How Esther Newton made everyone gay

When you find Esther Newton’s page on Wikipedia, she is billed as an anthropologist. Instead of heading off to study tribes in some far-flung location, as was probably expected,  she chose to study Gay and Lesbian humans… something pretty amazing for 1968! Her PhD dissertation was titled “The Drag Queens; a study in urban anthropology,” and considering it was one year later that Stonewall happened, her studies and writing began at just at the right time.

In honor of the documentary Esther Newton Made Me Gay screening at the LGBT Community Center on Friday October 21, as part of NewFest, please enjoy this 2019 interview.

Esther is famous for her books, Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in America, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas, and recently her biography My Butch Career: a Memoir.

I had the honor of interviewing Esther and finding out what her thoughts are on the LGBTQ+ community 53 years after her dissertation, what we have achieved, and why we must stick together and fight hard to protect our rights now more than ever.

Richard Jones: When you wrote your Ph.D. Dissertation what had led you to what was then a community on the very outskirts of society?

Esther Newton: Drag was practically outside the outskirts of straight society, but it was very central to the closeted but vibrant gay society of many towns and cities.

I discovered the drag queen performances going with gay male friends to bars, which were especially numerous in Chicago and Kansas City where I did most of my research during the 1960s. I immediately loved the performances and one performer, in particular, Skip Arnold, who was clever, funny and used his own voice to speak and sing.

I had been dreading going to do my anthropological fieldwork as a single woman (lesbian) somewhere with large mosquitos and strange food, so I wound up writing about the drag queens, and I’m not sorry!

Although it hurt my career it also became the foundation of my reputation and led eventually to honors and recognition.

RJ: Do you remember the Stonewall Riots the very next year? What are and were your thoughts as to what happened?

EN: Yes of course, I was living in New York City by then and read about it in the newspaper. The next day, excited, I went downtown and young people were still playing cat and mouse with the police. I suspected something momentous was happening, especially because there had been palpable anger and energy in the bars I had known.

The movement for equal rights started in the 1950s, but the atmosphere of persecution was so intense then, that the homophile movement as it is called, mostly adopted a strategy of respectability, protesting publicly, dressed in “gender appropriate” suits and dresses. Nevertheless, we owe them everything.

Stonewall (and the Compton Cafeteria riots on the West Coast) came out of the same anger and sense of injustice that had moved the brave protesters of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. So the fire was already lit but Stonewall was the gasoline that ignited the Gay Liberation Movement and all the successes since.

RJ: How did your studies feed into your personal life and who you were at the time, did it make changes that you had not expected?

EN: Throughout college and graduate school, I was closeted and still hoping to be “normal.” One of the main themes of my memoir is how incompatible homosexuality was with the usual expectations of a middle-class life, and the fear and shame my generation of queers experienced every day. Hanging out in gay bars and specifically immersing myself in that life and committing to writing about it helped me to accept myself as a masculine lesbian, partly because I recognized myself in drag performances. After all, I too was, so to speak, impersonating a woman.

At first, the publication of Mother Camp, the drag queen book, changed nothing in my life because it was not reviewed. It was my member card into academia and eventually, after one firing and a second almost firing, allowed me to get tenure in 1974. At that point, pressured by the queer students that I was starting to attract, and driven by a sense of responsibility toward them, I came out professionally.

RJ: What do you think has been biggest change we as the LGBTQ+ community have seen since the late 60’s?

EN: Overall there has been a change from the radical politics of the Stonewall generation, which envisioned the end of conventional gender and sexuality and of all oppressions, and even the overthrow of capitalism, toward a politics of assimilation and respectability.

Now we have open lesbians and gay men in the military (at the same time as transgender troops are being rejected). Gay politicians, nurses, doctors, small business people, CEOs. We have the legal right to marry, something that was utterly rejected by most women and men of the Stonewall generation. We saw ourselves as righteously radically different from straight society.

How can we get respect and civil rights while retaining some of that valuable and beautiful difference, that is the question? The biggest recent changes have been the right to marry and the emergence of the transgender movement leading to the questioning of gender categories in unpredictable directions.

RJ: What has surprised you as you have watched and experienced our freedoms, and rights and now the fear we have as some of those might be rolled back?

EN: How contingent our rights and freedoms are. Look what’s happened in the last two years. The ascendance of the religious right through Trump’s presidency has put the gains of the LGBT community in jeopardy. The banning of transgender troops is just the beginning.

Next year the Trump Supreme Court will likely decide that federal law does not protect any LGBT people from being fired by employers either because they don’t like us or the way we look, or because of their supposed religious convictions.

If Trump gets reelected the atmosphere will get more and more toxic for us.

RJ: What do you think will happen to the LGBTQ+ community as the future unfolds.?

EN: A lot will depend on the 2020 election. Any of the Democratic candidates will try to protect our hard-won rights. In the bigger picture, the community is changing and evolving because many young queers are challenging deep concepts of gender.

Homosexual identity is built on stable genders. You are attracted to the same gender instead of the “opposite” gender. These shifts are particularly difficult for many who fought so hard to build lesbian institutions in the 1970s, and who feel acutely threatened by questions about who and what a woman is.

I don’t see the same sense of threat among gay men, but after all men’s power is more secure than women’s.

RJ: Do you have any advice for the LGBT community?

EN: Stick together or we will all hang together. The components of the LGBT community are different along the usual fracture lines of race, class, and gender that bedevil American society.

Don’t let our enemies, and they are powerful, divide us politically. Stay active, engaged, think about how you can support our communities. Give what you can to LGBT non-profits and politicians who support us.

I would like to see our histories taught in schools so that young queers have some understanding of what has come before and made today possible.

RJ: What makes you happy? How has that changed over the years?

EN: Writing, teaching, although I am now retired I still have some contact with students, athletics, music, my friends and family and our dogs.

In my old age, I am less able to play sports, but I walk regularly and recently discovered chair volleyball which I love, the more competitive the better. I still have good hand/eye coordination and reflexes, though I am less steady on my feet.

Staying out of the hospital makes me happy, and I bask in Florida sunshine.

RJ: As you are a smidgen over 40 yourself, what advice would you give to those of us who are LGBTQ+ and over 40?

EN: The second half of life does hold pleasures. We are not as hot as we once were, but we can know the pleasures of long term life partner relationships and friendships. Those of you who are older than forty but younger than sixty-five, enjoy those years to the max, they can be among your best if your finances are stable.

Some of the uncertainty and anxiety of the earlier years do abate. And I have found that there is such a thing as wisdom.

To find out more about Esther and her amazing life and career, grab yourself a copy of her memoir My Butch Career here.

For more about the documentary, go here.