CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
Sage Wisdom
(reprinted, with permission, from Everybody's News, Issue 540, January 22-28,
1999)
by Michael Blankenship
Larry Wolf is 77 years old and has lived in Cincinnati since 1952, yet he did not "come out" as a gay man until fairly late in life, at age 59. That was in 1980 or '81 - he's not entirely sure.
"It was all Bob McNee's fault," he points out, citing the influence and example of a former paragon of Cincinnati's gay community. "I wasn't even in the closet, I was in the wall behind the closet. If someone had told me when I was in my teens that I was a queer, I would have had no problem, I would have known where I stood. But the word was practically unknown at that time."
I stop Larry to ask him about that word, "queer," pointing out that many in our community still cringe when we use it casually or in print.
"Batshit!" he exclaims. "It's like the pink triangle, we wear it with pride now. You have to reverse the meaning, throw it back in their goddamn faces!"
He had been married and fathered three sons, so he figured his "problem" was solved. He had known Bob McNee for about 20 years, and considered him his best friend.
"One day Bob came over, and revealed to me that all his life he had had this struggle, and that he couldn't take leading a double life any longer. Well, I was flabbergasted! Because, you see, it reopened all of these questions of my own!" He saw Bob trade in his image of "Mr. Establishment," give up wearing suits in favor of blue jeans and a cowboy hat, and become very outspoken on gay issues, "not just at school (U.C.), but at church! On Fountain Square!"
Larry, who had always enjoyed politics as a way to relate to people, then started getting involved locally in gay politics. He remembers fondly the marches, the rallies, the parades, the energy, the true "community" to be experienced and shared in that fairly recent past. But he also points to some of the notable failures.
"The trouble with gay men," he says, "is that they are men... The original Stonewall riot did not liberate effeminates, drag queens, and cross-dressers as it did the phallic worshipers and gay machismo types. "Coming out" for most gays applies only to sexuality, and does not liberate them politically, religiously, or generally," he laments. "Today we have a greater concern with body-building than with self defense through political action."
In discussing the difference in the local community over the past few years, Larry sighs, "The leadership seems to keep going downhill. The Coalition (the Greater Cincinnati Gay and Lesbian Coalition, now disbanded) was one of the high points. Even if they didn't communicate as much as they should, at least the mechanism was there. And we were one of the few cities to have such a thing, not even Amsterdam had such a thing!"
He also misses the former Cincinnati chapter of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), Gay & Lesbian March Activists (a.k.a. "glama"), who could always be relied upon to "do the dirty work" of organizing demonstrations and street theater on issues that the "mainstream" organizations wouldn't address (the Mapplethorpe trial, the Steven O'Banion prosecution, the Kenton County Safe-Sex Counseling Ban, etc.). Then he adds, "But I seem to be at odds with many people." I know how he feels, all too well.
"People died of AIDS, others moved away, and still more got burned out, and there was no one left to work with," Larry says. The situation reminds him of another experience: "In 1968 I was an alternate delegate to the Democratic Convention, pledged to Eugene McCarthy (anti-Vietnam candidate, not to be confused with Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the '50s). And of course we lost the convention, and Humphrey got the nomination. Well, the thought occurred to me, the Democratic Party was a paper organization. So what if we were defeated at the convention? We ought to go back home, get ourselves elected precinct captains and ward captains, take over the party, and then be ready for the next time around! But everyone felt defeated. Well, in my opinion, if you're defeated, you strike back harder!"
He saw the same defeatism following the passage of Issue 3, and we discuss the current efforts to get the community active again. "If a gay group of activists is going to form, or reform, I would be glad to work with them, but Stonewall has become so hesitant that I've long since let my membership lapse," Larry says. "They hire some middle-class professional to organize something for them, when what they really need is a red-hot trade union organizer who knows how to do it at the grass roots, which they seem constitutionally incapable of."
When I ask him what his hopes are for the coming campaign, Larry emphasizes that he would not regard it as a campaign, per se. "The real problem is to change people's opinions, and that means a long period of education." And in addition to working through the churches, he says, "we need to be heard in neighborhoods, and social groups, Rotary, Kiwanis, business organizations... Building a community, if we get started with these things, that might get some people involved. They'd see this as a legitimate act of self-defense, and that we're in need of defending ourselves. We ought to be able to anticipate hazards, and not wait for a Matthew Shepard incident to happen here to arouse us."
Larry Wolf would like to see more gays join organizations, and see those organizations form another coalition. "What I would really like to see is gay men in particular stop being such goddamn conformists. If society questions something as basic as your sexuality, this should spark you to question society, your politics, your religion, and your basic philosophy of life," he says.
His advice to today's young queers (and every generation thinks they themselves have invented rebellion) is "the same, advice as was given in my grandfather's time: 'Educate, agitate and organize.'"
