DENNIS ALTMAN'S HOMOSEXUAL: OPPRESSION AND LIBERATION, and its AUSTRALIAN ANTECEDENTS
Paper presented to: "After Homosexual: The Legacy of Gay Liberation" conference, Victoria University, 2-4 February 2012
This year marks 40 years since Homosexual was first published in Australia. (It had appeared in the United States in 1971.) It’s my intention today to look at Homosexual as an ‘Australian’ book - or, more precisely, to look at Homosexual’s Australian antecedents. By that, I really mean that I’m going to trace something of its author’s life and influences in Australia which led to his writing Homosexual.
Of course, everyone here knows Dennis Altman as an Australian. In his accent, his citizenship, his frequent appearances at HIV/AIDS conferences around the world, in the town of his childhood – Hobart – and the one he now calls home – Melbourne – his Australianness is obvious. But the Australian antecedents of Homosexual are not as obvious. The book itself was conceived largely during his third period of extended stay in the United States, during the northern summer of 1970. He had spent much of the previous half-decade in New York – first as a Fulbright Scholar at Cornell through 1964 and 1965, and then as a visitor in 1967-1968, when he was radicalised into countercultural politics. It was not until the 1980s that Altman finally decided to make his life in Australia, and the interest he has maintained in United States makes him one of the foremost Australian experts on American politics and culture. What’s more, Homosexual was described in the early 1990s by the editor of Sexualities, the British sociologist Ken Plummer, as ‘the most prominent early text of gay male theory’ and an ‘early classic’. In this sense the book ‘belongs’ to the global gay rights movement and if it is located anywhere it’s usually in the United States. Certainly the book draws primarily on the homosexual rights and Gay Liberation movements in the USA, and on American literature, film and theatre.
But there are some good reasons to investigate the book’s Australian identity (if any):
This is of course a fraught exercise. Not only does Altman frequently write autobiographically (so many of you may know most of this already), he is probably in the next room. This may make it decidedly weird to talk of Dennis’s intellectual influences, but I do think intellectual biography is a vitally important way of telling the history of movements and places, so I’m going to spend the next 20 minutes sketching a very brief one here. I’ll draw on both his own autobiographical writing, as well as on a kind of oral history interview I conducted with him as part of my own research into the history and nationalism of New Left intellectuals in Australia.
Dennis Altman’s experience of his Tasmanian childhood does not seem particularly bad, but nor does it seem excessively flourishing. Reflecting from the mid-1990s, he believed he learned from his mother ‘something of the mindset of the exile, projecting onto Australia as a whole that sense of being cut off at the bottom of the world, which was her experience of Hobart’. (His mother had lived in Sydney before that, and her father was Russian.) His lack of interest in sport set him apart from his mainly Protestant peers at school, where he was ‘drilled in the liberal version of official British history’. Being Jewish in 1950s Tasmania gave him a sense of ‘foreignness’ in the country of his birth: his Jewishness was a fact he ‘avoided ever admitting’ while he was at school in Hobart.
Jewish in a Protestant society, Tasmanian in Australia, an intellectual in a country whose heroes are sportsmen. And gay. This experience of multiple minority identities was important in two senses when considering the book, Homosexual. First, Altman’s experience of multiple minority identity – despite the fact that he was also white, middle-class and male – was central in his own politicisation and radicalisation. Second: it seemed to propel Altman toward leaving, toward America: it’s not difficult to understand why he might have felt such a strong desire to leave during the early-to-mid 1960s.
But why America? Why not initially Melbourne or Sydney, both places he’d lived before the age of seven? Or London? It seems now that almost an entire generation of writers, artists, actors, intellectuals and others left in order to build their reputations overseas first – the “big four” are always cited as Harris, Hughes, Greer and James, but the trend is still somewhat evident (think of Kylie Minogue). So it’s hardly surprising that it was further than Melbourne or Sydney. But most Australian academics still went to England during the mid-1960s.
The process by which Altman applied for and won the Fulbright Scholarship doesn’t concern me here. The United States was attractive, in part, because it was increasingly where the centre of western, or even world, culture and power was. Hobart was always too peripheral for Altman. Having grown up in Adelaide I understand this. And Australian intellectual and cultural life in the 1960s was dominated by debates about being “between Britain and America”, in the sense that Australians were leaving one Empire (as it was drawing away from its imperial responsibilities and joining the Common Market) and joining another. This of course reflected global geopolitical shifts, but Altman also puts the ‘moment’ when the United States became more important than Britain down to technological developments like the commencement of 707 flights across the Pacific, which became commercially viable in the late 1950s.
‘Until recently’, Altman wrote in his autobiography, ‘it was not unusual for Australians to expatriate themselves to escape sexual repression at home’. This was the other main reason Altman chose America, following in the footsteps of Christina Stead and Sumner Locke Elliott and it was in Ithaca that he made his first ‘tentative forays into the gayworld’, as he put it.
Eventually, Altman was able to settle finally in Australia and in Melbourne, which perhaps suits his intellectual bookishness more than the stereotypically more flamboyant Sydney, in fact the city of his birth. But this decision to call Australia home was not made until the 1980s, and certainly while he was writing Homosexual he’d not made any final decisions of this nature. There was little in Altman’s childhood and early adulthood which particularly predisposed him toward a patriotic identification with Australia except, perhaps, an attachment to the ABC’s Argonauts Club radio program, an interactive attachment he shared with a generation of children across the country.
But Homosexual, with its American flavour, should not be interpreted as a rejection of Australia. One of his dominant experiences at Cornell was of homesickness. While there he wrote an MA thesis on domestic Australian politics and, in his own words, ‘bored my colleagues with my insistence on discussing Australia incessantly’. If he was initially attracted to the United States because of its emerging hegemonic dominance and his desire to live closer to the ‘centre’ of cultural, intellectual and political influence, it was a conversation with the South African author Nadine Gordimer during the early 1980s which alerted him to the possibility that there were ‘multiple centres’. ‘Maybe’, Altman suggests now, ‘I needed her permission to feel it was okay to prefer to live in Melbourne than New York’. At this time he was living in New York with his American partner: ‘I think by that stage I had this feeling that I didn’t want to be an American. That was the dilemma. So I guess I did have a very strong sense that I was Australian. I think I’ve always had that’.
In part he puts this strong sense down to being the son of a refugee. This reflects his ambivalent patriotism: ‘you’re both exotic and you’re made to feel not quite part of the mainstream, and at the same time these are the people that took you in when your own country kicked you out’. Reflecting on the patriotism of the children of more recent refugees from Vietnam, he says: ‘I think children of refugees feel a strong bond to the country that took their parents in. After all,’ he adds, ‘for a Jewish refugee, the alternative was death’.
Looking back now through Homosexual, this sense, although subtle, can be detected in its repeated reminders that Gay Liberation was by the early 1970s a global phenomenon of the developed world, with expressions in places like London and Amsterdam and Melbourne and Sydney. An American author, writing from inside the empire so to speak, was more likely to have let the story begin in New York and end in Los Angeles.
To understand the politics of Homosexual, it might be helpful to trace the development of Dennis Altman’s politics, from non-communist liberal-Left to Liberation and the counterculture. Like all New Left intellectuals, the politics that informed Dennis Altman’s childhood and adolescence was framed by the Cold War. Asked by a classmate in about 1950 whether he was pro- or anti-communist, Altman recalled later that ‘without knowing which was correct’ he knew that ‘one must be the right one and it was tremendously important to know the answer’.
He’d inherited an identification with the Labor Party from his mother – a gut support he’s retained to this day – which was really a Leftish expression of the hegemonic, anti-communist liberalism of the postwar period across Australia. And during the 1960s, hitherto marginalised groups – migrants, Aborigines, women and gay people – began to make increasingly successful claims for inclusion in the liberal society. In Hobart, Dennis Altman joined the broad student movement against the White Australia policy which developed during the early 1960s. This was consistent with the Left-liberalism of his upbringing, and he carried this politics with him to Cornell, where his ‘first political act … was to join a civil rights march’ in support of black Mississippi workers. By the time Menzies announced that Australia would supply combat troops to Vietnam on 29 April 1965, Altman was already at Cornell, where he would be drawn into American political life and to anti-war activism in part through his encounters with Hannah Arendt, who was a guest professor for a term.
By the time Altman returned to Australia – though not to Tasmania; he took up a two-year lectureship at Monash University in 1966 – he had already been shaped by America’s politics to an extent that would effectively insulate him from the excesses of Australian New Left radicalism. During 1967 and 1968, Monash achieved notoriety as the hotbed of radical student dissent, mainly for its Maoist-influenced Monash Labor Club, which sensationally declared support for the Viet Cong in mid-1967 by appealing for donations in its name, and which made plans to burn an American flag at the US Consulate on Independence Day.
Altman was never drawn to these politics. He did express moral opposition to the war, but as an academic he could distance himself from the Maoists, whom he feared were merely Stalinists in a new guise: a visit to Leningrad as part of his involvement in Tasmanian student politics left him ‘unable to equate America and Russia as equally repressive’. What’s more, the communist ideologies were frequently homophobic. The Australian cities expressed their New Left politics quite differently: had he been lecturing at the University of Queensland, he might well have been drawn into the much more US-style direct-action politics of Brisbane’s radicals, much as Dan O’Neill was there.
The politics of Homosexual were those of Gay Liberation, which emerged from the politics and the thinking of the counterculture (as well as from the Women’s Liberation and Black Panther movements). There’s not really a settled definition of the counterculture, but Altman liked Theodore Roszak’s best: ‘a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion’. It was a radical challenge by young people from traditionally marginalised social groups which aimed not for toleration in a liberal society, but the radical transformation of society. And while the counterculture did have a broad influence on the social and political changes we identify with the late 1960s and early 1970s in Australia (Altman saw the New Left political movements as part of the broader counterculture), it was much less worked out intellectually than it was in the United States and to a lesser extent Europe. Indeed, Altman’s writing - in Homosexual, and in journals like Arena - was in large part responsible for introducing the intellectual philosophy of the counterculture to Australian radicals. The counterculture was immensely important to Altman because it allowed him to imagine beyond being merely tolerated as a homosexual person in a heterosexual society.
At Monash during 66 and 67, his homosexuality was expressed in furtive and secretive affairs, as he recalled it. During this time he published a fairly straight psephological account of the role of foreign policy in Australian elections. This paper, which drew on his Cornell research, was the work of a traditional political scientist. It wasn’t until 1967 that he read Christopher Isherwood’s book A Single Man, which was ‘the first statement of full self-acceptance by a homosexual man’ that he’d ever read. And throughout 1967 and 1968, on his second trip to the United States, Altman discovered the counterculture, the ideology of Liberation.
When he returned to Australia, it was to Sydney, as if to confirm the oft-remarked distinction between Australia’s two largest cities: Melbourne, the earnest city of moralism and intellectuals; Sydney, the Liberated city of Oxford Street and John Anderson’s Freethought tradition. He joined Henry Mayer’s Department of Government at the University of Sydney at a remarkable time; its other young teaching staff included RW Connell, Warren Osmond, Terry Irving and Carole Pateman, each of whom had a significant impact on the intellectual development of New Left thought in Australia. Henry Mayer, also a Jewish liberal intellectual and, like Altman’s own father, a German-speaking refugee from the Nazis, was immensely important to the writing of Homosexual, as he was to Humphrey McQueen’s iconic A New Britannia and Anne Summers’ feminist re-writing of Australian history, Damned Whores and God’s Police. On his third visit to the United States in 1970, during which time he discovered Gay Liberation politics, Altman wrote to Mayer telling him that he was writing a book about Gay Liberation and that he was going to come out publicly upon its publication. When Altman returned to Sydney, Mayer took leave and spent some unhappy months in the USA, during which time he sent bundles of Gay Liberation material back to Altman in Sydney. (This was of course hardly an uncharacteristic thing for Mayer to have done.) Importantly, Mayer ‘influenced and informed’ Altman’s radicalism in a way that complimented Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, away from the reverse-chauvinism of some Black Power and Women’s Liberation elements and toward a wholly inclusive vision of society that was truly radical.
The book was published in late 1971, and Altman became something of the intellectual prophet of Gay Liberation in Australia, which kicked off at a meeting at the end of 1971 where Altman gave a speech titled ‘Human beings can be much more than they have allowed themselves to be’. Homosexual made him a minor celebrity in Australia, especially after he famously came out (at least to the TV audience who had yet to read the book) on Bob Moore’s Monday Conference TV program while sitting alongside Peter Coleman of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. ‘To come out ... means bucking the most basic and deep-seating norms of a society that sees itself as based exclusively on the heterosexual family structure’.
The society of Hobart, Melbourne and even Sydney was repressive for Altman, in the sense that it encouraged him to repress his difference. Upon discovering the counterculture and Gay Liberation in the United States, his focus shifted from inward to outward. Society became oppressive. When he returned to Sydney after his third visit to the United States, he wrote in Honi Soit (the student newspaper) that the University was afflicted with a ‘sickness’, ‘one that permeates the whole institution’. Students suffered from the ‘combination of being worked too hard and stimulated too little’. This was pure counterculture. Ginsberg and Goodman’s ‘extremely open and public homosexuality’ was central to their ability to imagine a world beyond the oppressive, repressive ‘one-dimensional’ world of middle-class America. Obviously, their open and public homosexuality was also central to Altman’s own ability to imagine a world beyond the ‘one-dimensional’ world of middle-class Hobart or Melbourne or Sydney.
Altman had, in fact, been introduced to the ideas of Liberation much earlier. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth had reached even little Hobart in 1963, and he’d written his Honours thesis on the politics of Third World Liberation.
The story of Homosexual, and the biography of its author, is an intellectual history of postwar Australia, as much as it is the history of Gay Liberation and the counterculture more widely.
Paper presented to: "After Homosexual: The Legacy of Gay Liberation" conference, Victoria University, 2-4 February 2012
This year marks 40 years since Homosexual was first published in Australia. (It had appeared in the United States in 1971.) It’s my intention today to look at Homosexual as an ‘Australian’ book - or, more precisely, to look at Homosexual’s Australian antecedents. By that, I really mean that I’m going to trace something of its author’s life and influences in Australia which led to his writing Homosexual.
Of course, everyone here knows Dennis Altman as an Australian. In his accent, his citizenship, his frequent appearances at HIV/AIDS conferences around the world, in the town of his childhood – Hobart – and the one he now calls home – Melbourne – his Australianness is obvious. But the Australian antecedents of Homosexual are not as obvious. The book itself was conceived largely during his third period of extended stay in the United States, during the northern summer of 1970. He had spent much of the previous half-decade in New York – first as a Fulbright Scholar at Cornell through 1964 and 1965, and then as a visitor in 1967-1968, when he was radicalised into countercultural politics. It was not until the 1980s that Altman finally decided to make his life in Australia, and the interest he has maintained in United States makes him one of the foremost Australian experts on American politics and culture. What’s more, Homosexual was described in the early 1990s by the editor of Sexualities, the British sociologist Ken Plummer, as ‘the most prominent early text of gay male theory’ and an ‘early classic’. In this sense the book ‘belongs’ to the global gay rights movement and if it is located anywhere it’s usually in the United States. Certainly the book draws primarily on the homosexual rights and Gay Liberation movements in the USA, and on American literature, film and theatre.
But there are some good reasons to investigate the book’s Australian identity (if any):
- it might tell us something of the formative experiences of its author and perhaps something of what he was responding or reacting to;
- it might tell us something about radical politics and radical ideas in Australia during the late 1960s; or
- it might simply provide an interesting angle from which to view Homosexual at a conference devoted to its 40th-anniversary commemoration.
This is of course a fraught exercise. Not only does Altman frequently write autobiographically (so many of you may know most of this already), he is probably in the next room. This may make it decidedly weird to talk of Dennis’s intellectual influences, but I do think intellectual biography is a vitally important way of telling the history of movements and places, so I’m going to spend the next 20 minutes sketching a very brief one here. I’ll draw on both his own autobiographical writing, as well as on a kind of oral history interview I conducted with him as part of my own research into the history and nationalism of New Left intellectuals in Australia.
Dennis Altman’s experience of his Tasmanian childhood does not seem particularly bad, but nor does it seem excessively flourishing. Reflecting from the mid-1990s, he believed he learned from his mother ‘something of the mindset of the exile, projecting onto Australia as a whole that sense of being cut off at the bottom of the world, which was her experience of Hobart’. (His mother had lived in Sydney before that, and her father was Russian.) His lack of interest in sport set him apart from his mainly Protestant peers at school, where he was ‘drilled in the liberal version of official British history’. Being Jewish in 1950s Tasmania gave him a sense of ‘foreignness’ in the country of his birth: his Jewishness was a fact he ‘avoided ever admitting’ while he was at school in Hobart.
Jewish in a Protestant society, Tasmanian in Australia, an intellectual in a country whose heroes are sportsmen. And gay. This experience of multiple minority identities was important in two senses when considering the book, Homosexual. First, Altman’s experience of multiple minority identity – despite the fact that he was also white, middle-class and male – was central in his own politicisation and radicalisation. Second: it seemed to propel Altman toward leaving, toward America: it’s not difficult to understand why he might have felt such a strong desire to leave during the early-to-mid 1960s.
But why America? Why not initially Melbourne or Sydney, both places he’d lived before the age of seven? Or London? It seems now that almost an entire generation of writers, artists, actors, intellectuals and others left in order to build their reputations overseas first – the “big four” are always cited as Harris, Hughes, Greer and James, but the trend is still somewhat evident (think of Kylie Minogue). So it’s hardly surprising that it was further than Melbourne or Sydney. But most Australian academics still went to England during the mid-1960s.
The process by which Altman applied for and won the Fulbright Scholarship doesn’t concern me here. The United States was attractive, in part, because it was increasingly where the centre of western, or even world, culture and power was. Hobart was always too peripheral for Altman. Having grown up in Adelaide I understand this. And Australian intellectual and cultural life in the 1960s was dominated by debates about being “between Britain and America”, in the sense that Australians were leaving one Empire (as it was drawing away from its imperial responsibilities and joining the Common Market) and joining another. This of course reflected global geopolitical shifts, but Altman also puts the ‘moment’ when the United States became more important than Britain down to technological developments like the commencement of 707 flights across the Pacific, which became commercially viable in the late 1950s.
‘Until recently’, Altman wrote in his autobiography, ‘it was not unusual for Australians to expatriate themselves to escape sexual repression at home’. This was the other main reason Altman chose America, following in the footsteps of Christina Stead and Sumner Locke Elliott and it was in Ithaca that he made his first ‘tentative forays into the gayworld’, as he put it.
Eventually, Altman was able to settle finally in Australia and in Melbourne, which perhaps suits his intellectual bookishness more than the stereotypically more flamboyant Sydney, in fact the city of his birth. But this decision to call Australia home was not made until the 1980s, and certainly while he was writing Homosexual he’d not made any final decisions of this nature. There was little in Altman’s childhood and early adulthood which particularly predisposed him toward a patriotic identification with Australia except, perhaps, an attachment to the ABC’s Argonauts Club radio program, an interactive attachment he shared with a generation of children across the country.
But Homosexual, with its American flavour, should not be interpreted as a rejection of Australia. One of his dominant experiences at Cornell was of homesickness. While there he wrote an MA thesis on domestic Australian politics and, in his own words, ‘bored my colleagues with my insistence on discussing Australia incessantly’. If he was initially attracted to the United States because of its emerging hegemonic dominance and his desire to live closer to the ‘centre’ of cultural, intellectual and political influence, it was a conversation with the South African author Nadine Gordimer during the early 1980s which alerted him to the possibility that there were ‘multiple centres’. ‘Maybe’, Altman suggests now, ‘I needed her permission to feel it was okay to prefer to live in Melbourne than New York’. At this time he was living in New York with his American partner: ‘I think by that stage I had this feeling that I didn’t want to be an American. That was the dilemma. So I guess I did have a very strong sense that I was Australian. I think I’ve always had that’.
In part he puts this strong sense down to being the son of a refugee. This reflects his ambivalent patriotism: ‘you’re both exotic and you’re made to feel not quite part of the mainstream, and at the same time these are the people that took you in when your own country kicked you out’. Reflecting on the patriotism of the children of more recent refugees from Vietnam, he says: ‘I think children of refugees feel a strong bond to the country that took their parents in. After all,’ he adds, ‘for a Jewish refugee, the alternative was death’.
Looking back now through Homosexual, this sense, although subtle, can be detected in its repeated reminders that Gay Liberation was by the early 1970s a global phenomenon of the developed world, with expressions in places like London and Amsterdam and Melbourne and Sydney. An American author, writing from inside the empire so to speak, was more likely to have let the story begin in New York and end in Los Angeles.
To understand the politics of Homosexual, it might be helpful to trace the development of Dennis Altman’s politics, from non-communist liberal-Left to Liberation and the counterculture. Like all New Left intellectuals, the politics that informed Dennis Altman’s childhood and adolescence was framed by the Cold War. Asked by a classmate in about 1950 whether he was pro- or anti-communist, Altman recalled later that ‘without knowing which was correct’ he knew that ‘one must be the right one and it was tremendously important to know the answer’.
He’d inherited an identification with the Labor Party from his mother – a gut support he’s retained to this day – which was really a Leftish expression of the hegemonic, anti-communist liberalism of the postwar period across Australia. And during the 1960s, hitherto marginalised groups – migrants, Aborigines, women and gay people – began to make increasingly successful claims for inclusion in the liberal society. In Hobart, Dennis Altman joined the broad student movement against the White Australia policy which developed during the early 1960s. This was consistent with the Left-liberalism of his upbringing, and he carried this politics with him to Cornell, where his ‘first political act … was to join a civil rights march’ in support of black Mississippi workers. By the time Menzies announced that Australia would supply combat troops to Vietnam on 29 April 1965, Altman was already at Cornell, where he would be drawn into American political life and to anti-war activism in part through his encounters with Hannah Arendt, who was a guest professor for a term.
By the time Altman returned to Australia – though not to Tasmania; he took up a two-year lectureship at Monash University in 1966 – he had already been shaped by America’s politics to an extent that would effectively insulate him from the excesses of Australian New Left radicalism. During 1967 and 1968, Monash achieved notoriety as the hotbed of radical student dissent, mainly for its Maoist-influenced Monash Labor Club, which sensationally declared support for the Viet Cong in mid-1967 by appealing for donations in its name, and which made plans to burn an American flag at the US Consulate on Independence Day.
Altman was never drawn to these politics. He did express moral opposition to the war, but as an academic he could distance himself from the Maoists, whom he feared were merely Stalinists in a new guise: a visit to Leningrad as part of his involvement in Tasmanian student politics left him ‘unable to equate America and Russia as equally repressive’. What’s more, the communist ideologies were frequently homophobic. The Australian cities expressed their New Left politics quite differently: had he been lecturing at the University of Queensland, he might well have been drawn into the much more US-style direct-action politics of Brisbane’s radicals, much as Dan O’Neill was there.
The politics of Homosexual were those of Gay Liberation, which emerged from the politics and the thinking of the counterculture (as well as from the Women’s Liberation and Black Panther movements). There’s not really a settled definition of the counterculture, but Altman liked Theodore Roszak’s best: ‘a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion’. It was a radical challenge by young people from traditionally marginalised social groups which aimed not for toleration in a liberal society, but the radical transformation of society. And while the counterculture did have a broad influence on the social and political changes we identify with the late 1960s and early 1970s in Australia (Altman saw the New Left political movements as part of the broader counterculture), it was much less worked out intellectually than it was in the United States and to a lesser extent Europe. Indeed, Altman’s writing - in Homosexual, and in journals like Arena - was in large part responsible for introducing the intellectual philosophy of the counterculture to Australian radicals. The counterculture was immensely important to Altman because it allowed him to imagine beyond being merely tolerated as a homosexual person in a heterosexual society.
At Monash during 66 and 67, his homosexuality was expressed in furtive and secretive affairs, as he recalled it. During this time he published a fairly straight psephological account of the role of foreign policy in Australian elections. This paper, which drew on his Cornell research, was the work of a traditional political scientist. It wasn’t until 1967 that he read Christopher Isherwood’s book A Single Man, which was ‘the first statement of full self-acceptance by a homosexual man’ that he’d ever read. And throughout 1967 and 1968, on his second trip to the United States, Altman discovered the counterculture, the ideology of Liberation.
When he returned to Australia, it was to Sydney, as if to confirm the oft-remarked distinction between Australia’s two largest cities: Melbourne, the earnest city of moralism and intellectuals; Sydney, the Liberated city of Oxford Street and John Anderson’s Freethought tradition. He joined Henry Mayer’s Department of Government at the University of Sydney at a remarkable time; its other young teaching staff included RW Connell, Warren Osmond, Terry Irving and Carole Pateman, each of whom had a significant impact on the intellectual development of New Left thought in Australia. Henry Mayer, also a Jewish liberal intellectual and, like Altman’s own father, a German-speaking refugee from the Nazis, was immensely important to the writing of Homosexual, as he was to Humphrey McQueen’s iconic A New Britannia and Anne Summers’ feminist re-writing of Australian history, Damned Whores and God’s Police. On his third visit to the United States in 1970, during which time he discovered Gay Liberation politics, Altman wrote to Mayer telling him that he was writing a book about Gay Liberation and that he was going to come out publicly upon its publication. When Altman returned to Sydney, Mayer took leave and spent some unhappy months in the USA, during which time he sent bundles of Gay Liberation material back to Altman in Sydney. (This was of course hardly an uncharacteristic thing for Mayer to have done.) Importantly, Mayer ‘influenced and informed’ Altman’s radicalism in a way that complimented Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, away from the reverse-chauvinism of some Black Power and Women’s Liberation elements and toward a wholly inclusive vision of society that was truly radical.
The book was published in late 1971, and Altman became something of the intellectual prophet of Gay Liberation in Australia, which kicked off at a meeting at the end of 1971 where Altman gave a speech titled ‘Human beings can be much more than they have allowed themselves to be’. Homosexual made him a minor celebrity in Australia, especially after he famously came out (at least to the TV audience who had yet to read the book) on Bob Moore’s Monday Conference TV program while sitting alongside Peter Coleman of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. ‘To come out ... means bucking the most basic and deep-seating norms of a society that sees itself as based exclusively on the heterosexual family structure’.
The society of Hobart, Melbourne and even Sydney was repressive for Altman, in the sense that it encouraged him to repress his difference. Upon discovering the counterculture and Gay Liberation in the United States, his focus shifted from inward to outward. Society became oppressive. When he returned to Sydney after his third visit to the United States, he wrote in Honi Soit (the student newspaper) that the University was afflicted with a ‘sickness’, ‘one that permeates the whole institution’. Students suffered from the ‘combination of being worked too hard and stimulated too little’. This was pure counterculture. Ginsberg and Goodman’s ‘extremely open and public homosexuality’ was central to their ability to imagine a world beyond the oppressive, repressive ‘one-dimensional’ world of middle-class America. Obviously, their open and public homosexuality was also central to Altman’s own ability to imagine a world beyond the ‘one-dimensional’ world of middle-class Hobart or Melbourne or Sydney.
Altman had, in fact, been introduced to the ideas of Liberation much earlier. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth had reached even little Hobart in 1963, and he’d written his Honours thesis on the politics of Third World Liberation.
The story of Homosexual, and the biography of its author, is an intellectual history of postwar Australia, as much as it is the history of Gay Liberation and the counterculture more widely.