In recent news: the publication (on 7/6) of John D’Emilio’s latest book, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press). From Jonathan Ned Katz’s blurb:
a report from the trenches, a history of the struggle to create a history of sexuality, a personal history of political activism, the story of a [AZ: devoutly Catholic] smart boy from the Bronx who made himself into a pioneering, left, feminist, anti-racist gay, public intellectual.
Which prompts me to tell an anecdote about my man Jacques and me — and John D’Emilio. So my tale will of course begin with Larry Kramer, the author of the controversial novel Faggots, but more important to my tale, the founder of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which means that through his ceaseless abrasive hectoring, he changed the world for the better and helped to save untold numbers of lives.
(There are brief accounts of Kramer and D’Emilio in my 7/21 posting “Two celebrated gays”)
Autumn 1990. Arnold and Jacques, partnered since the 1970s, are at home on Ramona St. in Palo Alto. A news story about ACT UP comes by on tv. The gist of the conversation that follows (I note that our talk comes not very long after we have, to our weeping relief, tested HIV-negative — an astonishing escape from death, a bullet dodged, despite my open and intense pleasure in what the professionals call receptive anal intercourse; I have not killed us both, while friends are felled all around us):
— JHT>AMZ: How exactly does Larry Kramer plan to move the public health people to action?
— AMZ>JHT: I have no idea.
— JHT>AMZ: Oh, don’t be coy. Of course you’ve talked to him about it; all you famous gay guys know each other.
— AMZ>JHT: No, that’s a silly idea. The world of gay people is immense. My experience is of a tiny portion of that world, and a tinier portion of the famous ones; Kramer and I have never exchanged a word. And anyway, I’m not actually famous, just a minor player.
[This last claim, it turns out, my loving Jacques will never accept; he is resolutely egalitarian, as I am, but he also recognizes and respects great accomplishments, and he treats me as especially gifted — to reverse the usual slogan, he treats me as not only a great piece of meat but also as an especially wonderful human being. This is ridiculously sweet. Unrealistic but sweet.]
— JHT>AMZ [triumphantly playing his hole card]: No, no, no; for you the gay world is a small world. Look at it honestly. Last week I was reading John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. And then [in a distinctly accusatorial voice] on Friday you brought him to dinner at our house!
[Jacques being Jacques, he showed no awe at having one of his cultural heroes materialize at dinner, as if by request. But enjoyed John as a random interesting person, worth spending some time with. The thing was, I had access to John in a way Jacques did not, and that was a result of (a) John’s being a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford that year, while I was visiting there; and (b) John’s having collaborated with my Stanford colleague Estelle Friedman. It was a very specific association, not some small world of the gay elite.]
Small worlds. Meanwhile, Jacques was disposed to see small worlds embracing famous people. Some of his earliest memories are of life in housing at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where his father, a mathematician of some note, was working with Marston Morse, who taught at the Institute for many years. Later Jacques came to linguistics, where a relatively small number of language scientists are spread around the globe, so that we constitute a widely dispersed small world in which lots of people personally know lots of people; some of us are actually famous, lots of linguists know the writers of the textbooks they first learned about the field in, and there’s a lot of first-naming. And then through summers in coastal Maine and the massive efforts of his sister-in-law Virginia in Auburn AL in fostering chamber music (eventually putting chamber players up in her own home), he developed a wide acquaintance in this small and widely dispersed world. And through volunteering for political candidates whose goals were consonant with his, he became an acquaintance of some of the famous and powerful, most especially US Senator John Glenn, who I eventually got to spend time with as Jacques’s husband-equivalent; we mostly talked about early childhood education, a special passion of both Jacques’s and John Glenn’s.
In any case, Jacques was inclined to see small worlds linking famous people and so expected me to know the celebrities of the gay world the way I know the celebrities of linguistics. Well, yes, of course I knew Vicki and Roman and Sally and Geoff and Eve and Bill (Labov) and Bill (Bright) and Jerry and Penny and Chas and Noam and Ilse and Barbara and Morris and Anne and Walt. (That list includes a number of my mentors, champions, and collaborators.)
I have now gotten my own copy of John D’Emilio’s Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press, 2026) and done some skimming in it. The famous names (mine, entirely properly, not one of them) are there (along with some unfamous names, of acquaintances, friends, and lovers), plus John’s startling openness about all parts of his life and his characteristic compassion and humanity. There are good reasons why you’d want to have him come to dinner at your house: he’s smart, funny, self-aware, and extraordinarily nice (I can hear him protesting vigorously, in embarrassment, that he’s not nearly as nice as I’m making him out to be; but he’s just wrong about that — I am a keen detector of niceness, as well as of falsity, malevolence, and contempt; these are survival instincts in my world).
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