City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [125]
The institute had one seminar that trailed on for years on sex and consumerism. Broadly speaking, we were all interested in those days in how culture and especially material culture interacted with economic and class pressures and the conflicts generated by the gender divide. Now these connections are familiar and throw off fewer sparks, but back then we were reading Gramsci and members of the Frankfurt School and the Roland Barthes of the Mythologies and the Foucault of Madness and Civilization because we were no longer Marxists and we no longer believed in the determining role of class warfare, but we still thought that the world around us had hidden patterns to be traced, particularly in the underlying culture, not just economics. The sex and consumerism seminar could become heated and certainly heterodox.
I would dart around making people coffee, printing up programs, fussing over the schedules and budgets and room assignments, but I enjoyed dropping in on the biography seminar of Aileen Ward, the Keats scholar, or chatting with John Guare, the playwright who’d written Six Degrees of Separation and was the most tireless culture vulture I’d ever known. Barbara Ehrenreich, who would later become famous for Nickel and Dimed, her book about living for a year as a minimum-wage earner, was concerned with social issues in a familiar left-wing way, as was Todd Gitlin, an expert on the New Left during the 1960s. Doug Ireland was the most outspoken Leftist in our midst. He was a big, lumbering man with a broken voice whose body was constantly racked with pain. His parents, Christian Scientists, had not allowed him to be inoculated against polio, and he was one of the last kids to contract the disease in the 1950s. Perhaps not coincidentally, Doug became a militant atheist. He wrote regularly for the Village Voice, which back then was still a genuine alternative newspaper of some interest. Doug lived in France for a decade and befriended the charismatic French novelist and gay liberationist Guy Hocquenghem, who wrote the first book ever anywhere of queer theory, Homosexual Desire (1972), and codirected with his lover Lionel Soukaz an early film about the history of homosexuality, Race d’Ep. I used to sit around in rooms in Paris full of hashish smoke and talk to Doug and Guy with his strange beauty, pale and precise as if carved out of ivory, and the philosopher René Schérer (with whom Guy wrote a last book, The Atomic Heart).
Back in the days of the institute Doug was living in his office. He’d hang up underthings to dry in the small room and had a hot plate for cooking eggs. Dick Sennett was always in a bit of a rage against Doug for breaking the rules and posing a fire hazard, but he respected Doug’s militancy and was intimidated by his mocking self-assurance. At that time, just at the end of the 1970s, the whole country, and New York along with it, was shifting to the right. In the 1960s and early 1970s anyone who held the most extreme Leftist views automatically won the argument, but now middle-class intellectuals, with their tenure and co-op apartments, were beginning to rebel against this tyranny of firebrand rhetoric. In a sense the potential battle between Doug Ireland and Dick Sennett (a battle that was never openly expressed) was an emblem of this troubled and troubling shift. But don’t get me wrong—we all liked Doug, who was generous in a sort of reckless, almost indifferent way, and who laughed at all our sacred cows.
Chapter 18
The biggest star at the New York Institute for the Humanities was Susan Sontag. I think I must have met her at Dick Sennett’s house. At least I imagine I fell into a conversation with her, she who had been my idol for many years. It’s strange that I can’t remember our first meeting since I