist scene. She spoke out against pornography, gave speeches, moved south (which was a very bad idea), and solidified her (unconventional) partnership with John Stoltenberg.
Dworkin was vehement against those who opposed her, and this in spite of some even being her friends. An example, where Gloria Steinem edited Dworkin carelessly:
This wasn’t the last time that Andrea made Gloria, in her position as editor-in-chief of Ms., the target of complaint—though what Andrea called the “tenderness” she felt for Gloria to some extent stayed her hand. Over the years their run-ins were few, especially when put in the context of the trench warfare that periodically engulfed the feminist movement. But on at least one other occasion a serious conflict arose over what Andrea regarded as a breach of contract; she went so far—in a letter to Robin Morgan—as to accuse Gloria of “dishonesty” and “repeated lies.”
Having learned better over the years than to tamper with Andrea’s prose without her express consent, Gloria—facing an eleventh-hour deadline, and following legal advice—rewrote a sentence in one of Andrea’s articles, and for the word “Porsche” substituted “auto.”
It deeply upset Andrea. Ferdinand Porsche, head of the auto company, had been imprisoned for twenty months after World War II for war crimes (though never brought to trial), and in her Ms. article Andrea had deliberately called the firm out for its complicity in cooperating with the Nazis. To Andrea, establishing the linkage between the name “Porsche” and anti-Semitism was profoundly important. In response, Gloria implied that Andrea’s extreme distress about the changing of a single word was disproportionate—which upset Andrea still more.
“If you believe that it is all trivial and that I wasted time and energy on something not very important,” Andrea responded, “then I simply don’t know how to be clear and understood, and I can’t operate in a context that reduces my deepest concerns to a misguided personal overzealousness. I am absolutely lost . . . how can I hope to be understood and respected if you don’t understand the issues involved here?”
Gloria pleaded ignorance of the Porsche connection to the Nazis, and Andrea in turn repeated that “I care a great deal for you, as I told you. . . Surely you must know that I have been a loyal friend, and that, while I must protect my work and my ethics, I do not want to harm either you or the magazine.” Gloria never again touched a word of Andrea’s prose without prior consultation, and Andrea never again found fault with her standards, either ethical or journalistic.
Dworkin could be isolated, destitute, even starving, and would yet express her thoughts in contrast to a massive wall of hatred against her, e.g. as Larry Flynt, owner of Hustler, a porn magazine, made sure that she was ridiculed and hated in many pages of his magazine.
There are salient points in the book.
Andrea and Kitty felt secure enough in their relationship to read each other’s work with an eye toward improving, not simply admiring, it (though they usually did). When Kitty, for example, read Andrea’s book Pornography in manuscript, she pulled no punches: “You take certain things on the level of their own self-presentation, which is myth, and hold them to that standard, rather than criticizing deeper realities, which in each case are even more open to attack. Example . . . where you say ‘the objective scientists’ find such and such, it is not clear whether you are faulting their objectivity or questioning objectivity itself. It seems more like the former, and I think the latter is more devastating and telling.”
Conversely, though Andrea praised Kitty’s speech “Violence Against Women—A Perspective” as “wonderful,” she felt free to tell her that “I think it is just patently wrong to say that ‘lesbian eroticism’ per se is not from the male standpoint, and also that therefore from the male standpoint it is the most obscene. . . . The Well of Loneliness is I think saturated with the ‘male viewpoint.’”
The book also goes into her non-explicit feminist work, for example, Scapegoat:
Scapegoat is something of an anomaly in Andrea’s body of work. Her long-standing theme of misogyny shares the stage this time around, and is often crowded off it, by her impassioned discussions of anti-Semitism and the militaristic turn taken by the state of Israel. Scapegoat is also the most traditionally academic of Andrea’s books (though her insights go deeper and the pulsating intensity of her prose is more riveting than can be said for most academic works); it seems a surprising anomaly for a writer who in earlier books experimented with twisting autobiography into fiction, and then back again, to end up in Scapegoat with all the scholarly apparatus of the professoriate and a prose style all but free of onrushing proclamation.
Singular, too, is the near absence in Scapegoat of those occasional apocalyptic outbursts that previously studded her work. Aside from the innate drama of the subject matter itself, Scapegoat is notably free of showy theatricality or grandiloquence. The tone throughout is highly sophisticated, the analysis measured, deliberate, exquisitely cerebral. The central theme of Scapegoat is the analogous dehumanization of Jews and women in Nazi Germany, and Palestinians and women in the state of Israel. Andrea nowhere suggests any equation between the unmitigated vileness of the German Nazis and the current behavior of Israeli men. In her view, the link between the two, though only marginal, is the cultivation in both instances of a hyper-masculinity reliant for believability and force on the scapegoating of others. The matter of scale is all-important, as is the differing cultural context in which the warrior model emerged in the two countries, and the ways in which it was publicly deployed.
This is, strangely, both an impersonal book and a personal one; while Duberman goes through the motions of Dworkin’s life, he does not seem to have interviewed a single person to contrast what he is writing about. This kind of armchair biography brings light, but not enough, in my experience, and this book suffers because of it.
When Duberman gets personal, some weird stuff pours through. An example of this:
The New York Times, weighing in a month after the publication of Scapegoat, managed to put a damper—as only the Times can—on whatever momentum might have been building for the book
I most certainly agree that The New York Times has a lot to answer for, but this type of writing sidetracks Dworkin in a way that I feel she does not deserve.
The weirdness aside—of which there are really only remnants—this book does delve into Dworkin’s life and her interactions with others, mainly thanks to Duberman’s exclusive access to Dworkin’s archives.
The book does breathe and is quite exciting to read at times. Dworkin was an unabashed firebrand, a beacon of modern feminism: brash, outrageous, angry, and free. We all have things to learn from her and this book reminds us to do just that.
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pivic | 1 weitere Rezension | May 13, 2020 |
pivic | 1 weitere Rezension | May 13, 2020 | 
It does feel a bit weird to have my quote for this book be about feminism rather than LGBT as it is mostly about gay history. But it also feels right - because the most important thing this book has taught me is that both feminism and gay rights were topics way before Stonewall - something we easily forget since the general history media tends to act like LGBT movements and hell, LGBT people, popped into history with the Stonewall riots. Now, I've always known it wasn't the case but it's always nice when books like Jews Queers Germans actually discuss the early LGBT movements.
The book is a weird mix of a novel and a history book, which makes me reculant to claim it as too much of a source when it comes to the non-fiction of it all - but there is no question that I was taught a lot about things during my read. Not just about the actually flourising LGBT culture in Germany before WWII but also LGBT historical figures that I at the most knew by name, like Hirschfeld.
It was an interesting read, and a really interesting view into the LGBT movements of the late 19th century and early 20th century - especially as Germany lies relatively close both culturally and politically. I don't know. The mix of non-fiction and fiction makes me a bit unsure how to view the book, but it is nonetheless a good read for its LGBT history.
Lincoln Kirstein certainly merits a biography, just not one of 600+ pages. There's just too much intricate detail about the obscure politics of art administration organizations.
My favorite parts of the book were the diary entries reflecting the time-consuming and tiring yet necessary politicking Duberman engaged with in creating and sustaining the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies - CLAGS - through the difficult years of the late 1980s and 1990s. Committee work is no fun, nor is it glamorous but it has been and will continue to be the site of many important battles for queer and other minorities.
There's an interesting wistfulness through most of the book. In part it reflects the heavy shadow of AIDS which fell across these generations. In part it also reflects the fact that as the years roll on, Duberman seems to feel increasingly alienated from the mainstream political and social LGBT movement. He reveals a general disappointment, for he clearly had much higher hopes - and greater expectations for radicalism - for the LGBT movement earlier in his life.
Stonewall details the lives of seven different individuals from their childhoods, to the day they came out of the closet, to their lives afterward and up until the stonewall riots, and the aftermath. The six people are Yvonne (Maua) Flowers, Jim Fouratt, Foster Gunnison Jr, Karla Jay, Silvia Rae Rivera, and Craig Rodwell. Some like Jim Fouratt were previously involved in radical left-wing groups like the Yippies before Stonewall brought gay issues as an issue to be seriously considered. Yvonne Flowers felt out of place wherever she went, being a black lesbian and therefore subject to homophobia and sexism in much of the black community and racism in much of the white lesbian community. Foster Gunnison Jr was the son of an industrialist, and became extremely involved in the moderate Mattachine Society, which sought to seek an understanding with straight society. Karla Jay was a student who became involved with left-wing activism but quickly was uncomfortable about male domination of the movement. Silva Rae Rivera defiantly strikes the reader as one of the most interesting, as she lives on the streets as a queen, and transvestite. Finally, Craig Rodwell was a young member of the Mattachine Society and tried to turn it more radical and relevant by recruiting young members into it to infuse it with energy, and later opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore.
Without going to far, the Stonewall Riots started when the police raided the notoriously seedy, and Mafia-run, Stonewall Bar. Raids were common place and often were proceeded with warnings, bribes, and such, but this time after the police roughed up a few people, the crowd fought back. It escalated into a full scale attack on the police and lots of pent up rage was unleashed. The next day, as news of gays fighting back spread quickly, people took to the street and made a statement that they would no longer be silent second-class citizens. After this, the Gay Liberation Front was founded to push for confrontation and demand, not request, full equality with straight society. The effects on the characters reminded me of the effect that the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization had on me when I was a teenager. It all the sudden became alright to be out in the open.
The book itself can be a little confusing at points as Dr. Duberman switches between the individuals stories quickly and suddenly, but each story is indeed pretty interesting. Even today as there seems to be an enormous backlack by the Christian Right to attack the rights of people to be attracted to anyone, or to BE anyone, that they feel like, and to have access to all of the same health, jobs, and life that any straight person would, it really was the beginning of hope back in an age of closets and not being able to even talk. This was a beginning of change, before even the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. Stonewall should be read by anyone who believes in the right of anyone to struggle for a better life for themselves and those they care about.
Edit: It's a week later and I should also give a shout out of thanks to Steve Evans for enlightening me, since he's on LibraryThing now, too. Thanks, Steve!
He was branded a Communist and hounded by J. Edgar Hoover, another dagger to add to those borne of racial prejudice that were aimed in his direction. Most amazingly, all the insults and setbacks and threats and injustice never cowed him. In 1953 when reporters baited him for "hurting your cause by allying yourself with Communists," he lashed out angrily to them: "Is this what you want?" (pretending to bend at the waist) For me to bend and bow and shuffle along and be a nice, kindly colored man and say please when I ask for better treatment for my people? Well, it doesn't work!" Wow. What a guy.
Robeson also rejected the notion of "gradualism" in the struggle for civil rights as "but another form of race discrimination: in no other area of our society are lawbreakers granted an indefinite time to comply with the provisions of the law."
One final anecdote showing his outstanding bravery and brilliance (but there are many many such anecdotes in the book): he was visiting the USSR in 1948, which, unbeknownst to the world, was in the middle of Stalin's anti-Zionist purges. Robeson kept inquiring about his Jewish friend Itzik Feffer and wanted to see him. In actuality, Feffer had been arrested (and was later executed). In an attempt to cover up what was going on, the authorities brought Feffer to see Robeson in his hotel room on Robeson's final night in Moscow. Feffer could not tell Robeson the truth in the room that he assumed to be bugged, but tried to communicate his fate through gestures. After their visit, Robeson proceeded with his concert. At the end, he asked for quiet, and announced he would sing one encore. He said the song was in honor of his friend Feffer, and then sang (with no preparation at all), the Resistance Song from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, first in Russian, then in Yiddish. Incredible story, incredible guy. Possibly poisoned by Hoover's FBI in 1961 (see testimony on the Web from his son).
(JAF)
1 nbmars | 1 weitere Rezension | Nov 20, 2006 |
nbmars | 1 weitere Rezension | Nov 20, 2006 | 
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i guess it just... didn’t meet my expectations? i thought it was going to be either a) an accessible, not-extremely-academic synopsis of the revolutionaryness of a variety of older lgbt movements internationally compared to the moderation of current ones, b) an assortment of the author’s personal critiques of modern lgbt movements and where he’d like the see them progress, and/or c) concrete suggestions for how we can de-commodify pride, start collectively looking deeper at the systems we’ve fought to integrate into, celebrate our radical roots and maintain a Generally Leftist Vibe™️
this book was none of those things. it was kind of all over the place and really repetitive at points?
the author does not give an overview of past and present queer revolutionary vs reformist movements as I thought it would- which is understandable, as this isn’t a history book. however, he zooms in on a specific historical example (the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front), spending the entire first chapter (out of 4) on its politics, in-group dynamics, etc. he seems to view GLF as the beginning of queer revolutionary thought/action, which just isn’t true. obviously it’s an extremely important example- but one in a long list.
the book is also very americancentric- exclusively so, in fact. there is no mention of gay/queer politics anywhere else in the world, or if there are similar dynamics of revolution vs moderation elsewhere. (hint: there are.)
he also talks in the first chapter about Radicalesbians and the “woman identified woman” second wave, with barely any mention of the TERFism that ideology resulted in and that continues to be perpetuated today, particularly in the UK (again a situation where a more international perspective would certainly be helpful). the closest he gets to discussing TERFism and why trans people are turned off by radical second wave lesbian feminism is when he hints at lesbian “objection to transvestism”, which he doesn’t explore further and instead jumps right back to narrating about GLF.
i had to abandon this after finishing the first chapter and going halfway into the next. might continue later, but am pretty disappointed.