TY - JOUR
AU - Wilson,, Jennifer
AB - Abstract This article profiles Tolstoy College (1968–84), an experimental academic community built on the anarchist and antiwar principles of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Lev Tolstoy. Tolstoy College existed within the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and was part of a university-wide initiative to channel the growing radicalism of the student body (a radicalism nurtured by the Vietnam War protests and the American civil rights movement) into institutionalized academic spaces. Beginning as the locus on campus for opposition to the war and a space where returning Vietnam War veterans could receive support, Tolstoy College eventually transformed, offering a wealth of courses on the gay-male experience and becoming the Buffalo headquarters for the Gay Liberation Front. This article explores that development, tracing how a critique of masculinity and militarism served as the bridge between antiwar principles and commitment to gay liberation. Though it was eventually dissolved in the mid-1980s, Tolstoy College provides important and understudied insights into how opposition to the Vietnam War contributed to the development of LGBTQ studies on college campuses. Tolstoy College alumni like to joke that the school was supposed to be named after Leon Czolgosz, the Polish-American anarchist who shot President McKinley in Buffalo in 1901, but that Tolstoy, a pacifist, provided some necessary cover.2 Charles Planck, the political scientist who founded Tolstoy College, dismisses this, insisting, “We weren’t anarchists of the bomb throwing variety.”3 Planck’s brainchild, Tolstoy College was an experimental educational program founded on the anarchist and antiwar principles of Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910), the Russian author better known for penning literary masterpieces like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.4 From 1969 to 1984, Tolstoy College, otherwise known as “College F,” operated within the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo with relative independence. Before its closing, Tolstoy College provided courses on topics as varied as civil disobedience, class struggle, ageism, collectivism, sustainable living, and, most prominently, courses within the emerging discipline of gay studies. It was part of university president Martin Meyerson’s project to transform SUNY-Buffalo into the “Berkeley of the East,”5 a rebranding that entailed a more inclusive policy toward the politically active student body that had emerged in the 1960s.6 As such, Meyerson called for the establishment of a series of leftist educational communities, to be known as “the Colleges.”7 In addition to Tolstoy College, there was a Rosa Luxemburg College, which focused on labor issues; the Women’s Studies College (led by Elizabeth Kennedy);8 the Black Studies College; a Rachel Carson College for environmental studies; and several others, some more radical than others, but all left-leaning.9 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Tolstoy college campus poster.1 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Tolstoy college campus poster.1 Tolstoy College was of course not the first organized community built upon the anarchist principles of Tolstoy. In the final decades of his life, Tolstoy largely eschewed belles-lettres, devoting himself instead to more sociopolitical tracts on topics like land reform and free education for the Russian peasantry.10 Most of his later writings revolved around his critical rejection of the state, which he believed could only exist through coercion and violence, and all of the institutions associated with it—the police, law courts, the army, and the Russian Orthodox Church. He also repudiated private property, renouncing his copyright to all of his literary works.11 His most dedicated followers developed colonies devoted to living a Tolstoyan life, some of them as far flung as Japan, South Africa, and Chile.12 As far as full-fledged Tolstoyan communities, however, it is widely believed that they died out by the 1930s,13 making Tolstoy College an undiscovered iteration of Tolstoyanism that was not only thriving but funded by the state of New York as late as the mid-1980s. Planck was drawn to Tolstoy because his approach to politics embodied what scholars Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman have termed “taking the revolution inside,”14 in which social change is modeled in the practices of everyday life and often within intimate spaces. Writing about Tolstoy as the namesake of the college, Planck wrote: One of the reasons for identifying with Tolstoy is that he always stated the problem of life’s responsibilities in a straightforwardly moral and individualistic way: “How to live? What to live for?” Putting the question this way shifts emphasis away from figuring out the direction of abstract historical forces and a system of ideas to fit them, and onto the problem of what small groups of people can do now to make a better social order.15 Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Posters advertising Tolstoy College classes.19 Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Posters advertising Tolstoy College classes.19 The students and faculty at Tolstoy College similarly sought to understand how anarchism and pacifism could manifest in the lived experienced. In exploring the latter, they became interested in the impact of masculinity and militarism on sexual relationships, an inquiry that would eventually lead to Tolstoy College’s future focus on gay studies. Beginning as an anarchist college built on resistance to government coercion, including the Vietnam War draft, Tolstoy College eventually came to critique all forms of coercion, including compulsory heteromasculinity.16 This article explores the trajectory of Tolstoy College, from its roots as a site of anarchist politics against the war in Vietnam to its eventual zenith as a place to challenge the very concept that underpinned militarism—masculinity.17 In doing so, I argue that Tolstoy College provides a key case study in understanding how activism against the Vietnam War contributed to the emergence of gay studies on American college campuses. As such, this study participates in recent historiography that looks beyond the Stonewall Riots to identify other social phenomena that contributed to the formation of gay political consciousness in the United States.18 Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Posters advertising Tolstoy College classes.19 Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Posters advertising Tolstoy College classes.19 Vietnam and Gay Liberation In recent years, scholars have begun to challenge the almost mythic position the Stonewall Riots occupy within histories of gay activism in the United States. The events of June 28, 1969—the night spontaneous riots burst out in reaction to a police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village—have become a common origin story in popular narratives about gay liberation. While there had been gay activist organizations pre-1969, most notably the Mattachine Society (founded in 1950), Stonewall is often described as the “spark” that radicalized the gay movement, ushering in its alliance with “the Movement” and its constituent parts (women’s rights, opposition to US imperialism, denuclearization politics, etc.).20 Problematizing this narrative, Justin Suran has argued that by overly focusing on Stonewall, the impact of the antiwar movement in shaping radical gay political identities in the United States has been overlooked to the detriment of history. “Situating Gay Liberation squarely in the context of the Vietnam years,” Suran insists, can help “explain the force with which gay Americans emerged after 1969 as an assertively identity-affirming community and aboveground interest group.”21 The Gay Liberation Front, the political organization that formed after Stonewall, even named itself after Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and at a Gay Liberation march that took place in April 1971 in San Francisco, protestors waved lavender Vietcong flags.22 As an organization and a leading force in radical gay activism, the Gay Liberation Front was clear that the antiwar cause was ideologically enmeshed with gay liberation itself. In October 1969, a performance troupe in Berkeley called Gay Liberation Theater put on a play titled “No Vietnamese Ever Called me Queer” and termed it “perverse . . . to send men half way around the world to kill their brothers while we torment, rape, jail, and murder men for loving their brothers here.”23 Writing about the performance, Emily Hobson has argued that “‘No Vietnamese Ever Called me Queer’ encapsulated three foundational elements of gay liberation: a break with existing homophile groups, a demand for sexual freedom, and a claim that such freedom would only be won through radical alliance against militarism, racism, and police violence.”24 In 1970, the Berkeley, California, chapter of the Gay Liberation Front officially released a statement declaring: “War is the result of socialization to conventionally masculine roles,” and “both are inherently alien and oppressive to gay men.”25 Gay liberationists saw their movement as distinct from earlier homophile organizations that fought for the right of gay men to have entry into the US armed services. This newer iteration of gay activists, who came into political consciousness during the Vietnam War protests, departed from that position radically. As Randy Shilts writes in Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military about gay opposition to Vietnam: “It was elemental: to be gay and an activist in 1971 meant to be against the war.”26 Tolstoy College actually served as the headquarters of the Buffalo chapter of the Gay Liberation Front.28 While open to women, Tolstoy College and its work on gay liberation overwhelmingly attracted male students. This was partially because lesbian issues were taught and addressed at Women’s Studies College but also because of the college’s reputation on campus as a welcoming space for Vietnam War veterans and conscientious objectors. In my interview with Paul Richmond, an influential instructor who taught at Tolstoy College and designed much of the curriculum, he told me “once it became known that you could come to [Tolstoy College] if you were a Vietnam vet or if you were trying to not to go into Vietnam, this added a male focus.” Vietnam, according to Richmond, forced the men of his generation to interrogate their own masculinity and their relationship to other men. As he put it, one of the questions that animated Tolstoy College’s seminars on masculinity and gay identity was: “Can we only say I love you to a guy when he’s dying in my arms in a trench?”29 In that vein, Tolstoy College began offering a course in the early ’70s on this very idea, where students explored the development of the “macho” type and its role of instilling militarism among blue-collar men. The course description for that class, “The Working Class Macho Male,” connects the proliferation of masculine ideals with and the need of the armed services to replenish themselves with new male recruits: Figure 4. View largeDownload slide From a 1970 march commemorating the first anniversary of the Stonewall. The protestor’s shirt reads: “Suck cock to beat the draft.”27 Figure 4. View largeDownload slide From a 1970 march commemorating the first anniversary of the Stonewall. The protestor’s shirt reads: “Suck cock to beat the draft.”27 What Tolstoy College offers is a way to understand how opposition to the Vietnam War contributed not only to the rise of radical gay politics but also to the emergence of gay studies as an academic discipline on college campuses. With universities serving as a central nerve in the antiwar movement, an antimilitarist critique came to permeate campus dialogues.31 What impact this might have had on the early days of the LGBTQ studies becomes clearer by studying Tolstoy College and how it positioned its gay-centered curriculum within the context of the other political struggles that were dominating American public discourse, particularly at universities. Gay (Studies) on Campus Tolstoy College is generally left out of histories of early gay studies programs, which typically cite the initiatives of the early 1970s at Sacramento State University and San Francisco State University as the progenitors of LGBTQ studies within American academia.32 Such histories tend to assert that the women’s movement legitimized the study of gender and sexuality at universities, thus smoothing the way for gay studies. While there is much to suggest that lesbian studies emerged from the feminist impetus on college campuses, it cannot be taken for granted that the same was true for courses that focused on the experience of gay men.33 Indeed, another important aspect of Tolstoy College as a historical case study is that it shows how divergently gay studies versus lesbian studies emerged at universities and how impacted the former was by the Vietnam War and protests against the draft.34 Figure 5. View largeDownload slide “The Working Class Macho Male” course description text: “I want to work with a small group of working class men, like myself, who have learned at some point in their lives that life is tough, and that violence is something you can’t avoid dealing with. A lot of us end up, like me, in the Army or—that’s the obvious place for our kind in this world. That’s what we’ve been set up for all our lives. “The Fighting Marine!” This course will probably meet in the evenings, so working people can come, and will be informal, so maybe we can get to know each other and maybe be able to talk honestly with each other—let down some of the barriers that we put up all day long. Maybe it will be a kind of therapy for us. Why are we so prone to violence? How can they make us take so much shit?”30 Figure 5. View largeDownload slide “The Working Class Macho Male” course description text: “I want to work with a small group of working class men, like myself, who have learned at some point in their lives that life is tough, and that violence is something you can’t avoid dealing with. A lot of us end up, like me, in the Army or—that’s the obvious place for our kind in this world. That’s what we’ve been set up for all our lives. “The Fighting Marine!” This course will probably meet in the evenings, so working people can come, and will be informal, so maybe we can get to know each other and maybe be able to talk honestly with each other—let down some of the barriers that we put up all day long. Maybe it will be a kind of therapy for us. Why are we so prone to violence? How can they make us take so much shit?”30 Recently, scholars have begun to note the role of antiwar sentiment and activism in shaping gay studies and gay student organizations on college campuses. Writing about the Society for Homosexual Freedom (SHF) at Sacramento State, which sued the State of California for discrimination when its student group status was denied (a case that had a profound impact on the future of gay organization on college campuses), David Reichard noted that one of the key officers of the SHF was Stephen Whitmore, a “noted campus activist closely involved in the antiwar movement on campus.”35 Similarly, in Making Trouble: Essays on History, Politics, and the University, scholar of gay history John D’Emilio reflected back on his college years and talked about the importance of campus antiwar protests in shaping his political identity, which coincided with his self-actualization as a gay man.36 But while these instances of gay political activism certainly saw gay identity and organizing developing alongside the antiwar movement, Tolstoy College provides insights into how precisely these forces came together to further institutional change in the form of gay studies curriculum. Another reason that Tolstoy College is likely left out of histories of early LGBTQ studies programs is that the college did not see itself as a gay studies program per se (despite the central focus of homosexuality in the course listings and materials). The people behind Tolstoy College, students and faculty alike (as anarchists, they did not typically differentiate between the two), refused to see gay studies as a separate entity from anarchism or pacifism. They saw it rather as integral, that to be a pacifist college was to by default question masculinity and militant homonormativity. As Alex van Oss, in my interview with him about the connections between anarchism and gay liberation, put it: “The basic anarchist tenant is that one need not wait for permission from higher authority, from church, state, and so forth in order to live one’s life more fully. Social prescriptions, roles, taboos are all worth examining to see if they make sense, or if they are conditioned, burdensome.”37 Tolstoy College, like many gay studies programs, was similarly influenced by the civil rights movement and organizing around women’s liberation, both of which, had begun to migrate into academia. These movements centered the importance of personal identity as a political concept and the academic disciplines they inspired similarly emphasized an inward-looking approach to understanding the effects of social structures. Experimental approaches to pedagogy, which were spreading around the same time, helped facilitate the growth of these disciplines within academia. Courses on LGBTQ topics were often made possible by autonomous experimental colleges that typically existed within larger universities. For instance, the Seattle Experimental College (which was housed within the University of Washington), an initiative run by students looking to explore how their identities intersected with the social forces around them, began offering courses in lesbian studies in the early 1970s.38 Tolstoy College benefited from this precise confluence of forces: a robust women’s studies program, faculty who had participated in the civil rights movement, and a basis in experimental pedagogy. As such, the argument being made here is not that Vietnam was the sole factor in shaping Tolstoy College’s turn to gay studies but that it was a powerful one among many that has hitherto not been analyzed in terms of the history of LGBTQ studies. War and Peace Charles Haynie, who had been hired in 1970 to replace Charles Planck, sought to raise the profile of Tolstoy College on campus by highlighting the pacifist legacy of the author Tolstoy. In a letter for the faculty newspaper, The Reporter, Haynie wrote, “Back at the turn of the century, Tolstoy had written letters to young Russian men, urging that they not allow themselves to be drafted into the tsar’s army to shoot other young men like themselves.”39 Tolstoy’s service in the Crimean War convinced him that war was an exercise in which the ruling classes pitted “brother against brother” in senseless violence. Tolstoy recounted his experiences in the fictional Sevastopol Sketches (1855), which served as the basis for his later magnum opus War and Peace (1869). In both Sevastopol Sketches and War and Peace, Tolstoy sought to undo not just the figurative fictions of war but the literal ones as well. Both were consciously written against the typical “war novel,” which depicted battle as glorious, triumphant, and fully sanitized. Instead, Tolstoy depicted war in a realist fashion, focusing on injuries, deaths, disease, cowardice, resignation, pettiness, and men not made great but made cold and unfeeling by war.40 This aspect of Tolstoy’s legacy—reflected in his “Letter to a Non-commissioned Officer” (1899), which Haynie quoted for The Reporter—loomed large over Tolstoy College and its response to the war. Pacifism was decidedly to be a political position that required the demystification of masculinity and the introduction of nonnormative ways of being a man, including homosexuality. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Bondarchuk’s War and Peace adaptation screened at Tolstoy College.42 Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Bondarchuk’s War and Peace adaptation screened at Tolstoy College.42 Tolstoyan ideals of nonviolence had reentered the American public sphere due to a confluence of various cultural and political happenings. In 1967, Signet publishers issued a 1967 collection of Tolstoy’s political essays titled Essays on Civil Disobedience and Non-violent Resistance. The book’s cover emphasized the relevance of Tolstoyan thought for what was happening in the United States at the time: massive anti–Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement’s reliance on nonviolent methods of political resistance. The cover’s inscription read: “Gathered for the first time, prophetic writings by the author of War and Peace that speak directly to America’s dilemma with the urgency of today’s headlines.” The 1968 US release of Sergei Bondarchuk’s Oscar-winning film “War and Peace” in the midst of massive anti–Vietnam War demonstrations further thrust Tolstoyan pacifism back into the national conversation.41 Figures 7. View largeDownload slide Cover of a 1967 collection of essays by Tolstoy, many about pacifism. The cover reads, “Prophetic writings by the author of War and Peace that speak directly to America’s dilemma with the urgency of today’s headlines.” Figures 7. View largeDownload slide Cover of a 1967 collection of essays by Tolstoy, many about pacifism. The cover reads, “Prophetic writings by the author of War and Peace that speak directly to America’s dilemma with the urgency of today’s headlines.” Tolstoy’s place within 1960s political discourse also owes much to the endorsement of civil rights groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members discussed his writings on civil disobedience at the very meetings where they planned sit-ins and other acts of nonviolent resistance.43 Tolstoy’s most well-known reader from the civil rights era was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who quoted Tolstoy’s What IBelieve in his sermons and included questions about Tolstoy’s “distinctive contribution of non-violent philosophy” on an exam for a class he taught at Morehouse College, a historically black college for men, in the early 1960s.44 For their part, the Black Power movement similarly reached back to nineteenth-century Russia for political ideology, though not for Tolstoy; Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s minister of education, claimed in his 1968 autobiography, Soul on Ice, that he kept a copy of the anarchist and terrorist Sergei Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) in his pocket all times.45 Thus, in many ways, Tolstoy’s own pacifist critique of the methods espoused by the Russian nihilists of the nineteenth-century was recreated in the tension between Dr. King’s nonviolent philosophy of social change, and the by-any-means-necessary rhetoric of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.46 Figure 8. View largeDownload slide Tolstoy College fliers announcing antiwar events on campus.47 Figure 8. View largeDownload slide Tolstoy College fliers announcing antiwar events on campus.47 From its beginning until the war ended in 1975, Tolstoy College was the primary locus on campus for opposition to American military action in Vietnam; it organized petition drives and antiwar rallies and even advertised events like “The Om Circle-A Guided Meditation for World Peace.”48 Students protested the university’s own financial ties to the Vietnam War, particularly the Department of Defense contracts that some science and engineering professors were using to fund their research; these funds were called “Themis Grants,” and fliers announcing anti-Themis rallies appear throughout the Tolstoy College archives.49 Charles Planck and Charlie Haynie were also key members of SUNY-Buffalo’s Radical Faculty Caucus, which publicly spoke out to the university administration against the Themis grant program.50 Under Haynie’s stewardship, this emphasis on pacifism would become absorbed into larger questions of what motivates violence. For Haynie and the other members of Tolstoy College, the answer to that question rested in the socialization of men and compulsory heteromasculinity. Figure 9. View largeDownload slide Tolstoy College fliers announcing antiwar events on campus.47 Figure 9. View largeDownload slide Tolstoy College fliers announcing antiwar events on campus.47 “I’m Not a Man. I Don’t Want to Destroy You.” By 1974, the Tolstoy College description in the SUNY student bulletin, cowritten by instructors Chales Haynie, Paul Richmond, and Burton Weiss, explained the refocusing and new goals of Tolstoy College: “Perhaps the core project of the College, at this time, is what we may call—a Men’s Studies Program—a cooperative effort of a group of men to understand their socialization as males in America, how that socialization limits or oppresses them, and what they can do, collectively, to overcome that socialization.”51 Likewise, in a letter to the administration, Haynie wrote that Tolstoy College had increasingly become dedicated to exploring the connection between sexuality and politics, and that students, “needed to face the personal dimensions of political change raised by the women’s and gay liberation movements.”52 As a result, several courses on the subject were introduced, including: “Homophobia,” “The Working Class Macho Male,” and “Gay Literature” (the latter being the first course on gay literature ever taught at the university). Most of the courses sought to interrogate the oppressive gender roles that had been foisted onto men including the “macho” figure, which they believed steered men toward the armed forces. Figure 10. View largeDownload slide Poems “I am not a Man” and “Out”.54 Figure 10. View largeDownload slide Poems “I am not a Man” and “Out”.54 Figure 11. View largeDownload slide Flyer announcing Tolstoy College support groups.55 Figure 11. View largeDownload slide Flyer announcing Tolstoy College support groups.55 Throughout the materials I explored from this later “gay studies” period, the echoes of Tolstoy College’s earlier antiwar focus were palpable in how many of the courses and extracurricular activities were invested in rooting out violent tendencies within men. For instance, in one of the student journals sponsored by Tolstoy College, there’s a student poem titled “I am Not a Man.” The last line of the poem reads, “I’m not a man. I meditate on peace and love. I’m not a man. I don’t want to destroy you.”53 Underneath the poem, one can see a picture of Marx and Engels holding hands. Similarly, the description of a course titled, “Gay, Straight, and Other (Male) Sexism,” displays how much Tolstoy College seminars functioned like group therapy sessions, all aimed at a type of psychological self-disarmament: We’d like to work with a small group of men- some like ourselves who identify as gay, others as straight, and still others who can’t or won’t identify either way to learn: 1.) how to talk with one another; (2) how we as men relate to the unobtainable masculine, stud image we’re constantly confronted with; (3) not only how (and why) we engage in sexist oppression of women and one another, and how each of us oppresses himself, but much more important, how to stop.56 Figure 12. View largeDownload slide “College F Deals with Male Fears,” Spectrum (student newspaper).57 Figure 12. View largeDownload slide “College F Deals with Male Fears,” Spectrum (student newspaper).57 One of the most remarkable aspects of Tolstoy College is how its gay studies courses continued to exist alongside classes on topics like, “American Agrarian Protest,” “the American Jewish Experience,” and a “Workshop on Ageism.” In the minds of Tolstoy College participants, the struggle for gay liberation was considered inseparable from these other fights, be they against racism, ageism, or unfair labor practices. Its genesis within the Vietnam War protest movement leant Tolstoy College a suspicion of all systems of power and the ways they can invade private life. Race and Tolstoy College’s Radical Limitations Much of Tolstoy College’s legacy is closely tied to Haynie, a PhD candidate in mathematics from Cornell University turned civil rights activist, who was largely responsible for cementing the school’s gay studies program. Before his time at Tolstoy College, Haynie worked with an education nonprofit to implement better math curricula for black colleges in the American South. Aside from designing calculus lesson plans, Haynie spent his time in the southern states organizing with freedom riders and staging sit-ins.58 Planck ostensibly hired Haynie in hopes that his prior activism would position him well to attract more black students to Tolstoy College. In a letter to a colleague on the hiring committee, Planck wrote about his plans to incorporate race issues into Tolstoy College’s agenda, admitting that he did not “have any special rapport or competence in dealing with black students and their problems”59 but that should Haynie join the faculty, “we would have someone with the deepest and quite long-standing involvement with the black problem.”60 Though he was hired to make race one of the critical targets of Tolstoy College’s anarchism, Haynie focused his efforts on incorporating the ideas behind the new gay-liberation movement into the curriculum. Ironically, this was almost exclusively explored in the context of the white male experience, particularly as understood in response to the antiwar movement. This oversight is glaring considering the disproportionate number of black men who had served in Vietnam, a fact that prompted Martin Luther King to describe the conflict as “a white man’s war, black man’s fight.”61 Furthermore, as historian Kevin Mumford has described in his work on queer black male political participation, military service in the world wars and in Vietnam had been important catalysts for black men rethinking the narratives of their own sexuality hoisted upon them by white supremacy and later by respectability politics.62 When I asked Paul Richmond about the lack of black students and instructors at Tolstoy College, he felt that a lack of intersectionality was widespread within all “the colleges” and that it was an unfortunate byproduct of how they were structured, according to identity, saying: We did become isolated in a sense because [we] were trying to find [our] identities. Women were trying to create a space in which women felt safe. Black folks on campus were feeling like they were pretty isolated and were trying to help create their own identity and be together and make a statement for themselves. They didn’t necessary want to come to join College F. We interacted with them. We knew about what they were doing. If there was a black veteran who needed help and they weren’t getting it from there, they heard about College F and would come over to the trailer and so everybody was welcomed and we were always interacting in that way.63 It is important to note, however, the Women’s Studies College at SUNY Buffalo, which offered a class on the lesbian experience as soon as the early 1970s, had been intentional from the very start about including the experiences of women of color in their lesbian studies classes.64 In her study of the rise of the discipline, Margaret Cruikshank made special mention of the efforts of women’s studies at Buffalo to center antiracism in the lesbian studies curriculum.65 The Future of Tolstoy College Finally, in 1985, after years of budgetary battles with the SUNY-Buffalo administration, Tolstoy College was defunded and forced to shutters its doors. While some of Meyerson’s original “colleges” managed to survive (the Rachel Carson College for Environmental Studies still exists at SUNY-Buffalo as the Sustainability Studies department), all that remains of Tolstoy College are its alumni (who have scattered across the country and can now be found working as radical educators, anarchist book publishers, and even as farmers) and its archives. The testimonies of the former, paired with the documents that make up the latter, provide invaluable insights into how opposition to the Vietnam War reshaped American consciousness around militarism and the mythologies about gender that undergird it. Most uniquely, Tolstoy College sheds light on how all of these various social forces (specifically the antiwar movement and gay liberation) manifested in the context of a college campus as one of the nation’s first gay studies programs. Though focused on a single test case, my hope is that this research on Tolstoy College naturally gestures forward and will lead others to ask the question: what impact did massive antiwar organizing on college campuses in the 1960s and ’70s have on the academic disciplines that were emerging simultaneously? In the existing historiography regarding the gay student groups and gay studies programs that sprung up in early 1970s, there is a noticeable trend wherein many of these initiatives were sparked by student activists whose backgrounds in political organization were forged through opposition to the Vietnam War. While the impact of antiwar sentiment on the articulation of gay liberation has been well documented both here and elsewhere, and the influence of gay liberation on the creation of gay studies as an academic discipline is undisputed, can we triangulate backward? The case of Tolstoy College would suggest yes, that the antiwar movement was an important ideological factor in shaping the gay studies curriculum there. However, more examples are needed to fully grasp the impact of this constellation of social dynamics and what they meant for the rise of LGBTQ studies as we know it today. Specifically, one might explore what effect this antiwar, antidraft (and thus consequently male) queer epistemology had (and continues to have?) on gendered divisions within the LGBTQ academic community. In pursuing this question (of the impact of Vietnam), I mean not to obfuscate the numerous other factors that influenced the development of gay studies, both at Tolstoy College and writ large. The influence of the women’s movement, the African-American fight for civil rights, and an overall heightened sense of the potential of protest in American society cannot be overstated as vital sources of inspiration and courage for gay activists, both within and outside academia. Footnotes First and foremost, I extend my sincerest thanks to the former students and instructors of Tolstoy College who spoke at length with me about their time in Buffalo and what it meant for their trajectories as activists and educators: Paul Richmond, Charles Planck, Peter Murphy, Jeffrey Benson, Ross Pudaloff, Alex van Oss, Bob Paskoff, and Jerry Kaplan; your example continues to inspire me. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the family of Charles “Charlie” Haynie (namely Roenie Haynie and Aeron Haynie) for sharing insights into how his philosophy of revolution manifested in daily life; this piece is dedicated in Charlie’s memory. Thank you as well to the many scholars and other interlocutors who provided feedback on earlier drafts of this article, specifically the historians of the Delaware Valley Seminar on Russian History at Swarthmore College and the participants of the “Utopia After Utopia” research initiative at Yale University. Lastly, I am indebted to Matthew Karush and the two anonymous reviewers for teaching me, a Tolstoy scholar, to write about history. 1 Tolstoy College Campus Poster, Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, Tolstoy College Records, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 2 Peter Murphy (former Tolstoy College instructor) in discussion with the author, October 2015. 3 Charles Planck (founder of Tolstoy College) in discussion with the author, October 2015. 4 I asked Tolstoy College faculty and students if they saw any contradictions in the fact that theirs was an anarchist college funded by the state. Tolstoy College instructor Peter Murphy replied: “Back then, I never believed it was a contradiction. I believed that [anarchists] seize the apparatus of the state and use that apparatus against the state. If the state wants to fund its demise, that’s great.” Peter Murphy (former Tolstoy College instructor) in discussion with the author, October 2015. For my earlier discussions of Tolstoy College in popular media, see Jennifer Wilson, “The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College,” New Yorker, January 19, 2016; and Jennifer Wilson, “Tolstoy College: The War and Peace of an Anarchist Education,” Social Text Online, December 21, 2016. 5 Charles A. Haynie, A Memoir of the New Left: The Political Autobiography of Charles A. Haynie, eds. Aeron Haynie and Timothy S. Miller (Knoxville, 2009), 117. 6 Haynie, A Memoir of the New Left, 117. 7 “Historical Note,” Tolstoy College Records, accessed July 1, 2015, http://libweb1.lib.buffalo.edu:8080/xtf/view?docId=ead/archives/ubar_0542.xml. 8 Several of the faculty members at the Women’s Studies College at SUNY-Buffalo came together to write a history of the early years of building feminism within academia: Ellen Carol DuBois and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, eds., Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe (Urbana, IL, 1985). 9 Brochure advertising the colleges, Coll. 34/1/660, Director of the Collegiate Assembly Records, 1968–76, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 10 For more on Tolstoy’s philosophical writings, see Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton, NJ, 2013); Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton, NJ, 1986). For a history of Tolstoy’s experiments with alternative education, see Daniel Moulin, Leo Tolstoy (London, 2014). 11 Tolstoy did however retain copyright for his novel Resurrection (1886). He used the money toward resettling the Doukhobors, a Russian pacifist group, to Canada in order to avoid political persecution. See Andrew Donskov, Leo Tolstoy and the Doukhobors: An Historic Relationship (Ottowa, 2005). 12 Tolstoy himself distanced himself from the movement (which had largely been codified by his controversial discipline Vladimir Chertkov); he particularly disliked the “Tolstoyan communes,” as he believed the implementation of his principles should not be conducted separately from the rest of society. He famously declared: “Я Толстой, а не толстовец” (I am Tolstoy, but I am not a Tolstoyan), though he at times felt guilty that his followers adhered more closely to his ideals than he often did (Moulin, 142). 13 Charlotte Alston, Tolstoy and His Disciplines: The History of a Radical International Movement (New York, 2014), 230. 14 Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington, 2006). 15 Chartering document for Tolstoy College written by Charles Planck, Coll. 34/9/230 Charles Planck Papers, 1968–73, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 16 Letter, written by Charles Haynie to the SUNY-Buffalo administration (1974), Coll. 34/9/1071, Charles Haynie Papers, 1963-2002, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 17 My sources for this were project were the Tolstoy College records that are housed within the SUNY Buffalo archives, interviews with former Tolstoy College professors, students, and their family members, and A Memoir of the New Left: The Political Autobiography of Charlie Haynie, a professor who, if anarchists believed in power relations, would have been considered the head of Tolstoy College. Haynie “took over” following the departure of Tolstoy College founder Charles Planck, who abruptly left academia to start a farm in Virginia. Charles Planck (founder of Tolstoy College) in discussion with the author, October 2015. 18 One major critique of Stonewall-centered histories of gay activism is that that they tend to ignore the racialized bodies of many of the participants of the Stonewall riots, thereby erasing the important context that antiracist activism, particularly against police violence, had on shaping law enforcement’s response to the Greenwich Village rioters. Also, precursors to Stonewall that occurred in predominately black neighborhoods, such as the Compton Cafeteria riot, have been overshadowed as a result of Stonewall-centered histories. For more on the whitewashing of Stonewall and gay liberation history, see Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, and A. J. Lewis, “Reclaiming Our Lineage: Organized Queer, Gender-Nonconforming, and Transgender Resistance to Police Violence,” Scholar and Feminist Online 10, no. 1–2 (Fall 2011/Spring 2012), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/reclaiming-our-lineage-organized-queer-gender-nonconforming-and-transgender-resistance-to-police-violence/; Thomas Piontek, “Forget Stonewall: Making Gay History Perfectly Queer,” in Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies (Urbana-Champaign, IL, 2010). Other texts that question the centrality of Stonewall in histories of gay liberation include: Henry Abelove, “How Stonewall Obscures the Real History of Gay Liberation,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 25, 2015; Scott Bravman, “Queer Fictions of Stonewall,” in Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge, 1997). 19 Promotional materials for Tolstoy College, Coll. 34/1/660, Director of the Collegiate Assembly Records, 1968–76, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 20 Terence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York’s Gay Liberation Front, 1969–1971.” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 108; David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York, 2010). 21 Justin David Suran, “Coming out against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam.” American Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2001): 452. John D’Emilio in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities also problematizes the pre/post-Stonewall divide, writing, “What … if there is greater continuity between pre- and post-Stonewall life and politics than we usually acknowledge?” (259). D’Emilio’s project was an effort to create greater continuity between the homophile movement and the Gay Liberation Front. See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (Chicago, 1983). 22 Justin David Suran, “‘Out Now!’: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Vietnam Era,” in Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination. Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, eds., (New York, 2009). 23 Emily K. Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (Berkeley, 2016), 17. 24 Hobson, Lavender and Red, 18. 25 Flyer, Resolution on the War and Draft passed May 4, 1970, Box 8, Folder 41, Special Protest Collection, Gay Liberation Front. 26 Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York, 2005), 153. 27 Appears on Kissack, 109. Reprinted from “Gay Freedom,” Queen’s Quarterly (New York, 1970). 28 Tolstoy College played a large role in the greater Buffalo gay community and was not limited to campus activity. Its instructors set up support groups for men (where they learned to cope with the oppressive nature of compulsory heteromasculinity), which were open to the public. Also, one of the instructors, Alex van Oss (who went on to work for NPR), cohosted “Stonewall Nation,” a radio show devoted to gay issues throughout the country, with a special focus on Buffalo. One of the guests on “Stonewall Nation” was none other than Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who came on the show to talk about coming out to his family. The recording itself can be found at: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ginsberg.php. For more on “Stonewall Nation” in the context of queer radio in upstate New York, see Claire Tighe, “Happy, Sad, Gay, or Just Interested: The Queer Legacy of WBFO,” Belt Magazine (February 12, 2016). 29 Paul Richmond (former Tolstoy College instructor) in discussion with the author, August 2017. 30 “The Working Class Macho Male” course description, Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 31 Courses on peace began to proliferate across college campuses. In 1968, Manhattan College launched an entire “Peace Studies” program. This was influenced by both the antiwar movement and the antinuclear movement. For more on the development of peace studies as a response to the antiwar movement, see Carol Sue Rank, “Peace Studies in Higher Education: The Emergence of a New Field” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988). 32 For more information on the program at San Francisco State University, see John D’Emilio Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York, 2014). For more on the program at Sacramento State University, see David A. Reichard, “‘We Can’t Hide and They Are Wrong’: The Society for Homosexual Freedom and the Struggle for Recognition at Sacramento State College, 1969–1971,” Law and History Review 28, no. 3 (2010): 629–74. 33 Susan Freeman has written about the history of lesbian studies in the United States, including courses on lesbian identity taught within the Women’s Studies College at SUNY-Buffalo (concurrently with Tolstoy College). See Susan K. Freeman, “Building Lesbian Studies in the 1970s and 1980s,” Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945–1985 (New York, 2014). 34 Most of the advocacy around lesbian studies seemed to be focused on incorporating lesbian identity into existing women’s studies programs. A pioneer in this regard was Margaret Cruikshank, who published anthologies of fiction and nonfiction by lesbians in an effort to have more lesbian voices included in college curricula. She also published a monograph about the development of lesbian studies as an academic discipline. See Margaret Cruikshank, Lesbian Studies: Present and Future (Old Westbury, 1982). 35 Reichard, “‘We Can’t Hide,” 644. 36 D’Emilio, Making Trouble, xxiv. 37 Alex van Oss (former Tolstoy College student and instructor) in discussion with the author, October 2015. 38 Freeman, “Building Lesbian Studies,” 231. 39 “All of ‘War and Peace’ To Be Shown by Tolstoy,” Reporter, April 1, 1971, The Reporter Records, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 40 For more on Tolstoy’s critique of militarism and its reliance on strict gender norms regarding masculinity, see Jennifer Wilson, “(Drag)ging Tolstoy Into Queer Theory: On the Cross-dressing Motif in War and Peace” Tolstoy Studies Journal 25 (2014): 29–38. 41 In fact, the entirety of Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace” (which totaled 431 minutes) was screened at Tolstoy College in 1971, with Russian food served during intermission. See “All of ‘War and Peace’ To Be Shown by Tolstoy,” Reporter (April 1, 1971), The Reporter Records, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 42 “All of ‘War and Peace,’” Reporter. 43 Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism (Boston, MA, 1993), 195. 44 “Examination for MLK Class,” The King Center Digital Archives, accessed January 2016, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/examination-mlk-class. 45 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York, 1970), 25. 46 Tolstoy’s presence had actually been felt in the American political landscape long before the 1960s. Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy became an international celebrity whose social and moral philosophy were widely discussed across all over the world, but were particularly well received in the United States, where his anti-establishment views appealed to American reformers of the Progressive age. Tolstoy’s readers included influential reforms like Jane Addams and William Jennings Bryan. His name became a veritable symbol of the Progressive era; as the American writer Hamlin Garland put it, his generation “quoted Ibsen to reform the drama and Tolstoi to reform society.” For more on Tolstoy’s correspondence with American reformers, see James Cracraft, Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace (Lanham, MD, 2012); Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 130; Peter Sekirin, Americans in Conversation with Tolstoy: Selected Accounts, 1887–1923 (Jefferson, NC, 2006). 47 “Flyers announcing anti–Vietnam War events sponsored by Tolstoy College,” Coll. 34/1/660, Director of the Collegiate Assembly Records, 1968-1976, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 48 “Poster announcing the OM Circle- A Guided Meditation for World Peace,” Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 49 “Project Themis Not Gentle on Radical Faculty’s Minds,” Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 50 Haynie and Planck’s involvement in the Radical Faculty Caucasus is written about in: Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement (New York, 1992), 217. 51 Tolstoy College, Fall 1974 Overview, Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 52 Letter, written by Charles Haynie to the SUNY-Buffalo administration (1974), Coll. 34/9/1071, Charles Haynie Papers, 1963–2002, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 53 “Poem: ‘I am not a Man,’” Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 54 Poems: “I am not a Man,” and “Out,” from student journal. Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 55 Experiencing Support Groups, Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 56 Course description for “Gay, Straight, and Other (Male) Sexism,” Coll. 34/9/542 Tolstoy College Records, 1969–83, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 57 Course description for “Gay, Straight, and Other (Male) Sexism.” 58 Haynie, A Memoir of the New Left, 42. 59 Letter from Charles Planck to Bill Fischer (Feb 5, 1969), Coll. 34/9/230 Charles Planck Papers, 1968–73, State University of New York at Buffalo Archives. 60 Letter from Charles Planck to Bill Fischer. 61 Quoted in: David Coffey, “African Americans in the U.S. Military,” Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed., Spencer C. Tucker (Santa Barbara, CA, 2012), 9. 62 Kevin Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to theAIDSCrisis (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). 63 Paul Richmond (former Tolstoy College instructor) in discussion with the author, October 2015. 64 Freeman, “Building Lesbian Studies,” 239. 65 Freeman, “Building Lesbian Studies,” 239. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “I’m Not a Man. I Don’t Want to Destroy You”: Tolstoy College and LGBTQ Studies in the Vietnam War Era
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shy034
DA - 2019-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/i-m-not-a-man-i-don-t-want-to-destroy-you-tolstoy-college-and-lgbtq-dUdy0sVGk5
SP - 1355
VL - 52
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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