Gay Liberation Was About More Than Sex

(Jim Downs)

History has a way of repeating itself. As Jim Downs notes in Stand by Me, out March 1, gay newspaper The Body Politic had a policy against running personal ads containing the stipulation “No fats, no fems” in the 1970s. “You don’t even realize that you’re ventriloquizing something that people said 40 years ago,” Downs says.

Stand by Me challenges the idea that the gay liberation of the ’70s was primarily about sex, a popular historical narrative perpetuated following the AIDS epidemic. While Downs acknowledges the importance of sex post-Stonewall, he argues that many gay communities formed around other types of experiences that have since been ignored.

By combing through archives, Downs, a history professor at Connecticut College, spotlights communities that assembled around prayer, gay prison journals, and underground newspapers. He devotes a chapter to Craig Rodwell, who in 1967 opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first bookstore devoted to gay and lesbian authors, which served as a hub for bohemians seeking alternatives to the bathhouses.

Although Stand by Me toils with heavy subject matter like the largest massacre of gay people in the U.S., Downs is interested in capturing something more uplifting: friendship, which inspired the book’s title. “A really good friend of mine got dumped and we had a party at his house because he was so upset,” the author recalls. “It was the beginning of Facebook, and he wrote on the caption of a picture with me and two other friends, ‘Stand by me.’ I thought that was so poignant.”

Downs will appear for a conversation March 7 at Barnes & Noble, 2289 Bway (82nd St), 7pm; free.