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The Ninth Street Center
The Monographs |
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The Ninth Street Center
The Monographs |
A Ninth Street Center Handbook [1987]
After ten years, the Center was no longer the shiny new button it had once been. When you work on human liberation hard enough, you end up being more liberated than those around you -- at which point many of them will accuse you of taking liberties. If you happen to enjoy foul language, as we do, you are said to be rude or even uncivilized. So we ignored their facades and postures, teased apart their defenses, and spoke gently to the often seduced and intimidated individuals hiding inside. Unfortunately, such unexpected intimacy could be so alarming that we had to spend far more time than any of us wanted in repeating that we came in peace, meant no harm, and truly wanted to help -- an explanation many of them had grown too cynical to consider possible. It was clear that a simple, friendly pamphlet which introduced some of our strange ideas might be very helpful in preparing them for the shock they would soon experience in becoming familiar with our unfamiliar world. This handbook was the result.
Opening passage:
The Ninth Street Center is an organization founded by men and women who were friends and students of Paul Rosenfels, an American psychiatrist and social scientist who spent most of his life developing the foundations of what he called a "science of human nature". The following work is intended to serve as a handbook for new members, to help them understand why we created the Center and how we make it work. It can also serve as a provisional blueprint for those in the world at large who wish to promote personal growth and social progress by starting their own centers for independent adults.. . . .
At first glance, the Ninth Street Center will be seen to embrace all the classical tenets of American liberal social philosophy: people can and should grow; all men should have equal opportunities; society can and should progress. These are not positions to be taken lightly, nor did mankind arrive at them without effort. But they are where we start, not where we end.
The Center is an organization that helps people to grow, or more specifically, to learn to take their growth process seriously. When we opened our doors we said that it would be a gay liberation organization. We felt that homosexuality afforded a healthy arena in which to divest oneself of certain rigidities of the conventional heterosexual lifestyle. But our priorities were and are clear: we welcome the participation of all those who take their growth — their ultimate responsibility for social progress — seriously. It certainly does promote the liberation of gay people, but it has become much more than that. . . .
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