Reprinted from


May 1, 2003

David Rothenberg’s Political Education

Theater producer, publicist, political activist looks back at famous names in his life

By JERRY TALLMER

TWO PIONEERS Rothenberg with former Mayor David Dinkins.

At 140th Street and Riverside Drive, there is a huge old building that once was a Catholic girls’ school. Nowadays it is called the Fortune Academy. There, some 70 ex-convicts, male and female, have their own small apartments thanks to a playwright named John Herbert, a publicist/producer/political activist named David Rothenberg, and the audiences who took in the breakthrough 1967 Off-Broadway run of Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eye’s, complete with its homosexual rape behind the bars of a Canadian prison for young offenders.

John Herbert died last year in the Toronto where he was born, but Dave Rothenberg of West 13th Street is very much alive, and for at least two and maybe some other Sunday nights starting April 27 he’ll be up at the Fortune Academy regaling newer audiences––for the benefit of the Academy––with his Namedropping tales of a theatrical advance man’s adventures over the years with Richard, Elizabeth, Bette, Lauren, Judy, Al, Alvin, Joan, Peggy, Tennessee, etc.—and, as they say, if you have to ask: “Richard and Elizabeth who?,” forget it.

Fortune and Men’s Eyes, produced on the $15,000 that Dave Rothenberg had somehow raised, opened at the Actor’s Playhouse, just below Sheridan Square, on Feb. 23, 1967, in the face of withering disdain from the press––except for this theatergoer and, in the Village Voice, Michael Smith. It ran for a year at the Actor’s Playhouse, and all over the world, everywhere, for the next 10 years.

In 1969-70, a restaging of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, directed by and starring Sal Mineo, opened in Los Angeles and then came briefly to New York. It was nuder than the original, but not better.

To keep Herbert’s drama alive before it died in the cradle, Rothenberg had hit on the idea of dialogues between cast and audience after the show on Tuesday nights

“One night,” Rothenberg recalls, “a voice from the audience shouted: ‘This play is full of shit!’ From the back of the house came another: ‘Not if my 20 years count for anything, and I’ve been in Rikers Island, Dannemora, San Quentin, and on a Florida chain gang.’

“I stood up and said: ‘Come on down,’ and down to the stage came this New York Irish street kid, Pat McGarry, who mesmerized us for an hour. He said: ‘You need a black guy. I did white time. There’s white time and black time.’ The next week he brought along Clarence Cooper, who’d done time in Michigan.”

These three men, Pat McGarry, Clarence Cooper, David Rothenberg—soon joined by ex-convicts Kenny Jackson and Mel Rivers—would form the founding/sustaining nucleus of the Fortune Society, the now 36-year-old convict-support organization that a year ago opened that Fortune Academy up there on 140th Street.

Cut to 1973.

David Susskind has asked the National Gay Task Force to bring together on his talk show some mainstream homosexual men and women. Rothenberg was invited to be among them. He was quite well-known by now, “but still deeply in the closet.”

Before going on the show, Rothenberg went before the executive board of the Fortune Society and said: “I have three things to tell you. One, I’m going on Susskind. Two, I’m going to be talking on television about my homosexuality. Three, I’m prepared to offer my resignation, if you ask for it.”

There was “a Pinter silence,” Rothenberg remembers.

Then Kenny Jackson asked: “What are you going to wear on television?”

Rothenberg said: “What kind of question is that?”

Jackson replied: “You dress sloppy. Look right and make us proud of you.”

Mel Rivers spoke up: “You’ve stood alongside us for six years. Give us the opportunity to stand alongside you.”

In 1985, David Rothenberg would become the first openly gay candidate in history to run for the New York City Council. He would collect 46 percent of the vote, barely lose to a popular incumbent.

In all that he experienced in his life before and after, what Mel Rivers said that day back in 1973 is still, says Rothenberg, “the most profound political statement of my life.”