Donaldson, Stephen, 1946-1996

Writer and activist Stephen Donaldson was born Robert A. Martin, Jr. on July 27, 1946 in Norfolk, Virginia. The son of a career naval officer, his childhood was spent in numerous seaport cities of the eastern United States, as well as in Germany. His parents divorced when he was seven years old, and he lived for periods of time in a boarding school and with his grandparents. While attending high school in Long Branch, New Jersey, Donaldson acknowledged his sexual attraction to a male classmate and shortly afterwards decided to "come out" as gay. In the summer of 1965 he ran away from his mother's home in Florida to New York City, where he met leaders of the Mattachine Society of New York, an early gay rights organization. Attracted by the relatively permissive sexual atmosphere of New York, he enrolled at Columbia University.

As a college student, Donaldson was a founding member of the Student Homophile League (later re-named Gay People at Columbia-Barnard) and was active in the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. He was a participant in the spring 1968 student uprising on the Columbia campus. Donaldson worked during his college summers as a reporter for the Associated Press and Virginia Pilot and as a legislative intern in the offices of U.S. Representatives Howard H. Callaway (Republican, Georgia) and Donald E. Lukens (Republican, Ohio). He also traveled widely across the United States, often as a hitchhiker. In diary entries and letters written during these years he described his political radicalization, his experiments with marijuana and LSD and his sexual encounters with men and women. Inspired by many aspects of the sexual revolution of the late-1960s, Donaldson increasingly identified himself as bisexual. He began to publish short articles and poems in gay publications, occasionally under the pen name Stephen Donaldson. (Though he never legally changed his name, he increasingly chose to identify himself by this pseudonym, particularly during the 1980s-90s.)

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