Marc Rubin

From our archives:

Date: Sun Mar 18, 2007 9:37 pm
Subject: Marc Rubin

They say that things happen in 3's. It pains me to say that at least in the case of the passing of Stonewall-Era gay activists, this has been the case these weeks. Last month saw the passing of Marc Rubin as well as a very generous anonymous donor who helped fund the early Gay Movement, in addition to pioneer Barbara Gittings.

Marc Rubin was an early activist who was a leader in the Gay Activists' Alliance (GAA) in the 1970s as well as a member of the Lavender Hill Mob. In 1974 he helped found the Gay Teachers Association, and was involved in the early planning for the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, the original incarnation of the present Hetrick-Martin Institute. In 1994, Mr. Rubin was one of the primary organizers of the Stonewall 25 celebration and insisted that both the GAA and GLF (Gay Liberation Front) be given special places of honor. This was in response to what he felt was the erasure of the role the GAA and GLF played in the early stages of the movement by gay historians.

To give just a bare bones version of their history and significance, the GLF was the organization that came directly out of the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. Members of GLF were often divided on which direction to move in, and as a result of their fractured direction, led to the group's disbanding after about 2 years. Despite being so short-lived GLF is important, amongst other reasons, for putting forth the notion that the act of coming out was itself a political one.

GLF members who wanted to focus solely on gay issues broke off to form their own organization, the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). The GAA were known for their work both politically and socially. They frequently organized ZAPS, which were public confrontations with elected officials regarding various issues relating to the gay and lesbian community. In a short time they managed to get passed several laws protecting gays and lesbians in NYC. The GAA headquarters also became a community center of sorts, organizing fundraisers and dances, which helped fund the GAA.

Unfortunately in an arson that remains unsolved to this day, the headquarters burned down, which along with other factors led to the group's dismantling in 1981. GAA members went on to found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and the LGBT Community Center in NYC. Another offspring organization, the Lavender Hill Mob, eventually would go on to join forces with ACT-UP to protest discriminatory practices regarding HIV/AIDS issues.

I'll write more in-depth about the GLF, GAA, Lavender Hill Mob, and HMI in future posts, but for now, to learn more, go to:

Marc Rubin
MarcRubin1
MarcRubin2

GAA
GAA1 (please excuse the top photos!)
GAA2
GAA3
GAA4

GLF
GLF1
GLF2
GLF3
GLF4
GLF5


Lavender Hill Mob
LavenderHillMob1
LavenderHillMob2

LavenderHillMob3

LavenderHillMob4

Hetrick-Martin Institute
HMI1
HMI2

********************************************************


http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18055302&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568862&rfi=6


Marc Rubin, Early Activist, Teachers' Organizer, Dead at 74
By: PAUL SCHINDLER
03/08/2007
Email to a friend Post a Comment Printer-friendly



GAA activists (l. to r.) Vito Russo, Jim Owles, Marc Rubin, and Pete Fisher get a summons from police for staging a dance at the group�s famed Firehouse headquarters in Soho.

Marc Rubin, a pioneering activist who was a leader in New York's Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) of the early 1970s, helped found the Gay Teachers Association in 1974, and was part of the Lavender Hill Mob, a direct-action precursor to ACT UP, died on February 28 at the age of 74.


Rubin's death was announced by his partner of more than 35 years, author and activist Pete Fisher.


Contemporaries of Rubin recall his "commanding presence" at public demonstrations in Manhattan that were often met with law enforcement hostility and the scorn of passersby.


Recalling Rubin and Fisher as "a legendary couple" in GAA, Joe Kennedy, author of "Summer of '77: Last Hurrah of the Gay Activists Alliance," said, "They were very courageous. Others might be intimidated by hostile crowds. They would go places others would not." Kennedy described the couple attending Fisher's high school reunion in Westchester in the early '70s dressed "in full leather regalia."

Kennedy said that Rubin's size and "booming voice" gave him a memorable role in the many activist debates of the era, but emphasized that he was influential because he was "very persuasive," not domineering.

"He was a natural leader," Kennedy said.


Steve Ashkinazy, a social worker, also knew Rubin during this period and worked with him briefly on the early planning for the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, now the Hetrick-Martin Institute. Commenting on Rubin's death, Ashkinazy said he had just days before watched a video of the two of them speaking at a high school during the early 1970s. A public school teacher who worked with delinquent boys, Rubin with Fisher wrote a novel based on his experiences, "Special Teachers/ Special Boys," published by St. Martin's in 1978.

In 1974, Rubin, one of the first out gay teachers in the city's school system, and Merill Friedman placed a notice in the Village Voice to organize the Gay Teachers Association. Roughly 40 people turned out to form the group now known as the Lesbian and Gay Teachers Association. It was from the ranks of that group that Lambda Legal in 1987 drew the plaintiffs for a lawsuit to win domestic partner benefits for lesbian and gay public school teachers. The suit dragged on for six years, and was settled in negotiations with Mayor David Dinkins giving such benefits to all city employees just days before he lost to Rudy Giuliani in 1993.


In a 1999 remembrance published by Gay Today at badpuppy.com on the occasion of Stonewall's 30th anniversary, Rubin recalled the spirit of his activism in the early days, and lamented the "erasure" of GAA from queer history, even in the gay press.


"To distort history is to redefine reality, to bend it towards serving selective and exclusiona y agendas," he wrote. Then contrasting GAA with the group it grew up in reaction to, Rubin wrote, "GLF, Gay Liberation Front, was conceived as being part of the entire Liberation movement, one segment of a worldwide struggle against oppression. It was anarchic and strongly allied to, albeit rather unwelcome in, all leftist movements. The Gay Activists Alliance stood for writing the revolution into law... [T]he organization's single issue focus enabled it direct all of its energies toward working intensively in, on, with, and against 'The Establishment' on issues affecting lesbians and gay men."


He then went on to recall a dozen demonstrations, pickets, sit-ins, and zaps aimed at unfriendly or uncooperative institutions from the City Council to St. Patrick's Cathedral to the Taxi and Limousine Commission (for requiring psychological testing of gay taxi drivers) to "The Dick Cavett Show" (because of the host's "relentless anti-gay spiels"). It was that ethic of on-the-spot activism that Rubin and others, most notably Marty Robinson, brought to the Lavender Hill Mob's AIDS protest activities in the mid-'80s.


"I really adored him," said poet, novelist, and activist Perry Brass in admiration of Rubin's dedicated activism. Seeing Rubin for the first time in several years at an ACT UP meeting in the late '80s, Kennedy recalled him saying, "I will never be as young and energetic as I once was, but I will always be an activist."

Indeed, Rubin was one of the primary organizers of the city's massive Stonewall 25 celebration in 1994, at which he insisted GAA and GLF be given special places of honor.

Two years ago, Rubin, suffering from symptoms that included memory loss, underwent brain surgery, from which he recovered well. Kennedy, however, said that on Pride Sunday last year he received a call from Rubin saying that for the first time ever he was too sick to join the annual celebration and was instead spending the day calling his "old activist comrades."
Plans for a memorial service for Marc Rubin have not yet been completed.



©GayCityNews 2007

Anonymous Donor to Early LGBT Movement

From our archives:

Date: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:58 pm
Subject: Anonymous Donor to Early LGBT Movement

A wonderful article on the life, contributions, and recent passing of an anonymous donor who helped fund a great deal of some of the movement's earliest endeavors. Choosing to remain anonymous to inspire others to give in the same way, the donor funded the co-founder of the National Gay Task Force, Bruce Voeller, allowing him to successfully lobby key American Psychiatric Association members in removing homosexuality from its index of mental disorders in 1973. The donor was also involved in funding the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth (the precursor to the Hetrick-Martin Institute) in the 80s, as well as SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment), and the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project-sponsored ads in the New York Times after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. Strongly concerned about homeless LGBT youth, this donor gave huge sums to MCC (Manhattan Community Church) to fund shelters like Sylvia's Place and Marsha P. Johnson Drop-In Center.

I think this donor's life and work is an inspiration to young people of gays helping our own. To be able to step out of one's own financially comfortable experience to understand that for others less fortunate things could be a lot more difficult is certainly a trait more of us could stand to display.


http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18055247&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=6

********************************************************

Anonymous Generosity, In Life and In Death
03/08/2007


A New York gay man who donated millions of dollars to LGBT causes going back to the early 1970s died February 22 at age 85.


He insisted on remaining anonymous in life and in death not out of a desire to be closeted, but rather to inspire others to give in the same way. This reporter knew him for 20 years and served as an intermediary between him and several organizations he supported over the last decade.

The donor, whose fortune was made as a Manhattan art dealer, was also an expert on sexually transmitted infections, for years running a foundation that disseminated prevention pamphlets he authored. An intimate of Margaret Sanger, he was also active in the defense of reproductive rights.

In the early 1970s, the donor funded Bruce Voeller - who co-founded the National Gay Task Force in 1973 - to lobby members of the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality from its index of mental disorders. Washington's Franklin Kameny and the recently deceased Barbara Gittings of Philadelphia played the central public roles in that campaign, but the funding Voeller received allowed him to privately lobby key association members. The APA voted to make the change in 1973.

Voeller's initial salary at the Task Force was $250 a week, not enough to support his children from a previous marriage. The donor stepped in and more than doubled his compensation. A biologist, Voeller went on to establish the Mariposa Foundation for research on sexuality and STDs. The group pioneered the use of the spermicide nonoxynol-9 as an HIV-preventative during sex. Voeller died of AIDS in 1994.

Perhaps the most famous story about the anonymous donor is how he provided the seed money for the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth - now the Hetrick-Martin Institute- to offer social services beginning in 1983. Founded in 1979 by the late Drs. Emery Hetrick and Damien Martin, it had been a volunteer advocacy and research group.

As a board member of Dignity, the gay Catholic group, in the early 1980s, I remember Hetrick and Martin making a lengthy presentation just to secure a $100 donation for the Institute (an indelible memory about the state of gay philanthropy in those days). The donor heard about the Institute's work, met Hetrick and Martin in their Murray Hill apartment, pulled $25,000 in cash out of his boot, and told them that he had another $25,000 for them but that it did not fit in the boot.

"Without this donor, it never would have gotten started," said Dr. Joyce Hunter, a founding member, who was vice president of the Institute's board at the time and went on become its first director of social work. She said the city matched the donor's contribution soon afterward.

Over the next decade, the donor pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars more into the Institute.

One of his primary causes over the last decade was SAGE, the New York agency providing services and advocacy for LGBT elders, to which he contributed nearly a million dollars. He sponsored full-page ads for SAGE in the New York Times promoting the slogan, "Who loves you when you're old and gay? SAGE does!" featuring a big photo of exuberant SAGE members singing around a piano.
The donor also paid for ads sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project on the op-ed page of the Times after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, saying that the killers "acted in an atmosphere poisoned by the anti-gay rhetoric of religious and political extremists" and calling for education of young people in schools and at home on "tolerance, understanding, kindness, and concern for all."

One of the anonymous donor's lifelong concerns was homeless people, especially LGBT youth on the streets. Though he was not a religious man, he became a major donor to the Metropolitan Community Church of New York and its many programs for these young people. At his death, he was providing major funding for MCC's Sylvia's Place shelter for homeless LGBT youth - named for the late transgender leader Sylvia Rivera - on church premises at 446 West 36th Street and the new Marsha P. Johnson Drop-In Center, named for another noted transgender activist who is deceased, set to open in Harlem soon.

On the Sunday following his death, Reverend Pat Bumgardner, senior pastor of MCC, told her congregation that the donor was "as an imitator of God's generosity and kindness and that he strove by his example to make God's will for housing the homeless and feeding the hungry a reality."

While gay philanthropists have stepped forward since with more money and more varied causes, this donor will be remembered - though not by name - as providing critical sums when no one else would to populations in the community that almost no other big contributors cared about.



©GayCityNews 2007