The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

Editorial
by Dean Hannotte

This is the first issue of the Ninth Street Center Journal. As Rick says, we are voyaging to the futuristic world of homosexual psychology. Articles on the development of inner identity and the problems of relating will be our food and drink, simply because these are the most important issues of life.

If we are so psychological, then why the emphasis on gayness? Because homosexuality for us is a unique subject matter that unlocks many of the paradoxes of modern life. For instance, people complain about the lack of love in the world, but when they try to implement love on a wide scale they get nowhere, as witness the hippie generation. Or they condemn abuses of power at the political level, but adopt similar tactics if no better tools are at hand. The fact is that love and power, although primary human goals, are still haphazard occurrences in the lives of ordinary men and women. As homosexuals we can shed some light on this.

By virtue of the fact that we cannot reap conventional rewards for conventional roles, we have developed our own resources in facing the challenges of life. Through an acute awareness of a historically suppressed component of human nature, we became more sophisticated in dealing with the complications of vulnerability and acquisition than those who fend off any but socially sanctioned contact. We know that it is the very security of the normal person which is his greatest threat because it shuts off his need to learn and to grow.

Not that we always do so well on our own. Nor is the gay community notorious for providing its members with the good things in life. But we are still free of those stifling pressures to conform which oppress straight people who lock themselves into emotional straitjackets of inhibited formality and cowardly indirectness just to avoid the homosexuality in themselves. Although we get no credit for our pioneering work in the field of interpersonal space exploration, it is nevertheless we, the gay people of the twentieth century, who are baring the veins of silver that will satisfy the psychological hungers of the coming centuries.

If that sounds extravagant it is only because we have been trained not to recognize creativity at the human level, to distrust any deviance from the social norm. We must learn better. The reason for the lack of love and power is simple. Love becomes too risky when people are afraid that yielding to one another will make them learn too much about themselves. Power is made impotent by the morass of guilt we accept from an established order that doesn't want the joy of beautiful, alive vibrant creatures to expose its own emptiness.

Actually the submission of love and the taking of power are only the first steps in a long and arduous journey. Residues of oppression are found even in supposedly liberated homosexuals whose social adequacy is emphasized to conceal the pool of cynicism souring in their stomachs. But the choice is ours, as Gaetano says in his opening article. If we are willing to work at it, we can go forward all our lives.

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 1, Winter 1973