Allan Bérubé: On the Gay Waterfront

Synopsis by Carl Pope Jr.

"On the Gay Waterfront" was a slide presentation by scholar Allan Bérubé that illustrated three different but interrelated histories of struggle, defiance, and activism on Manhattan’s gay piers.

Bérubé stated that the Westside waterfront is "a strip of land at the geographic, social and sexual edge of New York and, in some ways, the nation." Bridging gaps and showing historical linkages between the maritime struggles of merchant seamen in the 1930s through 1950s, gay men’s protests of the 1970s and the current fight on the piers between black queer youth and the police were some of the goals of this lecture. Bérubé noted that his democracy project includes establishing and maintaining open philosophical, conceptual and physical spaces for sexual, racial and class difference by using his scholastic practice as a rallying cry to keep the waterfront a public gay space. "This is a scholarship and history that is engaged with current activism," he said. "I’ve been trying to do this for a long time."

Bérubé composed his slide presentation from a wide range of sources including quotes from Walt Whitman, Alan Ginsberg and Langston Hughes; photographs from private sources and newspapers; as well as visual ephemera from the National Gay and Lesbian Archives; and the verbal and visual contributions of those he interviewed.

Since the 1890s, the waterfront has drawn social outcasts to the brink, to the edge of the land. The male-only occupation/lifestyle of merchant seamen attracted a visible presence of gay men among the sailors and throughout the waterfront community, helping to establish the piers as queer space.

Bérubé also highlighted the ongoing themes of attack and defiance in maintaining gay public space at the piers within the various histories he narrated. The identical process of heterosexist attack recurred within every historical narrative Bérubé recited. The process began with social stigmatization through negative adjectives and name calling, followed by physical attacks that increased with severity over time. The activism of the gay and straight seamen, the gay leather community of the 1970s, and today, the queer youth of color and social action groups such as Sex Panic were/are working on what Bérubé called a "respectability project," where they affirmed their self-respect and protected their right to public space by using their words and bodies as weapons of protest. The fight for public queer space on the banks of the Hudson River continues today between black and Latino queer teenagers and the City of New York. Bérubé concluded his lecture by saying:

The political climate at the sexual margins of this city seems like the 1950s when sexual deviants seemed to have no ground whatsoever to stand on... no political or moral or legal basis to defend themselves from attack. Is this the end of a long tradition of defiance on Manhattan’s waterfront? Is it all finally over? Has protest here been redeveloped and regentrified out of existence? Or is this current silence merely a calm before a storm? [italics mine]

Analysis by Pamela Bentzien

Allan Bérubé introduced us to the gay history on the waterfront of New York. It is a romantic history—filled with tales of young men going to sea, finding other men, fighting for rights, overcoming oppression, joining in solidarity to form a union, and climaxing with the open, free lifestyle of the 1970’s gay bar scene. This is a salty dog tale, somewhat like a Melville novel, a real life character in this history. It is a glossed over history, polished and refined, as if it were to be presented to the PTA. But that was Bérubé’s intent, to leave the save confines of the gay community and take this story out to the rest of society. To do this, it has to be plausible to such an audience. The problem with this is what is missing from this history, the 1980's, the years that so dramatically changed the gay scene.

Bérubé put this presentation together at the time Mayor Giuliani was cracking down on the sex clubs and establishments in New York City. He is dealing with what he refers to as the marginal populations that occupied the abandoned piers and buildings along the waterfront of New York City. Bérubé, in telling this history, takes us to 1979 and then jumps to the 1990's. How can we discuss the conditions of the nineties—the closing of bars, the upscaling of neighborhoods, the displacement of those that had claimed this space earlier—without looking at how AIDS totally redefined the gay bar scene (landscape) in the 1980’s?

The history Bérubé presents is a hidden history that will not be found in any high school text book. Very few, if any, college history courses deal with it, but it is a history that should be told. As a lesbian, it is also my history because I relate to the hidden, secret lives that these men led. The free feeling when one felt accepted and the desire for respect—the end of living on the edge of a society. His presentation calls to mind the movie "Forbidden Love" that tells the history of the Lesbian bar scene in Vancouver, B.C. in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, involving women who were also living on the edge of accepted "norm," and on the physical edge of the city. Bérubé’s descriptive presentation of the symbolic location of the gay scene articulated the importance of this location: in the abandoned strips of land that are socially, as well as geographically, the edges of cities.

Since this was a symposium on public art and public space, how does Bérubé’s work fall into this discussion? Bérubé sees this work as "public art" in that it is a catalyst. It is also dealing with "space" and access to that space. The importance that this space has to the gay community seems to be in providing space for private acts. Bérubé stated two reasons for putting this project together—to address the intense debates going on in the gay culture on safe sex and to show the history of defiance. He also wants to examine this area today and question who gets to use the geographic edge of the city and the power struggles that emerge when these areas have been abandoned. To really get at the heart of this debate one must examine the issues of wealth and control. What is happening to this area is happening in other cities around the country: gentrification. What happens to cities that do not provide development for its middle and upper classes? They move to the suburbs. We can criticize this sort of development, but it does help in keeping and bringing in people that provide the revenue to support a city. An extreme example of a city that lost its financial base is East Saint Louis, a city that for several years could not even afford garbage pickup. So, before jumping into criticizing this sort of development, first examine the consequences of not improving certain areas of the city.

The politics of a history is a fascinating subject in itself. History is political, whose histories we include or exclude. To tell a history (what will be told and what won't) is to put up borders and, as Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out when talking about public space, borders exclude. Histories cannot possibly tell a whole story; thus in writing history the historian begins to exclude. The most powerful will always tell their history while excluding those they want to remain invisible. Take the same underlying premise found in history writing and apply it to control over space, and once again those with the most power will push those with the least to the edge. Bérubé writes a history about people pushed to the edge. Bérubé juxtaposes these two elements to present not only a history of a space, but a current struggle for that space woven into the struggle over economic oppression.

Bérubé has received some criticism in the gay community for this project. Some accuse him of creating a romanticized history that is leading towards monogamous coupling. He sees some of the attacks as a battle of Romanticism. Bérubé made a point to make class and race the focus of his work, while focusing on the unions and the building of solidarity. He asks the question: how do you build bridges between differences? He feels he is leaving the gay movement to do this, which means his audience will not be gay. Currently there are many people working on similar projects concerning gay history. There is certainly no consensus on how to relate this history, for each individual uses a different technique to tell a different aspect of gay history. They speak to different audiences who are looking for different things.

I find myself wondering if it is because of this other audience that Bérubé left out the 1980's. What he left out is the key element to connecting the past history to the present, the AIDS years.