Jonathan Lerner is a nationally recognized magazine feature writer and is the features editor of Atlanta Peach magazine. He specializes in architecture, planning and preservation; design and decorative arts; food and travel. His article "The Future of Havana's Past," about historic preservation in the Cuban capital. won first prize in the North American Travel Journalists Association 2001 competition. His work has appeared in Metropolis, Delta Sky, PaperCity, American Craft, The Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, Spa, Travel+Leisure, Metropolitan Home, Landscape Architecture, House Beautiful, InStyle, House & Garden, Men's Journal, The Washington Post, Westways, New England Financial Journal, Four Seasons, Diversion, Modern Maturity, Coffee Journal, USAir Magazine, United Airlines Hemispheres, American Way, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, Southern Voice, Specialty Travel Index, Salon.com. He is the author of the books Caught in a Still Place; fiction (Serpent's Tail,1989; rights available for expansion and republication.) Voices from Wounded Knee, oral history (Akwesasne Notes, 1974) His story The Everglade Kite won the 1992 Sideshow Award. From 1967, Lerner was a staff member of Students for a Democratic Society, the dominant organization of the New Left. Later he was a founding member of the Weathermen, which became an armed underground organization. He himself lived underground for most of 1970, following which he remained a secret above-ground member of the clandestine group until it broke up in 1976. Lerner wrote at length in his essay "I Was a Terrorist," published in The Washington Post Magazine, about the ideas and motivations that produced the Weathermen and continue to generate terrorist organizations. His principal conclusion is that in each person's choice to join, ideology was less decisive than individual psychological need. "For every member of the Weather Underground," Lerner wrote in the Post, "there was something going on besides the politics, something to get or prove." This understanding -- rejected by the underground's apologists, but obvious to anyone who appreciates the complexity of human decision-making -- was recently echoed by Susan Braudy in her book Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left. Like his character Alex in Alex Underground, Lerner participated in the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, and was then aided by the Cuban government in disappearing to Europe where he first went into hiding. Alex Underground is loosely autobiographical, in that Alex finds himself caught up in dangerous politics because of his emotional attachment to an activist friend; finds a way to use his situation in hiding to explore his own sexuality; and follows a similar geographic route while on the run. But in setting the novel outside the Weathermen, Lerner further emphasizes the point that many people in that politically-charged era got into trouble for "political" acts undertaken without much ideological or organizational rationale. |
About Jonathan Lerner |
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Jonathan Lerner is a nationally recognized magazine feature writer and is the features editor of Atlanta Peach magazine. He specializes in architecture, planning and preservation; design and decorative arts; food and travel. His article "The Future of Havana's Past," about historic preservation in the Cuban capital. won first prize in the North American Travel Journalists Association 2001 competition. His work has appeared in Metropolis, Delta Sky, PaperCity, American Craft, The Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, Spa, Travel+Leisure, Metropolitan Home, Landscape Architecture, House Beautiful, InStyle, House & Garden, Men's Journal, The Washington Post, Westways, New England Financial Journal, Four Seasons, Diversion, Modern Maturity, Coffee Journal, USAir Magazine, United Airlines Hemispheres, American Way, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, Southern Voice, Specialty Travel Index, Salon.com. He is the author of the books Caught in a Still Place; fiction (Serpent's Tail,1989; rights available for expansion and republication.) Voices from Wounded Knee, oral history (Akwesasne Notes, 1974) His story The Everglade Kite won the 1992 Sideshow Award. From 1967, Lerner was a staff member of Students for a Democratic Society, the dominant organization of the New Left. Later he was a founding member of the Weathermen, which became an armed underground organization. He himself lived underground for most of 1970, following which he remained a secret above-ground member of the clandestine group until it broke up in 1976. Lerner wrote at length in his essay "I Was a Terrorist," published in The Washington Post Magazine, about the ideas and motivations that produced the Weathermen and continue to generate terrorist organizations. His principal conclusion is that in each person's choice to join, ideology was less decisive than individual psychological need. "For every member of the Weather Underground," Lerner wrote in the Post, "there was something going on besides the politics, something to get or prove." This understanding -- rejected by the underground's apologists, but obvious to anyone who appreciates the complexity of human decision-making -- was recently echoed by Susan Braudy in her book Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left. Like his character Alex in Alex Underground, Lerner participated in the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, and was then aided by the Cuban government in disappearing to Europe where he first went into hiding. Alex Underground is loosely autobiographical, in that Alex finds himself caught up in dangerous politics because of his emotional attachment to an activist friend; finds a way to use his situation in hiding to explore his own sexuality; and follows a similar geographic route while on the run. But in setting the novel outside the Weathermen, Lerner further emphasizes the point that many people in that politically-charged era got into trouble for "political" acts undertaken without much ideological or organizational rationale. |
Other Highlights in Checkered Career Age 5. Softball game in the street. I'm catching. Big brother at bat, swings roundhouse and hits me in the head. Loathe sports ever after. So why have I developed a minor writing specialization in the Olympic Games? Because I'm fascinated by their impacts on host cities, regardless of what happens on the playing fields. Age 9. Father joins Foreign Service, family moves to Taipei. Taiwan not yet blessed with television. Incipient TV habit broken; I read instead. Favorite books: the Rick Brant Electronic Mystery series, and The Ugly American (recognize character types among parents' diplomatic circle). Dressed as a coolie -- torn t-shirt, conical straw hat, bare feet -- win Halloween costume contest for American children in ballroom of Grand Hotel of China. By age 11, have circled the globe, and developed lifetime addiction to exotic travel. Age 13. Back in Chevy Chase. Attend first political demonstration, picket line to integrate a Washington apartment complex. Receive Exodus as bar mitzvah present. Most indelible line for a confused proto-homo: Dov Landau, wimpering, "They used me, like a woman." Age 14. Notable moments of miserable junior high career: Remembering glamorous travel experiences, organize extra-curricular Gourmet Club; home ec instructor agrees to be faculty adviser but, in over her head, only teaches cookie recipes. Pretending infatuation with bohemian female classmate, begin accompanying her to take modern dance classes. Actually, I'm just a baby fag trying to educate myself. Age 15-17. With beatnik school pals: demonstrate for civil rights; go downtown to black ghetto to hear Modern Jazz Quartet, Motown Review, etc.; skip class to hang out with Renoir and Klee at the Phillips Collection; discover pot, booze, foreign films, irony. Age 17. Leave home for Antioch College. Work-study program provides series of disturbingly cop-like jobs: orderly in locked psych ward, helping to administer electroshock; time study analyst clocking bank tellers from over their shoulders; employment advisor in work-study program at Wilberforce University, where entire student body is black. Become friends with Antioch SDS heavies. Discover LSD, San Francisco rock, Regis Debray, Warhol, etc. Convinced Antioch training me to function as stooge of The System, drop out after two years. Move to New York to do theater and dance. Age 19. New York. Theater and dance fun, but crawling with scary queens. SDS pals talk me into joining organization's staff; militant atmosphere provides cover for homosexual panic, outlaw camaraderie masks unsatisfied craving for intimacy. Forgetting irony, guiltily recall award-winning childhood impersonation of coolie and begin calling myself revolutionary anti-imperialist. Work as SDS organizer and apparatchik until 1969, in NY, DC, Chicago. Then join the Weathermen. Age 21. Sent by Weathermen on Venceremos Brigade to Cuba. End up underground, in Europe, then Canada, then New York, supporting myself by hustling men. See: "I Was a Terrorist," Washington Post Magazine, for non-fiction narrative; Alex Underground, for fictionalized, psychological version of story. Age 23-28. No longer underground, function as secret aboveground member of Weather Underground Organization. Meanwhile work as journalist in radical press. Cover Wounded Knee confrontation in 1973, produce oral history Voices from Wounded Knee, living for a year at Awkesasne Mohawk Reserve, NY, where book is published. Age 29. Weather Underground splinters apart amid bizarre secret show trials. Bail out with and marry another burned-out Weather operative. Confounding all observers, we become traveling antiques dealers and disappear off map to tiny Cedar Key, Florida. Marriage just functions as a different kind of safe house, but provides setting for first published novel. See Caught in a Still Place for sense of place, portrayal of shut-down gay man. Age 41. We move to Atlanta. Surrounded by a city full of confident, visible queers, no longer able to pretend I'm not one. Emboldened by freshly published novel and beginnings of magazine career, throw life to the winds, come out as gay, get divorced. Wife keeps business, house and dog; I start over, thinking, Who cares? I'll be a writer now. In fact, wait tables for five years until established as freelancer, but learn a lot about restaurants that wil be of use later. Find artist boyfriend who restores sense of irony. Approaching 60. Now a successful freelance writer. Recycling previous lives by specializing in travel and food, decorative arts and historic preservation, and penning the occasional detached political commentary. Uncertainty of freelancing manageable because unlike previous vocations, risks do not include torture and prison. Alex Underground, novel loosely based on my experience with the underground, is finished and available for publication. New novel currently percolating in coffee-soaked brain. Stay tuned. |
Jonathan Lerner, on the wagon so to speak. |
