Gay Activists Speak Out

Nan Goldin gives her “queer” heritage and talks openly about the infamous gay activist group ACT UP

 “When she turned 18, Goldin says, she got involved with her first serious female lover and immersed herself in the gay culture of Provincetown…’If I were young and queer with the kind of queer girls there are now, I’d be in heaven.’” (The Advocate, 10-15-96, pg. 68

“In her own life Goldin is now exploring the more fluid boundaries of sexual identity. ‘Things are much more three-dimensional and less compartmentalized that they once were,’ she says. ‘Maybe that has to do with getting older and understanding the ambivalence of things. At the moment I’m actually dating a man. And I’ve known people who were active in ACT UP and were very defined as lesbian or gay but who were secretly sleeping together. I think people are more complicated than those categories. Being gay to me isn’t just who I sleep with, it’s how I live my life.’” (Ibid., pg. 72)

Out gay magazine also tells the story of one ACT UP “queer” man who fell in love with a straight woman (see the July 1999 issue). A headline on the front cover announces:

“HOW QUEER, SHE’S STRAIGHT, HE’S GAY, THEY’RE TOGETHER!”

Out provides interesting information on the insights of this article’s lesbian author, Sara Miles:

“SARA MILES, an Out contributing writer, sheds new light on sexuality this month by exploring the complex relationship between a gay man and his girlfriend. ‘I knew a lot of women who had been lesbians and then got involved with men,’ says Miles, ‘but I didn’t know any gay men involved with women. This man’s story is fascinating.’” (Ibid., pg. 12)

Out recounts this startling story:

“William ‘Bro’ Broberg first visited New York City in those days, as a tall, gangly 21-year-old with a desire to put the world right. Bro was born in Carrolton, Kentucky, to a 16-year-old mother and a 17-year-old father, and he spent a working-class childhood moving back and forth between them and his grandparents. By the time he was 12, Bro decided he was gay; by 16, he was driving at night for hundreds of miles through Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, seeking out bars rumored to be queer. ‘I knew something else was out there,’ he says, ‘and my strategy was just to get through high school as quickly as possible so I could find it.’"

"At Antioch College in Ohio, Bro found his first close gay friends. He translated his restlessness and passion into political meaning, came out to his parents, and started to look beyond the perimeters of his own life. In a work-study semester in which students designed direct-service programs for people with AIDS, Bro became radicalized… "

"In 1990, Bro dropped out of Antioch and moved to Manhattan to become part of a radical gay community. ACT UP, where decisions were made by consensus and there were no formal leaders, was a perfect place for him to jump in. As it turned out, Bro knew how to plan, mobilize, and execute; he found a calling in the strategic challenges of organizing. ‘Bro was best at the quick and dirty,’ says Esther Kaplan, an early ACT UP activist and now an editor at POZ magazine. ‘He had a conspiratorial mind and a lot of creative energy.’” (Ibid., pg. 51)

POZ is a magazine directed mainly at gay men who are HIV-positive. Bro found a lover at ACT UP:

“At an ACT UP meeting, Bro met photographer Charlie Welch. ‘He was talented, cute, and smart, and we moved in together within a month,’ says Bro. ‘We were together about three years.’"

"Their relationship became harder to maintain as Bro branched out from ACT UP. He was working as many as 20 hours a day on the campaign to free HIV-positive Haitians at Guantanamo…Bro came home one night and found Charlie strangely calm. ‘I’d missed some party with our friends for the gazillionth time,’ Bro says. ‘Charlie just said, “Look, it’s time for us to break up.” I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew it was true.’"

"By 1993, Bro had moved into a tiny sublet on Avenue C, and a lawyer he’d met on the Guantanamo case had become his inseparable companion. The two would talk endlessly, leaning in close over toast and eggs at a grimy diner."

"They’d ride the sweaty local trains to Brooklyn for a meeting, exhausted, embracing, one resting ahead on the other’s shoulder. They’d stay up discussing their organizing strategy until the clubs closed at 4 a.m., fall asleep together on the bed in Bro’s room, then get up again to wheat-paste at dawn, along the slowly brightening streets."

"‘They were living and breathing for their relationship,’ says Kaplan. ‘It was this intense political comradeship, plus an even more intense emotional connection.’ …It was a late November afternoon in 1993 when Bro stumbled out of a Tribeca restaurant to the curb where the lawyer was sitting, head in hands, after a devastating, ugly argument. Bro reached out. He started to cry. In a voice breaking with desire and grief, he said what he’d been trying not to say for so long. ‘If you were a man,’ Bro told Lisa Daugaard, ‘I’d be with you for the rest of my life.’"

"The lovers tell the story now, sitting next to each other in a comfortable booth at a café in Seattle’s gay neighborhood. They have been together for five years. Bro is finishing law school at Cornell, where he was president of the Lambda Law Students association, while Lisa works in the Seattle public defender’s office, representing homeless and indigent clients."

"Gay men and lesbians have always had to wrestle with the question of whom we love and how—with the answer, for a lot of us, defining our identities. For many, it has been possible to finesse the line between preference and orientation…That story became more difficult to manage after last year’s media blitz when ‘ex-gays’ Ann and John Paulk announced their conversion to belief in Christian marriage…Many gays, trying to defend our choices of whom we love, were tempted to draw the lines more strictly between straight and gay: Genuine gays and lesbians never looked back, never felt any attraction to the opposite sex, and never lived with uncertainty."

"‘Well, isn’t that convenient for everyone?’ says Bro. ‘There’s just this binary—straight and gay. What do we think we’ll lose if we admit life is complex?’” (Ibid., pg. 52)

So this vicious string of attacks against ex-gays and their supporters is a reaction of denial against the truth—people can change, and gay activists know that, but fear it. What an admission by activists like “Bro” and Sara Miles! Bro describes his own internal conflict in this process of newly loving a woman:

“Bro’s confession of love that night on the curb made the reality of their feelings ‘unavoidable,’ says Lisa. ‘But it was still hugely painful.’ Bro nods. ‘We fell in love,’ he agrees. ‘But there was this huge thing to negotiate, i.e., that I’m gay. It was a long process. I’d deny the attraction, go to the edge of it, peek over, and run back the other way.’"

"Bro lights another cigarette, remembering how he first began to tell his friends about his new lover. ‘I used to get angry if people said they were bisexual. Now I had to tell people that, yes, I was gay, and yes, I was in love with a girl.’" (Ibid., pg. 94)

"Kaplan says she wasn’t surprised. ‘There was a lot of this happening among our circle,’ she says. ‘Women started seeing men; other people, including me, came out as bisexual. And it was threatening: If we were defecting, who’d be left to be gay anymore?’” (Ibid., pg. 94)

"Another ACT UP activist, Juan M. Mendez (who is a journalist for the Spanish-language newspapers El Diario/La Prensa), recalls hearing about Bro’s changes:

“Mendez remembers the spring afternoon when he heard Bro’s news. ‘We were on the bus going uptown,’ he says, ‘and I was telling Bro how disappointed I was that a lesbian friend of ours from ACT UP was getting married to a man. I was talking very intimately about how it felt to me to have our whole East Village queer family breaking up.’ Mendez pauses. “And then Bro looked right at me and said that he was seeing Lisa.’” (Ibid., pg. 95)

The interview with Bro and Lisa ends poignantly:

“Lisa speaks. ‘Look’ she says, ‘life is short, and love is rare.’ Bro takes her hand. ‘The world is complicated,’ Bro says. ‘It just seems like a very bad idea to sell out true love because you don’t ideologically understand how you can be feeling it.’” (Ibid., pg. 96)[/i]