Photograph of Carl Wittman. (The young man shown here is unnamed. Verifying him as Wittman was made by comparing this photo with one from the same year appearing in the book, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America by Wesley Hogan.[38]) The image (above) is included in the 1963 edition of the Halcyon, the yearbook of Swarthmore College.[39] Printed on the page opposite the photo is the heading "Phoenix," which is the name of the college's student newspaper. He was made editor-in-chief of the Phoenix in the fall of 1962.[40]

The stapled 26-page pamphlet, An Interracial Movement of the Poor?, by Tom Hayden and Carl Wittman. About creating "a movement of the American poor," the authors state in their opening paragraph, "Our comments here are meant to be incomplete and unpolished, a set of working notes for those in SDS and elsewhere who wonder about these problems as they work on them."[41] They say that beneath the "excitement" about such a movement is "an historical knowledge of the tragic conflicts between groups of the same class situation which have prevented more constructive conflicts between truly-oppresed classes."[42]

 

The publication, "Seminar on Marxism," by Carl Wittman, no date of publication given. The cover indicates that "Carl Wittman (Swarthmore '64) is a member of the SDS National Council and is presently on the staff of the SDS project in Newark."[43] This stapled handout, which  Wittman prepared, was published by Students for a Democratic Society. "It is hoped that the first three weeks will provide a basic understanding of the original doctrines established primarily by Engels and Marx," Carl states at the beginning of his course syllabus.[44]

Where It's At: a Resarch Guide for Community Organizing, a stapled publication by Jill Hamberg, with Paul Booth, Mimi Feingold, and Carl Wittman. Its introductory section, "Knowledge for What," states, "Community research and the Central Intelligence Agency have one thing common to both—and it's not foundation money. It's that both require the gathering of information, not for detatched academic 'research,' but instead for 'intelligence' purposes . . . . that is, the applied use of information."[45] The authors propose that "activist groups"—civil rights, the poor, labor, students, etc., "view America from their own special vantage points."[46] However, they suggest, "Research can help provide some sight, and insight, into the nature of the whole 'animal.' Through action, an attempt can be made to capture the beast and make it human."[47]  Topic headings for other chapters are "Housing," "Community and Public Services," "Police, Courts and Lawyers," "Consumer Action," and "Unions and Jobs."[48]

In White America—SDS & Radical Consciousness by Greg Calvert and Carl Davidson. On the front cover of this handout it states: "Greg Calvert is a former national secretary of SDS. Carl Davidson is a former interorganizational secretary of SDS."[49] Calvert's article first appeared in the National Guardian on March 25, 1967.[50] (Davidson's article appeared in that magazine in three-parts from March-April 1968.[51]) The piece by Calvert is actually the body of a speech called "In White America: Radical Consciousness and Social Change."[52] He gave it at Princeton Univeristy for an SDS-sponsored conference. In his talk, he asserted, "Revolutionary movements are freedom struggles born out of the perception of the contradictions between human potentiality and oppressive actuality."[53] Calvert, a bisexual, later commented on the homophobia in the radical New Left movement of the 1960s.

Carl Wittman's "Refugees from Amerika: a Gay Manifesto." The essay appeared with a shortened title when published in the May 1970 issue of the underground newspaper, the Chicago Seed, shown here.[54][55] Lightly printed on the two center pages are same-sex couples sexually intertwined, males on the left, females on the right.

RFD, a magazine for non-urban gays, started in 1974. Derived from a US Post Office term signifying "Rural Free Delivery," the title has, through the years, playfully varied in meaning.[56] The letters have stood for "Rustic Fairy Dreams" and "Really Feeling Devine."[57][58] For the issue shown here, from Autumn 1975, the acronym (according to the title page) stands for "Raving Flamers' Diary."[59] Carl Wittman and his lover Allan Troxler, who both lived in the country at Wolf Creek, Oregon, were consulted on the proposed magazine's format.[60] Troxler, a graphic artist, designed the first issue's cover.

"Brilliant, just brilliant” is what an activist called Carl Wittman's civil rights actions in Chester, PA.[1] Protesting segregation there in 1964, he and other Swarthmore College students were jailed. The blond-haired son of communist parents was again jailed while participating in anti-segregation sit-ins at the Dorset Theater in Cambridge on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1963.[2] That year he joined the national council of Students for a Democratic Society.[3]

With SDS activist Tom Hayden he wrote an influential paper. Called An Interracial Movement of the Poor, it was, as it states, “working notes, not a 'blueprint,''' for people “sharing the concern with racial justice and an end to poverty.”[4] The authors assert that undoing poverty involves “cooperative practice,” instead of “elite[s] waiting for 'the masses.'”[5] Needed is a redistribution of “wealth and power” and making “problems of poverty visible, dramatic and legitimate to work on.”[6] The two SDS leaders recommended encouraging “the poor to further develop a consciousness of their social, rather than individual, plight, and even create the basis for class disgust with the men in Washington.”[7]

About an SDS project in Newark, New Jersey, Wittman, at the time a closeted gay man, remembered that Hayden “confidently announced that there was to be no homosexuality or marijuana on our community organizing project, and then proceeded to borrow my room to bed down with his latest woman.”[8] It was not the only instance of anti-gay bigotry in the '60s radical “New Left.” Former SDS national secretary, bisexual Greg Calvert recalled, “I was defamed and discredited by my opponents . . . including a vicious and disgusting gay-baiting campaign . . . People talk about sexism—they should talk about homophobia in the movement.”[9][10]

After leaving the SDS in the mid-1960s, Wittman headed west, participating in anti-war activities along the coast and settling in San Francisco. During that period he divorced his wife, civil rights and feminist activist Mimi Feingold.[11] (In hippie-style nuptials, they had wed in 1966 on the New Jersey farm of radical pacifist David Dellinger.[12])

In May 1969, he finalized an essay whose drafts he had been circulating among friends.[13] Considered a seminal document of gay liberation, it was called “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto.”[14] “Like refugees,” he writes, we homosexuals have fled “blackmailing cops” who beat us, families who “disowned or 'tolerated' us,” and “small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life.”[15] The time is now to “free ourselves.”[16] “We are children of straight society,” but we must “stop mimicking straights.”[17] Rather than “oppressive” “traditional marriage,” for example, he urges us to “define for ourselves a new pluralistic, rolefree [sic] social structure . . . instead of measuring our relationship in comparison to straight ones, with straight values.”[18] On coalition building he contends, “But we know we are radical in that we know the system that we're under now is a direct source of oppression, and it's not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten.”[19] “We've been playing an act for a long time, so we're consummate actors” he concludes, “Now we can begin to be, and it'll be a good show!”[20]

While living in the West, Wittman became involved in RFD, a "magazine for rural gays," first published in 1974. [21][22] About the journal, Don Engstrom, a "serious art and SDS person," and one of the men who began the publication, stated that "original RFD'ers thought it was really important to build culture," it was "never about isolationism."[23] Carl, he remarked, "was the first of us to start talking about how politics was truly about creating culture versus subverting culture."[24]

For the Autumn 1975 issue of the magazine Wittman wrote an article titled "Shit" in which he connected the personal—via a natural by-product of human consumption—to a larger benefit. In the piece he immediately poses the question, "Whaddaya do with the shit?," and begins a response by noting the adverse social effects of using "asshole" and "shit" as "sex negative" epithets.[25] Continuing on he acknowledges something "quite central to [in his words] my consciousness as a faggot."[26] That is, "enjoying that part of my body, not feeling so alienated or disgusted by the shit which passes through it; and having those sphincters relaxed so that I'm open to radically different solutions to our problem."[27] From there he advocates and explores ways to "return the nutrients ["waste matter, including shit"] to the soil," particularly "where we are growing food."[28] Because, by "return[ing] to that very soil much of what was taken out," "we can begin to live not as a parasite on the earth but as a part of the whole."[29]

Wittman's social activism remained multi-faceted. Moving to the southeast, in North Carolina he co-founded the Durham Lesbian and Gay Health Project. As well, recognizing that people must be "confident that they have some control over the decisions which affect their lives,” he co-led Citizens for a Safer East Durham in their successful drive to close down a toxic chemical company.[30][31] Additionally, as a believer in the “transcendent importance of art in social change,” he wrote about and taught gender-free English and Scottish country dance.[32][33]

In his manual on that dance style, he stated: “We will dance as an ever changing stream of faces, and groups will come together as a community rather than breaking up into cliques. No wall-flowers, no most-populars, no competition.”[34] “And it worked,” a friend remembered about it, “mixing up dykes and fags, hets and straights, men and women in constantly shifting patterns, and it didn't really matter who was what.”[35]

Doing “final work on the dance book” and saying “the most essential goodbyes,” recalled that same friend in a poignant newsletter article of farewell, Carl then decided to take his own life.[36] He had suffered from AIDS complications and died in 1986 at home surrounded by loved ones.[37]

Sources:

1. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society (New York: Vintage, 1973), 68, PDF, Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/SdsTheRiseAndDevelopmentOfTheStudentsForADemocraticSociety.

2. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America (N.p.: University of North Carolina, 2007), 124, http://books.google.com/books?id=jtxkwH3PosgC&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=carl+wittman+chester&source=bl&ots=dOhBOINTr3&sig=--IL1Z_ADHTzZHVaooTtrWKoFhg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=METSUOycCOmy0QHyrICgCA&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=wittman&f=false.

3. Charles Shively, “Wittman, Carl (1943–1986),” in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, ed. George E. Haggerty (New York: Garland, 2000), 1469, http://books.google.com/books?id=406CCTn4AAQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gay+histories+haggerty&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6VLYUJ3HMo6w0AHFyoC4Cw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=wittman&f=false.

4. Tom Hayden and Carl Wittman, An Interracial Movement of the Poor (Distributed by Students for a Democratic Society, New York, and its Economic Research and Action Project, Ann Arbor, n.d.), 22.

5. Hayden, 26.

6. Hayden. 26.

7. Hayden, 26.

8. Shively, 1469.

9. Vicki L. Eaklor, Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20^th Century (Westport: Greenwood, 2008), 15, http://books.google.com/books?id=qJZdHuZ0aM0C&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=greg+calvert+bisexual&source=bl&ots=fFEMcgNvit&sig=gxKRDgTPsT49aMf2JwGF0hqkoNM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wBrWUMTLE8zK0AHnn4DACQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=greg%20calvert%20bisexual&f=false.

10. Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2005), 216, http://books.google.com/books?id=gR8iHRUaOsIC&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=greg+calvert+homophobia&source=bl&ots=MjuE-qaw4s&sig=D0DJM1yaZpmr6ZDRBCiGi8Fm92g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QkfSUNPVH4XB0AHeq4GAAw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=greg%20calvert%20homophobia&f=true.

11. “Biography/History,” Mirium Feingold Papers, 1960--1967, Wisconsin Historical Society, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;cc=wiarchives;view=text;rgn=main;didno=uw-whs-mss00859.

12. D.E. Mungello, “A Spirit of the 60's,” “Originally published in: The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 15.3 (May-June 2008): p 20,” http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/BIB/mungello01.htm.

13. Mungello, n.p.

14. Shively, 1469.

15. Carl Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto,” Liberation, February 1970, 19.

16. “Manifesto,” 24.

17. “Manifesto,” 20.

18. “Manifesto,” 20.

19. “Manifesto,” 24

20. “Manifesto,” 24.

21. James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2001), 145.

22. Sears, 146.

23. Sears, 145.

24. Sears, 146.

25. "Shit," RFD, Autumn 1975, 28.

26. "Shit," 28.

27. "Shit," 28.

28. "Shit," 29.

29. "Shit," 29.

30. Shively, 1470.

31. Jennifer Strom, “Paving the Way: How Behind-the-Scenes Lobbying Allows Big-Money Interests Like the Asphalt Industry to Steamroll Citizens,” Indy Week: Raleigh-Cary/Durham-Chapel Hill, February 20, 2002, http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/paving-the-way/Content?oid=1185816.

32. Shively, 1470.

33. Chris Ricciotti, “Carl Wittman: The Development of Gender-Free English and Scottish Country Dancing,” in Welcome to Gender-Free Dancing: A Historical Perspective (2011), 21, PDF, http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Flcfd.org%2FGF%2520Historical%2520Manual.pdf&ei=YADWUKz2N-XD0QGQkYCICg&usg=AFQjCNE78GhK6SH7t0CxmvYZ_ABlp0Ks_Q&sig2=zQkc-zoGbEP-KzO25gKhUw&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.dmQ.

34. Mab Segrest, “Beginnings of a Farewell,” Lambda: Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association Newsletter, April/May 1986, 5, PDF, http://www.unc.edu/glbtsa/lambda/archives/1986/aprilmay.pdf.

35. Segrest, 5.

36. Segrest, 5.

37. Liz Highleyman, “Past Out: Who Was Carl Wittman,” Seattle Gay News, May 5, 2006, http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews34_18/page30.cfm.

38. Hogan, 125.

39. Peter Miller, ed.-in-chief, 1963 Halcyon (Swarthmore College, 1963), 55.

40. Darwin H. Stapleton and Donna Heckman Stapleton, Dignity, Discourse, and Destiny: The Life of Courtney C. Smith (Cranbury: Associated University, 2004), 228, http://books.google.com/books?id=q6TOgy0wAKMC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=carl+wittman+editor+of+phoenix&source=bl&ots=b5VUWf_TMp&sig=YK3Mdv7cLUdPvYMUwBPwtzK5CRo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lZN-UsKFCurksATZ34HIDg&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=carl%20wittman%20editor%20of%20phoenix&f=false.

41. Hayden, [1].

42. Hayden, [1].

43. Carl Wittman, "Seminar on Marxism" (New York: Students for a Democratic Society, n.d.), front cover.

44. "Seminar," 1.

45. Jill Hamberg, with Paul Booth, Mimi Feingold, and Carl Wittman, Where It's At: a Research Guide for Community Organizing (Boston: New England Free Press, 1967), 4.

46. Hamberg, 5.

47. Hamberg, 5.

48. Hamberg, 3.

49. Greg Calvert and Carl Davidson, In White America--SDS and Radical Consciousness (Ann Arbor: Radical Education Project, n.d.), front cover.

50. Calvert, 1.

51. Calvert, 4.

52. Calvert, 1.

53. Calvert, 1.

54. Sukie de la Croix, "Random Events from 1970," Gay History: Chicago Whispers, Windy City Times, April 2, 2003, http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/ARTICLE.php?AID=3544.

55. Carl Wittman, "A Gay Manifesto," Chicago Seed, "Vol. 5 No. 2" (n.d.), [16-17], 20.

56. Sears, 146.

57. Sears, 146.

58. Sears, 147.

59. "Raving Flamers' Diary," RFD, Autumn 1975, [1].

60. Sears, 146.