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This essay addresses Eric Rofes' use of friendship to realize movement goals. Friendship involved the nexus between individual and larger social forces. It offered the possibility for achieving a long-standing goal of Gay Liberation politics.
This essay addresses Eric Rofes' use of friendship to realize movement goals. Friendship involved the nexus between individual and larger social forces. It offered the possibility for achieving a long-standing goal of Gay Liberation politics.
This essay addresses Eric Rofes' use of friendship to realize movement goals. Friendship involved the nexus between individual and larger social forces. It offered the possibility for achieving a long-standing goal of Gay Liberation politics.
Reviving the Tribe: Friendship and Social Relations in the
Work and Play of Eric Rofes. Theory and Action. 3(3)
Abstract
As a journalist, executive director, organizer, and educator, Eric Rofes worked to support a Gay Liberation movement originally dedicated to sexual freedom and self determination. While Rofes skills as a writer, educator and cultural critic have long been recognized, this essay addresses Rofes use of friendship to realize movement goals. For Rofes, friendship involved the nexus between individual and larger social forces, linking ideas, bodies, and networks into Gay Liberation politics. Here, individuals and groups helped realize the image of convivial social relations, in which human care, freedom of the body, sexuality and imagination found support. Rofes died in 2006. The concept is discussed and explored through the review of Rofes life and story.
Keywords: Friendship, play, sexual self determination, social networks, HIV prevention
Activists, AIDS prevention workers, scholars, and Gay Liberationists around the world mourned the untimely death of Eric Rofes in June 2006. Over a period of three decades, this accomplished and acclaimed author, educator, and activist worked to support a Gay Liberation movement which he saw as dedicated to sexual freedom, democracy, and pleasure for everyone. He was the author of twelve books, including: Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Mens Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (1996) and Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (1998). While Rofes skills as an author, academic, and cultural critic have long been recognized, this essay addresses the ways Rofes cultivated friendships and what this meant to his work in queer politics. It explores the overlapping utility of these friendships in relation to organizing, teaching, writing, and community building. For Rofes, friendship involved the nexus between individual and larger social forces; it offered the possibility for achieving a long-standing goal of Gay Liberation politics. Here, individuals and groups prefigured the image of convivial social relations, in which human care, freedom of the body, gender, sexuality and imagination found support. And a queer politics of possibility was realized within the workings of everyday life. The first section of this essay considers the theme of friendship directly, while the latter considers its presence and absence in relation to AIDS organizing, panics over sex, struggles over the meanings of queer sexuality, HIV prevention, and the legacies of the Gay Liberation Movement in which Rofes first found his voice as a writer and activist. As it progresses, the essay includes a few of our discussions about play and organizing as my voice and observations as one of Rofes friends informs the narrative (Tedlock 1991). Throughout these chapters of his life, friendships provided pulsing, pluralistic, engaged social relations as an alternative to oppressive patriarchal family structures. For Rofes and others, friendship offered a vital social resource. I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship. That history is very, very important, Michel Foucault explained in an interview in the late 1970s (Gallagher and Wilson, 1987/2005, 33-4). For Foucault, friendship was a space to challenge conventional understandings gender and heterosexuality (Garlick, 2002). Friendship is increasingly recognized as a part of the study of social movements. Much of the topic helps propel mechanisms of social change. Here, this topic extends into means and motivations for social actors to gather, interact, and build space for alternate social relations. Through such practices, countless movements have transformed operations of power in everyday life. Eric Rofes story represents a useful case example in the complex interplay between friendship and social change practices. One of my challenges as an activist, and as an activist who structures his life in an alternative way, has been about understanding when something is work and when something is community or family, Rofes explained to me in a 2005 personal interview a year before his death. And I think because I came right after the 1960s into organizing, I carry with me the belief that the people I did organizing with were going to be my friends and in some ways, my family and my community.
Memories of Friendships Chris Bartlett, an organizer from Philadelphia who had worked with Eric in the Gay Mens Health Movement, was a speaker at Rofes East Coast memorial service held at the LGBT Community Service Center in New Yorks Greenwich Village on August 1, 2006. Eric gave many young men and women both an education about the history of the Gay Liberation Movement and strong support in putting visionary ideas into practice, Bartlett explained (Highleyman, 2007). Friendship was an integral part of these practices. This took shape via storytelling, collaboration, organizing, and even mentoring (Bartlett, 2006). Rofes loved to tell stories about the ways queers built a new world with their bodies, subcultures, social ties, and friendships. Last Tuesday night I attended a workshop by Eric Rofes on gay men's sexual culture in the 70s, Kirk Read (1998) wrote after a typical Rofes event in the late 1990s. I heard dozens of stories told by men who enjoyed San Francisco bathhouses and sex spaces before they were shut down in 1985, he recalled. Through the storytelling process, new social ties connected participants and cohorts. Remembering this history is essential for our elders; hearing this history is essential for our young. I caught a glimpse of the liberation that these brave pioneers envisioned. Sex was central to that liberation. Pleasure was a political act, (Read, 1998). Kirk Read would go on to work with Rofes and Bartlett in the Gay Mens Health Movement, joining the planning collective for the First Gay Mens Health Summit in Boulder Colorado. Bartlett and many others appreciated Rofes capacity to support social movement activities and friendships simultaneously. Part of his organizing method was to foster ever-expanding social networks through movement building, mentoring, and friendship. Each built upon each other in ways that fostered ever--expanding social networks. "He insisted that gay leadership depended as much upon relationships and shared community as it did upon ideas and action," wrote Chris Bartlett and Tony Valenzuela (2007, p.v) in the forward to Rofes posthumous book, Thriving. He was an artist of friendship, explained Richard Burns, a friend of Rofes dating back to the mid-1970s, when they first met while working for Bostons Gay Community News (GCN). San Francisco writer Liz Highleyman remembers Rofes as a hub that brought people together. To do so, he cultivated friendships. He did that with me, with Chris Bartlett, and others in the Gay Mens Health Movement. He took pains to reach out across generations, to reach out to women, to people who were not gay. Highleyman spent years with Rofes in the San Francisco Study Group on Sex and Politics, dubbed SexPols. It included luminaries in the field of queer studies such as Allan Brub and Gayle Rubin as well as younger activists and scholars. What I liked about him was that if Amber (Hollibaugh) was in town, he would call, she explained. Friendships and Organizing A few words on the intersection of friendships and social movement organizing are instructive. Much of organizing begins with recruiting through networks and relationships. I heard about it from a friend is a consistent response to questions about how people got involved in organizing efforts (ODonnell et. al., 1998, p. 143). Friendships make us feel more comfortable about leaving our individual worlds and connecting with broader social worlds. It is easier for people to get started if, as a new participant, they know someone at the meetings... (Ibid.). Such contacts can also be a positive outcome: I made good friends. I can say that. I made good friends here, one organizer explained (p. 147). Building friendships was one of the goals for his study group on sex and politics, SexPols, explained Rofes at the Western Regional Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, San Francisco, May 2005. At their core, these friendships involve the nexus between private and public spheres, between individual and community issues (Nardi, 1999). In doing so, he built on a long organizing tradition. In 1970, community organizer Si Kahn wrote, In some ways, the organizers main job in the community in the early stages of organizing is simply to make friends with the people there. That these friendships are also essential to the work of organizing the community does not mean that they are any less real (p.26). Rofes took this lesson to heart. For organizers like him, these friendships served as the foundation of organizing campaigns. When Gay Liberationist Cleve Jones sought to create the AIDS Quilt, the worlds largest piece of folk art, he looked to his friends to help him complete the project. They served as a profoundly personal and practical resource (Jones, 2001). In the years that followed, it was their collective memory that Jones sought to preserve (Shepard, 1997). When Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, the first U.S.-based gay rights group, moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, he knew no one. Yet he had a list of telephone numbers of other gay people in the community that he had been given by friends in San Francisco. This list of friends of friends functioned as an introduction into LAs social network of gay men. He met a few like-minded thinkers and started open meetings of the Mattachine Society in LA in November of 1950 (Nardi, 1999). The goal of the group was to break isolation among gay men, foster social tolerance, and draw awareness of the daily mechanisms of oppression faced by gays and lesbians (DEmilio, 1983). Friendships help social actors build their lives around communities of choice rather than non-voluntary repressive communities; by creating support for alternate forms of community and kinship, these friendships support subversive shifts within social mores. Rather than support restrictive patriarchal models of kinship, Rofes favored the notion of "family of choice" as a method to create relationships that transcended the work of organizations or projects. He often organized large dinners of organizers, both at conferences, and at his home in the Castro, explained Chris Bartlett (2010). At these dinners, you could meet the diverse men and women who inspired him. Bartlett continues this tradition, organizing similar dinners which help support convivial social relations and infuse fun and relaxation into the work. Such networks provide social and emotional support, which in turn fosters the capacity to effect social change and mobilize movements. For example in 1991, when California Governor Pete Wilson vetoed Assembly Bill 101, which would have included sexual orientation as a protected category in the Fair Employment and Housing Act, activists across the state received a call. Los Angeles sociologist Peter Nardi remembers being notified by a friend who had called him from a phone tree (Nardi, 1999). Rofes, who by then was living in Los Angeles, also received a call. Simultaneous rallies started, as gay activists organized demonstrations up and down the state. Many began with those simple phone calls. Through such ties, people become invested in issues larger than themselves (Nardi, 1991). From Harry Hay to Eric Rofes, friendships offered the nexus between individual and community. Much of the organizing of the liberationist era took place via such networks, sometimes born of formal politics, but just as often from bars and bathhouses. Through such ties, activists transformed the workings of everyday life (Boyd, 2003; Shepard, 1997; 2010). I think that what happened in the 1960s and 1970s is something to be preserved; that there has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside of the great political parties, and outside of the normal ordinary program, Michel Foucault, who reveled in a similar liberationist ethos, explained. Its a fact that peoples everyday lives have changed from the early 1960s to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely, that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements, (quoted in Gallagher and Wilson, 2005, pp. 335). Rofes came of age in this era in which a spirit of kinship, sensuality, and creativity propelled innovations in social organizing (Shepard, 2010). As he wrote in a prospectus for an uncompleted manuscript: The 1969 Stonewall Riots and the emergence of the radical Gay Liberation movement ushered in a decade of astounding social and sexual exploration which amounted to nothing less then a cultural revolution, For gay men, the 1970s was a time of bold exploration, thrilling adventure, and surprising discovery as they came out en masse and re-created themselves, their communities, and the nation in urban centers across America (Rofes Undated).
And of course, the history of social movements is full of stories of friendships propelling such innovationsBob Kohler and Sylvia Rivera in the years after Stonewall in New York; Charles King and Keith Cylar, of Housing Works; Panama Vicente Alba and Richie Perez, with the Young Lords Party and the National Congress on Puerto Rican Rights; Randy Wicker and Barbara Gittings, of the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitus; Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru ,with the Indian Independence Movement; the Friends of Brad Will, a US activist and independent journalist killed in Oaxaca in the fall of 2006, etc. For Rofes, much of the dialog started with colleagues at the Gay Community News in Boston in the mid-1970s. As a writer for the paper, Rofes took part in a conversation about social moments and change, personal identity and group culture which would continue for the next three decades. Richard Burns, one of his colleagues from this era was the executive director of New Yorks Gay Community Services Center in the years ACT UP peaked, as friendship networks helped support the struggle against the AIDS carnage. He also invited countless activists and authors to speak at the Center. I gave a talk at the Center on the work I co-edited, From ACT UP to the WTO, which included an essay by Rofes, during one of these sessions. The other author at the session was Burns GCN colleague Amy Hoffman. She read from her memoir An Army of Ex- Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News, which weaves a story of her friendships with Richard Burns, Urvashi Vaid and Rofes in the 1970s Gay Liberation Movement; here her gay family thrived as a part of social movement culture (Hoffman, 2007, p. xi). We often claimed that GCN was neutral, and that we were open to all perspectives, including conservative ones, but that was ridiculous, Hoffman confesses. We supported the most radical expressions of the Gay Liberation Movement. We believed in upsetting the social order and in creating alternatives to traditional gender roles, definitions of sexuality, and hierarchical power structures of all kinds, (p. xiii). In the years that followed, many of these friendships endured as did the work (and in some circles resentment for the cliquish brand of social activism practiced by Rofes and company). Yet, for Rofes and those he was close to, such as Burns, this friendship was invaluable. The two worked closely on projects ranging from the 1979 March on Washington to any number of talks at the New York Gay Community Center. Just months before he died, Rofes put on a workshop in January of 2006 introduced by Burns. Others resented Rofes very public brand of sexual civil liberties activism, implying it was too much about personal ties, sex, and social history (see Barrett, 2007A, B). Its always about Eric, one critic would complain after Rofes helped organize a 30 th
Anniversary Event for the Gay Community News, also with Burns, at New Yorks Gay Community Center. Eric and I were never friends, explained sociologist Donald C. Barrett (2007A). If you were not in, you were not in, he lamented referring to Rofes circle. Seeing Rofes navigate between friends, students, fans, allies and opponents at conferences, I was always struck by how many actually did feel part of Rofes circle.
Rofes Friendships
The nexus between individual friendship and social forces was in constant flux throughout Rofes career. In the years after the 1970s, it was going to be difficult to maintain the bond he began in the 1970s with his Gay Community News cohort. Rofes writings (1996) as well as interviews reflect ambivalence about the topic. [W] hat I had with me in my organizing are people from the 1970s who I had done organizing with in Boston and in the March on Washington in 1979, he explained in 2005. Organizing in those years after college, it was about having meals together and going to concerts and sharing Patti Smith albums together and going to bars together, and going to sex clubs together, and stuff like that. The extent of Rofes commitment to those in his circle was profound. No doubt the depth of these feelings led to occasionally being let down. I feel towards those people an odd kind of loyalty and community and family that sometimes they dont feel, he would later confess. Rofes struggle with some of these friendships and their connections to movements runs through in his Reviving the Tribe (1996). Friendship is anything but simple. It would endure and fade in different kinds of ways, as the years progressed, and the AIDS crisis hit full steam. The majority of Rofes writing involves a concern about the fate of his network of formal and informal friendships and their links to a broader queer social body. Early in Reviving the Tribe, Rofes writes about the way his friends used to dance together. For Rofes, dancing was a collective expression of freedom, desire, and celebration. On the dance floor at Chaps, a Copley Square clone disco where my friend Tom and I would dance for hours on Sunday afternoons, I noticed a subtle but pronounced shift in the energy of the men I had danced with for years, he writes, recalling a Sunday afternoon in Boston in 1984 (1996, p. 21). Much of this feeling changed with the early AIDS years: As a weekly community of dancers, we were shifting gears, and the dance floor was one of the last venues where we could assume masks of denial and pretend the catastrophic world hadnt overtaken us, (p.21). By the mid-1980s, the mood on the dance floor had taken on a more manic dimension, more desperate than in previous years: By 1984, it was impossible to disavow the rising tide of death, although wed certainly try. Ironic lyrics crept out of our lips. Whether we were mouthing, I will survive, or So many men, so little time, it became impossible to pretend that we were not all thinking the same hideous thoughts. One Sunday evening, as the powerful sound system throbbed with Irene Cara singing What a Feeling from Flashdance, I looked from face to face of my fellow tea-dancers, and a knot of raw emotion tore at my gut as my eyes dampened. In my AIDS story, that was the day the music died (p. 21).
In the years that followed, Rofes would report that his entire social world changed as friend after friend fell to AIDS. Many who had come of age in the 1970s would watch their entire social networks reduced to newspaper obituaries and photo-albums of former lovers, tricks, and friendships (Shepard 1997). Eric had volumes of photos and obits of his friends who died, recalled Chris Bartlett. They were gorgeously created remembrance books with hundreds of folks documented. Rofes spent the 1980s and 1990s consumed with the battle around the health crisis, working in AIDS organizations, writing about AIDS, all while taking care of friends and lovers suffering from illness.
Memories and Losses Much of Reviving the Tribe involved the fate of a subculture where so many of his friendships and movement organizing had taken shape. During a recent trip to New York City, I found myself in subfreezing temperature detouring a dozen blocks out of my way to walk through the Meat Packing District of the West Village, Rofes recalled. Without consciousness or planning, I needed to stroll by what had been the Mineshaft, the quintessential gay male sex club of the 1970s. As I stood and stared at the door, tears flowed as I remembered the individual men and the spirit of optimism of the times (1996, p. 33). Rofes mourned the loss in space, networks, and gay mens sexual culture (p. 33). Yet, the melancholic process involved conflicting feelings. By the mid-1990s, Rofes experienced survivors guilt. In the introduction to William Johnsons HIV Negative, he described the plight of uninfected gay men, such as himself, as a "population of supposed survivors left to walk the earth like robots or zombies, telling ourselves and others that everything's fine while we are actually numb, cut off from our emotions," (quoted in Young, 1996).
Forgetting By the late 1990s, many old-line activists worried that a vast cultural amnesia in the community had wiped out the memory and legacy of queer artists and activists of the 1970s. Whether they were sex club owners, porn film-makers, or activists defending their work, their passions and play spaces deserved recognition, not obscurity rooted in condemnation. Without them, there was little to prevent a culture of shame from taking hold of the queer scene (Moore, 2004). All reification is forgetting, Herbert Marcuse (1978) writes in the Aesthetic Dimension. With this in mind, Rofes started thinking intensely about what the years before the AIDS crisis had meant to him. Infused with memories of past friendships and activism, Rofes fought to make sure the meaning of the pre-AIDS Gay Liberation years was not lost to the sex-negative cultural narratives which accompanied the AIDS years. And he tended to have a good time while doing so. Ive often realized that most people who sustain themselves as organizers need to have fun and need to get social, cultural, and pleasure needs met through organizing, Rofes explained to me during our 2005 interview. Yet in many circles this need for pleasure was rejected in favor of a dour model of LGBT advocacy. People favored equality over affirmative battles for sexual freedom, opting for fitting in, rather than challenging an oppressive system (Goldstein, 2002). In the face of this vast forgetting, Rofes hoped to fight back by highlighting the stories and experiences of this network of queer activists and artists, liberationists and innovators. Following up on Reviving the Tribe and Dry Bones Breathe, he hoped to finish the trilogy with a project which highlighted the stories of gay men who went to baths, ran the bars, and functioned as sexual and social pioneers (Rofes undated). In the years after Dry Bones Breathe (1998) was published, Rofes completed nearly one hundred interviews with activists who had been involved with queer social organizing during the 1970s. He would refer to the project as, my 70s book. Rofes hoped this project could serve as a corrective: The gay glory days of the 70s are both mythologized and maligned. As the shadow of AIDS fell over a generation, memories and personal life stories became hidden, repressed, distorted or lost forever. The point was that queer life offers a route outside of imposed ideological structures and expectations about gender and culture; queer spaces allow for personal and social transformation (Halperin, 1995). Within this context, the search for another way to live within the culture had become a work of art in itself. This search would be the subject of Rofes final work. Through it, Rofes hoped to capture a small glimpse into the history and aesthetics of legendary queer public sexual spaces, including clubs like the Mineshaft, the Saint, and the Catacombs, from San Francisco to the Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of New York City. These were all spaces where personal lives overlapped with aesthetic explorations of self and community. In the second volume of the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault elaborated on those voluntary and deliberate practices according to which men not only set themselves rules of conduct but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into a work of art (Foucault, 1985, 10-11). Through oral history, Rofes (undated) hoped to describe the lived experience of such practices, spaces, and networks.
Beyond Shame
Rofes was particularly concerned about the implications of the loss of such practices of the self. As the AIDS years continued, he was worried queers would turn their back on the lessons of the 1970s Gay Liberation which called for queer world- making to involve a radical social critique of marriage, family, militarism, and any number of restrictive tenants of US social life. Through such practices, queer theorist Michael Warner suggests queer world making brings into being the space of our world, which is then the background against which we understand ourselves and our belonging. Here, our most intimate experience and self-understanding relies on a world that is essentially public, and brought into being by the interactivity of others, (quoted in Jagose, 2000). Warner, Rofes and company worried that aspects of this queer world were being privatized and sanitized away, a casualty of a sex panic which used a morality campaign to advance neoliberal aims to suburbanize urban space (Jargose, 2000; Shepard, 2010). Debate over this panic would last for much of the late 1990s. In the face of a push for more queers to turn their back on the world-making possibilities of queer sexuality and by extension public sexual cutlure , Rofes hoped for pleasure to be part of our democracy. He argued for this, screamed about it, yearned for it. When he was attacked he fought back about it. Throughout these years, Rofes remained a controversial figure. In our 2005 interview, I asked about his use of performance to defend pleasure at a government hearing: Yet, that was 1989, testimony at National AIDS Commission. They were doing hearings in San Francisco. And it was at a point when we were feeling like the gay piece of it was becoming kind of bureaucratized and mainstreamed away from authentic gay male subcultures. At that time I was the new executive director of an AIDS group [Shanti Project] and felt that it would be much more impactful to give testimony first in a suit and then in leather as a way of pushing the issue of culture and community I got flack for it because people thought it was disrespectful and unprofessional. This was when I was thinking AIDS groups were still community-based in the real terms. I later learned how wrong I was. But I was trying to bring an organization closer to grassroots gay male cultures. And I think it was at a time when it was a tension within AIDS organizing, about whether that was appropriate or not.
Rofes, who was blamed for a number of difficulties faced by the organization (see Rofes, 1996; Shepard, 1997), looked back with regret:
Many organizations were great examples of authentic communities that by the 1990s were inauthentic communities. I think thats an important distinction to make. Because there are moments within community organizing where authentic community forms around people coming together in crisis in a particular moment, and being there for each other for that growth which you are talking about. And then there are the times when people are trying to emulate or recapture that authentic moment. My experience, at least with some organizations, is that they are really not there for you when push comes to shove; they are around only in rhetoric or representation.
When the divide between friendship, activism, and professional commitments became too wide, the authenticity of the experience dwindled. Rofes left Shanti in the midst of an angry struggle over funding and questions about accountability for service providers. The end of the Shanti years would be the low point of Rofes career. He felt like many had abandoned him, Urvashi Vaid recalled at his funeral.
Resiliency and Regeneration
After leaving Shanti Project, Rofes earned a PhD in Social and Cultural Studies at UC Berkeley and wrote two enormously influential books (Rofes, 1996,1998). Both were important contributions, contextualizing the losses and challenges to community, pleasure, friendship, and social knowledge in the AIDS years. They also highlighted the links between public sexual space and community organizing which had been so vital to Rofes in the 1970s and early 1980s. After watching queers die en masse during the years before AIDS treatment, I remember reading Reviving the Tribe in the summer of 1996 with a profound sense of excitement, thinking of ways communities facing multiple losses could find new routes toward health and pleasure. Rofes was intensely aware of the need to think through what was going on in the face of multiple losses to AIDS. I believe that any hope for collective survival is rooted in the realities of our lives, however harsh and seemingly unacceptable, he wrote in Reviving the Tribe (p.7). Facing a stark reality head on, Rofes managed to articulate a life-affirming narrative for a new direction in queer life and activism. In doing so, Rofes railed against those who suggested gay men should just grow up and reject public sexual culture. Even a cursory look at the histories of our movement will show that sexual liberation has been inextricably bound together with Gay Liberation, the womens movement, and the emancipation of youth, he wrote in 1998 . Throughout the 1980s and 1990s a cultural war raged over of meanings of sexual self determination, S&M, public space and the place of sex in the GLBT movement. Much of the debate centered around the meanings of sexuality and pornography, S&M and public sexual culture (Duggan and Hunter, 1995). Here panic grew over strategies of HIV prevention (Crimp et al, 1997; Moore, 2004). Many suggested gays should act more responsible (Goldstein, 2002). In response, activists, ironically dubbed themselves SexPanic!, to challenge this discourse (Crimp et al, 1997). Rofes, who supported the groups efforts, was keenly aware of the complexity of questions of sexual self- determination. For many, the forbidden becomes desired; taboo produces cravings; the return of the repressed is made corporeal and is experienced as an enormous hunger, he wrote in A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality & Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer (2005). He was aware that telling gay men or anyone to just say no served no ones ends but the Comstock like moralists who favor abstinence over more comprehensive approaches to sexual self determination (Goldstein, 2002; Collins, 2002; Crimp, 1988). Rather than condemn, Rofes supported efforts to considered HIV prevention within a broad holistic, harm reduction approach, aimed at increasing safety rather than prohibiting specific behaviors (Crimp, 1988; HRC, undated). For Rofes, there was far more to the question of pleasure than just getting off, or male privilege, as his old GCN colleague and veteran activist Urvashi Vaid had charged. Central principles of American democracy lay at the core of the sex panic question, argued Rofes (1997). Can you lose your job for deviating from conventional sexual norms, he wondered? Many have (DEmilio, 1983; Murphy,1988). Like so much else within our democracy, what one person enjoys, another will inevitably find offensive, Rofes counseled. Variation is a core component of social life, he would explain. In a pluralistic democracy, alternate kinship networks abound; honoring difference is part of democratic living. Yet, many condemned the ways queers and sexual outsiders organized their friends and families in alternative ways (Goldstein, 2002). Much of Rofes work and scholarship involved challenging such narratives. Among the most effective ways of oppressing a people is through the colonization of their bodies, the stigmatizing of their desires, and the repression of their erotic energies, Rofes declared during the National Gay and Lesbian Task Forces Creating Change Conference in San Diego, on November 16, 1997. We believe continuing work on sexual liberation is crucial to social justice efforts, (Rofes, 1997). Without pleasure there can be no justice, it was a point born of Rofes years of thinking and writing about sexual politics.
SexPols A primary means for Rofes reading of sexuality was the San Francisco Study Group on Sex and Politics (SexPols), a study group he helped organize in San Francisco. A few words on the group are instructive. Founded in 1993 with the iconographic queer writers Allan Brub and Gayle Rubin, the group was formed to help sex activists break down feelings of isolation, make sense of their experiences, and chart shifting political and cultural trends. Its a group of kind of egg head type people who have formed a community of some kind, said Rofes. Some of us are new and some of us have been around for thirteen years just getting together once a month over food and a book and a reading or an article or a video weve seen to discuss it. And along the way, the writers and friends from the group helped produce a pulsing body of writing as well as activism SexPanic!, The Gay Mens Health Movement, among others. Yet, much of this project began with a series of monthly salons. The precedents for the group were many. Some were the 1970s queer study groups and San Francisco History Project (Rofes 2005C). The other, of course, was Wilhelm Reichs similarly named Sex-Pol group formed in 1927, a Viennese network of social clinics for social reform, sexual education, and street based psychoanalysis (Reich, 1966). Through the group, Reich called for an authentic, politics of everyday life which focused on both broad social issues and the details of everyday living, including cravings for intimacy, care, and safe ways to connect with others (Danto, 2005, 116). The group railed against the social and political costs of repressed sexuality. Reich linked political repression to neuroses and redressed sexuality and guilt notes Elizabth Danto (2005, p. 119). The San Francisco Sex Pol group built on a similar ethos. It was an argument Rofes advanced throughout his career. And as with Reichs day, not everyone agreed. Sometimes Erics honesty about his personal sex life made people feel uncomfortableas if somehow the seriousness of his work were diminished by his personal stories, acknowledged Bartlett and Valenzuela (2007, p. v). It was too much about himself and not others, complained Donald C. Barrett (2007A). So it [his writing] comes off as braggy. Its one thing to locate yourself in the environment, but it is not about you. But this discomfort was a gift of Erics: he helped his readers, fellow organizers and community members to see those hidden niches where shame and fear bind us, argue Bartlett and Valenzuela (2007, p. v). The rejection of sexual shame was one of Rofes powerful skills as an organizer and thinker. An unfortunate by-product of those years and cultural battles was the schism among queers. I think the conflicts that emerged during that period in the 1990s were not pleasant or fun for any of us, Rofes (2004) recalled in another interview. Gay men took sides in this debate and some long-time friendships were destroyed. This might also discourage people from diving into the wreck of AIDS writing. Throughout the sex wars, panic seemed to everywhere. It certainly was in New York. In 1998, Rofes came to New York to speak on a panel for the one-year anniversary of SexPanic! and contacted me about the book I had just finished on the San Francisco AIDS years, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic. We talked about survival, the capacity for resiliency, and the hope for a lusty pleasure in a democracy. I told him about my work with SexPanic! as a kinky straight man, and he encouraged me to push forward and help forge a different kind of politics, based in caring connection and social justice rather than identity. Shortly before he died, we corresponded about an essay I wrote about the topic (see Shepard, 2006). I had always had an image of him being an intense, highly contentious man in pursuing his ideology. Yet in person he was a caring, thoughtful person willing to consider each of our unique contributions. He was aware of all of our capacities to contradict ourselves. This was what Whitman talked about when he suggested we are all bountiful (Christman, 1963; Schmidgall, 1998). Unfortunately, many rejected such a lusty politics. Some of Rofes greatest critics were gay men who scorned him for such views (Barnett, 2007A,B). Where are your sexual politics? he used to lament. In the years after the sex wars of the 1990s, Rofes (2007) organized a series of conferences, aimed at supporting a movement for gay mens health which expanded the conversation beyond HIV and its related panics. Friendship was integral part of the mix. Our aim is to encourage socializing, friendliness, and caring and downplay stardom, power plays, and community civil wars, Rofes explained in the call for the Gay Mens Health Summit in Boulder, Colorado; July 19-23, 2000. In doing so Rofes and company helped move debate around gay mens health toward a more holistic approach to community health (Rofes, 2007). In between such engagements, Rofes continued to enjoy the company of gay men in less formal settings, including clubs, and even bars, such as the Lone Star, a bear meeting space in San Francisco. These spaces are friendly, theyre warm, theyre silly! Rofes confessed in an interview about bear culture (Suresha, 2002, p. 16). I hate using that word but there truly is a silliness, a lightness about it. He found great meaning in such subcultures. Eric was famously a proud member and stalwart defender of the sex and party cultures of gay men as vital sites of engagement and critical thought. He was a non-monogamous, kinky leather bear and community organizer and scholar and writer, explained Bartlett and Valenzuela (2007, p. 5). He insisted that most gay men in their erotic adventures are not sick, immature or vestiges of a bygone era rebuked by AIDS, but are instead brave innovators of ever-expanding the possibilities of intimacy and play. He was keenly aware of the need for social movements to support broad-based struggles for sex and social justice, with multiple means, including forms of play. When I interviewed Rofes for my dissertation in 2005, he helped tease out the relationship between embodied experience and the history of struggles for pleasure. Rofes argued that the role of the Gay Liberation Movement was to reject notions that pleasure should be considered a peripheral component of social movement activity. Rather than distractions, pleasure and play represented smart strategies for organizing. Play is a term for drag, ACT UP zaps, the use of food in the Latino community, the use of dance dramaturgy, culture jamming, carnival, and other forms of creative community building activities, he argued. In this way, play supported the exhilarating, pleasure of building a more emancipatory, caring world. Here, cultural rituals, such as humor, drag, and eating food, support and foster activism. Ultimately, does a sober form of organizing appeal to more than white people in a sustainable way? he asked, responding to a common critique of those who suggest activism should involve a calculated analysis of benefits and costs. A politics of play would involve any number of similar questions (see Shepard, 2010). Throughout our 2005 interview, and in the following months, we debated this politics of pleasure and playcomparing and contrasting our respective samples of activist narratives. [I]f you look at the first chapters of my White Nights book, I suggested, one could find a group of people who were doing both political organizing as well as organizing parties. I cited party promoter Michael Molletta, one of these early AIDS causalities, as a prime example. Rofes retorted, I can find exceptions but they are rare, and I think your White Nights sample may have been unusual. The long email conversation was a continuation of our interview from the previous spring. In that interview, he noted, In doing my research, I have found that there is a division there. When asked, what was their relationship to gay political, social, religious, and cultural organizing in the 1970s, Rofes interviewees suggested, basically they had no relationship to it. They were getting laid. They were going to the bars or the baths or the parks. Conversely, My political activist friends often had total disdain for them The activists tended to be sober and tended to be anti bar, anti disco. It was a kind of Marxist left. Rofes found himself straddling these worlds. I felt like because I had this interest in kink and masculinity, I did the leather bars, I did the sex clubs in a way that put me next to people who generally had total disdain for the political activists, (Rofes, 2005). We concluded that play was an integral part of expanding networks, social capital, and friendships which extended into and beyond activism. As we walked away after the interview in the West Village, Rofes said to me that he felt like a strange kind of survivor of a storm from a different era, as he looked around with a warm smile, a gesture of reflection and relief. Many, of his friends had passed. AIDS was still around and so was Rofes, who had recently become tenured at Cal State Humboldt, where he happily taught and wrote as he continued to participate in organizing efforts. In spring of 2005, Rofes wrote that his life was a success despite the losses: Recently I attended a dance party, one of the many evenings of intense music and cavorting available to thousands of gay men in my city [San Francisco] each weekend. I looked over the crowd of primarily twenty-something and thirty- something men, shirtless, gyrating, arms reaching to the heavens. I thought immediately at how the doomsayers criticize this population of young gay men, saying things such as, I didnt work my ass off during the past 30 years to create a culture of drug use and unprotected sex and self-centered me-me-me attitudes. This is not what the gay movement was all about. And then I realized something, something surprising and simple. As someone who has spent the last 30 years working on Gay Liberation and AIDS activism and sexual liberation, what I saw before me was precisely the world I was trying to create. When we fought during the 1980s and 1990s to prevent gay mens sexual cultures from being destroyed, when we worked to preserve certain values about gender play, friendship, and erotic desire, when we quietly worked behind the scenes to ensure that certain spaces would survive gentrification and public health crackdowns, we were fighting to preserve the ability of new generations of gay men to create worlds of pleasure and desire. As I looked out over the sea of dancing men, I realized, despite all the battles weve lost in terms of politics and discourse and the media, gay men and gay sexual cultures had managed to survive and, indeed, thrive (quoted in Rofes, 2005B).
The last time we saw each other was in the spring of 2006, during the Pacific Sociological Association meetings. I had flown out at Erics invitation to participate in one of his panels (see Shepard, 2006). After a tour to Slammers sex club in West Hollywood, we chatted about careers; he gave me the name of a couple of books, including Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich and we talked about other heroes of the movement who were facing their mortality. Rofes was always concerned about AIDS, but none of us know how we are going to go out.
Friendship and Freedom
In the end, Rofes life experiences of movement building through friendship belongs to a tradition dating even before the days of Gay Liberation. Friendship and Freedom was the name of the short lived 1924 publication for the nations first gay rights group, Society for Human Rights. Throughout Eric Rofes experience, friendship connected personal passions with broad movement goals. It made lifes struggles worthwhile. The friendships offered room to celebrate when he won and to lick wounds when he suffered a setback. Without them, it is hard to imagine three decades of Rofes writing and movement building taking shape in quite the same way. My most meaningful kinships have emerged out of that movement, Rofes explained toward the end of our conversation (Rofes, 2005). The following summer Rofes flew East for a summer vacation to write his 70s book and spend time with old friends in Provincetown, one of his old Gay Community News romping grounds. And he would never return. The legacy of friendship and organizing that Rofes leaves behind is best summed up by Rofes himself, in an observation made towards the conclusion of our 2005 interview, as he reflected on three decades of community organizing; For me, most of the meaning in community organizing has come from being part of a movement. I am someone who has been able to work it so that I find it meaningful to be part of movements that change the world or resist thingsand to me thats a very sixties notion. But that is where Ive had to find satisfaction and where I could actually find it. So for me theres an identity piece thats around being part of a movement
Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Erika Biddle, Jay Blotcher, Chris Bartlett, Liz Highleyman, Peter Nardi, and Nadia Raza for feedback and editorial assistance with this essay.
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