Making History
The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990
HarperPerennial
1992
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Download Herb Donaldson and Evander Smith Interview from Making History
Praise for Making History
“Making History is one of the definitive works on gay life. Through this collective testimony we may come to understand what it is to be ‘the other’; in short, the other part of ourselves.”
— Studs Terkel, Oral historian and author
“Make no mistake about it: Making History is a far richer entertainment than its academic title might suggest. I picked it up idly and just kept reading until my eyes grew bleary, riveted by its sheer Dostoevskian sweep; the living breathing, fallible human souls who emerge on every page, their stories interlinking magically to create a saga of conflict and growth spanning half a century. As in the best of novels, there is a little bit of everything along the way: humor, anger, sensuality, poignant self-revelation, and transcendent courage. Eric Marcus not only writes with grace and clarity but makes it look so easy—the ultimate measure of historian and novelist alike.”
— Armistead Maupin, Novelist
From Eric Marcus:
In the spring of 1988 I got a call from Rick Kot, an editor at HarperCollins, who wanted to talk to me about writing an oral histor - all personal stories - about the gay civil rights movement. Rick thought I was a good match for the project. I thought he was mistaken. For one thing, I was not a historian. But perhaps more significantly, there was a long way between writing a guidebook for male couples and writing a history of the gay civil rights movement. Rick disagreed. He liked the way I used interviews and dialogue in The Male Couple's Guide and he didn't want an academic history. I didn't either, because I found most traditional history writing to be boring.
When Rick called, I was on a six-month contract at was then called "CBS This Morning," one in a series of attempts by CBS to challenge the supremacy of ABC's "Good Morning America" (where I had worked previously before being fired) and NBC's "Today" show. At CBS I was a segment producer in charge of, not surprisingly, all the author interviews.
Rick Kot wasn't offering me a book contract, but he asked me to do a proposal, with the hope that I could produce an outline for what he had in mind. My then partner encouraged me to take the summer to write the proposal, which I did (after turning down a four-year contract with CBS). HarperCollins bought the book based on my proposal and I spent the next two-and-a-half years fashioning what I came to call Making History.
When I began work on Making History, my intention had been to interview two hundred people who had been involved in some way in the post-World War II gay rights movement (until I started work on the book I had thought the gay rights movement began in 1969 with a riot at the Stonewall Inn in New York City - as I said, I wasn't a historian). From those two hundred interviews I planned to use fifty to convey the history of the gay rights movement.
By the time I had completed eighty-nine interviews, I realized that if I didn't stop I would never finish the book in time. So I started transcribing the interviews, which averaged two to three hours each. By the time I finished transcribing more than forty of the interviews I realized that I'd better start editing the interviews and constructing the book or I would never make my deadline. (When I wasn't working on the interviews, I pored over books and articles to create a detailed timeline.)
Selecting which interviews to include in the book proved painful, as did the tendonitis I developed from the non-stop transcribing and typing (I worked on a Mac SE-30 that my grandmother bought for me - it cost a fortune, even by today's standards). I eventually chose to include material from a total of forty-nine interviews, but because of time pressure and my relative inexperience as a writer, I wasn't able to write the book in the way I had originally hoped.
As I had envisioned Making History, I thought I would use the material I gathered to create a rich tapestry of interweaving stories. And through those stories, which I would hang from a chronological narrative, I would tell the compelling, funny, tragic, triumphant history of the gay rights movement. But that book would have to wait for another day (have a look at Making Gay History). Instead, Making History is a collection of loosely chronological oral histories, where each story is its own chapter.
Still, Making History was well received. It won the American Library Association award for best gay non-fiction. Anna Quindlen, who was then an op-ed page columnist for the New York Times wrote a column about Jeanne and Morty Manford, whom I had featured in the book. Making History was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and on the front page of the Washington Post's Book World. And in January 2005, "Making History" the play (adapted by the very talented Matthew Crehan Higgins) premiered in Buffalo, New York, to rave reviews.
Making History provided me with an astonishing opportunity to preserve for posterity the stories of the men and women who contributed in their own ways toward making the world a better place for gay and lesbian people. They were the ones who made history. I was lucky enough to meet them, interview them, and then had the good fortune to tell their stories in the pages of a book.
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