Mitchel Interview
Interview of DUNCAN MITCHEL by JULIA TURNER, Herman B Wells Library, Indiana University, November 14, 2009.
JT: When did you first become active in…?
DM: 1971, I came to Bloomington in the Fall semester of 1971 from Northern Indiana where I’d grown up. I came here specifically to find the gay community and to come out. I’d been in South Bend which had a couple of gay bars and they actually started a gay organization the very soonest that I’d left, which always felt like a plot to me. But I already knew that there was a gay organization and community here, which was a major factor in helping to get down here, getting me to get off my butt and move. I went to the first meeting of Gay Liberation Front that was announced and got involved right away, not very involved I was more just someone who wanted to be a member, but the main involvement I had was in October or so, someone from the organization said “we’re going to talk to a class tomorrow do you want to come along?” and so I got involved in speaking to classes which I have done on and off ever since and am now running the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual speakers Bureau which I have been doing since the late 80’s, probably about twenty years now. But I also stayed involved in GLF as it became first Bloomington Gay Alliance and Bloomington Gay and Lesbian Alliance, which didn’t really change much of what was happening, but was just following trends around the country. I was not a founder of OUT but I got involved probably in its second year, I was one of the co-founder’s of the gay men and women’s literary circle which was started in 1976 and ran to about 1980; so I’ve been involved in a lot of things.
JT: What were the founding principles of the GLF and the ways they were different from organizations today, it’s evident that there was a more radical political bent to that organization?
DM: That was true nationally, but you have to remember that the Gay Liberation Front was a short-lived wave in the Gay movement, within a year I believe, the Gay Activist Alliance got started in New York City with a more single-issue focus; The GLF had always had the idea of paying attention to other struggles, as well as our own, with a left-inflected and informed kind of analysis. But I think that outside of a few people, that was never really what the GLF was about. Aside from one man here in Bloomington who had been a member of the U.S. Communist Party before he was kicked out for being gay, nobody in the GLF had much in the way of left politics, or very much knowledge as far as I could tell about left politics or gender politics. When I used words like ‘sexism’ I found that a lot of the other Gay men in the group had no idea of what I was talking about, had not read any literature, and in a way that was good, because it was important to come from where they were coming from. Burt for me it’s always been a matter of combining the personal with the ideological, and using the ideological to inform, to help me understand why I’m going through what I’m going through, and to use my personal experience to inform the correct analysis, which sounds like I’m a lot more conscious then I probably am, but I have always valued ideology in a way that a lot people didn’t. So I was kind of disappointed by that aspect, it would seem to me that it wasn’t so much that I wanted anything in particular from the Gay Liberation Front, but that a lot of it was there was an explosion of organizing around the country in the wake of the Stonewall Riots. Bloomington Gay Liberation Front was founded in 1970, the year before I came here, and I often had the impression –and I may have been wrong- that it was just ‘everybody was doing that so let’s do it too.’ And that was a good thing because it gave us a very strong visibility on campus, a lot of people thought that there were more of us then there were, and that we were more powerful than we were, which was not entirely a bad thing to have people think: that we were more organized then we were. But, we didn’t always know, it was more like ‘we have this organization now what are we going to do with it?’. There were two, as I understand it, two founding things about it: the year before I came here –I believe it was the summer of 1970, I don’t think it was the summer of 1971- one of the local bars put up a sign saying ‘This is a bar, not a fruit stand.’ It was a popular hang out… there were no gay bars in Bloomington at that time, it was a party and household scene. Parties were held in a couple of different semi-collective households around campus, and there was usually a party every other weekend or so, but there were no bars. There were bars where those who were 21 would go, Nick’s was one of them, Sully’s Oak and […] on the square which drew an older crowd even than Nick’s which had always been an […] bar and a graduate student bar as well. Also the Gables, which was not a bar, which is –the building is still there, it’s still known as the Gables, but it hasn’t been called the Gables since the early 70’s –also drew a lot of those of us after GLF meetings who couldn’t go to the bar but would meet there afterwards to hang out and talk. So, in response to the ‘This is a bar, not a fruit stand’ sign, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but at the time it was kind of considered that this was okay to do. If you only consider how racist Bloomington was and is, those are fairly mild kind of put-downs in the same kind of vein; just kind of asserting status, asserting priority and power. But, the GLF was organized and started a picket line outside of the bar, Nick’s, and within a little while the signs came down. I don’t think it was a strongly motivated move on the part of the ownership, somebody thought they were being funny or kind of tired of […] Queens around, but too bad, they were a major part of the customer base, and they found … I think that the picket line was effective, a lot of people were not pleased by the sign, maybe they just thought it was tacky. In the fall of 1970, GLF organized a dance […] and at the time this was very good, I think from all over the state and probably the Midwest. The dances that GLF organized in the fall, especially for Halloween, were huge events, and included people from all over the state, as were the parties, the parties were usually quite huge. For example, the second one was held in Wright Quad and it was quite big, after that we moved to alumni hall in the union and I know that the capacity there was eight hundred with an extra four-hundred in the solarium, and we always sold it out. So, it was a very successful sort of thing, and that gave us money for whatever we wanted to do. We soon got an office in the IMU tower, we’d had a weekly literature table in the commons lobby back by the elevators –I always liked the educational stuff because it was handy to have this visible presence- everyone going by had to see it, there was a lot of traffic there so there we were. This was a time when the idea of being openly gay –not caring who knew that you were gay, not being openly closeted so that those who knew, knew- this was a fairly new idea, at least as far as catching on at a whole new level. The poet Robert Duncan had come out publicly in an article in a magazine called Politics that was edited by Dwight MacDonald in 1944, but without a social context for it, it kind of hurt his poetical career, his writing career a little bit, and made sure that he was never going to be in with the ‘cool’ straight poets. But, it also kind of sank of like a stone, it was kind of a revelation when it was rediscovered in the 70’s that he’d written in public this article. And he had very political reasons for doing that. So when the 70’s and the radical gay movement made an important issue to come out publicly, it was seen as weird not only by straight but by gays at large as well, and so just to be sitting there, with our literature, a lot of GLF literature, mostly from other sources, other organizations, mimeographed, was itself probably one of the most effective things we did because it was, I think weekly, maybe bi weekly for years, it lasted until the late ‘70’s.
JT: Did you ever experience any direct harassment from the student body from being there [at the tables] or from the events that you had done?
DM: I don’t remember any direct harassment. There was some harassment as I understand it of the first Halloween dances in Wright Quad, putting it in a dorm, they also had security, there was some hostility, but I don’t think any disruption. There was [… ] I don’t remember any at the dances in the IMU, it was […] they drew a large number of straights too, and it was just a big friendly dancey atmosphere, and I don’t remember any overt hostility or difficulty… but it may be that I just don’t remember.
JT: When did the GLF […] did the GLF transform itself into the Gay Alliance?
DM: Yes, it just renamed itself. Even in the first year there’d been a split with the Lesbian Liberation organization, splitting off because of the sexism of the men, that was something that remained an ongoing problem, I am not sure, I think I was a lot less involved by the time it became Bloomington Gay and Lesbian Alliance, so I am not really sure of the dynamics there, but involvement by women has always been a difficult factor. That is one of the reasons we are proud of the Gay Women and Men’s Literary Circle because it always had a lot of involvement by women, at least as much as men, and some of the co-founders were women and uh, but that was a different kind of setup. There has always been a lot of resistance by gay men to involvement by lesbians and a lot of garden variety misogyny in gay men’s culture, which took me a few years to get my own consciousness raised on that. Now with Speakers Bureau we always aim for gender parity on the panels which is difficult at times because women have always been somewhat less involved, we have a number of explanations, but no one really knows why, but it is something that I continue to push for so that people, the audiences, who are mostly students, we mostly speak to classes now, won’t go on with the idea that homosexuality is a boy thing. So [...] Lesbian Liberation split off, I think…some women stayed involved in GLF and then in the BGA. Out kind of got the right idea by explicitly having, at least at the start, both a male and a female co chair. I dunno if they still do that, but for a long time they did.
JT: Was there any involvement of people of color in the GLF, or was it largely a white male thing?
DM: It was overwhelmingly white males. There were always African American gay people in the community, very few African American lesbians but not many of them got involved in the organization, and there was certainly racism among, this was after all Bloomington, there was hostility to say mixed couples, interracial couples, from both gay whites and gay blacks, though it was a different kind of hostility in either case. There was also just […] I was in a lot of ways naïve about that, because even though I had grown up very much aware of the civil rights movement and so on, I didn’t realize how deeply rooted racism is or all the structural forms it took, and I’d grown up […] I’d never known any black people until I came to Bloomington so it made if more difficult to learn to hear what was going on. So the organizations were and remain pretty much predominantly white. I think that OUT’s male vice-president is African American now but I am not sure. I haven’t been to meetings.
JT: So, you have already said that the GLF was a lot different in Bloomington than it was nation wide, and that its main activities were information distribution. Were there any larger goal of Bloomington’s GLF?
DM: The larger goals were I think kind of theoretical. There was a big attachment to gender bending, to drag; again this was mostly men who were concerned about this. They say drag as a major subversive factor, which it probably was; it was never anything that mattered very much to me. I noticed that among the most misogynist and most sexist men I knew were among the radical drag queens. I am not sure that it was necessarily different from other college GLFs. It was different from what I read about New York GLF. Which I think was …there were radical gay politics all over the country, Carl Whitman’s Gay Manifesto I think was published 1968 and it still reads as a radical document as it is…it was never really…I tend to think of gay liberation as sort of a utopian movement, and uh…and very soon gay activist alliance focused on specifically gay issues, zapping, dealing with media, we did very little of that here, one of our ongoing problems, well, it was more like an entertainment in the meetings, was someone would come to his first meeting and say ‘well, why aren’t you lobbying the state house, why aren’t you doing this, why aren’t you doing that” and we said, ‘well would you like to organize it’ and he would say ‘well no I cant do that, my mother would kill me. It would kill my mother if she found out.’ There was this wide spread attitude, which persisted well into the OUT years that the organization had this vast reserve of robot slave labor that we were selfishly keeping to our selves and not using for the greater good. But in fact we could only do what people wanted to organize. So things that I mainly remember were the educational, political aspect…and a lot of discussion, there were also gay men’s discussion groups, I went to some, they were called rap groups at the time, sometimes we tried to call them consciousness raising, but I don’t think most of us, including me, knew what that meant. There were also lesbian groups, but they were women only so I get into any awareness of that. By the mid ‘70’s I was a lot closer to lesbians in the community and I socialized with them a lot more than I did with gay men, but by then it was as with say Daughters of Bilitis, started out originally as a social organization and became politicized in the 60’s, but for most people a very important part of organizing was to provide a social environment, often an alternative to the bars. Though as time went on the dances became less popular because everyone wanted to go to the bars and drink or something…but I should add that within the university we had [recording cuts off]
So, our presence made the university deal with us, and so it had to deal with questions like discrimination. I think it wasn’t until the late 80’s that the university set up a non-discrimination policy for the university and there was eventually a move to get domestic partners benefits for same-sex couple’s. But, it was more we were watchful about these things in the university, there were a number of faculty members whom were not part of the organization, but whom everybody knew and so there was a lot of connection of or discrimination within. I remember hearing from one professor I knew in the late 70’s that there had been some concern when one young faculty member didn’t get his contract extended or renewed and the faculty made sure that he… it hadn’t been for gay related issue it was just other stuff, so there was some watchfulness. I don’t know what we would have done, things like pickets and so on became increasingly rare. But we rarely ran into any overt documentable kinds of discrimination outside of the university. The main thing after that …the main burst of demonstration, public kind of prostest, was over the foundation of the Gay lesbian bisexual transsexual gender student support office in ‘94, so that’s the next one I remember where any kind of organization like that got formed or activism got going…there were also AIDS related groups in Bloomington like positive link and Buddies but I never…those are groups that I didn’t get involved in, laziness, and approaching middle age, and the fact that it didn’t come close enough to me at the time.
JT: I think you have covered most of my questions in one way or another and I feel it would be redundant to ask the rest of my question. But I guess generalizing of course, what do you feel are the main differences in organizing politics…
DM: I don’t think the organizing politics have changed very much. The bulk of the community isn’t interested in activism most of the time. They might want to wear a t-shirt that says ‘silence equals death’; it always struck me funny when a very middle of the road, diversity management type organization like the student GLBT SS office used a ‘silence equal death’ slogan, which came from a trend within our activism very, very beyond anything in that organization would be involved with…but that’s fine…a lot of the stuff does mainstream itself, if it’s effective it does. But most people were mainly interested in getting laid, finding friends, finding boyfriends, having some place to go on Saturday nights, and that’s important too especially considering the relative isolation that gay kids grow up in still, nowadays, unless they’re very lucky. Eve Sedgwick calls it the long Babylonian exile of gay childhood. So that’s important. So there has always been that tension between those who wanted more activism and the rest of the people in the organization who were there because it was a social opportunity. So the organizing principle I would say stayed pretty much the same. A group of people…OUT you know started originally as a social organization, but then got taken over some careerist oriented people who wanted to go into counseling, politics, but they were still basically oriented to the kinds of professionalism, the kind of business oriented, and helping professions oriented kinds of activism that have largely taken over the gay movement. So that was I think a reflection of what was happening in the country generally. So they organized… Oh, another thing I forgot to mention another thing that happened fairly early, it must have been in ’72, we organized a Midwestern conference, it would have been the BGA by that time, which drew hundreds of people from all over the Midwest, had some big name speakers, we had a big dance. We had several of those over the years, I think ‘72 was the very first one. And that was another thing. But it was still pretty much getting people together, getting them to talk, getting them to meet each other, and talk about what was going on in there minds and think about what they wanted. It never went far beyond that but I would say that the basic project of achieving visibility was extremely important and we did a lot of that. We were the people who were visible at a time when most gay people still agreed that it was completely ridiculous, most people agreed with most straight people that the idea of rights for gay people, that we had a right to be gay, was absurd, but the idea of us as a people, as a group, with shared interests and concerns and rights, was ridiculous. We were among the people who produced the change that made that cliché and sort of a joke. And I think the main thing that has changed is the increased presence of professionals who come in with a sense of entitlement, ‘you know, we’ll show you how to run this organization’; they are often astoundingly ignorant about the issues, about the people they are dealing with, and they have a very distinct class bias. But then, that is not something that I very much sorted out either. I didn’t really become aware personally of class issues until probably the late 80’s. And I still don’t know how I would if I wanted to get involved in anything now, I would […] I don’t know exactly how I would deal with that.
JT: What are some of the things you address in your speakers…
DM: We have two main focuses in speaker’s bureau; we have the standard panelist introduce themselves and take questions from the floor model, which we’ve been doing ever since I got involved. We stress the idea of panels having more than one person, having more than one voice, more than one opinion; perspective is a very valuable thing. We welcome in fact, having panelists expressing even disagreement so that the audience discovers that gay people are not monolithic. The other one is the guess my orientation panels, which about started again in the late 80’s; the first one was held by the Gay Law Student’s group, OUTLAW, at the law school. I’m not really sure of the date, you can probably find that, and they caught on, they’re very popular […] they’re about the main thing that we do outside of classrooms in the dorms. It used to be that most of our panels were in the dorms, now they’re mostly in classrooms except for the guest panels, which still draw crowds. Our main issues are still basically the same thing of answering the same ritualized questions: ‘how did you know you were that way?’ ‘how did your family react?’ ‘do you think you were born that way?’ which is actually not a question that came up much before the 80’s, in the 70’s we were not really concerned with that. Questions like marriage, families, a lot of that stuff. We don’t get many questions that I know of about things like the military, we have very few people who have been involved in the military; we were in better shape actually with the people who had been married and have kids. Doug Lauter is a grandparent, things like that. So it tends to be very much on the personal level. Still doing the same sort of thing; the literature table’s petered out and I think that it’s a pity that we can’t have that. The one time that we did a guest panel in a classroom we had trouble because the students thought that they were being braided, if I’m guessing correctly. They were angry when it turned out that there were two people, two gay men, and they thought that it was a multiple choice test and every answer was mutually exclusive. Very, very funny. Someone also complained that some of the panelists changed their style of personal presentation before and after the revelation, which may be partly the audiences perspective, but I do think it is quite possible that people do change their presentation when they know they’re keeping a secret and when they are not. So that gave me at least something to think about, I don’t know how much the panelists thought about it. Running the Speakers Bureau and hearing the issues come up, because of my job, I work in Edmondson Dining Room Collins LLC, I can’t attend most of the panels so I don’t hear most of the stories that I would like, but it’s always the main benefit has been more education for me, hearing other people’s stories and hearing the questions people ask. […] One of the things that hasn’t changed, though it may be in terms of numbers, even in the 70’s we got people who in the audience had gay relatives, gay friends, that’s not as much a novelty as people might think. There’s always more awareness of us then people wanted to admit, which is why one reason visibility was important. You get people like Rosie O’Donnell saying ‘why should I come out, because everyone already knows’, well if everyone already knows why not talk about it? And that remains a sore point, even now, with a lot of closeted people, not only celebrities I think. Anything else?
JT: I think that’s all. Thank you very much.
