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History boy
Author-activist David Carter discusses 40 years of LGBT civil rights.
David Carter recalls walking down his street in Manhattan’s West Village this summer and finding an old copy of Life magazine from 1968. The cover featured a daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass and the words “The Search for a Black Past.” The first in a two-part series exploring black history, it made the activist-historian wonder, Why hasn’t there been a major-magazine cover story on LGBT history? “We aren’t really legitimized yet,” he says. As the keynote speaker at Gerber/Hart’s annual dinner and benefit on Saturday 3, the author of 2004’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, $15.95) will reflect on the movement then and now.
Carter, 59, a resident of New York since 1985, has strong ties to the Midwest. Born in Jesup, Georgia, he studied religion at Emory before moving to Madison in the mid-’70s to pursue an M.A. in South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin. Carter found himself equally drawn to the spirit of independence that had swept into the state’s capital in the ’60s. “Madison was already this island of liberalism,” he says. “My first drive around town, I turned on the local radio station and they were playing Ho Chi Minh’s poetry to music. They had recently renamed a street in honor of him. It was very radical.”
His attention soon turned to gay activism, especially after Anita Bryant helped overturn a gay-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida, in 1977, and began making her campaign national. Carter responded by taking part in a grassroots movement in Wisconsin that led to the passing of the first statewide gay-rights ordinance outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
But much of that activism, says Carter, was soon swept away. “Americans have been pretty complacent since the 1980s with the resurgence of the far-right wing,” he says. “They’re trying to destroy the progress that has been made in American society. I feel like I’m maybe the only one in a room of 10,000 that says this is horrible.”
By the mid-nineties, Carter undertook a decade-long research project on the Stonewall Riots that resulted in his 2004 book about the events. In Stonewall, Carter uncovers some surprising history, including details about the bar’s shady owner, Ed Murphy, a gay man who, according to Carter, blackmailed gay people, ran a prostitution ring and was connected with several deaths. “He used the Stonewall Inn to blackmail and murder gay people,” Carter says his sources for the book told him. “Later, he announced himself one of the leaders of the Stonewall Riots.”
It’s revelations like these that have made Carter one of a growing number urging more recognition of LGBT history. “A need now for the gay movement is to have our history taught,” he says. “When my book came out on the 35th anniversary of Stonewall, the most important [attention] I got from the mainstream media was a book review from the Boston Globe. That lack of response made me realize that our history is not seen as civil-rights history, human-rights history or American history. If you use a museum as a metaphor, we’re seen as this odd thing in an alcove off to the side.”
As Carter continues to study the community’s history (he’s currently at work on a biography of Frank Kameny, the doctor who got the AMA to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness), he remains optimistic that full LGBT civil rights will happen in his lifetime. “I’d be even happier if they’re teaching the history of our civil-rights movement as an integral part of American history,” he says. “That would be the icing on the cake.”
Gerber/Hart Library’s annual benefit dinner happens Saturday 3.
