Marc Stein

Background: Marc Stein is a soft-spoken 30-something who carries the recent history of gay Philadelphia around in his head the way the rest of us carry our personal memories. His book, The City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: The Making of Lesbian and Gay Communities in Greater Philadelphia, 1945-1976 (to be published by University of Chicago Press in 1997), focuses on the relationship between lesbians and gay men in Philadelphia post-World War II and pre-AIDS epidemic. The book will join a number of studies that have explored gay and lesbian communities across the United States.

After growing up in suburban New York, Stein became involved in gay and peace activism in Boston, where he edited the Gay Community News and the Arms Control Reporter and helped to found the AIDS organization Act Out. In 1989 he traded in the bullhorn for the word processor and became a doctoral student in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Philadelphia's gay community. Currently, he holds a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in gender studies and history at Bryn Mawr College. Stein will be discussing his research on Thursday, Oct. 26, at 7:30p.m. at Penguin Place, 201 S. Camac Street, in a talk titled, "Perverts in the Philadelphia Press, 1945-1960."

So tell me about your book.

I think what makes it unique is that I'm focusing on the history of relations between lesbians and gay men. A lot of the other studies coming out are either on lesbians or on gay men or they lump both groups together without trying to explore their differences.

I assume that you're not just focusing on the bars?

My work for my degree at Penn focused on public controversies and political activism; for the book, I'm trying to layer in much more information about everyday life. Right now, actually, I'm doing a little map of all the sites I've identified in Philadelphia — so that includes not only the bars and restaurants, but I have a mailing list of a gay group from the early 1970s with addresses for several hundred residences, so I can really see on the map where gay men lived and where lesbians lived.

Is it true that gay men—who can afford it—live on Pine Street and Spruce Street in Center City, while lesbians live in Mount Airy and the Art Museum Area?

I think theres an element of truth to that stereotype. Center City's been gay, as far as I can tell, back for 100 years. Lesbians also lived in Center City, but they were not, perhaps, as visible to the straight world as gay men.

Has all this changed the way you see Philadelphia?

Yeah, absolutely. I walk through Rittenhouse Square probably every other day, and some of the most colorful descriptions that I have of lesbian and gay life in the '50s and '60s center around Rittenhouse Square. I walk, smiling, when I go through the park, just imagining what it was like. It really gives the lie to the idea that lesbian and gay life was utterly miserable before Stonewall. People describe an incredibly vibrant outdoor scene with gay men promenading around the outside of the park, sitting on the benches, cruising one another — lots of black drag queens; it was a pretty racially mixed scene. Another interesting thing about Rittenhouse Square is that almost all the gay men I interviewed say they don't remember lesbians being there. But the majority of the lesbians that I interviewed from that era have given me stories of cruising there, hanging out with gay male friends there, coming out there. It's one of those fascinating instances of the way gay men just can not see lesbians, and also of the way lesbians so often have built their world around, on the side of, gay male culture — that is until the women's movement when there began to be more of an independent lesbian culture.

Tell me about some of the public controversies you discuss in the book.

Well, in 1954 the Delaware River Port Authority was in the process of overseeing the building of a new bridge. In 1955 the Catholic Church in South Jersey organized a major campaign against naming the bridge for Walt Whitman. There was a series of articles in the Catholic Star Herald, a Catholic newspaper in South Jersey, and in the last of those articles, the author, who was a priest, specifically said that one of the reasons that the Church objected to Whitman was that he was homoerotic. One of the really interesting things about this controversy is that, while the New York Times was open about the reasons behind the Catholic campaign, the local Philadelphia newspapers never mentioned homosexuality — they questioned Whitman's stature as a poet, they said that he was objectionable to the Catholic Church, but never said why. The City of Gloucester threatened to put up signs with their own name for the bridge on their side of the bridge, but in the end, the Port Authority stuck to its guns. The other controversy in the '50s occurred in 1959, when Philadelphia developed its own beatnik coffeehouse scene, with four coffee houses right around Rittenhouse Square: the Humoresque, the Proscenium, the Gilded Cage, and the Artists Hut. That was back when Frank Rizzo was a police captain, and he conducted a series of raids. One of the coffeehouse owners filed a civil rights suit against the police. He not only lost the case, but was forced out of business and subject to police harassment. And, while the suit resulted in Rizzo being transferred out of Center City, he was promoted to Inspector, and the whole thing became a critical episode in his rise to power.

What kind of obstacles have you encountered doing this study?

Well, a lot of the book is based on oral histories, and the group that is most difficult for me to find are people who can talk about the '40s. That's obviously because they're older, which either means that they're no longer with us or that they're less connected to the very youth-oriented lesbian and gay scene. The easiest group for me to find have been white lesbians and gay men from the '70s. Older people, African Americans, working-class people, people who were into the butch-femme bar scene, and non-activists—I've interviewed people in each of those groups, but if any of your readers fit that bill I would love to talk with them.