The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

The Stonewall Experiment:
A Gay Psychohistory
by Ian Young

Excerpt from pages 145 - 147:

. . . . Opened in March 1973, the Ninth Street Center operated out of a small basement headquarters in Manhattan's Lower East Side where it provided its gay male constituency with various regularly scheduled events: open talk groups, acting and drawing classes, buffet suppers, game nights and private counselling. The Center's literature described it as 'designed for those who want their homosexuality to help them lead more fulfilling lives . . . . We believe in the creative individual who is attempting to expand the dimensions of his world, and want the Center to become a workshop of human resources.' Privately funded by gay members and supporters, the Center made an effort to 'provide a setting where gay people can learn about themselves and develop their relationships with others.' New projects were solicited, especially if they were 'unconventional and probing'.

The Ninth Street Center was founded by students of gay psychotherapist Paul Rosenfels, an original and independent figure on the New York scene. A physician and former Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, Rosenfels (in his fifties at the time of Stonewall) had also been chief of psychiatry in a California prison and a therapist in private practice. He had become increasingly disillusioned with classical psychiatry and had eventually moved to the East Village, where he began advertising his services in the local underground papers and counselling residents at low rates, with the first session free. Early in the 1970s he came out as gay, and his practice started to focus largely on gay men. . . .

Rosenfels' writings on the nature of love, the construction of sexuality and the interaction of history and psychology are complex, challenging and often profound. His writing style, unfortunately, is dense, philosophical, and relentlessly theoretical; ideas are never illustrated by examples, anecdotes or case studies. One reader described his books as 'all meat and no gravy' -- or was it 'all steak and no sizzle'? This, as much as his originality, led to his being virtually ignored by the gay, popular and professional press. Nevertheless, through his books and through the Ninth Street Center, he developed a loyal following.

Another reason for Rosenfels' unpopularity was his unfashionable view of the nature and meaning of male/male relationships. Stressing the importance of mated behavior in gay men, the interaction of love and power, and the working polarity of dominant and submissive (or 'masculine' and 'feminine') aspects, Rosenfels emphasized the need to maintain the original inner spark that leads one to gayness in the first place: the spiritual drive to individuality, creativity and same-sex bonding.

In his major work on homosexuality, published in 1971, he wrote: 'In a homosexual romance love and power are released to find their own destiny. Men face the fact that love is an entity which is not automatically brought into being because socially supported eroticism exists, but must be built in a workmanlike fashion out of true devotion to an idealized object. In a similar way, the personal power capacities must discover the nature of human resources. Such growth experiences increase personal honesty and courage to a degree which threatens the stability of social beliefs and institutions.'

Rosenfels worried about the compulsive promiscuity he was seeing in his young gay friends and clients. Like Gerald Heard twenty years earlier, he connected promiscuous patterns to a more general emotional constriction in society, and saw a rediscovery of personal creativity as the key to the way out: 'The homosexual must deal with the high level of promiscuity which any release of eroticism in a sexually dishonest society brings. The promiscuity of the homosexual is his heritage of the society's failure to face this problem, and insofar as he is capable of developing toward a level of human involvement which goes beyond promiscuity, he attains the creative expression of an inner identity for which his sexual honesty and flexibility have laid the groundwork.'

'If freedom takes its entire being from an absence of restraint', Rosenfels wrote, 'restless wandering replaces the freedom to choose commitments, and the individual finds that he is running loose in a desert.' The metaphor is reminiscent of Rev Malcolm Boyd's allusion to 'running in chains'. Compulsive promiscuity and sexual repression are revealed not as opposites, but as two aspects (or consequences) of the same crisis, a crisis of fear, with both social and personal dimensions -- what Wilhelm Reich called 'the emotional plague'. . . .

-- reprinted from The Stonewall Experiment:
A Gay Psychohistory,
Cassell, 1995