The Homosexualization of America with Philip Anthony and Dennis Altman

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J.P. Der Boghossian
Hey everyone, my name is JP Der Boghossian. I'm the founder of the Queer Armenian Library, an essayist, and a Lambda Literary Fellow, and you're listening to the podcast that asks LGBTQ guests, what is the queer book that saved your life? And what does saved mean? Well, it can mean a lot of different things. These are the books that helped you process an abusive relationship, or it helped you start your gender transition, or reconnect you to your faith tradition, or find the language to come out.

Or like today, the book that saved your life gave you a ticket to a whole new world of LGBTQ culture in which you can find your true self. And it's a book you should be reading right now. Welcome to This Queer Book Saved My Life.

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[audio clip from The Downright Upright Show]

Philip Anthony
Hello everyone and welcome to the Downright Upright Show, the place to go to hear out loud and proud what Minnesotans are thinking. And I am your host, Philip Anthony. Thank you all for joining us today. I have a very, very [audio fades out, lively music fades in]

J.P. Der Boghossian
And we are listening to a clip of a recent episode of the Downright Upright Show hosted by Philip Anthony, who is our guest today. 

Philip Anthony
My name is Philip Anthony. I live in the Twin Cities of the United States and Minnesota. And I have a podcast. That's a progressive podcast with LGBTQ issues being addressed. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
Like so many of us, Philip grew up in a household with a strong faith tradition. And in Philips family, that was the Catholic faith.

Philip Anthony
Everybody around me was hyper macho. It wasn't proper, quote unquote, to be gay. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
Which is why when he came across the book that saved his life, it was such a revelation. And that book was The Homosexualization of America by Dennis Altman. 

Philip Anthony
It addressed the fact that gay people were a culture, that we were not crazy, and I wasn't the only one in the world. Almost like a ticket for me to explore my sexuality and to explore what my true self was. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
As you've heard on previous episodes of this show, our guests aren't always looking for the book that's going to save their life. A lot of times it is by complete luck that they walked into a particular bookstore on that particular day when that book was in stock. Or in Philip's case, he met the right guy in the right club. 

Philip Anthony
I used to sneak on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to go to the gay clubs. And this one particular guy that had hung out with me a lot in the club invited me over after the club and we hung out and we were talking and da da da. And it was a tabletop book on his coffee table. And I looked at it and I said, there's a book about gay people. He said, yeah. And I was, is it a positive book about gay people? He said, yeah, very. I said, well, would you mind if I borrowed the book? If you read this book, you will totally see what we were living like as gay people in the early 80s, late 70s. We were on the upsurge. We were becoming less of a marginalized community and becoming more of a mainstream community at that point.

[audio from a protest]

Dennis Altman
My name is Dennis Altman. I'm an Australian. I was a professor of politics for a very long time and my basic teaching was always US politics.

[70s rock music]

J.P. Der Boghossian
I have to admit I was a bit flummoxed on how to best describe Dennis and his career to you, and then I found out that in 2006 he was listed by the Bulletin, which is an Australian magazine like Newsweek. He was listed as one of the 100 most influential Australians ever. He was born in Sydney as the son of Jewish refugees, and in 1964 he won a Fulbright Scholarship to attend Cornell University in the US and The Homosexualization of America was not his first book on the US LGBTQ movement. 

Dennis Altman
In a sense, it is a sequel to the first book I wrote 10 years earlier, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, which came about because as a very young barding academic, I found myself in New York and fell into the beginning of the gay liberation movement there. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
In New York, he contributed to the newspaper Come Out, published by the Gay Liberation Front. He also began delivering speeches. And it is important to note that homosexual oppression and liberation was a big deal. It was considered one of the first, if not the first, serious analysis to come out of the LGBTQ liberation movement. It was published in seven countries and it is still taught today. If you go to YouTube and search for Dennis Altman interview, you can find a video of him on the Australian TV news show, Monday Conference. The year is 1972. He is debating the ideas in his book with a liberal member of the New South Wales Parliament and a Sydney-based Methodist minister. And we're going to talk about that in our conversation later today. For Dennis, he saw the Homosexualization of America as a chance to look back on his first book. 

Dennis Altman
I think a reassessment 10 years later of what had happened to what was in its time a small and radical movement. But by the time Philip was coming of age and reading the homosexualization of America, we were talking about something on a much bigger scale and a much greater degree of public awareness and public acceptance. 
J.P. Der Boghossian
And here is my conversation with Philip and Dennis. 

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J.P. Der Boghossian
Philip, so I'm hoping you can tell us, after reading the homosexualization of America, what became possible for you? Like, how was your life different? 

Philip Anthony
Yeah, well, again, I mean, being that it was so suppressed in me. And I'm reading about culture. Like he was talking about that we had gay foods. Remember that chapter that you were talking about quiche and perrier? Oh. Do you remember that? I don't, but I can believe it. I have it somewhere. I could, oh yeah, the page 146. 

Dennis Altman
I will go to, I got a check. 

Philip Anthony
Yeah. And I said, wow, we even have our own food. You know, I mean, and then we had music, we had the village people, you know, singing about gay things and gay places like San Francisco was a big hit. You know, it was just eye opening to see that it was we weren't just this deviant bunch of deviants because that's what I heard my whole life. And Dennis was giving me validation and making me feel better about myself. I mean, I could go on and on about the things. 

Dennis Altman
And did you then go off and look for quiche?

Philip Anthony
I never had it until I read about it. I was like, I gotta have some of that! 

Dennis Altman
I just checked and I saw that it comes from a story in the Soho News. The Soho News was a short-lived publication that was in competition with the Village Voice and one of my best friends worked there and I wrote a few pieces for them. And I wrote a piece that got me into a lot of trouble which was about having brunch with the Violet Quill. Now the Violet Quill, I don't know if either of you guys have heard of the Violet Quill, but there's a group of very well, some of them very well known gay writers, three of whom now are still alive, Edmund White, Felice Picano and Andrew Holleran. And I wrote this piece about brunch with the, I think it was called the fag literati that got me into a lot of trouble. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
[laughs]

Philip Anthony
Oh boy.

Dennis Altman
When you're a foreigner, you can do these thing! (chuckles)

Philip Anthony
Well, I love the terminology you use in the book is amazing. Like you use this term paramarriage, meaning like, because in those days, obviously gay marriage was not a thing at all, ever. And you use the term paramarriage to say that you're married, but you had to go to a gay church that accepted you, but obviously the society wouldn't, but you were paramarried. Do you remember that as well? Page 189. I wrote it all down. I just love the terminology. Then you were talking about daily sex. Do you remember that chapter? Where you were talking about that straight men have more daily sex than homosexual men do. Page 174. And you- 

Dennis Altman
This is fabulous, I may go back and read this book. You're making it sound much more interesting than I realized. 

Philip Anthony
Well, because, I was told that we were sexual deviants. All we did was have sex. And you brought it out that straight men have more daily sex than gay men, page 174. And gosh, I mean, it was amazing. That's what I'm trying to- 

Dennis Altman
Oh, daily sex, right. I think, however, I would claim that gay men like you who have had sex with more partners than most straight men, and that's something we should be proud of. 

Philip Anthony
Yeah, but not every day. Because it's daily. So I wasn't that lucky. But yeah, okay. 

Dennis Altman
Actually, can I ask Philip a question? Because when I wrote that book, I still was very influenced by Freudian theory. And I'm curious whether that resonated in any way with you. 

Philip Anthony
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because our sexuality was always, psychologists just in that decade previous decade, said that we were no longer mentally ill. And your book told me, Dennis, you're not, there's nothing wrong with you. You're just, you have an alternative sexual orientation. And that you were, when you first came out, you went to Columbia University to a dance. And then later in the 80s, you went to the Saint. And if anybody knows what the Saint is, it's this huge disco. You could fit hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people into it. So we graduated from a little Columbia University dance to this big venue like the Saint. So a lot of this stuff was resonating with me. And I was saying to myself, wow, we did come a long way since the early 70s. 

Dennis Altman
Well, and of course, a much longer way from the 50s and 60s. And I can't remember, it's probably not in that book, it may be in my first book, but I talk about the very first time I ever went to what we would now call a gay dance was in San Francisco at the end of the 60s. And it was organized by Sir, I think, which was a pre-Stonewall gay organization. And it's the first time I think I'd ever seen two men dance together. Yeah. Yeah. Now, of course, you can't watch a Netflix film without two men dancing together. 

Philip Anthony
Well, I have to tell you something really quick, Dennis. The day I stepped into a gay bar for the first time, I had a girlfriend, believe it or not. I did, because I again, I was trying to conform. I don't think that makes you unique. Of course. And I saw, I'm sitting down with my girlfriend, she's got her arms around me and all this. And the name of the club, I don't know if you remember it, it's defunct now, it used to be called Gables, near the Ninth Circle on, Oh, okay. In Greenwich Village. And I'm sitting there with my girlfriend, I'm seeing these beautiful men with their shirts off, dancing together, and I'm getting all hot and bothered in my brain. But I'm like, wow, this is cool.

But I had no guts to, I thought it was just an aberration. I didn't think it was becoming mainstream. And then when I read the book, I started to realize this is a phenomena. This is not something one-off. And we all have people like Dennis to thank. We really do. Especially an old gay man like me. 

Dennis Altman
Well, I'm obviously an older gay man, so there you are. 

Philip Anthony
You look great, by the way. Right, JP? I mean, I can't believe this man is in... You're in your eighties? You have to be in your eighties because... 

Dennis Altman
Not quite. 

Philip Anthony
Oh, late seventies? 

Dennis Altman
Yeah.

Philip Anthony
Because I'm 63, and when your first book came out, I was 11. 

Dennis Altman
I was an infant prodigy. 

Philip Anthony
You must have been.

J.P. Der Boghossian
Dennis, you mentioned Freudian theory and I watched this clip of you when you made an appearance on an ABC, that's Australian Broadcasting Corporation program called Monday Conference. You were promoting your first book, the whole video is on YouTube, and they brought on a liberal MP and a minister to debate you. And the minister, he like immediately cites this AMA, American Medical Association paper about how gay people are quote, deviant and how this is medical terminology, and that this paper was presented at a medical conference, and it won an award. And you immediately clap back at him by saying, to the effect of, people win awards all the time for pseudoscience. It doesn't mean it's factual, which, A, I love. But B, I'm curious about the experience of that, to be on national television at that time and then ultimately to be validated, right? A few years later when the AMA struck down their position, can you share more about the lived experience of all of that?

Dennis Altman
What happened is that my first book came out in the US with a very small publisher, and for some reason, it got reviewed in Time magazine, along with another book. And the review in Time was not particularly favorable to me. I mean, my book was far too radical for them. But an Australian publisher read that article, both the Australian rights, and it became a big book in the sense of it actually was in the top 10 bestsellers for a while, I think, in Australia. And yes, there was a national television program. And people say I was very brave, but I never felt I was very brave. I never felt threatened. I don't remember anybody ever threatening me in any way. 

My sense is the more public you are, the more protected you are. And in fact, just people who are closeted, who are most likely to be in danger. And I think that's true even today. I enjoyed it. Look, I'm a Leo. Leos are known to be egotistical and performers. I say this because I'm speaking to Americans and we know that Americans believe in astrology. It was actually, it did in many ways, there were moments, I think, during my life where it has limited me. I think it took longer for me to get promoted in the academic world because when there was a move to promote me, I was then teaching at Sydney University. I think that the book actually counted against me rather than for me. For the last 30 years or so, I've been at the La Trobe University in Melbourne, which has been enormously supportive. The world has changed a great deal anyway.

The experience of doing national television was, it was enjoyable. And, you know, it led to a whole lot. I've been very lucky. It's, it's given me access to a whole lot of people over a long period of time. For example, I met James Baldwin because we were put together on a radio program. Jimmy was speaking out of a radio station in Nice. I was speaking out of a radio station in Sydney.

And that led to a couple of years later, my visiting him at his house in the south of France. So in some ways there are some real advantages to working on the periphery. Wow. I told you JP, that this gentleman is going to be- My jaw literally dropped. I know, me too. Oh, I am a terrible name dropper, you know. I really have, I have friends who say, we're gonna put a jar on the table and every time you drop a name you put in 10 cents and then they said no actually we like this so much we'll put in 10 cents. 

Philip Anthony
J.P. you have to see the footnotes in this book I mean all the people that he was able to refer to and his references um it's crazy. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
My jaw literally dropped about James Baldwin.

Philip Anthony
Mine too.

Dennis Altman
Yeah I think that New York so I was living in New York in the early 80s right that's in I was in and out of New York is when I wrote that the book we're talking about. The gay literary world was very small. Everyone knew everyone. It revolved very much around Christopher Street magazine, which people now I think have largely forgotten, but which was pretty important at the time. Yes, it was. And so that's something that is not possible today. I mean, every month, and we still have in Australia, two queer bookstores. Every month I see from them 30 new titles coming out. It would be impossible today to have any chance of reading the majority of what is being produced. 40 years ago, one actually felt you could, you felt you knew. You went to the new gay play reading, you read the book, and around the Christopher Street and New York native newspaper, there was a community, a community which collapsed essentially with the AIDS epidemic when the New York native became crazier and crazier and more and more HIV denialists. But for a few years, that was a really central part of gay life, at least in New York. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
May I ask, at Christopher Street, did you know George Stambolian? 

Dennis Altman.
Yes. Ah. Not well, though. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
Wow. He is a giant for a lot of reasons, including the Men on Men anthology series that he edited, but also for gay Armenian writers, he was a trailblazer. But I do want to follow up on the idea. Can you speak more to the idea that you were talking about of how being out and in the public can be more protective than being in the closet?

Dennis Altman
Well, I think there's a very different environment and I have to be careful because it will vary enormously from not just from country to country, but from region to region. I mean, clearly downtown Minneapolis is not equivalent to rural Alabama. Oh, yeah. In any way. But I think that in the early days, coming out was enormously important because nobody was known to be publicly homosexual. When you reach a point where all sorts of prominent people are.

Coming out has a different meaning. So I'm gonna speak for a moment from the Australian experience. Our current foreign minister, Penny Wong, is an Asian lesbian. She's also very, very widely regarded as one of the most effective and admired members of the current government. Now that would have been inconceivable 30 years ago, but in an environment where that is possible, you have an out gay secretary of transport, right? In Peter Bush's case. He's a good judge, yeah. Yeah, I can never pronounce the name correctly. So that coming out doesn't have quite the same political importance. The other thing I'd say is that I think for a lot of young people, they actually are much more open to ideas of both sexual and gender fluidity. And so they resist the idea of coming out as anything particular because they actually believe that it is possible to be everything.

And in a funny way, that reinforces what I believed as a radical Freudian 40 years ago, namely that our sexuality is very fluid and that the potential to be homosexual or heterosexual is something within all human beings. So I think that it's a complicated question. And again, it's a question that has enormous importance when you go to countries where illegal, stigmatized. It's probably becoming again, certainly for trans people in the United States, coming out is now extraordinarily fraught. 

And I'm very aware of that. I mean, we are very scared in Australia of the impact of the anti-trans movement in the US because it does have its followers here. And it has led to some very, very nasty incidents. There are people here who seem to take relish in reading about the book banning is going on in some US libraries, for example. It's not happened, but there are people who would like to do it as well. 

Philip Anthony
I have a quick question. Do you feel that Sky News is like an equivalent to our right-wing Fox News? Because every time I watch, I do a lot of channel surfing on the internet. Whenever I watch Fox, excuse me, Sky News, it's consistently bashing LGBTQ people consistently. Can you talk about that a little bit for both of us that don't know?

Dennis Altman
Sky News does not have much of an audience. I mean, it is not a really significant factor in Australia. It may be in Britain, I'm not sure. And it's basically where the crazy right find a home. But it is not one of the major news channels in this country. There is, we have, and I think JP made a reference earlier on to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. So we have in Australia two national government funded networks, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and SBS. SBS was set up primarily to cater for multicultural programming.

And then we have three commercial chains. And then of course we have all the streamers. So there's a lot of competition in a sense. But the great majority of people here do not take their news from Sky News. Sky News is basically a collection of nasty, angry, nasty right-wing people. They are tied into the Murdoch Empire. The Murdoch Empire has huge weight in Australia through newspapers rather than through television. But the Murdoch newspapers control something like 70% of daily newspapers in Australia. It's one of the worst newspaper monopolies around. I mean, you have to go to a country like Hungary to see something equivalent. And that is... The good thing is that over the last few years, the Murdoch newspapers have consistently lost every election.

We now have labor governments federally, and we have labor governments in five of the six Australian states, which suggests that Rupert Murdoch's influence is not as great as he would like it to be. 

Philip Anthony
JP, I wanna piggyback on what Dennis just said. When I was growing up and when Dennis was growing up, we only had Anita Bryant, for example. We didn't have a whole network like we have in with Fox News. We had Anita Bryant and we had people like, what was the guy with the Family Research Council, whatever his name was, we had people like that, but we never had a whole network of people where you could tune in and watch people bash LGBTQ people. And that's what's graduating now if you watch Fox News. It's always about…

Dennis Altman
Yes, but Philip, the other side of that is we also didn't have Glee. We didn't have Sex Education. We didn't have a whole set of programs that have very positive images. I recently wrote a short, I was asked to write, a few of us wrote short pieces on television programs we've been streaming, and I wrote a piece about Glamorous. I don't know if you guys have watched Glamorous. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
We just finished it yesterday, my partners and I!

Dennis Altman
Isn't it great?

J.P. Der Boghossian
It's wonderful. It's really wonderful. 

Philip Anthony
I've got to watch it now. 

Dennis Altman
Oh yeah, that was just great. But I think that's, that Philip, the point I'm making is that, yeah, media is much more diverse, but the point is there are lots and lots and lots of queer characters, positive queer characters on television who didn't exist until recently. And in fact, they existed in Europe. And to some extent here, long before they did it in the United States. 

Philip Anthony
The only positive gay character that I can remember growing up was in the mid 70s. Do you remember, I don't know if you had it in Australia, there was a show called Soap. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
Billy Crystal.

Philip Anthony
Billy Crystal played a positive gay character, which is shocking to think about in the 70s. And he was the smart one in the family. So, you know, there were very small drops of positiveness that we saw, but by and large, it was Anita Bryan and people like that, you know, Jerry Falwell and all these negative people who were consistently causing people like me to stay in the closet.

Dennis Altman
And of course, at that point, you had nobody speaking from the top of government in support of queer issues. You now have a president who does that. And that also, I mean, there's been huge shifts, huge positive shifts. And I understand the anxiety any American must have at the moment with the uncertainty about next year's presidential election. It could reverse. But certainly in rich Western countries, the shifts have been enormous. What bothers me is that there is actually growing very nasty homophobia in many other parts of the world. Often I have to say supported, ironically, both by the Russian government and American evangelists. It's an odd collusion between two groups who one would think had nothing in common. 

J.P. Der Boghossian
Well, the evangelicals certainly love Putin, but Dennis, I do want to take some time to talk about your new book that's just come out. Can you tell us about it? 

Dennis Altman
Look, I've written a lot of books. This one was the most fun. It's a murder story, Death in the Sauna. It begins when a body of, a dead body is found in a London sauna, the body is that of the chair of a very important international AIDS conference. To save embarrassment, both to the conference and his wife, the body is taken to his home. It's claimed he died of a heart attack. There's a hasty cremation. Of course, it wasn't a heart attack. And over the course of the book, et cetera, et cetera, we discover that it's a murder, and we discover who did it.

And I'm going to tell you one story which summed up for me why it was so much fun, but also, in a bit to my surprise, a very useful book to write. I was doing an adventure to bookstore in Brisbane, you know, one of those book events, 30 or 40 people, it was Brisbane. So we were out in the back garden of the best independent store. And at the end of the talk, there are questions and this young guy said, “I'm here on a mother-son date. We both loved your book, but I had to explain to mom what Anal was.”

J.P. Der Boghossian
[groans]

Philip Anthony
Oh boy.

Dennis Altman
I realized actually having done interviews with people that people will read a murder story who won't read by nonfiction, but that actually in reading it, they will learn a lot. So because it's set in a mythical AIDS conference 20 years ago, there's quite a lot of discussion about the politics of HIV, which for a lot of people would come as, you know, totally new and surprising.

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J.P. Der Boghossian
I'd like to thank Philip and Dennis for being on the show today. There are several ways you can listen and watch Philip's show, The Downright Upright Show. You can watch it on AM950 Radio's YouTube channel. You can listen to it on am950radio.com. And of course, you can listen to it everywhere you listen to your podcasts. The Downright Upright Show will soon be joining a full block of LGBTQ programming that airs every Saturday afternoon on AM950. Starting at 2pm every Saturday you can listen to This Queer Books Havn My Life, and then The Gaylee Show, and then a new show called Twin Cities Pride Amplified, and then LA 2.0, and very soon The Downright Upright Show. Stay up to date by following AM950 Radio on Facebook, on YouTube, or am950radio.com.

You can purchase Dennis's new book, Death in the Sauna, in our bookshop. Visit bookshop.org slash shop slash this queer book. And of course, you can also purchase it through your local indie bookstore or through the major retailers. For a full list of Dennis's publications and research, you can visit La Trobe University's website. We've included links in the show notes and on our website.

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That's our show for today. Our podcast is executive produced by Jim Pounds, accounting and creative support provided by Gordy Erickson. Our associate producers are Archie Arnold, Natalie Cruz, Jonathan Fried, Paul Kafer, Nicole Olilla, Joe Parrazo, Bill Shea, and Sean Smith. Our Patreon subscribers are Steven D, Steven Flam, Ida Goatberg, Thomas Mckna, and Gary Nygaard.

A reminder to listen to The Gaily Show, listen live every Saturday at 2pm on AM950 or through the TuneIn app, or find it everywhere you stream your podcasts, or you can watch my pretty face on YouTube. Search for The Gaily Show. To view the full video of Monday Conference with Dennis Altman, visit ABC's YouTube channel, that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Links are in the show notes and on our website. Our soundtrack and sound effects are provided through royalty free licenses. Please visit thisqueerbook.com slash music for track names and artists. We are on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Blue Sky, or on Instagram. As always, you can connect with us through our website, thisqueerbook.com, and if you want to be on the show, fill out the form on the home page. And until our next episode, see you queers and allies in the bookstores.

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