William Shipley
Reti: Bill, let's start by talking about your early
background. Where were you born, and where did you grow
up?
Shipley: I was born to a couple of teenage parents in
southwestern Oklahoma in 1921. They had run off and
gotten married, secretly, and when they turned up with
an infant, they decided to just get rid of me. I was
born in a town called Lawton, which is in southwestern
Oklahoma. It was one of those towns that you see in
movies about the early twentieth century, where the bank
robbers are. They left me there about three o'clock in
the morning on a December night, when I was three weeks
old. I was found the next morning by the town constable,
and taken to Frank Shipleyhipley, who was the president of the
bank in this tiny town. He and his wife decided to adopt
me. I grew up in Lawton. My adolescent years were spent
in Oklahoma City. When FDR became president in 1933, my
dad, who was a loyal Democrat, got a job in Oklahoma
City, which is the big place in Oklahoma. So we moved up
there and my adolescence was there, which was probably a
good idea.
My mother died when I was eleven years old, and my
father, who was a very gentle and kind man, but very
old-fashioned, had the notion that he had to have a
woman in the house. The idea that a household could
exist without a wife/mother figure was just not
something he could deal with. So he asked his first
cousin's husband's sister to come and live with us. Her
name was Mrs. Rankin. I was about twelve years old. That
was a disaster for me. Being gay in the 1930s, there was
zero information, zero anybody to talk to. It was like
you had some incredible state or sickness that you
didn't understand at all. There was nobody to ask. I
went through the public library in Oklahoma City looking
for information and couldn't find any. So I was already
having the usual difficulties that gay kids have when
they first try to figure it out.
Reti: You were in your teens when you first became aware
that you had these feelings?
Shipley: Oh, I was clearly aware of all this just about
the time I hit puberty, because it became apparent to me
that the other guys were all getting interested in
girls, and they didn't interest me at all. What was
this? Why did I find looking at these good-looking guys
much... Why did I want to do that? There was nobody to
talk to. It was unbelievably dead when it came to any
kind of information at all about anything, which in a
way was a kind of an advantage, because at least when I
was in high school there was nobody yelling faggot
or
anything like that. They didn't even know there was such
a thing as gay people, so there was no problem. And I
wasn't effeminate or anything like that, so I could just
slide along.
I had started in the second grade in school when I was
five years old, so I graduated from high school when I
was sixteen. Quite apart from any of the gay stuff, Mrs.
Rankin was a very difficult person for me to cope with,
because she was from Georgia and wanted to teach me how
to be a Southern gentleman. My dad was a banker, so we
lived well, but it was Oklahoma, which was not the
world's fashion center or anything. But she made lots of
difficulties for me, which I probably could have coped
with better if I hadn't also been trying to deal with
this big-time life problem. So when I was sixteen and
out of high school, I first tried to get my dad to get
her to go away. He couldn't bring himself to do that,
because it was not gentlemanly. So I finally arranged
with my dad's sister and her husband in Utah to let me
come and stay with them.
Reti: Had you told anybody in your family about your
sexuality?
Shipley: No. Nobody at all. I was desperately in love
with another boy in the school, who was funny and
charming and good-looking and cute--and straight as an
arrow. And he liked me a lot, because I was pretty
smart, and fun to be with. But it was driving me crazy,
of course. The usual thing, no touchy! [laughter] But I
found no other gay guys.
Well, that's not quite true. One night just after my
mother died, my dad and I went to a dinner party at the
house of one of the local bankers in Oklahoma City. They
had a son who was unfortunately not very good-looking,
but he got me upstairs and seduced me. We were thirteen,
fourteen, something like that. But that was no fun,
because I didn't like him. I think that was the only
thing that happened to me that involved somebody else
who was also gay. I remember my father tried to get me
to be more friendly with this kid because of the
connections to his father. I must have already figured
something out, because I clearly remember saying to my
father, "I don't want to stay around with him, Dad,
because he is homosexual." So I learnt that word
somewhere, but I can't remember how. I must have found
some book in the public library. My dad asked, "What's
that?" I said, "Well, I think that's boys who like other
boys sexually." He said, "I've never heard of that." He
didn't even know there was such a thing. In a way that
was nice, because that meant no one was hollering faggot
. No one was picking on anybody. There was none of that
in my high school. But on the other hand, it made
finding out what the hell was going on virtually
impossible for kids who were gay, because there was no
place to get any information. There was nobody to
consult. What's going on with me? One book I found when
I was a teenager was Radclyffe Hall's The Well of
Loneliness. I found that. That helped some because at
least I found that women had these feelings.
So I went off to Utah for a year to live with my aunt
and her husband. It was a delightful and also dreadful
year. My aunt's husband was a munitions expert at an
ordnance depot just outside Ogden, Utah, and that's
where we stayed. It was a kind of small military post
that had a few officers. No enlisted men, because it was
mainly a place to store shells. But the commanding
officer, who was a colonel, had a son, Bob, and the son
was great! So another relationship got started. This
time it paid off because we had a kind of a real affair.
He was very charming. But he was, like most [gay] kids
in those days, conflicted and disturbed. It's easy to
see why. It's why everybody later thought it was some
kind of disease. It was the society which was producing
the problem. If somebody had just said to us--that's
just the way the genes are, don't worry, just forget
it--it would have been an enormous relief. But nobody
with an authoritative voice said that at all, or
anything about it.
So Bob and I were handling a similar problem but in
somewhat different ways. I was already out of high
school. I was taking some courses in the local junior
college. But he was still in high school. He was very
popular, because he was charming and fun, and in those
days faggots were unknown. Nobody did stuff like that.
He tried to brush me off, finally, after a few months. I
remember going at night and standing outside his window.
He was upstairs. Doing that lovelorn stuff. But we did
get that affair a little bit back on the road later on.
I went home again the next summer. My dad had gotten rid
of Mrs. Rankin. But he'd also lost his job. He was in
desperate circumstances. So I went down to visit a
friend and her family who wanted to go to California,
but none of them had ever learned to drive. I said, "If
you'll take me along and feed me, I'll drive." We set
out for California. I remember driving on Highway 66
until we came to Santa Monica by the Pacific Ocean. This
was before the war, 1938.
I decided to go back to Ogden. I took [my friend's
brother], Robbie, with me. He wanted to get out of
there. He was another handsome, big, wonderful kid who
was straight as an arrow. We lived for a year, the two
of us in a room. That drove me crazy. Man, it was awful.
I never did anything about it.
After that year, I went back down to Los Angeles. Robbie
and I were driving through Oxnard when it came over the
radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. So of
course, Robbie and I both raced down to the marines
recruiting station. I was nineteen and he was about
seventeen. He got in instantly. He was this big,
strapping kid. But I was very near-sighted. The marines
were very picky. They didn't take any near-sighted guys.
So they wouldn't take me. Thank God. He ended up on
Guadacanal, and went through the whole Guadacanal
campaign and didn't get a scratch physically.
I tried to get into the navy and they wouldn't take me.
During the year of 1942, I got a job in Los Angeles.
Then I decided to go back to Oklahoma City and work at
another job for awhile. At the end of November of that
year, I finally went ahead and enlisted in the army. I
don't know why my draft number never came up. I just
joined up. During all that time, nothing else happened
that was particularly related to my being gay.
I got sent to the infantry down in Texas. As soon as I
got there, it turned out that they didn't have any
company clerks. So only about two weeks after I got
there they made me a company clerk, which meant that I
became a corporal almost instantly. I didn't have to do
anything but sit around the office and type.
A couple of months later, they took all the guys with
high IQs and gave them this aptitude test. They pulled
me out of there and sent me to what was called the Star
Unit at Stillwater, Oklahoma. There they sorted
everybody out by giving us more aptitude tests, and I
ended up in Berkeley in a situation where we were to
study the Chinese language and the history and geography
of the Far East. We were to be sent as interpreters to
the American forces in Chungking, where the government
was at that time, because the Japanese had driven them
inland.
We lived in a fraternity house, thirty-seven guys, half
of us learning Chinese, and half Japanese. There are
some poignant little things about that. First of all,
there was a kid there, whom I instantly fell in love
with, and we became best friends. He's still alive. He
was also straight. He lives down in San Diego. He's
retired. I got along fine with everybody in that
situation. It was a wonderful year. We spent a whole
year there right in the middle of the war, studying
Chinese.
Reti: Was that the beginning of your interest in
linguistics?
Shipley: Sort of. Although what really got me started
was back in the ninth grade when I took Latin.
Since we are talking about the vicissitudes of being
homosexual, there is a little story that I must tell
you. One of the guys of these thirty-seven was very
effeminate. Nowadays, it's hard to imagine what the
situation was like. Nobody was out. Nobody went around
cross-dressing or doing that stuff, or just being out.
There wasn't any of that! Well, this kid was a very
willowy, unattractive-looking, obviously very gay guy.
He was so different from everybody else. He just
couldn't relate to the rest of the group. He did relate
to me, and he fell in love with me. I felt an enormous
amount of empathy and sadness for him. The rest of us
would go out and drink beer, go to San Francisco to the
bars, and have the kind of fun that soldiers had, always
in a bunch. He never did any of that. He'd stay in the
fraternity house and walk around up on the third floor,
all by himself, singing songs from Oklahoma! which was
the big show of the time. I spent a lot of time with him
because I had great compassion for his plight. I have
love letters that he wrote later on, extensively. That
was very sad. He was so totally trapped by the cultural
situation. I have been in touch with him all the rest of
his life. I got a letter from him last Christmas. He
lives in Chicago and has an apartment on Lakeshore
Drive, so he must have done pretty well financially.
He's still writing me letters and cards, always signed
"love," after all these years.
Reti: Was he ever able to come out and have
relationships with men?
Shipley: I imagine he came out at some point, but if he
had any kind of a functional relationship with another
guy, he never mentioned it to me, and there's no reason
why he wouldn't. He used to come out to Berkeley when he
had a vacation from his job, and visit. Even after I was
married, he'd come and see us. But I wrote him a card
last Christmas, and he was always very good about
answering, and I haven't heard from him. There's nobody
there who would tell me. He was up in his eighties. I'll
be eighty in a couple of months. He was a few years
older than me. The last thing he wrote was pretty
valiant. He was saying, "The doctors are crazy," I knew
that he was very bad off. I'm afraid he's dead. But I
don't know how to find out, because I don't know anybody
out there to write to.
That was going on. Meanwhile, I was mooning over a guy
who was straight. We were great friends. People buddy up
in the army, and we were really great buddies, but of
course he was straight. So again, [laughter] I finally
came out to him. We agreed we'd come back to Berkeley
together and go to school. So we did. And he got out
before I did, because he fought his way all the way
across Europe. You know, that big push to get to Berlin
and all that.
Well, what happened to me was that they shipped us all
back. They didn't send us to China, didn't use us as
interpreters, just sent us back to the infantry.
Apparently the army just lost track of what they were
doing. And it was even more ludicrous, because I was a
sergeant. We were all floating around. About half the
guys that had been there had been sent to Camp Cook near
Lompoc, California. We were just hanging out because we
didn't fit into the table of organization.
I was working in the battalion office because I could
type, and a circular came in from the army saying, we
are desperately in need of interpreters, for someone to
go to China and be with the American forces in China. I
went to the personnel officer and said, "Sir, look at
this. There are a whole bunch of guys in this regiment
who can do this." "Oh yes, Shipley. Yes, I'll do that."
He never did it. I reminded him three or four times, and
he never did it. So finally I wrote a letter myself (and
this is death in the army), to the Adjutant General's
office in Washington, and explained that there were
these guys there. Well, what they did next was, first
there were orders ordering me, but nobody else to go to
China as an interpreter, but they ignored the other
guys. Then the other thing that came through was a
letter to the battalion commander saying, "How is it
that you let this man write letters to Washington?" So
they broke me from a sergeant and put me down to a
private on KP, and sent me out to Fort Ord, as a
replacement. I was there for a long time.
I found out that the orders had been cancelled to China
because I was no longer a sergeant. I had become a
regular infantry replacement to be sent to the Pacific.
Remember, I had no basic training. Remember, I was made
a corporal so fast. Well, I shipped out with a whole
bunch of guys on a boat, and they were mostly taken out
of the stockades in this country. They were a tough
bunch. It didn't take me long to figure out that my
situation was dire. I had no training, and replacements
typically live about ten days, the situation being that
there's this bunch of guys, and they've been together
since they first went in the army. Say you've got a
squad--that's six guys. Then they go and get into
battle, and one of them gets killed, and he's a big
tight friend with these other guys. They've all been
bonding. So he's dead, and they're all mourning. Then
they send in some guy that nobody ever saw before. The
only way you can survive in battle is by helping each
other. They just forget these replacements.
Well, I knew all this when I got to Hawaii, to Oahu. We
were all sent up there as a temporary place to live. My
problem was, how do I keep from getting killed? So I
came up with a plan. Now, I've not told anybody much
about this before, but it has to do with what we're
talking about. I decided that the alternative to getting
killed might have to be that I'd get a dishonorable
discharge from the army. So I went to the chaplain, and
I told the chaplain that I was homosexual. He was a
fuddy-duddy creature from Tennessee, and he said, "Oh
yeah. I used to know a feller that was like that." I
said, "Well, I don't think it's a good idea for me to
be..." I was absolutely, totally capable of behaving
correctly in the army and not doing anything, but I
said, "I don't think I ought to be around here. I can
hardly stand it," and all this crap. He said, "Well,
I'll see what I can do about that." I thought, well, it
doesn't look like I've really accomplished anything
here. I went back to the barracks.
In a couple of days, I was called out to go to a
psychiatrist that they had in the medical center. I went
to see this psychiatrist and he said, "So. You're
homosexual?" I said, "Yes." And he said (I've never told
anybody this before), "Well, what exactly do you do?"
[laughter] I said, "Well..." You can see that I'm
embarrassed right now by this ridiculous situation. But
it was a life-and- death matter. He was very nice, this
guy. So we talked about it, and he asked me questions
about how I was about getting on with the other guys,
and without lying to him I tried to make it seem like I
had a problem. I really didn't have a problem. Because
like anybody, most of the people around you are not
driving you crazy with desire. But I had the interview
and left.
About a week later, orders came down to disconnect me
from this situation I was in, and send me to Admiral
Nimitz's fleet headquarters at Pearl Harbor as the
librarian for the army officers. I don't to this day
know whether they did that because they checked my
credentials, or whether it was because I saw that
psychiatrist. But one way or another, I got pulled out
of that situation, and got put into one of the softest
jobs possible for an enlisted man in the whole Pacific.
I was there the rest of the war. It was nine months more
before the end of the war. Life was very nice there
because at least half the enlisted men in that place
were gay. The people who knew how to type, who were good
with books, who were sort of pleasant to get on with.
You can see how it would come out that way. Nice guys. A
whole bunch of very charming, sweet guys.
When the war was over we couldn't go home, because all the
guys who had been in combat had to go home first. It took a long
time to haul them all out of the Pacific. So I spent nine more
months in Hawaii. I was on the staff of the Stars and Stripes,
which was the army newspaper. I had a place to live in the YMCA.
No officers were telling us what to do. I had my own room. I
began then to really learn what it was like to be gay. There
were guys around and I began to get into it.
Reti: Were there bars?
Shipley: Not gay bars. No. But there were all these guys in this
YMCA, in the showers and in the pool. There were some very
charming things that happened simply because of the naiveté of
everybody. They were trying to think of ways to help guys pass
the time until they could go home. There was a guy who was a
choreographer, an enlisted man. They let him start a class to
teach all these soldiers and sailors how to ballroom dance,
because a lot of them didn't know. But they had no girls around,
so we had to ballroom dance with each other! [laughter]
Everybody was so naive, but it was wonderful fun. All these guys
going around. In Honolulu the nights were just unbelievable,
guys wandering all over the place.
In those days, the big problem that gay guys had was to try to
keep cheerful. It was so easy to get depressed. You were locked
in this peculiar, dead-end situation.
As soon as I got home, I went to see my folks briefly. Then I
went back to [UC] Berkeley and started regular school, and
finished up. The spring of 1948 is when I graduated from
Berkeley.
There used to be a men's swimming pool (it's now been filled
in); guys would go out there, and there was a huge place to lie
around on the sides. I ran into a guy there named Jerry Davis,
and we started dating. The first thing we did was go to the city
and see Beauty and the Beast. It had just come out. And after a
certain amount of time we finally figured out that we loved each
other. We were together for fourteen years.
After I graduated that spring, we decided we'd take our bicycles
and ride back to Lawton, Oklahoma from Berkeley. So we did. We
rode all the way down the coast to Los Angeles, and then across
the southern route through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. It
took us about two months, but we got back there on bicycles. You
couldn't do it now. In those days everybody was so nice about
things. We'd just get off the road if there was a pleasant
little spot with some trees and grass, and roll out our sleeping
bags and sleep there at night. Nobody ever would bother us. But
many people in the little towns were upset because we were
wearing shorts, and in those days men did not wear shorts, ever!
Except maybe on a tennis court. The idea of anybody going out on
the street in public in shorts was out. But we were on these
bicycles going across the desert. Anyway, we wanted to wear
shorts. We had that kind of narcissism. We were both young,
good-looking, healthy, and well-built and all that. We rode
three-speed Schwinns. We got in enormously good condition. It
was a great adventure and of course we bonded like mad. We were
together for fourteen years.
We spent the winter in Lawton. The next spring we came back out
to Berkeley. I started graduate work at UC Berkeley in
anthropology, and it didn't go well because I got into trouble
with a couple of the professors, whom I really think were mean
about academic things. During the time I was a graduate student,
Jerry and I lived in a little apartment about four or five
blocks from the campus, on Walnut Street, and there were a whole
bunch of other people that lived in this house, and another
house behind it. The graduate student in the front apartment was
Barbara Bartle, the woman whom I finally ended up marrying.
Everybody in that house bonded together, but Jerry and I were
together, and we weren't really looking for sexual adventures
anymore. We had a fine time.
There was a guy upstairs named Bob who had a lot of money. His
father was rich. We all decided that what we wanted to do was to
leave this culture behind, especially because in those days the
United States and Russia were acting like they were going to
bomb each other. It was the Cold War. It was the common belief
that if atomic bombs were dropped they would not cause problems
in the Southern Hemisphere. If you stayed out of America,
Europe, and China, you were safe.
So we decided we were all going to leave the country, after a
period of saying, "Let's all start a colony in lower California
and be away from everybody." College kids often get into this. I
managed to get the promise of a job in Rio, in Brazil. We all
went down to Nogales on a train. What we were going to do was go
to Vera Cruz in Mexico, and try to get on a ship. In those days
it was very expensive to fly. Bob had money but nobody else did.
We all went down to Mexico City. When we got down to Vera Cruz,
we found out that there was no shipping between Vera Cruz and
Brazil. So we went clear back up to New Orleans, hung out on the
docks there, and finally got on an old Norwegian steamer that
took us from New Orleans to Rio. It took twenty-three days of
floating along. The three of us lived in Rio for a year. I
worked there for a bi-national project to teach English classes
to Brazilians.
I also got a job with the national radio. There was a young
woman there who had been five years with the BBC in London
learning about radio. She was the director of this section of
government. She hired me to do radio programs. And you know,
this is hard to be clear about still, but in my experience,
homosexual men are very different from one another in what it is
that attracts them. There're some gay men who can get on very
well with women. Under certain circumstances, it's a very
pleasant and seductive idea for me. She and I got into a
charming and delightful love affair. It was one of the great
events of my life. She was so charming and so much fun. She
loved me. It's unfair to not put that into the mix. I know lots
of gay guys who have no ability to relate to women at all. I
have one friend who tells me that women are like blank places in
space for him, which is a very curious idea for me. It's never
been like that for me. Of course, Jerry was with me. So this got
a little strange. But he went with it. That's another thing of
course, is this notion of fidelity. That's kind of complicated,
I think. Always has been.
After a year in Brazil, Jerry and I came back. Then I worked in
Berkeley on Telegraph Avenue, for a place called Fraser's, which
was a very elegant store full of avant garde furniture and glass
from Sweden. I had dropped out of graduate school. I wasn't in
school at all. I was the floor manager of this store. A year
went by, and I was thinking, I'm really into a dead-end here. We
had lots of friends. Jerry and I had other gay couples that we
knew. We had a nice social life. But what was I doing? There was
no future, really.
One day I was down in the stock room talking to the stock clerk,
who was a really nice, smart guy. He had found out that there
was a new department of linguistics getting started on the
Berkeley campus, that it was for graduate students, and that
they had succeeded in getting the state legislature to put up an
annual fund of money. It was $10,000, which was like $100,000
now. This was to train graduate students in linguistics to go
out in California and learn and record Native California
languages. So that's what we all did. It was run by a wonderful
woman, who was not the easiest person to get along with, but who
was a genius, Mary Haas. At the time she was the only female
faculty member on the Berkeley faculty. She did it out of sheer
brilliance. They would have been idiots not to hire her. Isn't
that something? This was 1953.
So Stuart Fletcher, who was the guy from the loading dock, and
I, got into that graduate program. And in a year or so, after
I'd had enough training in phonetics and field methods, I had to
pick a group in California and go and work with them. I picked
the Northeastern Maidu, who live up by Mount Lassen. Actually,
the people I learned from didn't live there at the time. They
lived much closer to Red Bluff. They lived up a ways into the
foothills from Red Bluff, in a little place called Payne's
Creek. I went up there. That was a marvelous experience, being
admitted inside the framework of Native American life, even
though it was much changed from the old days. Of course my main
teacher was half-white, and only half-Maidu, genetically. She
and her mother, who was full-blood Maidu, spoke the language
fluently and talked that way with each other all of the time. So
I learned it, and at the same time I had this wonderful social
experience. They stopped acting like I was a white guy. We had
meals together. I was hanging around the house. I had my own
place to live further up in the mountains. We became enormously
good friends. It was so great. It was the greatest thing,
because with many Native Americans, not necessarily everybody,
because they are individuals like anybody else, there's a kind
of validity that's under there somewhere. I think it must be
because they've been pushed around so much. In fact, I've often
thought that there are some similarities to being gay. Because
they've got to deal with this thing. They can't not be Indians,
right?
Reti: I was wondering how that was for you, the intersection of
your own identity with theirs?
Shipley: Yes, I think that helped me with this work. Until the
early- to middle-twentieth century, being gay was a crime. Not
so much being gay, but if you did anything about it, it was a
crime. So the first thing that guys felt was that they were
criminals because they absolutely couldn't stop themselves.
After that, there was a long stretch [where it was considered a
mental illness], and I went to a psychiatrist for years, which
was stupid.
That was the stage I was in the 1950s, when I was working up
there with the Maidu. [The definition] didn't seem right,
because I knew I was alert, and intelligent, and functional. I
could run up and down the mountains, and I could relate to
people, and make everything work out all right. So it was hard
to know what was ill about it, but nevertheless, it was a kind
of general notion that was floating around, and most gay guys, I
think, fell for it, which kept that residue of sadness.
I finally got my doctorate in 1959, and almost immediately I got
hired onto the UC Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor.
Jerry and I were still together, but around about that time,
around 1959 and 1960, we were not having a great time with each
other. I was a linguist consultant for a psychiatrist at Langley
Porter, a psychiatric clinic attached to the UC Medical Center
in San Francisco. Barbara had gotten her M.D. degree in
Philadelphia. She was a six-year resident at the Langley Porter
institute at that time. Since I was working with one of the
faculty members at the time, I was over there once a week. We
had known each other from that house in Berkeley. We started
going out for lunch. In spite of the fact that Jerry and I were
still physically together, that had become sort of routine. So
she and I started going out more than just for lunch. By that
time, I had a real job as an assistant professor. We took some
trips up in the mountains, and just gradually worked our way
into a relationship.
I got a Guggenheim fellowship in late 1961, for 1962. It
involved me going to Europe for some months. I went to the
University of Copenhagen. There had been a Danish linguist who
had written a theory of linguistics that nobody understood. He
had died, but I was going to go talk to his sidekick who was
alive, and try to find out about this theory, because he had
worked with the Southern Maidu. The plan was that Barbara would
join me in Rome that spring. I was in Copenhagen, and it was
winter, and I was cold, and my father had died, and I was
miserable. So I jumped in my Austin Healy and drove like mad
across Europe, down into Italy. Barbara joined me, and we went
to Greece. Barbara's relatives all came from Copenhagen so we
ended up in Copenhagen. While we were in Geneva, my daughter
Betsy was conceived. By the time we got to Copenhagen, Barbara,
who was a doctor, already knew she was pregnant. We bought rings
in Copenhagen, and decided to get married.
When we got back over here, my problem was, should I tell her
about myself? I was still going to this goddamned psychiatrist,
who was really a monster, as it turned out. I think some of
those guys were monsters in those days. Information was so hard
to get, still, even though it was a lot better then than when I
was a little kid. Barbara was pregnant. But that wasn't what was
driving me. I really wanted to be a daddy and have a family. The
only way I could think of to do that was by getting married.
Reti: Gay men parenting children just wasn't done then.
Shipley: No, there were no arrangements then about anything. If
you were gay and you wanted to have kids, you had to get
married. I was not averse to that, as I've explained. Having
relationships with women is okay with me. I had a dream that I
was in a tuxedo driving along in my Austin Healy. This is
unbelievable, but the psychiatrist said, "That shows that your
marriage will work out all right." I know it is hard for young
people to understand this now, but I fell for that. Partly
because I wanted to do it, but partly because I thought this guy
had the con on what to do. So we went ahead and got married, and
had Betsy early the next year in 1963. A year later I had a son,
who now works down in Hollywood. So we had these two kids. And
then my life for eighteen years was essentially the life of a
married man.
We lived for a year in Berkeley after we married and bought a
house. Then I got wind of what was going on down here at UC
Santa Cruz. They were just beginning to build this campus. They
had built Natural Sciences, and the Field House, and nothing
else. I came down to talk about coming here. Clark Kerr and Dean
McHenry were the two main guys. They were talking about how
there were going to be no grades and small classes. A lot of
things never actually worked out, but the idea worked out. I was
the undergraduate major adviser at Berkeley for the linguistics
major, and I was teaching all the big courses. That's what they
sometimes do to assistant professors, make them teach all the
introductory courses. At Berkeley, I had 600 people in the
introductory course in linguistics. So I knew a lot about the
pedagogical problems of the University. One of the great curses
was grades. At Berkeley, and any university at the time, you had
to figure out some way to get a number for everybody, and grade
on the curve. After all these years, and all these experiences
with universities, I still think that's a bad idea. What the
hell does that mean? The kids would come in to see me and they'd
say, "Look, I got a composite score of ninety, and my friend
John got a score of ninety-two, and he got an A, and I got a B."
The idea that you could work somewhere where that didn't go on
was immensely enticing to me because it fit my temperament very
well. I had an upper-division course in linguistics the last
semester I taught at Berkeley. I had forty or fifty students in
there. When I began the course, I knew I was going to come to UC
Santa Cruz the next fall. So I said, "I'm going to leave and go
to Santa Cruz next fall, and I want you all to know that if you
do anything at all in this class you are going to get an A. I'm
going to give everybody an A unless they just leave." I loved
doing that. All the kids loved it.
I came down here. I didn't come the first year. The first year
there was only Cowell College. There were no buildings so they
lived in trailers by the Field House. Their classes were all
held there. They tried to get me to come down the first year,
because both McHenry and Page Smith, who was the provost of
Cowell at the time, wanted me to come down. But they had a rider
on it. They wanted me to take over running the language teaching
program. It's now called language studies. I didn't want to do
that because I still don't see language teaching and language
learning as linguistics. It's not linguistics. I wouldn't do
that. So they didn't hire anybody to do that at the time. But
the next year they were starting Stevenson College. Charles
Page, who was the first Stevenson provost, got in touch with me
and I went down and talked to him. They would hire me without
the language rider. So I came down at the beginning of the
second year to Stevenson College when it first started.
The first year or so we did all the things that we had planned
to do. There were lots of independent studies. Sometimes I'd
have twelve or fifteen independent studies, as well as the
classes I was teaching. We were very loose and free. Of course
this was in the context of the middle- and late-1960s, which
were beginning to emerge. In fact, I think we may have been a
kind of harbinger of some of that [social change].
Alfred Kroeber, a famous professor of anthropology at Berkeley,
was a mentor of mine. Remember I told you about the little bunch
of soldiers studying Chinese? Well, that whole program was run
by Kroeber. So I first knew him when I was twenty one years old,
and he was still in his early sixties. Later on, when I was in
linguistics he had retired, and he was in his eighties by then,
but he was on my dissertation committee. So his grandson showed
up in those early years at Stevenson College, and the grandson,
whose name was Karl Kroeber, was a very charming, funny guy. He
had a pickup truck, and what he wanted to do was build a log
cabin on the back of his pickup truck. He wanted to get
independent study credit. So I said sure. It was like that.
I went off on sabbatical in 1968-1969, to Yugoslavia. I had a
Fulbright. That was the time, I feel, that things began to
unravel [at UCSC] about the idealistic, totally different way of
looking at everything, certainly by the 1970s. There was one big
flaw in the old system that I suffered from and lots of people
did. That was that half of the budget that you had for hiring
new faculty was controlled by one of the colleges.1 It was like
somebody tore a dollar bill in two, and gave you half. In order
to hire anybody you had to get them to agree to match. Well,
several really good people applied to be hired in linguistics,
people who were really great, good linguists, and would have
added a lot to the texture and quality of the linguistics
program. But I couldn't hire them because the relevant college
didn't like them. The colleges had different criteria. I
remember one guy who was here for awhile as an assistant
professor of linguistics. That was College Five, which is now
Porter. They agreed to hire him because he knew how to make
harpsichords. It made it very tough to get anyone. I had some
really dreadful experiences with young junior faculty who were
really not who I would have hired at all, had I had control of
the situation.
Reti: Were you board chair?
Shipley: I was
it . For a while I was the only linguist. Then
they started putting out these slots for new linguists, but they
were always this half-and-half arrangement. It put me, and I'm
sure a lot of other people, into a double bind that they really
couldn't cope with. If you're supposed to put together a good
board, you have to have some kind of consistent idea in your
head of what it is that you are trying to do. And if you are
always having to conform to a bunch of other stuff over here
that isn't related to what you are doing... It was a hopeless
mess.
I hit my low point in the middle-1970s, because I was struggling
with the problem of a very bad appointment in linguistics. Well,
everything got very bad. Now there are nothing but new people so
it doesn't matter anymore, but the trouble with new people
coming in was that their whole world view was different from the
old-timers who had been around here. The reason I came down here
from Berkeley was because of the things that made this place
different. Those things were disappearing.
Reti: Those early years didn't last very long.
Shipley: Yes, and I often thought to myself, I'm a damn fool. I
should have stayed in Berkeley. UC Berkeley is a great world
university, and there I was, voluntarily giving up an
appointment on the Berkeley campus to come down to UCSC. Now the
reason I came had just fizzled away. There was so much emotion.
People would come in and make awful messes out of everybody's
feelings, because they didn't understand why it was that people
did things the way they did them, because they didn't know what
this place had been like.
Chancellor Sinsheimer did try to close the linguistics board
down. During that time, I was still going to a psychiatrist. I
was so nerve-wracked by what was going on [in linguistics], that
my psychiatrist was medicating me to calm me down. Halverson
used to drive me up there. He was in Berkeley. Barbara and I
were having troubles communicating. I was just overwhelmed. All
this stuff at UCSC about changing the tenor of the University
was driving me crazy. Linguistics was taken entirely out of my
hands. They appointed a statewide committee of linguists to come
here and solve the problem. They hired the people who are here
now, or the beginnings of them, Jorge Hankamer, mainly. They
started a whole new program in theoretical linguistics.
Where they left me was kind of like when I was in that regiment
in the army after I left Berkeley. I didn't have any role to
play anymore in the department, except to teach the introductory
courses. I taught a course in Indo-European comparative
linguistics and things like that, but for the rest of the time
before I retired (which was another ten years or so), they had a
graduate program. They had graduate students. I had had graduate
students writing dissertations at Berkeley, but I never had a
graduate student here. I was marginalized. But I must say in all
fairness that all of those people were very nice to me and
always had been. They treated me well. The only one I see now is
Bill Ladusaw, because he's gay, of course.
The old UCSC dream was gone by the end of the 1970s, really
gone. None of the people down there now has any connection with
the old days. They are all nice people in the department, and I
want to make sure that nobody thinks that I don't admire them.
But they had nothing to do with the original plan. That is one
of the symptoms of the great tragedy of this place. It's now
more or less, as far as I can see, ten years after I retired,
just like any good university. It has departments and regular
programs and grades.
Reti: So you ended up leaving your marriage.
Shipley: Yes, in 1981, we had been married for eighteen years,
and we decided to split up. We had problems communicating. I
moved out and I started renting places to live in the
early-1980s. Barbara kept the house. She was the campus
psychiatrist. There's a picture of her in the front of the
Cowell Health Center. She was the campus psychiatrist from the
time we came down here. Then in January 1986, we got a divorce.
In 1987 Barbara got cancer. She got cancer in May and she died
in September.
Reti: Backtracking a little bit, when events like Stonewall were
happening in the late-1960s, was that something you were aware
of?
Shipley: Well, I knew it happened. Of course it didn't affect me
much, because I was living the life of a paterfamilias at the
time. I had a wife and kids.
Reti: But did it open up any sense of possibility to you as the
gay movement got going?
Shipley: Yes. Yes it did. It's very hard for young gay folks to
understand that I got conditioned about all these things when I
was a young kid, and that was way back in the 1930s and 1940s,
when it was like I was some monster from outer space. I had no
idea what was going on about me. I remember when I was in high
school, some friends of mine had found these girls who were
willing to do it. And I got trapped in the car with them and one
of these girls was cuddling up to me and the other two guys were
doing it in the car. It was totally without any interest for me
at all. I found all that kind of repulsive. There are still a
few people I'm kind of wary of in terms of ever bringing up
these matters. But I don't hide out from anybody anymore. And my
kids pretty much understand.
Reti: When you were a faculty member, were there gay or lesbian
students who knew about you, and talked to you?
Shipley: Well, there was Bill Dickinson, but he was in the first
bunch who went through here. Do you know Marc Okrand? Marc
Okrand is the guy who wrote the Klingon language that they use
in Star Trek. He was a linguistics major here. He was gay. He
knew about me when he was here. But Mark is an exceptionally
well-balanced, calm, so-what kind of guy about the whole thing.
He lives in Washington, D.C., and has a permanent boyfriend. But
he went to school here, and he's kept close in touch with me
ever since. He was sitting at a bar in Los Angeles one night and
a guy next to him was saying, "I don't know what we are going to
do about this Klingon language." They were making the first Star
Trek movie. Mark said, "I can do that!" Any linguist can make up
a language that works. I knew he was gay at the time he was
here. In fact, there was a big draft problem at the time. Mark
is about five foot, two inches and he weighed in those days
about 115 pounds. Well, the draft situation was that if you
weighed less than 110 pounds, you could get out of the draft. So
Mark and I were having these discussions. Should he tell them he
was gay? At that time, we were a little worried about what that
might mean for his future, if that information got recorded by
the army. So we decided that what he ought to do is go the other
route. He fasted for two weeks before he went to the physical
and he was down to 109. He got out of the draft that way.
Reti: So he was a student here in the early-1970s.
Shipley: He graduated in 1972, I think.
I never was known well enough in that way that kids would think
of me as a kind of gay mentor. My classes had nothing to do with
this subject. David Thomas taught classes with gay content. He's
always been much braver than I am. It was fine. Nobody ever did
anything to him for it that was bad. But he was always known to
be gay.
Reti: I came out twenty-three years ago, and I'm forty now. It
was still very different when I came out than it is now.
Shipley: Yes. I feel a little bit like keeping the barriers up.
I feel like a tortoise out of its shell. My kids and everybody
say no, no you don't have to do that. But a lot of it is about
early conditioning. I'm strongly in agreement with the fact that
all of the hard-core stuff in our personalities, certainly
including sexual orientation, are genetic. It's in the hard
drive, if you are talking computers, and the idea that you have
any way to change it, or modify it, or be somebody different is
just out of the question. Still, there is another kind of
conditioning that comes from things that you do habitually for
protection in your youth. I still think, God, I shouldn't talk
about that because somebody will wap me, or something bad will
happen, which I can't even maybe identify or describe. Of
course, people my age will soon disappear from the scene and
that will be over with entirely.
-
Shipley is referring to the fact that in
the early years at UCSC faculty appointments were decided
jointly by the discipline/board of studies and the college.
Boards of studies are now called departments.--Editor.
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