Will Fellows is the author of Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture, and the forthcoming Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s. Producing a heartfelt written compliment to Jeff Pearcy’s powerful photography, Will completed the gay-straight collaboration that made The Shall Not Be Recognized project happen.

Angie Aker contributed questions via e-mail.

Angie (via Arno): Being marginalized in a broken system and told that you don’t matter as much as someone else can be a very power-stripping experience. How do you maintain the drive to approach this fight from a position of usefulness and power when being repeatedly told that you don’t matter? How do you maintain goodwill for human beings that repeatedly don’t display it to you or your comrades in this movement?

Will: I guess one of the first things that comes to mind as I think about that question is that I tend to see the kind of marginalization that gay people have experienced for a long time as being as much or more about those who are doing the marginalizing as it is about the target of the marginalization. It’s not like I pretend to be a know-it-all about human psychology and so on, but I guess I just see it as this is really not so much about me as it is about those people who have some sort of problem with me. It would be interesting if in our culture we could get at what that problem is about—what makes them tick in that way and think and feel that way about me and other people like me. Short of managing to do that, I guess I’ve pretty much always been fortunate to set that stuff aside and proceed with my life. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never been a victim of significant direct one-on-one violence or harassment. So my experience is different as a result of that. I’m sure that if I had a more brutal experience, as many gay and lesbian people have, I would undoubtably have a different take on this.

When the constitutional amendment result was known the day after voting back in ’06, I remember hearing a representative that had been working on the amendment fight make the remark, “…apparently we didn’t do a good enough job, we didn’t work hard enough to let all Wisconsinites know who we are and what our relationships are about.” On one hand I could understand why he was putting that spin on it, but on the other hand it really annoyed me because I thought it’s not that there wasn’t a significant effort made, its that they don’t want to know; they don’t want to recognize. The combination of anxiety, insecurity, fear, denial, and whatever else that goes into that fosters their being comfortable with being ignorant about things—or thinking maybe they’re not ignorant, but thinking they know all they need to know—without reading anything or expanding their horizons a bit. In a nutshell, what I’m saying is it wasn’t so much about us as gay people, its more about those who don’t know about us and want to keep this little box up around who they are and around who we are. This is something that’s been going on a long time; centuries, even millenniums. Even looking more recently at whats happened in this country in the 1950′s after Alfred Kinsey made ground breaking research on human sexuality. His first book was on sexual response in the human male. One of his findings totally blew people’s minds in the 40′s and 50′s; it was the prevalence of same sex activity. Men not necessarily identified as homosexual or gay, but they indulged at some point in their life in same-sex activity. It was like a 3rd of the male population, which totally blew people away. It no doubt contributed to the incredible, rigid notions of gender rolls in conformity that the 50′s is noted for when you look back at the cultural history of this country. Through the course of the 1950s there was this incredible push of “men are like this” and “women are like this” There was this kind of hyper-distinction that was being made and the whole persecution of who were called “sex perverts” of that era and expunging them from government jobs and making it difficult to even obtain jobs in the private sector. To me its pretty clear; you can easily connect the dots. It was all growing out of a need for the majority—who perhaps given that most of us are some blend of masculine and feminine—to sort of wall off a part of themselves and get away from that. If you affirm those who embrace and except that part of themselves, it’s hard for you to shut it down within yourself. These were ideas that were being talked about even in the 1950′s among the early homosexual rights organizations and some of their straight allies.

So its a very complex dance thats going on; it’s like the greater visibility demands for fair treatment in the legal arena and so-on that gay people make are unsettling for a lot of straight people because it sort of reminds them of the fact that maybe they have had at some point in their lives significant same-sex affections. Not necessarily that they’re closet gays or anything; its much more complex then that. There’s this huge grey area that people fall in but our culture demands we get into the black and white categories or the pink and blue boxes. So in some people that contributes to just a huge desire to avoid the topic completely, and if it has to be a addressed to address in it an antagonistic, ridiculing kind of way

Arno: Did you think that the public attitude towards homosexuality has became more negative since that time? There were societies throughout history where same-sex activity was not only accepted, but promoted: the Spartans of Greece for one. It seems like when you take it a step backwards our society—since the 50′s and those studies were mentioned it seems there has been a roller-coaster type of activity. I’ve raised my 17 year-old daughter to be very tolerant and open, but even amongst her peers homophobia is much less acceptable. She doesn’t tolerate it, and if she has friends who express homophobia she shuts them down. I think that positive attitude exists much more prevalently now then it did 10-20 years back.

Will: That is really an extraordinary turn of events in this country’s culture. When you look at, for example, opinion polls for issues related to sexual orientation and rights and so on, you find the older the segment of the population your polling is, the more negative their attitudes are towards gays; and the younger, the less negative. There’s definitely a remarkable shift, and a huge amount of that has to do with greater visibility. It’s more likely that kids going to school are going to be in classrooms with peers that have openly gay or lesbian parents, or even openly gay or lesbian students. Now there’s student organizations that are alliances between gay and straight students in chools. I don’t know what the precipitation of straight students is but certainly there are some. I would say the majority of students involved are gay, but there are some straight students involved. It is a huge cultural shift absolutely. I view some of what’s going on in the political arena, this roller-coaster going back and forth, as just a natural process of cultural change happening. It’s not all going to happen in a neat all-at-once kind of way. It’s going to go this way and then that way and forward and backward, and then lurch left and right. But I think barring some kind of a disappointing, unforeseeable convergence of conditions that would make it impossible for things to continue in a diversity-embracing sort of direction; I see that inevitably 40 and 50 years from now people will look back at this time and think—sort of like looking back at the sufrage period when women were trying to get the right to vote—and think, “God wasn’t that just incredible how at one time a whole segment of the adult population was disenfranchised from voting and other individuals were considered 3/5 of a person?” I think that in 50 years there will be that perspective on this issue. I hope.

Arno: I have the same hope, and that brings up another interesting thought: today there’s a socio-political element that essentially ignores that there was a time when interracial marriage was outlawed. I wonder if in 50 years when they’ve come and gone and we’ve reached a point where people are allowed to marry who they are attracted to, is there going to be a resurgence of people who forget how things were, like looking through a temporal myopia where they only see what they want to see of the past?

Will: I think that most young gay people today have no idea other than in that vague superficial cliché sort of way what it would be like for them to be who they are in this country 50 or 60 years ago. We do live in our times. We do have very limited ideas of what life for our kind or other kinds were like a couple of generations earlier; that’s definitely true. The kinds of things that I am able to do in my life and the ways I’m able to go about living my life today; the options that are open to me and the way in which I’m able to not live a double life would’ve been unimaginable a couple generations ago to most gay men. They might of dreamed of it as some sort of utopian goal. I think many of them would just have thought that we’re never going to have a President acknowledge, with a sense of respect and appreciation, gay people as a part of an inaugural address as full-fledged citizens. That would be unthinkable in a time when it was just not talked about. It was totally marginalized. Many people agreed—even gay people agreed—it was supposed to stay that way. I have to in order to make my life work. I have to play along, get married, raise a family, and to whatever extent I feel I need to have an outlet for my homosexuality, I will look for that in various liaisons here and there. That is the traditional way most cultures have handled it, it still goes on hugely that way in Asian and Muslim countries. That is the traditional way. This notion of two women or two men setting up a household and rearing children; that’s a very newfangled thing that there really is no precedent for. Even in say, American Indian cultures—many of which were accommodating with essentially third and fourth gender categories men and women who didn’t confirm to the typical sort of set of ways of being—they accommodated that but you would never see two women or two men in a household. It’s a fascinating time to live in; with it comes these various stabs and insults and everything, but these insults are very much offset by some real significant achievements and a sense of “Hey it sucks now; but we’re heading in the right direction!”

Will and I had such a great conversation that what was planned as a single article became a 3-part series. Watch for part 2 of my conversation with Will Fellows in the next issue of Life After Hate…

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