Taught at school for gays

Mark Peterson/Redux - Fred Goldhaber and Monica Fishof in 1991, then the Havey Milk School’s only full-time teachers.


Among Mr. G.’s first students back in 1985 were runaways who had been sleeping in a shed down by the docks in Lower Manhattan where the city stored mountains of road salt. One boy had hitchhiked from Ohio after eight teenagers dragged him into a bathroom at school, bashed his head against a toilet and burned his arm with a cigarette lighter. Another boy, from New York City, had been abused by his parents after a teacher told them he was “acting like a faggot.” He was kept at home for a year — chained to a radiator, beaten and taken by his father to 42nd Street and forced to have sex with men for money. His father went to prison.


There is no way to know how many of the gay and lesbian youngsters who came under the wing of Mr. G., as he was known, went on to graduate from high school or just found the strength to make their way in the world. But for dozens, at least, he was a hero. Mr. G. — Fred Goldhaber, the first and, for four years, the only teacher at the Harvey Milk School in Manhattan, the first school in the country with a mission to provide a haven for gay and lesbian students, died of liver cancer on Monday at his home in Jersey City. He was 63.

He had lived with AIDS for nearly 30 years, said his brother, Richard.


The Harvey Milk School, named for the gay-rights advocate and San Francisco city supervisor who was killed in 1978, was established in 1985 by what was then called the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth (now the Hetrick-Martin Institute), with financial support from the city’s Board of Education. Mr. Goldhaber, who had taught English and remedial reading at Wingate High School in Brooklyn for 17 years, volunteered to teach the incoming class of 22 students, who first gathered in April 1985 at a church in Greenwich Village. The school later moved to a building at 2 Astor Place.

Back then it was like an old-time country school, with Mr. G. juggling academic demands: answering questions about physics, correcting spelling tests, going over verb conjugation, keeping an eye out for the girl slumping into sleep. A longtime member of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, he laced lessons with song snippets: “Teach me tonight” while assigning homework; “Call me irresponsible” to a girl who had not done her math.

“At his right hand,” Time magazine wrote in 1989, “Goldhaber pores over pictures with one student, saying, ‘Yes, this is an ion, but is it just an ion or a hydroxide ion? Think about it.’ He asks the student on his left, ‘Do you really believe 20 times 15 is 30,000?’ ”


Until 2003, the school was actually what the Department of Education classifies as a transfer program, meaning students could earn graduate equivalency diplomas or enough credits to graduate from the school they had left. Now they can graduate directly from the Milk School. Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, said about 100 students are enrolled at the Milk School each year, about one-third of whom graduate within four years — a reflection of the difficulties they face. Stephen Phillips, a professor of education at Brooklyn College who was the city’s superintendent of alternative high schools and programs when the Milk School opened, observed Mr. Goldhaber in action.

“The kids idolized him,” Mr. Phillips said. “Many of them never would have gotten diplomas had it not been for the way he treated them.”

When his brother walked the city’s streets, Richard Goldhaber said, “time after time” students “would stop him, hug him and thank him for rescuing them.” Fred Martin Goldhaber was born in Brooklyn on April 23, 1947. His father, Max, was a lawyer; his mother, the former Betty Chatow, was a concert pianist. He received a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in 1968 and a master’s degree there a year later, both in education. Besides his brother, Mr. Goldhaber is survived by his companion, Wilfredo Hinds.


When the school celebrated its sixth anniversary in 1991, a student asked, “Will the school survive?” To which Mr. G. replied, “If you kids do.” Another student said: “I hope there will be a day when there is no gay school. Because, you know, there shouldn’t have to be one.”

November 15, 2010: Fred Goldhaber, 63, Dies; Taught at School for Gays. By DENNIS HEVESI

Led Raid on Stonewall Inn

Seymour Pine, the deputy police inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, on a hot summer night in 1969 — a moment that helped start the gay liberation movement — died Thursday at an assisted-living center in Whippany, N.J. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his son Daniel.

Inspector Pine, who later apologized for his role in the raid, was commander of the New York Police Department’s vice squad for Lower Manhattan when he led eight officers into the Stonewall Inn, an illegal club frequented by cross-dressers, just after midnight on June 28, 1969. Although the ostensible reason for the raid was to crack down on prostitution and other organized-crime activities, it was common at the time for the police to raid gay bars and arrest transvestites and harass customers.

The club, on Christopher Street near Seventh Avenue South, was owned by members of the Mafia. Inspector Pine later said he conducted the raid on orders from superiors. About 200 people were inside. When the officers ordered them to line up and show identification, some refused. Several transvestites refused to submit to anatomical inspections. Word of the raid filtered into the street, and soon hundreds of protesters gathered outside, shouting “gay power” and calling the police “pigs.”

Unbeknownst to me, I was in the Village that Friday night, with friends. We had no idea what was going on (in more ways than one, in point of fact). We saw surging crowds, charging police, toilet paper of fire being thrown out from the upper floors of the Women's House of Detention. At one point a police officer caught up with a protester, and raised his club to hit the prostate person, when a flash went off, catching the moment in photography. It took me many years to connect the two, to realize I was there that particular night.


The turning point came when a lesbian fought with officers as she was pushed into a patrol car. The crowd rushed the officers, who retreated into the club. Several people ripped out a parking meter and used it as a battering ram; others tried to set fire to the club. It took police reinforcements an hour and a half to clear the street. It was the start of several nights of rioting, during which the police used force to disperse crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Fewer than three dozen protesters were arrested, but hundreds were detained and released.


“The Stonewall uprising is the signal event in American gay and lesbian civil rights history because it transformed a small movement that existed prior to that night into a mass movement,” David Carter, author of “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” (2004), said in an interview. “It is to the gay movement what the fall of the Bastille is to the unleashing of the French Revolution.”

In 2004, Inspector Pine spoke during a discussion of the Stonewall uprising at the New-York Historical Society. At the time of the raid, he said, the police “certainly were prejudiced” against gays, “but had no idea about what gay people were about.” The department regularly raided gay clubs for two reasons, he said. First, he insisted, many clubs were controlled by organized crime; second, arresting gay people was a way for officers to improve their arrest numbers. “They were easy arrests,” he said. “They never gave you any trouble” — at least until that night.


When someone in the audience said Inspector Pine should apologize for the raid, he did. “There’s been a stereotype that Seymour Pine was a homophobe,” Mr. Carter said. “He had some of the typical hang-ups and preconceived ideas of the time, but I think he was strictly following orders, not personal prejudice against gay people.”


Seymour Pine was born in Manhattan on July 21, 1919, one of four children of Nathan and Anne Pine. Besides his son Daniel, he is survived by another son, Charles; a brother, Arnold; a sister, Connie Katz; and seven grandchildren. His wife of 45 years, the former Judith Handler, died in 1987. Soon after graduating from Brooklyn College in 1941, he joined the police force, but within months he was serving in the Army, first in Africa and later in Europe. He returned to the department after the war, rising to deputy inspector in the late 1960s. He retired in 1976.

“He once told me,” Mr. Carter said, “ ‘If what I did helped gay people, then I’m glad.’ ”

September 7, 2010
Seymour Pine Dies at 91; Led Raid on Stonewall Inn
By DENNIS HEVESI

David Vilaseca

An exiled authority on Hispanic culture, he homed in on identity

David Vilaseca, who has died aged 46, after being run over by a skip lorry as he rode his bicycle near his home at London Bridge, was a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specialised in Hispanic studies and critical theory. He wrote two major books and a string of brilliant articles over the course of some 20 years.

Skip lorry seems to be a sort of tow truck.

As an authority on Spanish and Catalan culture, he produced original and innovative studies of a number of writers, mostly gay, and exiles from their native land or language. Himself a proud and openly gay man who had made his life in London rather than his native Barcelona, David clearly had a personal interest in such figures. But as a master in the demanding school of poststructuralist thought, especially psychoanalysis and queer theory, he was an impeccable scholar. His central theme was that identity was unstable and the limits between self and other difficult, if not impossible, to draw. It was a theme he would also explore in a prizewinning novel.

David took his first degree in philology in 1987 at Barcelona's Autonomous University before studying for an MA at Bloomington, Indiana, in 1989. I supervised his PhD, awarded at Queen Mary, University of London, in just three years (1992), in spite of the fact that he had a full teaching load as a language assistant. He then returned to teach at his home university. Finding the British system more receptive to his research, he came back to a lectureship at Southampton University in 1994 before moving to Royal Holloway as senior lecturer in 2000 with rapid promotion to professor of Hispanic studies and critical theory in 2003.

Salvador Dalí, whose autobiography was written in several, indecipherable hands and in a macaronic mix of languages, was clearly a perfect match for David's deconstructive approach. His first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."

Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate.

While David's first book had on its cover a youthful Dalí, proudly posing in a turban, the second, Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography (2003), boasted Johnny Depp in full drag from the film version of Before Night Falls, the autobiography of the Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas.

Typically, David's accounts of Spanish, Catalan and Hispanic writers could prove unsettling to scholars and activists alike. Thus, he showed convincingly that Arenas actively constructed an image of himself as a person with HIV/Aids, even as that identity was imposed upon him; and that the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo came to identify himself as a homosexual only when told as much by his mentor, Jean Genet. This was a fine example of the "hindsight" of David's title, the way in which retrospectively we build narratives of ourselves, telling tales that are never simple or single.

It was perhaps a surprise that such a private person as David should publish a novel that was clearly autobiographical in origin. L'Aprenentatge de la Soledat (The Apprenticeship of Solitude), composed in diary format, is the story of a gay Catalan living in the London which David loved. While it would be naive to take the novel as a personal revelation (David worked for years on stylistic revisions of his text), it charts with disconcerting objectivity love and sex in the capital. Lengthy and controversial, it marked David's return to the Catalan language and won him the 2007 Octubre prize for Catalan fiction.

David wrote that, as in the continuing relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, Dalí's autobiography was "part of a love story which has clearly not come to an end". This is also true of his own writing. A third academic book, Negotiating the Event, will be published this autumn.

David is survived by his mother, Marina, his sister, Marta, and the many friends who loved him.
• David Vilaseca, Hispanic scholar, born 6 February 1964; died 9 February 2010
* Paul Julian Smith
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 March 2010 18.45 GMT 

Paul Julian Smith is the author of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Verso), Amores Perros (BFI Modern Classics) and Television in Spain (Boydell and Brewer). He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound