Charles Kaiser

From Philosopedia

Charles Kaiser (1950 - )

Born in Washington, D.C., Kaiser grew up there and in Albany, New York; Dakar, Senegal; London, England; and Windsor, Connecticut.

A historian, he has written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, and other publications.

Kaiser has taught at Columbia and Princeton, where he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism.

In 1968 he was a volunteer in the McCarthy campaign and a freshman at Columbia University. Also that year, one of his books - 1968 in America - was a main selection of the History Book Club. A reviewer for The New York Times, wrote:

• Though 1968 in America is best read for its many-sided account of Mr. McCarthy's electoral crusade and his involuted personality, there are other affecting touches that bring back powerful memories, including strong accounts of the impact of the Tet offensive and of the frenzy aroused by Bobby Kennedy's race for the Presidency. Elsewhere, the personal side of the book gets in the way. Caught up once again in the heightened emotions of the era, Mr. Kaiser falls short of proving how special his generation was. Though it comes to us dressed up as history, the book reads at times like personal therapy, a summoning up of traumas past, a lament for paradise lost. Will we ever get those times out of our system?

Interviewed by Badpuppy Gay Today (3 November 1997) about The Gay Metropolis, New York City: 1940-1996, Kaiser was asked why he wrote the book:

• I had considered writing something historical about New York for a long time. About seven years ago, I reached a point as a gay writer when I felt I had to write something about AIDS—to bear witness to the catastrophe that we all experienced. I wanted to write a book that would include AIDS, but not be overwhelmed by it. And, in fact, I don't mention the word until you're five sixths of the way into the book. For so many years during the 80s, it felt like gay life and AIDS were practically the same thing. So this was a way of trying to put the epidemic into perspective.
• In three decades, the national media has gone from being one of the most serious impediments to the gay rights movement to one of its most important allies. Throughout the 60s, the message conveyed by places like CBS News and the New York Times was clear: the only respectable homosexual was one who was determined to become heterosexual. One of the first major breakthroughs, which I describe in the book, was Merle Miller's article in The New York Times Magazine, "What Its Means To Be a Homosexual," published in 1971. It was a direct response to one of the most disgusting pieces ever printed on this subject: Joseph Epstein's cover story published in Harper's in 1970. "If I had the power to do so," Epstein wrote, "I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth." That sequence is another example of my central theme: adversity has its advantages.
• Some crucial events which propelled the gay movement forward were World War II, when the United States Army acted as a great, secret, unwitting engine of gay liberation, the first Kinsey report, published in 1948, Evelyn Hooker's groundbreaking research in the 1950s which proved that just because you're gay doesn't mean you're disturbed; the Stonewall riot, because it gradually gave gay people a new image of themselves; Jack Nichols and Frank Kameny, because they did more than anyone else to infuse the movement with the spirit of the 1960s; the decision by the American Psychiatric Association (partly inspired by a Frank Kameny lobbying campaign) to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders in 1973; Gore Vidal, because he wrote more frequently and more intelligently on this subject than any other member of his generation; and the AIDS epidemic, the worst and the best thing that ever happened to gay people in America. AIDS had a greater impact on the shape of the gay community than all the other events of the previous forty years put together.

Kaiser is a member of the board of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and a founder and former president of its New York chapter.

An avid bike rider, he once biked 1,000 miles in three weeks over the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and Kentucky. Since 1968 he has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

"If you believe, as I do," he wrote in The Advocate (28 March 2006), that

• the modern gay liberation movement was made possible by the triumph of science over religion, the news from Washington could hardly be worse. There are at least seven new Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiaties: in the White House, the departments of Labor, Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Servics, and the Veterans Administation. German diplomats are often startled when early morning meetings with American officials begin with prayer sessions. The president argues for equal time in high school for "intelligent design" and evolution. Since the rise of science over religion began when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, it makes perfect sense that evolution is still the central issue for religious reactionaries.

A freethinker, Kaiser laments the fact that "unreasoning faith is at the heart of all of the [George W. Bush] Administraton's problems, beginning with Bush's belief in the need for a 'crusade' to bring democracy to Iraq."