The Ninth Street Center doesn't receive a lot of publicity, so could you tell us a little bit about what it is and how the Center got started? The Center was started 14 years ago in 1973 by students of a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychtherapist named Paul Rosenfels, who passed away two years ago. He had written a number of books by that time, had a number of students in New York and was one of the few therapists who was "out" himself as a gay man. His book, , is considered by many to be the leading theoretical treatment of why homosexuality is good for you, why we feel that being gay is not only okay but it provides certain advantages to people. It helps fill you out as a person, it helps you understand more about human nature than just following the party line of being straight, as many people do.

Those of us who were his students — I was his lover at the time — felt that this view of homosexuality was an important one to teach and to promulgate. We knew these ideas were helpful in therapeutic settings, but we wanted to see how these views would by received by gay people at a community center, whether ordinary gay people would share them amongst themselves to better their lives.

Although many of us had worked intimately with the Gay Activist Alliance, which was headquartered at the Firehouse in those days, we felt that we wanted an organization that was going to be more psychological in its orientation, that would provide more of an opportunity for people to really focus on the issues that are central to their ongoing development — how we relate to other people, how we learn to love other people, how we learn to live constructive, creative lives — going well beyond the issues of just politics or just medical health.

Although we fully supported, and continue to support, the political organizations, we felt that there was room now for an organization that concentrated more specifically on the psychological dimension. We wanted to become the psychological arm of the gay movement. But we didn't want it to be run by professionals. And we didn't want to be a business like Identity House, because we came from a background of being pretty anti-establishment. Paul himself was an extremely anti-establishment kind of guy. He dropped out of the whole psychoanalytic circus 30, 40 years ago in the early 50's, became a cook in California for a number of years and finally started writng books. His life story is actually pretty interesting. He hated psychiatrists more than any of us, and cautioned us to be very distrustful of that kind of establishment authority figure. Even the psychiatrists who are finally now willing to say, okay, we won't say you're 'sick' any more, just 'deviant', are not really usually equipped to work with it all that well. Their training really prevents their being open to human growth, I feel. We should talk more about why this is later.

The Center has continued to be a place run just by individuals who are volunteering their own time. We have no funding. We get no support from foundations or the government. We have a contribution jar by the door and that's how we fund ourselves. We don't have professional degreed psychiatrists or anybody manning any kind of service that we give. It's all given by layman who belive in the work we're doing and who want to do it out of their own sense of love for their fellow man and not because they're being paid for it. So even though we give counseling and we ask for donations, our fees are not high. They're just whatever you can afford. The counselor himself gets nothing for it except a sense of worth and inner fulfillment. Very good. I want to remind our viewers that we are a live call-in show. Please call us up and give us some feedback in reference to the topic we're dealing with tonight. Another thing I'd like to ask you now. I've never been to the Center and I would like to come down. Just by talking with you before we came on the air I was very intrigued and excited about your agenda and how you go about working with people. I like your approach. I'm 35 years old so I come from that period of rebelliousness. In keeping with what "Out in the Eighties" is all about, we also feel that the gay community has to address those psychological and social areas that are very important for our health and our survival as a people, as a community. I want to ask what the participants are like who come to the Center. Do a lot of people come? Do people come and stay on a regular basis or do you have a large transitory population? I guess before I came down I kept seeing an ad in the Village Voice week after week. It was pretty vague. I think at the time it said "Tired of the bars and the baths? Alternate choices for your gay lifestyle. Gay rap groups. Psychological focus." And that was about it. Finally I came down. We're on East Ninth Street, between First and Second Avenues, and you go down a lighted stairway, and you come into this basement. Depending on what time you arrive, perhaps after the group starts, there's a number of gay people sitting around. It's very casual. Rather than focusing on one specific area that has to be talked about through the whole evening, people can go from topic to topic.

Basically the way the groups get started is that people will bring up some problem that they're facing, like when they're trying to live a homosexual lifestyle, or perhaps some insight they've had or some skill they've developed, and the conversation gets going that way. That's kind of the tip of the iceberg for the Center because it is a community of gay people. This is a kind of an opening to other members of the gay community to come down and find out what we're doing. We try and be as flexible as possible as an introduction to our community and what we hold as values. Talk about the unique experience that we as a group face in coming out. Basically that's what "Out in the Eighties" is about, and I'd like you to address that issue. People who are gay are, I think, experiencing one of the most important kinds of revolution that has ever occurred in human history. It's not easy for people who have studied history to really see a psychological justification for homosexuality unless they think very deeply about issues like universal love. Why should there be more love in the world? It's very hard for people who read history to face the fact that historians are not usually qualified to address such issues and can't write the kinds of histories that might guide our future decisions.

It's difficult for people to come out nowadays for the simple reason that society is very rigid. We're not raised to be thinking, flexible human beings. We're raised to be "finished products" by the time we're 20. What this "finishing off" process does is teach people not to learn anymore, to learn just so much and then stop and pretend to be finished products, pretend to be "mature".

I hate the word "maturity" because it's so often used by yuppies to mean "I'm not going to learn any more and I'm not going to grow any more. My goals are fixed. I know what I'm going to do when I'm 40 and when I'm 50. I know where I'm going to die and I know where I'm going to be buried." From my point of view that's just not a life worth living. Well, when yuppies talk about maturity they may also be talking about their IRA. [laughter] We have a caller on the line. I'd like to ask Rob a question. I think he was saying something about justifying the homosexual lifestyle. Can he say whether he was talking about justifying that to other people, or justifying it to himself, or justifying it to the straight community? I can't remember if I used that expression particularly. I think that when anybody chooses to come out, chooses to take their homosexuality seriously, it's probably one of the most important times in their life. They're faced with a decision of conforming to what social values they've been raised with or what they've been told by their peer group, or going with their individuality.

I guess I don't want to focus, at least in my life, on justifying myself to the larger community. But I think just in my actions, the choices I make and the way I live, I think I can serve, if I do it well, as a role model for other people who are choosing to look at their individuality, to take it seriously. We are facing one of those dangerous times in history for the gay community — not only from the epidemic, but also the fundamentalist and moral majority threat and now this new wave of anti-gay violence. I think that one of the things that straight people don't realize is that gay people are people, and as such we have faced some of the mundane problems of living: dealing with relationships, dealing with careers, dealing with jobs, dealing with growing up. Puberty, whether you're gay or straight, is a very traumatic experience. One thing that I've always found interesting when people talk about young people is that gays really aren't helped to go through puberty. They aren't really given any healthy, positive role models. I want to know if a lot of people who come to the Ninth Street Center are young. What are some of the issues that they talk about at the Center, if indeed that ever comes up? We haven't had that many teenagers per se because the group is largely adults in their 20's, 30's, 40's and up. We talk in a very serious kind of way about problems, using a lot of psychological terminology that we've evolved over the years. We almost have a vocabulary of our own to some degree. I don't want to make it sound too inbred, because that's something we have to fight. We don't want to be inbred, but we do have a very serious viewpoint, and a lot of young people who haven't gotten serious about themselves yet — let's put it that way — will get a little bored and wander off to other groups for awhile. But sooner or later, people who are taking themselves seriously and want to use their homosexuality for good and valid human purposes, will find that we're offering a context in which they can explore those issues with a great deal of freedom and flexibility and understanding and support.

As I was saying before, it's one thing to feel that you want to justify your sense of enjoyment of something like your sexuality, but if it's just going to be sexual pleasure without regard to whether you're going to respect yourself in the morning or have a good relationship with your lover, it's going to fail in the long run to lead you into a good kind of lifestyle. So what we're saying is that we believe in being gay. We think that coming out can be a wonderful and exciting and beautiful experience, and we'll try to help you have it in that kind of way. But there'll be problems along the way. Becoming a homosexual who can have healthy relationships is not an automatic thing. You don't become competent to deal with the twentieth century just by becoming gay one morning. It's a learning process and there are many problems to be faced. They'll be many people you won't want to tell about your homosexuality. Many people choose not to be out on their jobs for valid reasons. Many people do choose to be out on their jobs or to be expressive in other political ways and we support that as well.

We don't tell people what to do. We're not politically rigid. We don't want people to all be modeled on one particular image we have in our minds about what a good person looks like. All we say is that we provide a context, a workshop, a community of minds who will share the growth process with you, who will talk to you, who will discuss the issues, who will help you find reasonable alternatives in your own path that will help you to find a better life. That's what we're offering. Could they please give the exact address, dates and times of the meetings? 319 East Ninth Street, between First and Second Avenues, on the north side of the street, down a lighted stairway. We have groups Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We open the Center around 7:30 pm, we start the groups at 8:00 pm and we go to about 10:00 pm. And we stay open for about an hour afterwards if people want to socialize. It's a very friendly group. We're not snobs. We're not there just to create a little clique or to be self-important. We try to help everybody who comes down there in some way. Now, we don't offer a lot of the services that well-funded organizations do, but at least we can route people to those services if we can't help them ourselves. How do your relationships with your parents affect all this? Well, I came out to my parents a few years ago, and I got a number of reactions from them. The reaction that my father had, after my going through a 20 minute introduction about homosexuality was, "Well, why didn't you tell me when you were younger?" And I said, "Why? Would you have sent me to a therapist?" And he said, "Yes, to make you straight!"

And I think that's the bottom line with my parents. They're very supportive, but they don't understand what I'm doing particularly and I think they see it as something where I've gone wrong. At least that's how they viewed it traditionally in the past. I think their views may be changing now. But I do get support from my parents. They don't understand exactly what I'm going through, but I guess I don't expect them to because I find it very difficult myself sometimes to see a clear path ahead of me. I don't think there are very many admirable role models out there for how a gay person should develop, but I think that can be an advantage, because we can blaze our own trails. And also perhaps a bit of a disadvantage at times when I'm feeling down, feeling a little lost. I guess that's the downside of homosexuality. There aren't rules out there, there aren't the same games you can play when you choose a straight lifestyle. So, how old were you when you told parents? 25, perhaps. We always think the sky will fall down when we tell our parents. What was it like after you told them? Was there a feeling of relief? The first thing my father said was, "Well, that's all very well about your homosexuality, but what are you going to do about your career?" Which was ironic. I would like to know if I could volunteer at the Center. I am not gay per se, but I have a few friends who have died. I am a reformed addict and I would like to work with gay men who are addicted. I would say come down to the Center and see what it's like, see if you like it. Talk to people there and either help us or help some other gay organization that might be more to your liking. I'd like to ask the gentleman who was speaking about coming out to his parents if he had any support from aunts or uncles or cousins. I got a great deal of help from my outer family. They helped my parents see things a little more clearly. My parents were a little too close to the subject to fully understand, while the aunts and uncles are a little further removed. My parents are good people, non-bigotted people, but my outer family helped my parents understand me better. Well, I don't have a lot of close relatives. I moved around a lot in my lifetime. I haven't grown up in one place with lots of aunts and uncles. I have one aunt and one uncle. But I'd like to say — and it's a little bit of a segue from the point the caller is bringing up — that I don't think that it's important that my extended family know. I think that fundamentally it's not even that important that my parents know as long as I'm taking my homosexuality seriously, trying to do something constructive with it.

I think I probably have a couple of gay uncles, but I don't think it would be welcome news for me to come out to them. They've spent their lifetimes in the closet and I don't want to introduce new stress into their life in their late 70's and early 80's. So I take it that they don't live in Manhattan. If you have parents that will welcome this information and support you — or at least accept it without screaming — that's great, go for it. But some of us aren't so lucky, you know? Some of us have risen from the muck and came from people who were very anti-human in some way. The folks I came from didn't know anything about human liberation in any real way. They were racist, they were bigotted, they were ignorant. I can say this without shame because I feel very proud of the path my life has taken. I'm doing my best to live a life that helps other people improve themselves and become all they can be. And that's about all I think any of us can really do to help the world get to be a better place. So I'm not ashamed and I'm not angry anymore that my particular upbringing was not a whole lot of fun. And I'm not eager to think about it or go back to it. My mother is not equipped to understand why anybody would want to be deviant in any way, so I'm not about to try to get support from her, and I'm not really capable of supporting her in any way that means a whole lot to her. What I have to convey to people who ask me this question is, if you have a good relationship with good parents, great. But if you find that your parents are not motivated to understand what's good in homosexuality and are just going to see it in some very narrow-minded way, you might be better off just leaving them alone. Okay, we're going to take some more phone calls. I was kind of lucky because I came out, if that's what one can really call it, from day one — the minute I realized what was going on. I just didn't feel I needed to keep it secret from anyone who needed to know about my sexuality, which included my entire family. And I never felt that really impeded me. But now I don't really feel the necessity of "coming out" in a formal way, like to my office. I have no hesitancies about revealing things to friends that I have in the office that might be curious. But I don't feel the necessity to broadcast my sexuality, because that's really not anyone's business unless they ask. I don't have to hide, but what is the point of coming out just for its own sake? Well, I'd like to respond to that. One of the things that I identify myself with as being gay — and I like the word gay as opposed to homosexual because "homosexual" stresses the idea of "sexuality" — is that as a gay person my life is made up of many different types of relationships with people, sexuality being only one of them. And sexuality is not at the root or the main or the majority of my interpersonal relationships. A lot of my gay involvement with men — and women — is social, political, intellectual. As you can see I'm doing a TV show yet I haven't slept with anyone here. I feel that in facing the homophobia that is inherent in our culture I got to the point where I felt personally that I needed to respond to it. I'm not just talking about the stupid fag jokes that I've heard in the offices I've worked at, but I got personally uncomfortable with a lot of the sexism that's inherent in our society. So I made a personal decision to come out on my job. Now, fortunately the job I was working at, I was able to do that, but I think that it's a personal choice that I made once it got too uncomfortable not to come out. I don't stress anyone doing that, but I feel that the decision to come out or not to come out has to be a personal choice. You have to decide for yourself where you're most comfortable and where you're most uncomfortable. I just got very uncomfortable making excuses as to why I'm 35 years old but don't have a wedding band, I don't have a girlfriend, the person I was speaking too very affectionately on the phone was a man. There are just little social things that are very complicated when you try to cover up the fact that you're gay but which get simplified once people know that you are, and that you can just go on with your typing or answering the phone, or even just doing the laundry without making excuses at to whose pink shirt that is. Basically that's why I came out at work. How does your family feel about it, Steve? I'm 35 years old. I'm the oldest of seven children. My family has always been very supportive. I came out when I was 17 back in 1967, when the gay movement was started. The thing that my mother wanted me to do was to make sure that when she was at work my room was cleaned up and that we didn't open the door to strangers. One of the things she always stressed was that, as kids — I have five brothers and one sister — what she tried to instill in all of us was a sense of respect, of dignity, and that our lives have a sense of fulfillment and purpose. Now, naturally when I came out and told my mother I was gay, she was very distressed because, living in the real world and being that we are black and already a member of a minority, she knew that I would be faced with a lot of hardship. But my family has been very supportive. My family respects me, they admire me. I don't think that this is typical of many families, but I have been very fortunate to have a very loving and understanding family. And I think that's very important. If you don't get that in your family it's important to have a support group or to be involved in a community where you can get that support, because we all need that. One of the issues we talk a lot about at the Center is selectivity, in terms of your social world. It's very important to learn how to select a group of people who are going to be in your life for the right reasons. You needn't feel as if you have to be that close to people just because they're your neighbors, or just because they happen to work at the desk next to you, or because you see them on the bank line every Monday. It's very important to learn what your psychological needs are and what kinds of people are going to satisfy those needs, and then select your friends from among the people who are qualified to deal with that. People who fail to be very selective end up being victimized by fighting against a world that is basically ignorant and immoral. The world is not prepared to understand people who feel that they are at the forefront of the human revolution, as I think gay people are. We have a right and a duty to protect ourselves from the ignorance and immorality out there, by chosing our friends from amongst people who can really treat us as we ought to be treated. Rob, you talked a bit about coming out to your family. I wanted to ask you a little more about yourself: where you're from and how you came to be involved at the Center. I'm from the West Coast originally, and I came to New York in the autumn of 1982 to go to graduate school. That was my up-front reason, but behind it was the fact that I knew that there was a large gay community in New York and I wanted to "come out" — I think. It was very confusing at the time. How old were you? 23, 24? I definitely wanted to explore that area of my personality and I didn't feel the freedom elsewhere. As time went on I found graduate school less and less fulfilling. I found that it was kind of a "job" for me, I guess. It wasn't something that really satisfied me, and I wasn't really dealing with my homosexuality in any sort of creative way.

I remember one of the first men I got involved with happened to say to me that, at the age of 32, he had "outgrown" relationships. This was a guy that I met at a gay movie theater, so I was obviously not being very selective. I certainly wasn't looking for psychological quality in people. But I found that I desperately needed some psychological quality in people and not this very homophobic kind of reaction, which is to say that "I've outgrown relationships", "I don't need them anymore" or whatever.

The Ninth Street Center ad kept flashing at me every time I looked in the Village Voice. I wasn't buying the Native — that was a little too "out" for me at the time. And that was my one lifeline, I guess. Finally when I got really sick of my very feeble attempts at trying to enter a homosexual world and decided to stop trying to live a dual life, that's when I came down to the Center. And it was much more than I ever expected. I was going to come down there for a week or two, get cured of my homosexuality (or not), or satisfy my curiosity, or something like that, and it's turned into a four-year committment, something that I'm valuing more as time goes on. Very good. I'd like for both Dean and Rob to talk about "the ethics of being gay". That's one fascinating topic that we talked about before we came on the air when we were having coffee. What do you mean by the ethics of being gay? Being gay provides people with a unique opportunity: an opportunity to be more individuated, to be more "who they are" — an opportunity that many, many straight people don't have. This may sound like an overexaggeration, but it's an issue, and it's an issue that we like to focus on at the Center. It's one of our favorite issues.

Another of our favorite issues is homophobia in the gay community itself. We have to ask ourselves why is it, if we're such wonderful and beautiful people, that we find ourselves not treating each other very well. Why are we not loyal? Why are we cruel to one another? Why don't we often have friendships that are as deep and meaningful as we need and want.

The answers to these questions are very deep. They have to do with the fact that we've been programmed to dislike ourselves, so one of the issues that we talk about and which is implicit in everything we do is getting gay people to like themselves. Not only because everyone should like themselves, but because we have a very special and unique ability to learn about human nature. We have been rejected, we have been outcast, and we have been thrown on our own resources to find out what a good life is. We can't really resort to the social supports that are out there for straight people. They just don't apply to us in many cases. And so we have to find, on our own, what it means to live a good life.

This is scary for some people, and some people find that they're not able to do it well, or they're thrown back into some kind of silly parody of straight living — especially in some of the marriage ceremonies that are staged between gay men which do nothing to solidify the underlying psychological relationship. But in the main, if people feel a real sense of independence and a real sense of faith and hope in the emergence of strength and wisdom in their personalities, they can go through this sort of dark territory and come out the other end much stronger and much more independent and much more human, I feel, than your average straight person.

Now, there are a lot of generalities in what I've said, so anybody can argue cases. You know, "This person or that doesn't reflect what you're saying." But what I'm saying comes from dealing with real people in this context of the Ninth Street Center for fifteen years, and it's an issue that needs to be dealt with by gay people. Rob, are you in a relationship? If not, what qualities do you look for now when you meet people? Particularly men. That's always a strange question for me. "Are you in a relationship?" Well, I don't have a lover.

I guess I would like to add something on to that. I do have a couple of very important relationships, ones that I value and that I'm learning things from. And I think that's as important. I have a feeling that when people ask that question it's like saying "Do you have a BMW? Do you have a brownstone? Do you have a relationship?" Somehow all of these are supposed to be what makes people successful.

My life will be one of a series of involvements with different people, of varying levels of depth and from each of which I'll learn, hopefully, something valueable which will help me in the next relationship. You don't have a lover? No, I don't have a lover. But you do have relationships? Yes, but I think that's very important. I think a lot of gay people get very desperate and put themselves down because they haven't met Mr. Right. I think Mr. Right isn't out there. Maybe he can be made, but he's not ready to walk in and sweep you off your feet and carry you away on a charging white steed or something. Well, one of the things that we advocate is that instead of looking for Mr. Right or waiting for Mr. Right, why not be Mr. Right? I aspire to that. How about you, Dean? I am Mr. Right. Okay, great! Well, I want to thank you both — Dean Right and Rob Right — from the Ninth Street Center.

Good night.