Political Activism and Personal Pleasure by Jeff Weinstein "I hope you can find them. The more photos the better. They really do add to the Internet experience." That's what I recall my editor Robert telling me, but I, increasingly, have a porous memory--which is why pictures may help me trace the connection that he and I know exists between, as Robert put it, political activism and personal pleasure. Even if I can't find them, I remember them. The author, ca. late-70s Photo 1 (1966) Shows my sallow, tightly bell-bottomed, 18-year-old self watching a bus pull out of my college quadrangle, heading for civil rights and voter registration work in Mississippi. Some of my professors are on it; classes will be cancelled. The expression on my face, which is the center of the picture, is trancelike, one of disconnection, solipsism. The person my friends call my girlfriend is also on that alien bus. Photo 2 (1968) Me, sitting on a dormitory bed with the sable-eyed boy I could not yet call my boyfriend: now many years dead. A picture book devoted to Bette Davis lies between us. The exhilarated and relieved expression on my face is utterly at odds with the circumstance, as if this coffee-table trifle were the Rosetta stone. The look on his face? "See? Now we know you're a member." His name is Michael, and I still miss him, but Michael segues naturally to a later figure in my life. Vito made it his business to decipher the hieroglyphics of that movie book and dozens of others. He figured out that if we looked carefully at our own delight in and fascination with, let's say, film (yes, for him it was film, film, film), this well-nigh involuntary scrutiny would flush from so-called common cultural life all manner of secrets and lies. In 1981, Vito wrote his own Rosetta stone, "The Celluloid Closet," which found its way into Michael's hands and, I am certain, onto the warm dorm beds of ardent young men much less confused--because of Vito, and those like him--than I had been. Vito Russo is dead, too. Anyone who knew this passionate man understood that, for him, coming out was the bottom line, and no gay political work or pleasure was worth a rat's ass without it. I came to believe this at about the same time he did, soon after Stonewall, finally shedding my--Janis Joplin had the phrase--horny shell. Sound corny? Maybe, but beliefs had consequences: wasn't Vito an early motor of ACT-UP? Let's look at ... Photos 3, 4, 5 (1970-71) These are much more dramatic, at least on the surface. In the first, a stocky man in a California sheriff's uniform points his pistol at me and my closest friends. "Boycott Lettuce" and "Support the United Farm Workers" posters hang limp in our hands, and the steaming parking-lot asphalt is littered with what looks to be bashed heads of lettuce and bruised bunches of chartreuse grapes, bought by outraged shoppers to lob at us. We had driven from La Jolla, California, where I was a graduate student, to Oceanside, home of Camp Pendleton Marine base, to make our point in front of a Safeway supermarket. We--"the radical coalition" is what we call ourselves--visit a different market every weekend, but this is the first time we encounter a gun. "Get your faggot asses out of here," the peace officer says. This is odd, because I am the only faggot in the immediate area. Carol walks up to him and replies, without blinking, that we have every right to demonstrate. Her clear, steely response is fed by the same stream of righteous consciousness released in me by coming out. I--we all--recognize our common "tone of voice." We also have the common sense to leave.    Photo 4 I stand in front of a classroom of mostly sandy-haired undergraduates; many, both the men and the women, are wearing Hang Ten shorts. I, on the other hand, am sporting a beige silk blouse and a deep purple, Madras-cotton, midcalf-length skirt the same hue as my eye shadow; my mascara matches my dark mustache. On my feet: platform huaraches. I have just written "Phenomenology of" on the blackboard, and am beginning "Mind." The class is copying dutifully, for Mr. Weinstein has the reputation of being tough on grades. A week before, one of my professors had suggested I was doing myself damage professionally by being so vocally "out." My clothes were my response. And I can still feel the tangy, honeyed light of this photograph's bright afternoon. Photo 5 Our radical coalition of feminists, United Farm Worker supporters, antiwar activists and gay liberationists--me--meet almost every week, often at Melvyn's house, trying to plan things and see how our political threads can be knit together. But also we gather because we are learning to depend upon one another. Anyone may offer a risky or outlandish opinion and not be dismissed out of hand. No two (or three) of us are lovers, but we feel an intimate glow when we come together: not a familial comfort, but, at best, a more sprawling pleasure of shared, unselfish purpose. This is unlike any of my other predictable happinesses: in reading, writing, dancing, sex. Dancing and sex are the closest. I experience the expansion of my self into the world that Walt Whitman calls adhesiveness. Do we have commune fantasies? Do we think about adopting kids? Yes, of course--but no, we know it will not do to meld. Oh, the picture. A fuzzy, unsmiling group of seven is in the background, with unsullied dinner plates on their laps and empty beer bottles beside. I am at the edge, but in clearer focus, at the dirty stove, sautéing a dozen at a time of absolutely tiny ivory eggplants, phallic netsuke, pressing and rolling them in a cast iron pan made glossy by emerald, unfiltered California olive oil bought in bulk from the communally run health-food store. A friend of one of us, a film director, had discovered Chino Farm and its roadside bags and bushels of miniature vegetables on his way to Escondido. (He later told his close friend Alice about this farm, who put its gems on her Berkeley restaurant menu and made them popular.) This picture has a caption that comes from another, similar dinner: "Jeff, you enjoy food so much, why don't you write about it?" Thank you, Kathleen, for my next 25 years. The pleasure of food, I discover by eating and writing about eating, is startlingly private; is always potentially shared; engages, through the real as well as metaphoric act of declaring this pleasure universally available, almost every political and practical decision one can make in the world. This extraordinary vegetable is new to everyone in the room, and even those who think they dislike eggplant--bitter and woody--are amazed by its easy texture and moderated, complicated sweetness. This also happens to be the day I take my apron off and explain gay life to them. Photo 6 (1978) These snapshots aren't exactly works of art, and this one is particularly grimy: 150 or so T-shirted "Village Voice" union members meeting about upcoming contract negotiations under the fluorescent lights of the District 65 union hall on Manhattan's Astor Place (look through the ceiling of the Starbucks there now, and you'd see our feet). I am not yet a union member, but writer and editor Bob has asked me to attend. Our union organizer is talking about the health plan and mentions, almost in a whisper, that because the union itself arranges the medical, dental and mental coverage, the boss agreed to let it apply to a few long-time couples (such as Bob and his partner Carola) who, for feminist or hippie-ish reasons, had decided not to marry. The ugly photo shows me raising my hand. No, she has no idea, Kitty the organizer answers, why the plan couldn't cover same-sex couples too--if management allows. I later became a shop steward, proposed and explained the same-sex-couple medical benefit to my fellow Voicers, and in July, 1982, under strike pressure and the persuasive rationalization of fairness, management (which was Rupert Murdoch) did allow. Bert, Murdoch's lawyer, came up with the term "spousal equivalent," but history recognized its infelicity and has replaced it with "domestic partnership." The photo does seem to indicate that this was my idea; the "Village Voice" was the nation's first workplace to offer domestic partnership benefits. But ideas such as this floated in the air of those earlier eggplant meetings or the long drives home from the gay bar when, disco sweat and cigarette smoke evaporating from our bodies, we batted around scenarios for our future. Can an idea be "yours" when so many make it possible? When you, a catalyst, realize it's inevitable? When so much happiness and pleasure result from working to invent and achieve it, not possess it? Jeff Weinstein, author of "Life in San Diego" and "Learning To Eat," is fine arts editor of the "Philadelphia Inquirer" and a contributor to "Artforum," "Food & Wine," and other publications. Jeff is a founder of the National Writers Union.