Gay activist pioneer, PETE FISHER was born on this date (d: 2012) His groundbreaking 1972 book “The Gay Mystique”
chronicled the early, vibrant post-Stonewall movement and explained
homosexuality to straight people and to homosexually-oriented people
still coming to terms with themselves. For this reporter, it was a
seminal text as a college student coming out and, later, becoming an
activist in 1974.
Describing his
intense joy marching in the Christopher Street Liberation Day march in
1970 that commemorated the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion,
Fisher wrote, “There’s no going back after that. You can’t feel those
things and take them back to the closet and nurse them. When you know
what it really means to be free, you know that freedom is life. Do you
know how it tastes to be alive for the first time? Oppression in any
form requires the complicity of the oppressed. To come out is to refuse
to oppress oneself, refuse to play the game.”
Fisher was
writing and agitating at a time when sodomy was still a crime in most
states including New York, psychiatry classified homosexuality as a
mental illness, and civil rights protections on the basis of sexual
orientation were non-existent. He led several of the most famous “zaps”
for which GAA was known, taking over the offices of the Daily News when
its editors derided gay people as “fairies, nances, and queers” and of
Harper’s magazine when its Joseph Epstein wrote, “If I had the power to
do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth, because I
consider it a curse.”
When City
Councilman Saul Sharison refused to allow the New York Gay Rights bill
to be heard in committee in 1971, Fisher was among those who led more
than a thousand people from a dance at the GAA Firehouse at 99 Wooster
Street to Sharison’s high rise at 70 East Tenth Street and got clubbed
by the police. “It was the most nightmarish scene I had ever witnessed:
long, brutal clubs smashing left and right, landing on people’s heads,
the crowd panicking, pushing first to the barricades and then falling
back,” he wrote. He and Rubin were arrested, but five days later the
hearing was scheduled on the bill that GAA put forward as the first in
the country to propose protections on the basis of “sexual orientation.”
Perry Brass, a
veteran of the Gay Liberation Front, wrote in an e-mail, “I remember
Pete as a very handsome, very charismatic, blonde young man. He was
always dressed either in leather or a tight, beautifully fitting
T-shirt, but he was totally devoted to GAA and the cause of real Gay
Liberation, that is, leaving self-hatred, leaving oppression, and
forging a new identity as a Gay man.”
With partner Marc Rubin, Fisher wrote the novel “Special Teachers/ Special Boys” based on Rubin’s experiences teaching troubled youth.
Fisher, coming to
consciousness of being Gay pre-Stonewall, had a rough time. His father,
an executive at the New York Times, strongly disapproved and sent him
to a shrink to try to turn him heterosexual — partly by forbidding
masturbation! Fisher’s counsel to parents in “Mystique”: “The rule with
regard to sexuality is a simple one. Hands off — let your child be
himself.”
Fisher took his
own life by suffocation. Lynne Fisher said her brother “told me he spent
60 percent of his time thinking about suicide” and made several
unsuccessful attempts over the years. This latest successful try was not
unexpected. But she also remembers Pete as “exceptionally intelligent, a
book writer and a songwriter,” and “a quiet but popular kid.” He was
cremated, and his ashes were scattered in her backyard in Springfield
with Rubin’s.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|
Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the
increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful
corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community
is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave
standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming
mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|
