Toby Marotta's book Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of 1967 and The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide

For the Gay & Lesbian Review "My Story" project

Why I feel a certain loyalty to the Gay and Lesbian Review/Worldwide

by Toby Johnson

I feel a personal loyalty to the G&L Review. I’d like to share a bit of history that I’ve been witness to.

Remember, the Review was originally titled The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. My connection to Harvard was through my literary collaborator, friend, and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.

For his 1977 undergraduate class reunion at Harvard, Toby Marotta came out in the 10-year class notes called the Red Book. He was the first gay man to do so. And he revealed that he and his lifelong partner Rustam Kothavala, who’d been the SRO-popular professor and counterculture leader in the 70s at Harvard, had run off to San Francisco together.

At the time, Toby and Rusty were living in the East Bay; Toby was completing his dissertation on the homosexual rights movement, tracing three waves of organizing: homophile, gay, and lesbian feminist with a major focus on Stonewall, GLF and GAA. And he was working for Hospitality House, a social service agency in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, surveying similar agencies in the neighborhood. He was naturally interested in identifying gay services.

I was working in such a service, a community mental health clinic around the corner from Hospitality House. The Tenderloin Clinic—which had developed out of a telephone hotline which I’d volunteered in some six years earlier as my entry into gay activism—had a special mandate to see gay and lesbian clients from all over the City to offer coming-out help and gay-positive psychotherapy. Having done an internship there in Counseling Psychology, I was now a staff therapist.

I happened to be on intake the day Toby Marotta came to visit the clinic so met him in the waiting room. We hit it off immediately, if only because we shared the same little-boy nickname. We talked at the clinic, then went out for a beer after closing time. We ran into John DeCecco (founding editor of The Journal of Homosexuality) in a bar on Market Street. As I would discover, Toby knew everybody. I learned he was writing his dissertation about the gay movement and said I’d like to see it. In fact, he asked, would you proofread it for me. I jumped at the chance to help him perfect the manuscript.

Toby’s next step was to seek publication. I was just finishing my own dissertation for a degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies. I too had a book. We made a sort of pact to help each other get published: Toby and Toby. Through Toby’s college connections, we got THE hotshot New York literary agent at the time, John Brockman. We succeeded with two books for him and two for me, and we worked together in a federally-funded study of gay teenage hustlers and runaway youth.

Toby’s dissertation was published as The Politics of Homosexuality (Houghton-Mifflin, 1981). Of course, since the 70s, there’ve been several more waves of LGBTQ organizing, but Marotta’s analysis of conflicting themes, priorities, and agendas among the activists is still salient. Some of those same dynamics are going on today, just with different names (and alphabetical designations).

After the Red Book came out, old friends and a number of also now-openly-gay men, though he hadn’t known them in school, contacted Toby to thank him. That became the idea for another book. The lives of these classmates demonstrated the success of the movement which the first book had been about. For a while the working title of the dissertation had been The Explosion of Things Gay. It was that explosion that allowed these men to be successful and happy as openly gay. Toby visited a dozen or so around the country and conducted taped interviews.

We listened to the interviews together and selected sections to include. I have a wonderful memory of the two of us, sitting in the sun shirtless in the backyard of Toby and Rusty’s Oakland bungalow, listening intently and making notes. I transcribed the selections and rewrote them into readable prose and Toby wrote a narrative framing the stories. The result was Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967. It was published by HarperCollins in 1982.

Starting with the Red Book coming out, a group of Harvard graduates gathered around Toby and Rusty and formed a gay alumni club called Sons of Harvard. I attended a few parties, but I wasn’t a Harvard grad and didn’t belong to the club. So I didn’t know much about the organizing or connections with other cities. But then after a few years, in 1984 the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus formed within the Harvard Alumni Association.

According to the current Gender and Sexuality Caucus website: “Starting in the late ’70s, self-styled gay and lesbian alumni/ae groups were formed in San Francisco (Sons of Harvard), Boston (Lesbian Alumnae of Radcliffe College, Harvard University Gays), New York City, and Washington, D.C. With information-sharing facilitated by the new ‘Gay Harvard Alumni Newsletter,’ they provided increasing visible support for the gay and lesbian student groups that had been struggling to establish themselves on campus since 1970.” A little further down in the chronology it says: “In 1994, the Caucus launched The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (now known as the Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide), a bi-monthly review of literature and ideas.” The Harvard association got dropped with the updated name. The Review is not a publication of Harvard University but of gay community entrepreneurship.

But so I think the gay alumni caucus in Boston with the newsletter that evolved into the G&L Review was indirectly a result of Toby Marotta’s book.

However tortuous—and questionably causal—the chain-of-events, it seems like the little gossipy project Toby and I worked on in that Oakland backyard in the late 70s eventuated in Richard Schneider and Stephen Hemrick’s taking on the mantle of the Review and creating a modern American gay intelligentsia culture. I’m happy to have been a minor participant.

Toby Marotta's book Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967 and The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide

Articles and Excerpts:

Gay Consciousness

Enlightenment

Gay Spirituality

Mystical Vision

The Hero's Journey

Seeing Differently

The Vision

People

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

Why I feel a certain loyalty to the G&L Review

Sons of Harvard

by Toby Marotta