Gay Voices from East Germany.

Marcus presents a Studs Terkelish anthology covering the development of gay rights in the United States. Some 47 people are interviewed, including eight straights. Interestingly, three gays prefer to use pseudonyms so that their "outing" will not embarrass relatives or friends. Clearly, there is still antagonism toward lesbians and gay men.

However, so much has changed on this subject since World War II. In 1945 gays were generally deemed sick, sinning criminals. Someone once asked Talleyrand what he had done during the French Reign of Terror; the diplomat replied, "I survived." In the 1970s a youth asked an older gay why he had not "come out" in the 1950s. The elder replied, had he done so, he would have been sent either to prison or a mental institution. Furthermore, in the 1950s a common method of trying "to cure" gays in mental institutions was through electric shock therapy. No wonder that few were openly gay then.

Those not incarcerated faced other formidable problems. If a gay teacher were discovered, he would be fired and lose his license; those working for the government would be dismissed as subversives; an attorney would lose his license because of moral turpitude, and in California in the 1960s a prosecutor even tried to revoke a gay's license as a hair dresser. Gays had to hide their orientation or be fired. And if the wrong person discovered his secret, he was susceptible to blackmail.

How could sick, criminal sinners change America? For change America they did! In less than half a century four states and over 100 cities now have laws protecting gay rights. Marcus interviews some of those who helped bring about this change, some of whom are prominent, others less so.

Unlike the history of black struggle in the 20th century, wherein the NAACP has played a prominent role for eight decades, the gay movement has not created a single, long-term rights organization. In the four decades since World War II gay organizations have risen and fallen, some supplanting others--the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis, Society for Individual Rights (SIR), Council on Religion and the Homosexual, Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG), National Gay Task Force (NGTF, later NGLTF), Queer Nation, and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up).

However, the struggle for gay rights came at a cost. Of the 39 gay leaders interviewed, four attempted suicide and two others considered it. Anti-gay oppression was so severe, the desperation so great, that those who survived were willing to challenge the conventional wisdom of religious, legal, and medical authorities.

Strangely, it was during the height of Cold-War conformity that several former Communists established the first important gay organization, the Mattachine Society. It was a secret, cell-like group where gays would gather at someone's apartment to discuss common issues. Curtains were drawn and only those known to someone in the group were permitted to enter--like a Prohibition speakeasy. And that may be a fitting description, for it was where the prohibited could speak easily. In time, some members grew suspicious of the secret leadership. They also felt it was burden enough to be gay without also being stigmatized a subversive. At a rare, open meeting of Mattachine in 1953, the anti-Communists ousted the radical founders, and California Mattachine abandoned certain political aims.

Meanwhile, some psychiatrists were beginning to argue that gays were no more maladjusted than straights. Research was new, and it took time to convince colleagues. By the 1960s even popular columnist Dear Abby was defending gays as popular opinion was changing. Finally, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and illnesses.

On New Year's Day 1965 the Council on Religion and the Homosexual hosted a costume ball in San Francisco. It was not the tolerant city one thinks of today. Police surrounded the hail, harassing those entering and those already in attendance. They finally arrested several of the organizers, including a straight woman who was a secretary for the Teamsters' Union. Anger about this raid coalesced the large gay community in San Francisco to press for basic political rights. A better known police raid occurred four years later at New York's Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Police arrested patrons of the gay bar, including drag queens, and a riot ensued. After Stonewall, raids on gay bars declined in New York.

As late as 1961 the two largest gay organizations in America had fewer than 400 members. After Stonewall and the publicity surrounding it, gays started to come out of the closet. Emerging during the counter-cultural revolution, the anti-war protests, and Black Nationalist militance, the Gay Liberation Front sought to link the gay issue to those of the larger Left. Gay student groups joined other campus organizations in protests. In 1972, two open gays addressed the Democratic National Convention, and in 1977 a delegation from the moderate National Gay Task Force conferred with a representative of President Carter in the White House.

Not everyone approved the new demands. Singer Anita Bryant crusaded to repeal newly enacted gay rights ordinances in Florida and elsewhere in the late 1970s. But moderate gays in Seattle proved that by stressing everyone's right to privacy, gay rights could be preserved by a majority of voters.

In the 1980s gay life faced a new danger--AIDS. Of the 39 gays interviewed for this volume, three have died of AIDS. Reactions to the disease varied. The shrill, opinionated larry Kramer expounds his views as a founder of Act Up. Marcus includes participants in Act Up and Queer Nation demonstrations. But he also includes interviews with conservative military people discharged from service because of their orientation. And Joyce Hunter, mother of two, and a lesbian, who sought to help gay and lesbian teens in new York schools and those dumped on the streets by narrow-minded families.

One need not agree with all, or any, of those interviewed to recognize this as a remarkable book. This volume discusses people who did make history. The interviews are well-edited. Each could be a full-scale biography, but Marcus wisely restrains the temptation to include everything. The thread that ties these 525 pages is the struggle for gay rights in various forms. Marcus includes two sides of the radical purge of Mattachine in 1953, and the hostility of a radical feminist lesbian toward a drag queen in the early 1970s. I wish he had included some of the debate within the gay community over AIDS. Few are aware that New York's leading gay newspaper, and now many scientists, question and deny that HIV causes AIDS. Marcus might also have included those who formed gay bowling leagues, gay alcoholic anonymous groups, Dignity for gay Catholics, gay marching bands, gay soccer clubs, but the book is 525 pages. He could not include everything.

Nevertheless, Marcus's book accomplishes its purpose: it describes those whose struggle for gay rights helped change laws in many cities and states, helped revise conceptions of what experts deemed sickness, and helped broaden the notion of morality in some religions. They have not changed everyone, of course. Many states retain laws against sodomy and the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in July 1992 reiterated its view that homosexuality is a disorder while urging opposition to gay rights legislation. But, each year in Boston during the large Gay Pride parade, one of the oldest non-Catholic churches in America greets the thousands of marchers by ringing its bells, and the congregation is led by a lesbian minister. Forty years ago, the march no less than the minister would have been unthinkable. The point is not that Rome has not changed, but that so much of America has.

For a contrast to Marcus's Making History, read Jurgen Lemke's book about gays in the former East Germany. Here the content is more stirring, but the presentation is dull, jargonized, less specific, and occasionally poorly translated. Fourteen East German gays were interviewed (when there still was an East Germany), and some of their stories are amazing. A young orphan in the Kaiser's Germany grows into a young gay man enjoying his sexuality in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic. He moves to Berlin and opens a book store. But Hitler's election victory establishes a new moral order. The young man, like other gays, was sent to a concentration camp. Years of surviving. No sex. No joy. Just lucky to survive. Hitler's defeat brought Soviet occupation. The man was freed from the camp and assigned an apartment. The superintendent warned all the other tenants about the deviant in the rear flat. The gay man chuckles, he could not have had better advertisement, for, to his surprise, men knocked on his door at night for sex. He was "liberated" even before East Germany decriminalized homosexuality in 1968 (a year before the Stonewall eruption).

Though the individuals relate powerful stories, the writing is disorganized. One man declares that as a child he played with puppet furniture. This is undoubtedly a mistranslation of doll furniture. Similarly, in some essays, "normal" is used where "heterosexual" is meant. University cities are identified only as J. and L. rather than Jena and Leipzig.

Though the book discloses some of the problems of average gays, there is no discussion of how a Soviet satellite changed its law in 1968 making gay sex legal. The East German law stood in conflict with all the communist world at that time: in the Soviet Union gays faced seven years imprisonment, and Castro's virulently anti-gay policies were far harsher.

Nazi policy was to confine, cure (which might mean castration), or kill gays. Castro's actions are only slightly better. Marcus's book of short biographies shows how many gay leaders in this country have been beaten, bashed, tom from their families, shoved into unemployment, jail, or therapy, just because they were gay. But after much struggle and numerous setbacks, it is easier to be gay or lesbian in the U.S. today than 40 years ago. Because some made history, America is now a freer, more tolerant nation, for gays and for all Americans.

Hugh Murray Milwaukee, WI