Ronald Gold Papers

Provenance

These papers were donated by Ronald Gold in 2007.

Scope and Content

This collection includes Ronald Gold’s written and email correspondence with a number of organizations (PFLAG, media outlets, public relations firms, governmental bodies) offering and exchanging opinions about a number of policy issues confronting the American gay and lesbian community in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. These issues include bans on military service, sex education, sodomy laws, marriage, representation of gays in the media, psychiatry’s treatment of homosexuality, and immigration laws. There are some speeches he wrote for others. There are also a number of literary and creative writings, including a translation of a text by Baudelaire. There are some reviews of theater and dance performances. Collection also includes pamphlets and guidebooks (some written or co-written by Gold, others that Gold’s work counters) about issues such as the portrayal of gays in the media and sex education.

History or Bio

The biography provided by Ronald Gold is as follows:Ronald Gold was born in Brooklyn in 1930, entered Brooklyn College at fifteen, and took twelve years to get a degree. By that time, he had been a junkie in San Francisco and had his head shrunk in Topeka, Kansas. After a career writing for various publications, including Variety, he became a full-time gay liberationist at the age of forty-one. He was one of the founders of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and is remembered for his role in persuading the American Psychiatric Association to take homosexuality off its sick list. In the early 1980s he quit activism to “learn how not to have to be effective,” which he learned so well that he hasn’t had a full-time job since. He’s had four live-in lovers since 1959 (he prefers to call them “mates”): a Cuban, two Puerto Ricans, and a Bangladeshi. It was while he was living in Bangladesh that he wrote his as-yet-unpublished book, Polarity: The Psychology of Paul Rosenfels.

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