Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

Author:Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller [Lemmey, Huw & Miller, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Social Science, Human Sexuality, Popular Culture, LGBTQ+ Studies, General
ISBN: 9781839763274
Google: fuhOEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2022-05-31T21:22:49+00:00

The two of them remained primary partners for the rest of their lives, with Métraux’s marriage only a minor inconvenience; by 1955 they were sharing a house in Greenwich Village with their two children and collaborating on a project called Research in Contemporary Cultures. Métraux would edit much of Mead’s late-life work, and perhaps contributed to what Mead, when a 1960s interviewer commented on how much energy she had for her age, called her ‘postmenopausal zest’.66 Certainly, their love for one another did not decrease. In 1974, from Honolulu, Mead wrote to Métraux, ‘I’ve just pressed the violets and 2 little violet leaves within the unread pages of a new book. Be better, my love. Life does not make sense – you make it make sense for me – I love you.’67

During these years Mead served for a time as president of the American Anthropological Association, vice president of the New York Academy of Sciences, and was both president and board chair of the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences. It was in 1971, while serving as the president of the AAA, that Mead fought to make sure a report on anthropologists’ collaboration with the CIA and US Army found that they had not done anything wrong by using their skills in support of murderous counterinsurgency programmes in Latin America.68

She worked to develop a graphic symbol language, supported UN projects on development, and founded the Department of Anthropology at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University in 1968. She also joined in with others of her Anglican faith to draft the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1976, and regularly appeared on talk shows and continued her writing in both academic and popular forms, including a late book of essays with Métraux called A Way of Seeing and her 1972 memoir, Blackberry Winter.

A representative article in a 1972 issue of Stars and Stripes, the magazine of the US armed forces, described her as ‘the peppery grand old lady of American anthropology’ in a write-up of a press conference she gave in Heidelberg, Germany, advocating for the abolition of laws against marijuana, discussing ‘the problem of black and white relations in America’, and the need for ‘fewer and better parents’.69 In the article (as in her dialogue with Baldwin from a year earlier, A Rap on Race), Mead is careful to indicate her support for racial integration and even the Black Power movement as she understood it (‘the growing sense of Black identity’, the article calls it). Her support for population control and work with UN and other Cold War–era bodies on contraception and population control, however, indicates the ongoing relationship between liberal anthropology and sexology and eugenics, as active in the 1970s as in the time of Magnus Hirschfeld.

In the last year of her life, 1978, Mead developed pancreatic cancer. She employed a faith healer, a decision with which Métraux disagreed, and the two became estranged.

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