The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

New York's Dr. Paul Rosenfels:
Building the New Gay Society
by John Paul Hudson

Regulars at the lively and welcoming "alternative" NSC drop one name with the enthusiasm and loyalty of Actors Studio aficionados during the ascendancy of Lee Strasberg. Paul. And they herald the man's philosophy as a supramovement force.

      "Paul sees homosexuality as a psychological/revolutionary force in human history. . . ."

      "If you are tuned into Paul you know that homosexual persons have a basis for living an exemplary life, superior to the conventional. From such a human basis one can make political demands more believable. . . ."

Such "Paul" references spring not only from the possibly partial Dean Hannotte, Paul's lover, or confirmed chainah Mark Liebergall, with his little-boy-willing eyes set in a face which seems to retain Some of the hesitancy acquired in the straight world, where his vulnerability taught him to flinch from threat of calculated abuse. The probing statements studded with "Pauls," uttered with the assurance from their having been well-assimilated, are ubiquitous as speculations about cock size at a crowded meat rack.

One hears from all sides: "Paul knows that in order to reach a creative position people don't have to limit themselves to one image of what a mature personality is. He makes room for development of self-confident masculine identity as well as love-oriented feminine identity."

Also, "Aggression is willful manipulation for selfish purpose."

And, "The feminine psyche surrenders some independence to the masculine. There must be a polarization for a romantic relationship to work out, you know. The power/masculine/assertive personality must be fertilized by the love/feminine/yielding and by his own wisdom and self-knowledge."

They are all talking about same-sex relationships. "Masculine" and "feminine" have nothing to do with gender.

Does it sound like the salon of a cult, with loaded terms being tossed around to the bafflement and/or dismay of someone who's just gone through liberation pol-style, struggled to overcome society's role-playing assignments, cleansed himself from overt if not internalized chauvinism and perhaps dared to cross-dress, show tenderness, cry, or even throw his legs in the air?

It's not a salon nor the Green Room of some Theatre-of-the-Rigid-Dogma, nor is it a belles lettres soiree where the subject du jour is some resident charlatan or even authentic itinerant genius. (Though there is one of the latter in the imposing figure of Paul, lurking like Peter the Great in mufti trying to pass as a dockworker in the Low Countries.)

It's a place where you look around at the homey tables and chairs that smile and wonder, "Who was the architect of this Periclean student union/candy kitchen/Gray's Inn milieu where there are no institutionalized mottos or icons, but the felt imminence of the birth of a zeitgeist?"

Without minimizing the hard work, imagination and fervor of Dean or Mark, of radiantly handsome David Tesdell who conducts the art classes, or ruggedly sensual Neil Elliott in charge of the drama workshop, or any of the other buttresses of NSC, one finally has to stop and acknowledge the cornerstone. Or is he the coping stone of the house that gays built?

Who is Paul to you? one asks a new pupil who waited some months for an opening on the Rosenfels calendar with the determined patience of a fan waiting on line for a ticket to catch Bette Midler at the Palace. What is he to the Center?

"Imagine Mahatma Gandhi as your den mother!"

Describing his student-teacher relationship, the Rosenfels fan goes further: "Albert Einstein instructing junior high math." Thus he gives some idea of what it is like to socialize or work with Paul Rosenfels, M.D., a psychoanalyst who no longer practices psychiatry, an author of a recent book so intimidating to reviewers of the establishment and alternative press that it went largely unheralded when it was introduced in hardback by Libra Publishing (391 Willets Road, Roslyn Heights, N.Y.) in 1971.

To those who have "discovered" him, Paul is the giant of the New Free Gay culture here, who posits that gay-to-its-ultimate-power is not only acceptable, it's the lifestyle opportunity for the future which can renovate the self-defeating and archaic straight system. Yet he never appears on TV panels where he might annihilate the likes of Socarides with his wry, sardonic wit alone, not to mention erudition. He is not sought after by Gay Lib campus groups, beseeched by activists to lend the weight of his sanction (though he's on the boards of both the Mattachine Society and the Homosexual Community Counseling Center and is certainly no apostate when it comes to righteous political and social causes).

It's not that he wouldn't be welcome in Gay Lib counsels and wouldn't be a natural to peddle beyond them with a little p.r. It's just that he's a private person -- even at the Center when he's serving up the spread he's spent all his week's free time preparing. His writing style is so complex that he has never popularly peaked. But as one brother puts it, "He dwells on the peak and writes down the dialogues between himself and who-knows-who. Only those of us who are climbing up, hoping to become his soul-neighbors, take the time to read him carefully."

However, Paul is not inaccessible -- not even in his weighty volumes, which include Love and Power, Psychoanalysis and Civilization and Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process. It takes faith for many to digest what he has to say in print and work on developing one's honesty to feel comfortable with him face-to-face if one is his student. He sees right through -- and isn't notably patient with voluntary or involuntary misrepresentation.

In person he is as impressive as the traditional Hollywood concept of a famous scientist, university chancellor, venerated statesman or Chief Justice (without Wardrobe supervision). Strong-featured, sporting modified mutton-chop sideburns, stocky. His martinet tongue reveals his self-assurance and right to command in superior echelons -- though he is no commander. He's a lover, a mind-fucker with yielding psyche who makes you feel you deserve better than what you've dealt yourself or allowed the world to deal you out of sentimental attachment to the Old Order, sloth, self-deception, promiscuity, lack of commitment (if you're a lover man).

Paul is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. In 1946 he became an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was there two years, then left to go into private practice. After three years he decided he had to "draw back" and rethink a lot of things he had taken for granted.

      "But I couldn't do this while I was still . . . responsible for patients' welfare. So I gave up my practice and moved to California. But there I found I really didn't know what else to do to earn a living. So I took a job as chief psychiatrist in the Reception Guidance Center in the Department of Corrections, which is a receiving prison in Southern California."

As reported in the November-December 1968 Psychiatric Reporter -- after he had established his East Village Counseling Service and begun to "deal with the problems of creative and unconventional people" -- Paul stayed at his Dept. of Corrections post a year, then went ahead with his original plan to "draw back from the practice of psychiatry."

For four years he worked at such jobs as cook and printer, and also wrote his first book, Psychoanalysis and Civilization. In this he proposed that "results are not the real test of truth," a Libra Publishing release of the time announced. "Universality alone can measure the scientific validity of ideas, and since neither Freudian nor Pavlovian psychiatry has passed the test of universality, neither can claim to be true. Each fails to produce a unified science of human nature."

The release went on to claim that Dr. Rosenfels proceeds to offer such a science, "using universal concepts derived from the historical traditions of the West to unify the role of thought and experience in explaining the psychological nature and behavioral complications of man."

Next came Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity, direct forbear of his latest book on homosexuality, which has helped to bring droves of males to his modest home on East Sixth not far from NSC.

      "I simply try to show them (gays) how to make their lives more meaningful. Homosexuals, particularly in the kind of atmosphere created in this East Village world, are generally a very promiscuous lot. They can't have a meaningful relationship with other people. And that's the real reason they come here."

After listening to Paul discuss his teaching approach toward a troubled group with whom he has dealt successfully, drug addicts, the psychiatric journal reporter commented, "Coming from an 'unconventional' person (what you do) doesn't sound very unconventional to me."

Rosenfels replied, "I often have to laugh at myself because I am like radical and flexible, and yet my patients always go toward the abiding values of life. They tend to give up drugs, they tend to give up promiscuity, they tend to get an image of a 'true, mated union' between partners. I try to demonstrate to them that man is essentially a mated animal.

      "You know, it's not that hard to get people to be moral if they have a motivation for it. And though this may sound the most conventional of all, a good motivation is to care about the welfare of other people, and to really want to be loved."

Dean, who has had five years on most of the other gays who are attempting to "fathom" Paul's deceptively simple approach to relationships in Center talk groups, has written that

      "[Paul] . . . maintains that only the eyes of love can see the emerging totality of a subject because love alone can surrender in altruistic devotion and thereby become completely absorbed in and cognizant of what it is loving, whether it be a beautiful youth or the science of physics. Yet this is precisely what modern man is afraid of. Only a saint is expected to give all he has to the search for truth. Only a sexual deviant is permitted to know what total love of another man means.
      "It is because his own need to understand the human scene long ago made him abandon the false security of artificial restrictions against interpersonal experimentation that Paul has been able to comprehend the value of mankind's wonderful diversity without losing his profoundly scientific orientation. He concludes that homosexuality is a central aspect of civilization's coming of age, that no man can ever fully know himself before facing and learning to handle his homosexual capacities. Furthermore, he charges the puritanical dishonesty about homosexuality with having crippled the development of psychology as well as having undermined societal progress in general."

Many newcomers to the NSC, after wanting to "tap the source" of the vitality there on more than a casual, good-time basis (though no one discourages such a level of participation) become oriented by reading available copies of the Foreword to the new softcover edition of Homosexuality. In it, the author summarizes the essence of his philosophy, in part as follows:

      "There is a great deal more in homosexuality than a simple release of new levels of sexual permissiveness. True psychological mating is not only possible between individuals of the same sex it is actually the rule in human interactions (whether sexual or not). How can two men, biologically alike, find a true difference between them through which mating can occur? The answer is simple but profound in its implications: through character specialization. . . . [That] is dominant over biological identity, and . . . therefore two men (or two women) can have a masculine-feminine interaction which can lay the basis for a true romantic union, pregnant with possibilities for creative self-development. The concept of masculinity and femininity, used in this way has nothing to do with conventional masculine and feminine roles in our society. Such roles have social roots, not independent psychological ones.

      "If men and women are to find their true identity, set free from the sexist tyranny of their conventional social roles, there is no way to avoid passage through homosexual territory. The straight world adheres with stubborn tenacity to its idea of what a man or a woman should be, because it cannot believe that if men and women are set free to find what is best for themselves as individuals that they will be able to reach heterosexuality out of their own needs. What cynicism! The straight world adopts contradictory viewpoints. On the one hand it says that homosexuality is hedonistic, superficial and sick. On the other hand, it finds homosexuality to be both sinister and powerful, capable of mobilizing contagious tendencies which threaten to destroy mankind through self-imposed genocide. . . .

      "When human beings have learned to make constructive relationships with someone of the same sex, they can learn to transfer this capacity to someone of the opposite sex, if they find it in their interest to do so. But this is for the future to show. In the 20th century it is enough for men and women to demonstrate that their homosexual capacities can serve the interests of the creative development of all mankind."

And so Paul Rosenfels goes on in his book to present the scientific basis for such a "great human undertaking." Meanwhile back at the Center, his pervading presence provides one of the firmest conceivable foundations for Gay Pride. Paul's ideas and ideals have resulted in the creation of the new basement treehouse which is a place of adventure, calling to a New Free Gay Swiss Family Robinson to come congregate and build together amidst the greenery.

All gays are welcome to drop by or telephone (212) 228 - 5153. It's where love abounds. "You can tell when you open the door."

-- reprinted from Gay Magazine, No. 112, March, 1974