Stephen Donaldson (activist)

After Donaldson's death, the Columbia Queer Alliance renamed its student lounge in his honor. SPR continued to work for prisoners' rights. It contributed to gaining the passage of the first US law against rape in prison Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. The issue of rape and prisoners' rights continues to receive national and state attention.

Donaldson died of a bronchial infection in 1996 at the age of 49. He was HIV-positive at the time.

Donaldson became president of Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc. (SPR), which he and Cahill incorporated in the mid-1990s from POSRIP. The organization (since 2008 known as Just Detention International) helps prisoners deal with the psychological and physical trauma of rape, and works to prevent rape from happening. Donaldson was perhaps the first activist against male rape in the United States to gain significant media attention. Writing on behalf of SPR, he appeared on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, as well as in other major media. He testified on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in its case ACLU et al. v. Reno, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Donaldson was associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (Garland Publishing, 1990). He was editor-in-chief of a concise edition of the encyclopedia, which remains unpublished.

Donaldson was released on parole in April 1984 and returned to New York City. During the 1980s-90s, Donaldson volunteered as a counselor to male victims of sexual assault, and spoke out publicly in a wide variety of forums on the issue of prisoner rape. In 1987-88 he visited India for religious study and was there initiated in the Veerashaiva tradition of Shaivite Hinduism. This trip constituted a parole violation, and resulted in another term in federal prison during 1990. In 1992 Donaldson visited Europe to meet punk rock musicians and fans and to lecture on the American punk scene. Throughout this period he advanced his career as an editor and writer. His short essays on such topics as punk rock, prison conditions, Buddhism and sexuality appeared in numerous magazines and underground publications.

Around 1983, Cahill resurrected the defunct organization "People Organized to Stop Rape of Imprisoned Persons" (POSRIP), which had been founded in 1980 by Russell Smith. In 2004, Cahill recollected:

In 1982, Donaldson wrote about his lack of success in getting needed psychological counseling after the rapes:

In a 1982 essay written from jail, Donaldson described the event:

As "Donny the Punk", Donaldson was already a respected writer and personality in the punk and anti-racist skinhead subcultures. He had published in punk zines such as Maximumrocknroll, Flipside and J.D.s. In the mid-1980s, Donny was the chief organizer of The Alternative Press & Radio Council (APRC), which brought together members of the punk community (such as fanzine editors and college radio DJs) from New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This co-operative group met on Sundays before the weekly CBGB Sunday hardcore matinees and organized several benefit concerts. The group published a newsletter, and released a compilation LP on Mystic Records in 1986, which was entitled Mutiny On The Bowery. The compilation featured live recordings from the group's benefit concerts. Among other active members of the APRC were WFMU-FM DJ Pat Duncan, Maximumrocknroll columnist Mykel Board and Jersey Beat editor Jim Testa.

After a series of meetings, the Committee of Friends on Bisexuality was formed, with Donaldson (using the name Bob Martin) as its chair until he left the Quakers in 1977.

In the spring of 1977, Donaldson became depressed enough to cut his wrist and arranged to get himself arrested for sale of LSD in Norfolk, Virginia, with the hope, he later wrote, "to find myself being wanted and needed, to find the warm security I had experienced with the marines in the county jail." Donaldson was placed in the city jail, where he was gang-raped nightly until the guards were alerted and he was put in solitary confinement for his protection (to which Donaldson vigorously objected, believing the loss of rights and privileges unfair). After being released into a cell with blacks (who had allegedly paid $5 to receive him), Donaldson was again raped and "paralyzed with terror, the emotions of D.C. Jail overwhelming [him]", he fought his assailant, for which he was returned to solitary. After being released into a white cell, he was greeted: "Why, it's Donny the Punk!", giving him his nickname.

While traveling to Florida for his mother's funeral in late 1976, Donaldson was arrested after urinating in a motel parking lot, then was charged with possession after the police searched his hotel room and found cannabis. He was placed in a small cell block with four white and eight black prisoners, most of them Marines from a nearby base, who demanded sexual services. Donaldson later wrote:

Donaldson wrote that he was aided in his sexual recovery by an understanding woman who helped him regain his confidence. After a year and a half, he returned to his prior level of sexual activity. In 1975, "the suppressed emotions began to rise to the level of consciousness, primarily in the form of anger, aggression, and a vigorous reassertion of [his] own masculinity," leading him to join a male consciousness raising group and then, in 1976, to pursue "individual Gestalt therapy (not being able to afford anything else) with a lay therapist."

In a 1974 account in the Friends Journal, Donaldson asked:

From 1974-77 Donaldson did graduate work in religion at Columbia University, and served as Chairman of the Student Governing Board of the Earl Hall Center for Religion and Life. In May 1976 he was ordained as a novice monk in the orthodox (Theravada) Buddhist Order. During the late-1970s Donaldson worked intermittently as a developer of war simulation games and immersed himself in New York's punk rock subculture, centered on the CBGB nightclub in downtown Manhattan. Several personal tragedies, including the 1976 suicide of his mother, contributed to bouts of psychological depression.

After being discharged from the Navy in 1972, Donaldson moved to Washington, D.C., where he "worked as Pentagon correspondent for the Overseas Weekly, a privately owned newspaper distributed to American servicemen stationed in Europe". Donaldson considered himself a Quaker and took part in the Langley Hill Monthly Meeting, where he was part of a group influenced by "a series of pray-ins at the White House sponsored by the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV)" who felt a call to "hold a memorial meeting for worship at the White House to commemorate the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki [on its 28th anniversary] and for the victims of all wars and violence" on August 9, 1973. The protesters (referred to as the "White House Seven") were arrested for unlawful entry and released on bail except for Donaldson, who refused and spent the night in the D.C. jail before being released by a judge the next morning. On August 14 Donaldson was one of 66 demonstrators (including Daniel Berrigan) who took part in a CCNV-sponsored pray-in at the White House protesting the bombing of Cambodia, where he was again arrested. Donaldson again refused to post bail. In a 1974 account under the pseudonym Donald Tucker, he explained:

Despite the support, he received a general discharge in 1972. Donaldson continued to fight, and, in 1977, his discharge was upgraded to "honorable" as part of "President Carter's sweeping amnesty program for Vietnam-era draft evaders, deserters, and service members", at which time:

Donaldson had a longstanding desire to join the Navy, even buying a sailor's uniform during college, in which he cruised the city and pretended to be a serviceman on a visit to a naval base in Pensacola, Florida, and maintained a "lifelong identification with sailors and seafaring." After graduating from Columbia in 1970, he enlisted and served as a radioman at a NATO base in Italy with an unblemished record until "he wrote to a former shipmate, Terry Fountain, about his latest sexual adventures [with both women and men] at his current home port of Naples, Italy". After Fountain left the letter unattended on his desk, someone turned it over to the Naval Investigative Service, which allegedly coerced Fountain into signing a statement that he had sex with Donaldson, which Fountain later recanted. In 1971, "the Navy announced its intention to release [Donaldson] by General Discharge on grounds of suspected homosexual involvement." As Randy Shilts wrote in Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military:

Donaldson was involved in the New York bisexual movement in the mid-1970s, for example appearing in 1974 on a New York Gay Activists Alliance panel with Kate Millet. Donaldson propounded the belief that ultimately bisexuality would be perceived as much more threatening to the prevailing sexual order than homosexuality, because it potentially subverted everyone's identity (the idea that everyone is potentially bisexual was widespread) and could not, unlike exclusive homosexuality, be confined to a segregated, stigmatized and therefore manageable ghetto.

Donaldson continued to suffer from depression, insomnia, and panic attacks in the late 1970s, and attempted suicide in 1977, the year after the suicide of his mother Lois Vaugahn. In 1980, Donaldson "hit rock bottom" and committed a semi-deranged incident at a Veterans' Hospital in the Bronx. Having been denied treatment after a half-day wait and asked to come back the following day, Donaldson returned with a gun and fired it through a window. During the subsequent trial, Donaldson heavily criticized the United States Government's policies. The judge ultimately found him guilty.

The publicity also led students at other universities to contact Donaldson about starting chapters. In 1968, Donaldson certified SHL chapters at Cornell University, led by Jearld Moldenhauer and advised by radical priest Daniel Berrigan; New York University, headed by Rita Mae Brown; and Stanford University. In 1969, chapters were started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Stan Tillotson, San Francisco State University, and Rutgers University by African American Lionel Cuffie. The University of Massachusetts Amherst gained a chapter in 1970. Other early campus gay groups outside the SHL network included the Boston University Homophile Committee, Fight Repression of Erotic Expression (FREE) at the University of Minnesota, and Homosexuals Intransigent at the City College of New York.

Through Bo Lozoff, Donaldson met Tom Cahill, whose correspondence with Lozoff also appeared in We're All Doing Time. Cahill was "an Air Force veteran turned peace activist when [he] was jailed for civil disobedience in San Antonio, Texas in 1968. For the first twenty-four hours, [he] was beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured", allegedly as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) due to Cahill's anti-Vietnam War activity.

That fall, Donaldson suggested to Millham "that they form a Mattachine-like organization on campus, what he envisioned as 'the first chapter of a spreading confederation of student homophile groups.'" At first, Donaldson was unable to gain official recognition for the Student Homophile League (SHL) (now called the Columbia Queer Alliance), as Columbia required a membership list. Donaldson and Millham were the only gay students willing to provide their names. This prevented the group from receiving university funding or holding public events on campus until Donaldson realized that by "recruiting the most prominent student leaders to become pro forma members, he could satisfy the administration without compromising the anonymity of gay students, and Columbia officially chartered the country's first student gay rights group on April 19, 1967," and subsequently the first known LGBT student movement.

Despite having "assured the administration that publicity would be kept to a minimum," Donaldson "launched an aggressive public information campaign about SHL and homosexuality", making sure it was covered on Columbia radio station WKCR, where he was a staff member. He also sent out "at least three press releases to several large newspapers, wire services, and magazines with national and international distribution." The group received little coverage until gay rights supporter Murray Schumach saw the Spectator piece and wrote an article, headlined "Columbia Charters Homosexual Group", which appeared on the front page of The New York Times on May 3, 1967:

While at Columbia, Donaldson "experimented with cannabis and LSD" and described himself as "ordained in the psychedelic church," going on to guide first-time LSD users. He wrote that he became a liberal in 1967 in response to the Kerner Report on racism towards blacks in the United States and went on to become a "full-fledged hippy-valued radical." He was arrested twice for participating in anti-war protests at Columbia, including a "liberation" of Columbia president Grayson Kirk's office, spending an uneventful night in jail in 1968.

In the summer of 1966, Donaldson began a relationship with gay activist Frank Kameny, who had a great influence on him. Donaldson later wrote:

He also worked summers as a legislative intern in the offices of U.S. Representatives Howard H. Callaway (Republican, Georgia) and Donald E. Lukens (Republican, Ohio). Frank Kameny arranged his first internship, which was in the summer of 1966.

In 1966, Donaldson fell in love with a woman, Judith "JD Rabbit" Jones (whom he later considered his "lifetime companion") and began to identify as bisexual. His "growing feeling of discomfort with biphobia in the homophile/gay liberation movement was a major factor" in his deciding to quit the movement and enlist in the Navy after graduating with highest honours from Columbia in 1970.

In 1965, Donaldson went to Florida to spend the summer with his mother. "When Lois discovered young Robert was having an affair with a Cuban man, she decided to punish her son by outing him in letters to her ex-husband and to Columbia University, which Donaldson had planned to attend in the fall." Donaldson moved to New York, where, he later wrote, "The gays of New York welcomed me enthusiastically, offered hospitality, and 'brought me out' as a 'butch' homosexual (in contrast to the "queens"). Among the Mattachine Society members he met were Julian Hodges, Frank Kameny, and Dick Leitsch.

In August 1965, Donaldson "had a social worker call the dean's office to ask whether Columbia would register a known homosexual." After a delay of two weeks, the administration responded that he "would be allowed to register, on condition that he undergo psychotherapy and not attempt to seduce other students."

In April 1962, at the age of fifteen, Donny returned to the United States to live with his grandparents in West Long Branch, New Jersey. In high school he was the news editor of the school paper, an actor, and a student government officer. He achieved a perfect score on the SAT and graduated as valedictorian. He also became active in politics as a libertarian conservative, supporting Barry Goldwater for president" and "considered joining the Young Americans for Freedom but was so uptight that he first checked with J. Edgar Hoover by letter to inquire whether the YAF was 'a communist organization, communist subverted, or in danger of becoming either'. Hoover sent back a reply "praising his concern about communism and then opened an FBI file on the boy". (Years later, Donaldson received a copy of his FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act.)

Donaldson was "heavily involved throughout the rest of the 1960s not only as national leader of the Student Homophile League but also as an elected officer of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) and of its Eastern Regional subsidiary". By 1971, there were an estimated 150 gay student groups at colleges and universities "often with official sanction and with remarkable acceptance from fellow students".

The son of a career naval officer, Donaldson spent his early childhood in different seaport cities in the eastern United States and in Germany. Donaldson later described his father Robert, the son of Italian and German immigrants, as a man who "frowned on display of emotion" and his mother Lois as "an English, Scottish Texan, artistic, free-spirited, emotional, impulsive." After his parents' divorce in 1953, when he was seven years old, Donaldson's mother suffered from acute porphyria (a rare genetic disease), and his father gained custody of Robert and his two brothers. His father remarried several years later.

Stephen Donaldson (July 27, 1946 – July 18, 1996), born Robert Anthony Martin Jr and also known by the pseudonym Donny the Punk, was an American bisexual rights activist, and political activist. He is best known for his pioneering activism in LGBT rights and prison reform, and for his writing about punk rock and subculture.