"The Chronological 'I' Always Dies": The Lives and Times of Stephen Donaldson

This paper details the eclectic work and writings of longtime activist Stephen Donaldson. Amongst queer scholars and activists today, Donaldson is comparatively well known for his numerous notable accomplishments: he was a founder of the very first gay student group at Columbia University in 1965, a forerunner of early bisexual activism, the first to contest—and prevail against—a dishonorable military discharge for homosexual conduct, and a leader of the organization Stop Prisoner Rape. However, the image of Donaldson as a traditional “activist” is belied by the striking preponderance of his life’s unorthodoxies. The extensive personal papers that Donaldson meticulously kept detail, for instance, his fascination with Eastern religions, meditations on psychoactive consciousness-raising, involvement in underground punk scenes, and his at times startling, even troubling, attachments to coercive prison sex cultures. Donaldson also struggled with mental illness over the years, which, by his account, precipitated his arrest and eventual incarceration for kidnapping in 1980. This paper centers the more intractable elements in the archive of Donaldson’s life not to argue simply for a more nuanced history, but to insist that the accomplishments for which he is already recognized be understood as an extension of—not in spite of—his more fraught biography. Donaldson's comparatively neglected writings not only illuminate a far more radical body of critique, they offer a window into a very different and variegated network of queer social worlds—psychedelic and alternative religious communities, prison cultures, and underground music scenes—that Donaldson changed and was changed by. More broadly, however, Donaldson presents an important challenge to queer historiographies that would construct “activism” as the purview of transparent, secular, and rational historical actors. I thus turn to the Stephen Donaldson papers in effort to reassess conventional understandings about queer strategies for social and political living and acting.