The Downtown Collection features a variety of oral history interviews with artists and others whose personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection. Below is an audio example. To explore more of the oral history collection, visit NYU’s Archival Collection Search Portal and search for “oral history.”
Raymond Dobbins (b. 1947, Cleveland), a playwright and videographer, has been a central presence in New York’s downtown / queer / underground theater scene. He was also involved in the anti-Vietnam war, labor movement, and gay liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Dobbins was a founding member of the film collective Queer Blue Light/Gay Liberation Video and wrote scripts for the Bloolips, the Hot Peaches and the Jazz Passengers. He also authored three pieces of now iconic underground gay literature, Don the Burp and Other Stories (under the pseudonym Jim Flannigan) (1980), Minette: Recollections of a Part Time Lady (1979), and Stonewall Romances: A Tenth Anniversary Celebration (1979), a photo novella about the Stonewall uprising. In this interview clip from 2018, Dobbins talks about his reaction to Stonewall:
TB: So when Stonewall happened, did it have a big impact on you immediately, or—
RD: Immediately. I mean—and other people talk like this too. Other friends of mine that were gay and not out, and in the labor movement and so on. It was really like that picture of a light going on above your head. It was like, “Oh, wow. I’ve been in the Civil Rights movement, I’ve been in the anti-war movement, I’ve been doing this labor organizing, working for oppressed people—and I’m an oppressed person, you know? And look at the way we’ve been crapped on all these years. Look at this, look what I’ve tolerated, look what I’m doing here, hiding myself from these other—it was like, within twelve hours, the whole scenario of gay liberation just opened up. And everybody describes that. Everybody that was involved in liberal and left wing politics that was gay were always operating under the surface. . . .
But anyway, yes, it was really one of those moments, everything just changed right there. I reviewed my life in an hour, and I saw the whole thing, and by later that afternoon, the afternoon—there was a riot at night, by the next afternoon I was down there with a football helmet and a big piece of chain, and a heavy jacket, waiting to fight the police [laughs].
Interview clip: Raymond Dobbins, October 9, 2018, New York City. Interviewed by Tamar Barzel.
Image credit: Raymond Dobbins and Kelly Haydon, audiovisual archivist for Fales Library, at Dobbins’s East Village apartment, November 15, 2017. Photo by Tamar Barzel.