Dr. Joel Dorius

From the days of my earliest part-time teaching at the University of Utah in 1939, I have long known that I was a man born to teach. I loved the reciprocity of the experience, the perpetual give and take. Without this profession, I have long felt that I couldn’t have validated or given meaning to my life. After having taught young men at Harvard and Yale in the Forties and Fifties, however, I feared even after two years at Smith that I was less effective in teaching young women. They were then far quieter and spoke much less in class. But after talking with several students and taking a walk along Paradise Pond with Jane Yolen - one of your best and most prolific writers, I began to see how responsive and deeply involved the young women were. Their subtle and well-written term essays confirmed this impression. And it has been further confirmed by the extraordinary letters - with remembered quotations from me - I’ve since received from women now distinguished in their professions, including Janet Adelman and Lynn Hecht Schafran. Before the beginning of my third year at Smith, I gave a party to celebrate my feeling at last that this college was my home. But as classes were about to begin, I was made a horrendous example: I was tried and fired.

Although I have always been a very private person, in early September of 1960, I was caught in the center of a moral hurricane. While vacationing on the Cape, I read in The New York Times that my colleagues, Newton Arvin and Ned Spofford, had been arrested for possessing so-called "pornographic” photos. I soon heard on the radio that there was a warrant out for my arrest. Fearing the worst, I immediately left for Cambridge, where a friend had already arranged for an excellent lawyer to meet me. William Homans then told me about Sergeant John Regan, a ruthless and publicity-seeking officer who led the Pornography Squad. A police unit with unlimited powers, this posse had recently been established by the state legislature in response to an alert triggered by the country’s Postmaster General. Regan vowed in the media and in public speeches to cleanse the Commonwealth of what he considered "filth.” Like his fellow crusaders, Regan of course couldn’t define "pornography,” but, as he said, he knew it when he saw it. The Post Office in Springfield had somehow spotted suspicious photos in a package addressed to Arvin. Very soon, the spirit of old Salem was resurrected in Northampton and the righteous were once again out to get sinners.

Within three weeks, I was tried twice before two judges in the county courthouse. At the first trial, I was astonished to see my colleague, Arvin, testifying against me. Arvin, terrified when the police had confronted him in his apartment, then "ratted,” as Lillian Hellman said, betraying several of his friends by giving their names to the Squad. He testified that, not long before, four colleagues shared with him some photos of male nudes one night in his apartment. This sharing was our dastardly deed, the unspeakable act from which all else followed. Our names had now become associated with what were, for many, two of the most odious words of the day - "homosexuality” and "pornography.” Thus convicted of possessing questionable photos (photos that today would seem tame indeed), I was designated a felon (akin to manslaughter), and given a fine with a suspended jail sentence. "Possession and distribution” was the charge against us. "Distribution,” according to the legal definition at the time, could mean simply one man’s sharing a photo with another.

Shortly after they had heard of our arrests, the Smith faculty, led by Helen Bacon and a few other brave liberals, voted to keep Ned and me. But their decision was flatly overruled by the Board of Trustees. Prominent on the Smith board were influential members of the "moral majority” - a term then used to describe severely moralistic conservatives.

Having known Smith’s President, Tom Mendenhall, at Yale, I suspected that he too would acquiesce in the Board’s decision. Indeed, my lawyer told me that when the Trustees were determining our fates, Mendenhall, to Homans’ total dismay, didn’t speak a word in our defense. Meanwhile, a tireless group of friends from both Smith and Yale, led by Robert Petersson and Martin Price, raised the funds that enabled us to pay our ever-increasing legal fees.

I think that our scandal was among the lowest points in Smith’s history. I did not then know that the Smith case was one of the last spasms of the McCarthy period, in which men and women of good will were blacklisted as Communists or left-leaning citizens, almost as bad. Pornography and homosexuality were considered by some to be graver threats to the republic than Communism.

This purging of deviants in Northampton - reported with wild exaggerations from coast to coast - may now seem incredible to you. But as the press and TV remind us daily, America is periodically overwhelmed by waves of righteousness, in which the self-styled "good” and "patriotic” declare war on what they regard as "evil,” "alien” or "un-American.” Now, as Cheney, Ashcroft, and Bush try to discipline the country through threats of terrorism and war, I fear the loss of our liberties on a much larger scale.

When I was at Smith in the late Fifties, the concept of civil rights for lesbians and gays was inconceivable. These undesirables had no civil rights. The college, like the rest of the country, was still frightened into silence by the echoing thunder of the McCarthy-like attacks. Even some liberals at Smith didn’t think that a case like ours could possibly be won. Overwhelmed by the tabloid accounts, I too at times wondered whether our "crimes,” as publicized, had been too offensive and outrageous to be tolerated, much less defended, by reasonable citizens.

* * *

The lives of those of us who are outside what is considered to be the sexual "norm” have often since childhood been deeply troubled. If we are later confronted by other major challenges to our sexual identities, as I was, we can be rocked to our foundations. Having been labeled a felon by the courts, I felt after my trials that I was persona non grata, rejected in my profession as a teacher and declared a criminal before the law. Indeed, I felt like an outlaw in my own country. For years following my arrest, I often felt (and possibly behaved) like an escaped convict. Only my dearest friends knew what had really happened. Everyone else only knew of the absurdly inaccurate reports in the media. Pornographic Profs made for a juicy story, and for a while this tale was even reported in Europe.

In December 1960, feeling dazed and disoriented, I left Smith and the old Victorian on Crescent Street, an elegant apartment the police described as being filled with "obscene art.” Actually, they were referring to several reproductions of ancient Etruscan frescoes. Afterward, I hid at the "safe houses” of friends in Cambridge and New Haven, staying just blocks from where I had once lived. Although I had lived in both cities as student and teacher for a total of sixteen years, I now probably acted as though I truly were a menace to society. Furthermore, having had a weak back since childhood, I now began to stoop markedly, and I wore a large hat that didn’t quite conceal my dour face. The few former students I ran into seemed embarrassed to see me. I realized the oddity of my behavior, but it was demeaning either to explain or apologize. The gulf between the man and public image was too great.

For the next few months, I worked at the Grolier Publishing Company in New York, where I found that everyone had heard my story. During this time, my personal life became yet more precarious. My partner of four years suffered several nearly fatal attacks of epilepsy, doubtless exacerbated by my own plight. Helpless before the prospect of the death of my closest friend, I collapsed. The next day, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where I endured three weeks of stern psychotherapy. One Freudian therapist told me that I had suffered "social death,” and I felt that he was right. Soon after my discharge, a poet friend offered me his apartment near the Met. Even though I was now surrounded by the art and music I had always loved, I could do nothing but wander through the city, especially Central Park, and read The Times. I had apparently lost the self that had once loved Bach and Shakespeare. My senses were deadened. As a gay man, I had long lived with guilt - inevitable for someone with my strict Mormon background. Now, after all these years, though deeply closeted, I had finally been exposed.

With the help of my Harvard mentor, Harry Levin, I was then offered a position for two years as a guest professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Within three months I was on a plane for Europe. It was a tremendous relief to be out of the country in which I might have gone to jail. Although they too had heard the Smith story, my German colleagues only laughed at American Puritanism.

After almost four years, in 1964, the Massachusetts Supreme Court finally acquitted me. The warrant used to break into my apartment was proved to be invalid, and thus I won on a technicality. But no court in the land would then acquit anyone associated with pornography (however innocuous) or homosexuality (however discreet). Under the law, penises in books or magazines had to be concealed by fig leaves or "draped,” as the euphemistic expression was. My release by the court was never reported in the media and never acknowledged by Smith. The college had at once buried the case, and now it offered no reparations and no apology.

While I was still teaching in Hamburg, Smith’s Elizabeth Drew wrote Caroline Shrodes at San Francisco State University, among other schools, detailing my situation. Almost immediately, I was telephoned and then hired by this gallant lesbian, sight unseen. She and I became lifelong friends. Since my acquittal, this was the only job offer I had received in the U.S. My position in San Francisco, where I subsequently taught for the next seventeen years, proved to be a lifesaver. And with the invigorating experience of several trips to my beloved Italy, where I could pursue my hobbies in Renaissance Art and Architecture, I could now for extended periods forget the cloud I had been living under - a cloud that I could never fully dispel. I continued to feel that even my acquittal could not erase my blackened reputation. For years after my arrest, I was haunted by the fallen Cassio’s speech in Othello: "I have lost my reputation! ...I have lost the immortal part of myself and what remains is bestial.”

* * *

As early as 1948, Alfred Kinsey, in his landmark studies, had made us aware of the actual sexual behavior of men and women in America. The most famous of his findings, which shocked the nation, documented the extraordinary number of males and females who had engaged in repeated same-sex experiences. And yet, during most of my life, moralizers spoke as though Kinsey and other responsible researchers had never written. Fundamentalists have never permitted facts to alter their convictions. Those of us who occupy varying positions on Kinsey’s sexual scale - lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and so on - are still confronted in much of America by heterosexual denigration and scorn.

Why should the prohibitions against sexual behavior today be dictated by the cruel Deuteronomic laws of a small desert culture that lived hundreds of years BCE? Most of the extreme prohibitions in the Old Testament’s Deuteronomy we now reject or laugh at, regarding them as uninformed prejudices of early peoples. But fundamentalists continue to employ archaic sexual laws to justify their fears, even though these man-made strictures contradict everything we have learned about the natural world. The variety and richness of sexual activity in the animal kingdom, of which we are a part, seem inexhaustible. My favorite example is the bonobo monkey, whose motto seems to be "Make love, not war.” No so-called "missionary” positions are prescribed by the laws of nature. We know, of course, that the basic family unit - man, woman and child - is central to human culture and has guaranteed the survival of the species. But in the eyes of gays and lesbians, this secular trinity has become a "tyranny of the family.” All other human relationships have been officially forbidden. Many of us have suffered under this church- or state-sanctioned interpretation of "family values” and the assumption of its believers that they are morally superior. Why cannot enduring same-sex relationships be protected under religious and civil law? Sound out your representatives in Congress for their answers.

* * *

In recent years, gays and lesbians - for the first time in centuries - have been able to make themselves seen and heard. Since the Seventies, I have rejoiced in the opportunity to view and review many of the best gay films as they have become available on TV and videotape. Unfortunately, however, the long history of our minority on film has been grim. The demeaning cinematic stereotypes applied to gays since the silent era are made painfully clear in The Celluloid Closet, narrated by the versatile Lily Tomlin and illustrated by powerful film clips. This documentary groups negative gay characters into several categories - among them, the sissy, the comic, the victim, and the criminal. I recently studied again this superb documentary and I urge everyone to watch it carefully to see how far we’ve come, and also how far we have yet to go.

I am saddened by the hostility and contempt with which gay characters - both men and women - have for decades been labeled and vilified. Because of censorship, gay characters in fiction when adapted to the screen are usually transformed into alcoholics, misfits or other doomed eccentrics. In the early days, there were exceptions: the glamorous Marlene Dietrich in Morocco and the luminous Greta Garbo in Queen Christina offered us superb examples of bisexual behavior. Frequently, a character’s sexual identity was completely ignored. Shirley MacLaine admitted that during the filming of The Children’s Hour, she, Audrey Hepburn and the director never once discussed the lesbianism of the characters they were tragically portraying.

Fortunately, since the Seventies, many films have transcended these stereotypes. A recent docudrama of the Nineties, Serving in Silence, tells the true-life story of Colonel Margarethe Cammermayer, the highest-ranking military officer ever to be court-marshaled because she admitted that she was a lesbian. Played by the handsome Glenn Close, Cammermayer chooses to remain with her artist lover, Judy Davis, instead of continuing her service in the military, in which she had vainly sought further advancement. Although her fellow officers view her sexuality as "worse than murder,” she insists that her lesbianism is not what she does but who she is. Glenn Close’s brave public defense of her sexuality in this film and Peter Finch’s modest defense of his own in Sunday Bloody Sunday are two of the most eloquent assertions of self by gay characters that I know.

Toward the end of The Celluloid Closet, the bold and articulate Susan Sarandon talks about films which she saved from banality and hypocrisy by insisting on including scenes of physical intimacy between women that would otherwise have been cut, as in The Hunger and Thelma and Louise. Finally, among several other sophisticated movies, Desert Hearts - based on the novel by the gay icon, Jane Rule - explores a growing lesbian relationship movingly and candidly.

Ironically, the plague of AIDS has enabled audiences to see gay men, women and their friends and lovers not only as victims but also as heroes. Finally, I have greatly admired The Vagina Monologues, recently shown on HBO. Early in the film, Eve Ensler points out that many women don’t like their vaginas. But they should know that many men also don’t like their penises - at least in repose. Indeed, men are so self-conscious about their genitals that, even when dressed, they feel obliged to cover them with a hand or other object. But with this observation, I have come full circle. In 1960, I was punished and made notorious for daring to look at mere pictures of this forbidden part of the body, thus breaking an ancient taboo.

* * *

Although long subservient to dominating and aggressive males, women of all persuasions in recent decades - far more than men - seem willing to stand up for the powerless and dispossessed. In considering the make-up of our Congress, I’m immensely proud of California's two female Senators. As women have entered the major professions in ever-greater numbers, we have seen that they have given voice to millions of marginal human beings who have had no one else to speak for them. Indeed, women today outnumber men in admission to graduate schools in most major professions.

I have been astonished to learn in recent years more about the inventive lifestyles of the citizens of your Pioneer Valley. They have given new meaning to the word, "pioneer” - new freedoms that the patriarchal pioneers of the nineteenth century could never have imagined. What other college in the land would publicly acknowledge an outrageous miscarriage of justice that took place nearly half a century ago?

* * *

I would like to thank everyone responsible for this remarkable occasion. Barry Werth’s book on Newton Arvin, The Scarlet Professor, - and his subsequent plea at Smith for recognition of those fired - sparked this event. A devoted group of civil libertarians on the Smith faculty - Dan Horowitz, Marilyn Schuster, John Davis and others whose names I don't know - joined by the Northampton Human Rights Commission and the Daily Gazette, have collaborated in an attempt to awaken the present Trustees to action. Our firing doubtless resulted from the Trustees’ desire in 1961 to maintain Smith’s reputation as a "bastion of moral integrity,” as they interpreted these words in that dark time. But with their sexual prejudices, what on earth would they have thought of this conference today? The present Trustees, in a guarded mood - acknowledging no responsibility for the decisions of the earlier Board - granted at least enough money to the faculty for the subsidizing of this meeting. Of course, we must not expect the impossible. Trustees never apologize nor make reparations. But the dedication of the current faculty has transcended their cautiousness.

Having lived in the shadow of my disgrace for decades, I can scarcely believe that my name is at last being officially "cleared.” Not long ago, I was, as a gay man, considered a member of a criminal minority, punished savagely for an event that today seems trivial. Smith’s public gesture this week has had both psychological and physical ramifications for me. My mental state and the severity of my spinal infirmity were both undoubtedly worsened by my tragedy at Smith. But thanks to this conference, I feel that my burden is now somewhat lighter.

I am grateful that Smith’s faculty and students have created this superb forum. At 84 - more than twice the age of the teacher who was publicly shamed - I salute all of those here today who had the courage to set to rights a long-buried wrong. Despite the fearsome challenges to personal liberties in the nation today, I hope that all of you may live to see greater freedoms ahead.

For a more detailed discussion of the Smith scandal,
see Chapter 9: Crisis in my memoir.