David Eisenbach’s Gay Power: An American Revolution provides a definitive history of gay and lesbian activism in New York City from the 1950s to the 80s. His study was researched largely through the collections of the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division. Eisenbach begins his study with consideration of the politics of the closet in 1950s New York City. In the 50s, New York had one of the largest and most active gay scenes in the country, and yet, gays and lesbians were continually endangered by public censure, police entrapment and brutality, random violence, and blackmail. Eisenbach shows how Edward Sagarin’s The Homosexual in America helped radicalize gays and lesbians across the country. Sagarin’s book called upon America to recognize and respect homosexual Americans like any other minority group and to stand up against totalitarian politics. He chronicles the rise of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis and shows how their east coast chapters further radicalized those organizations leading to the creation of the East Coast Homophile Association (ECHO) in 1963 and picketing of the Pentagon and White House in 1965. Eisenbach provides a moving account of the Stonewall riots and the radicalization of the gay and lesbian movements that followed with the creation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Gay Activists Alliance (GAA).  Eisenbach fleshes out the chronicle of the emergence of LGBT political power with moving first-hand accounts drawn from interviews such as:

Equipped with helmets, shields, and billy clubs, the riot police lined up, shoulder to shoulder like Roman legions and pushed their way down Christopher Street. Squaring off against one of their flying wedges was a brave, if foolish, group of street kids who formed Rockette-style kick line while singing:

We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair

The riot police charged into the kick line, smacking the singing youths with night sticks. Over the next hour, gay rioters dodged cops in the winding streets of the Village, setting fires in trash cans and breaking windows. One participant gleefully recalled his experience battling the police.

I developed, in that first encounter, a sense of street fighting tactics, of how to harass and get away with it; of how to taunt and provoke a response and somehow to not get hurt. And just years and years of all the resentments and humiliations and things that can come down on the head of a gay person were really—I was really experiencing liberation and radicalization and everything bang!, right then and there.

Eisenbach shows how the New York LGBT community developed as a political constituency, and has struggled with issues like the right to marry, military service, and the status of homosexuality with the psychological profession for over 40 years. He also introduces us to an entire range of LGBT political activists who are often forgotten such as Barbara Gittings, Kay Tobin Lahusen, Morty Manford, Frank Kameny, Arthur Evans, and Jack Nichols, among many others.  Essential reading.

 Lincoln Kirstein. Photograph by George Platt Lynes. Gift of Marie-Jeanne, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Copyright Estate of George Platt Lynes

2007 was the centennial of the birth of Lincoln Kirstein who, with George Balanchine, co-founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet, two of the most important dance institutions in the world. In the fall The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts celebrates his unparalleled achievements with the exhibition Lincoln Kirstein: Alchemist. The exhibition was also a testament to his importance in the development of the Library’s world-class Dance Collection, now the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. If you missed the exhibition this fall, you can still access the exhibition brochure online. The Kirstein centennial was marked by events around the city, including the publication of Martin Duberman’s new book, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein.

Kirstein (1907-1996) was born in Rochester, NY, and educated at Harvard (B.A. 1929, M.A. 1930). He invited George Balanchine to America in 1933 and then co- founded the School of American Ballet with Balanchine and Edward M.M. Warburg in 1934. He participated in the founding and/or direction of several ballet companies, including American Ballet in 1935, Ballet Caravan 1936-41, Ballet Society in 1946, and became general director of the succeeding company, New York City Ballet in 1948, He retired from New York City Ballet and School of American Ballet in 1989. In addition, Kirstein was also a major scholar of modern dance, a novelist, and poet. Kirstein’s bisexuality was widely known in New York circles, and he was a close associate of noted gay artists such as Paul Cadmus and George Platt Lynes.

Lincoln Kirstein was a frequent user, friend and supporter of The New York Public Library’s dance collection from its founding, expanding the Library’s service through donations of rare books, prints and designs, and endowments for preservation and conservation. The Lincoln Kirstein Collection includes more than 3,000 items, among which are rare books, prints, and personal correspondence. In addition to his indefatigable work on behalf of dance, Kirstein also supported visual artists and was a sponsor (1959-60) of Japanese theater in the United States. He was the recipient of many distinguished awards, including the Medal of Freedom; the Capezio Award; the Distinguished Service Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; New York City’s Handel Medallion; the National Medal of Arts; the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Fourth Class, Government of Japan; the Brandeis University Notable Achievement Award; the Benjamin Franklin Medal of Britain’s Royal Society of Arts; and, with George Balanchine, the National Gold Medal of Merit Award of the National Society of Arts and Letters.

A bibliography of Lincoln Kirstein’s work can be found on the New York City Ballet’s website.

“Here on 42nd Street it was less elegant but no less strange,” a young novelist wrote in the early fifties. “He loved this street, not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.” The passage is from Go Tell It on the Mountain. James Baldwin was one of many who got over their fear, their awe of the lions and the marble and the grandeur. He, too, walked in, and he left behind his books, a shelf of gifts in a palace of many millions.
David Remnick, The New Yorker,
May 22, 1995

Tomorrow LIVE from the NYPL will be holding a program devoted to the life and work of of the great gay African American writer James Baldwin. Walton Muyumba will moderate a discussion with Colm Tóibín, John Edgar Wideman, Manthia Diawara, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Michael Thelwell examining James Baldwin’s lesser known works to cast a new light on his views on writers and writing, his politics, and his vision for the future of the United States.

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1924. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, established him as a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. “Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,” he remarked. Soon after his debut, Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner was performed at Howard University and a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, was published. A second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published between his novels Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. The Fire Next Time, appearing just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans’ refusal to face their own history. Other works include the play, Blues for Mister Charlie; a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man; and novels, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head; collections of essays, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work, and The Price of the Ticket; a children’s book, Little Man: A Story of Childhood; and a volume of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues. Baldwin’s last work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, was prompted by a series of child murders in Atlanta. In 1986 Baldwin was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Among the other awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Partisan Review fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. James Baldwin died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, on December 1, 1987.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008
at 7:00 PM
Celeste Bartos Forum
Humanities and Social Sciences Library
5th Avenue and 42nd Street (directions)

$15 general admission and $10 library donors, seniors and students with valid identification

More information is available on the LIVE from the NYPL homepage.