Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.

  There had been a handful of gay-themed plays performed in New York, such as The Madness of Lady Bright by Lanford Wilson in 1964, The Bed by Robert Heide in 1965 and his Moon in 1967, all produced at Caffe Cino. But there had never been a gay play that received as much public attention as Boys. The New York Times in particular was fascinated and wrote about it endlessly. Clive Barnes gave it a surprisingly perceptive review when it opened, saying it was “one of the best acted plays of the season” and was “not a play about a homosexual but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, and the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis of human experience.” Barnes began by comparing the play to Virginia Woolf and closed by citing the Stanley Kauffmann article: both were already touchstones in discussing Boys. Barnes went back the following February when the show had a new cast and found he still liked it: “the best American play for some few seasons. But I do hope that Mr. Crowley is wrong and that all homosexuals are not as wretchedly miserable as he paints them.” But as if to prove the Times wasn’t too progressive, Walter Kerr took the play apart in a long Sunday piece, complaining that these gay men were all the same “in their amused, quick-minded, diminishing address to each other,” presenting them as a pack of wisecracking zombies afraid to feel any real emotion. A year later, reviewing the movie, Vincent Canby complained that the play “sounds too often as if it had been written by someone at the party”—as close as he could come to calling Crowley a fag.

  When Boys was recorded on a set of long-playing records, the Times reviewed the recording, too, as an excuse to offer yet another perspective. “How Anguished Are Homosexuals?” was the headline of the piece by Donn Teal. “Realizing that the author’s attempt was not to epitomize the normal American homosexual in The Boys any more than Albee’s was to apotheosize the average (childless) American marriage in Virginia Woolf, we are angry still that a misrepresentation has been broadcast by an excellent play.” The tangled prose tries to defend the play as well as take issue with it, but more interesting is that Teal wrote as a gay man and used his real name. A year earlier he had written an article about gay plotlines for the Times under a pseudonym. The world was beginning to change.

  The Teal article ran on June 1, 1969. Crowley was in the city, supervising the making of the movie of the play. There had been a bidding war by the studios hungry to film a stage hit. The old Hollywood production code, which limited representations of any kind of sexuality, was dead, nobody knew what worked anymore, and the sensationalism of the material added to its appeal. Crowley insisted on serving as producer and keeping the original cast when he sold his play. Cinema Center Films, a division of CBS, agreed to his terms. However, they wouldn’t let a stage director, Robert Moore, direct the movie and insisted on someone more experienced. Crowley chose a young straight director, William Friedkin, who had just made a good movie from Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Filming began at the Hy Brown Studios on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. Interviewed on the set by Katie Kelly for yet another Times article, Crowley defended his play against gay critics. “The story is about self-destruction. I’m talking about the self-destruction angle that’s in all of us…. I hope there are happy homosexuals—they just don’t happen to be at this party.”

  Summer began quietly that year with far less drama than the summer of 1968. Little was happening politically. Judy Garland died of an accidental overdose in London on Sunday, June 22. Forty-seven years old, she had been a gay icon since the 1950s. (“What’s more boring than a queen doing a Judy Garland imitation?” asks Michael in Boys. Donald replies, “A queen doing a Bette Davis imitation.”) Her body was flown to New York and seen by thousands at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel before she was buried in Westchester on Friday, June 27. That night the police raided a gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.

  There are many different accounts of the Stonewall riots and I won’t sift through them all here. People want to connect the death of Garland with the riots, but no mourners appear to have been present at Stonewall. The juxtaposition is only a symbolic coincidence (yet it’s hard to say exactly what it symbolizes).

  The riots began as a routine bust of the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-run bar that had been raided earlier that week. Plainclothesmen and uniformed cops entered, asked for IDs and began to arrest people. A crowd gathered outside.

  Edmund White was on the street that night. The twenty-nine-year-old writer worked at Time-Life Books, but his chief interests were sex and his own writing. He had begun as a playwright but was finishing his first novel. He actually knew Crowley from Fire Island; the two had had a brief fling, and Crowley read one of his experimental plays (“Is this supposed to be funny?” Crowley asked), but White had not seen Boys. He described the riot two weeks after it happened in a letter to his friends Ann and Alfred Corn.

  [A] mammoth paddy wagon as big as a school bus, pulled up to the Wall and about ten cops raided the joint. The kids were all shooed into the street; soon other gay kids and straight spectators swelled the ranks to, I’d say, about a thousand people…. As the Mafia owners were dragged out one by one and shoved into the wagon, the crowd would let out Bronx cheers and jeers and clapping. Someone shouted “Gay Power,” others took up the cry—and then it dissolved into giggles. A few more prisoners—bartenders, hatcheck boys—a few more cheers, someone starts singing, “We Shall Overcome.”

  It was not a political crowd. These were young people out for a good time on a Friday night. Yet they watched TV and followed the news; they had read about Black Power and the Black Panthers and had seen footage of the riots in Chicago.

  The paddy wagon left, leaving cops behind in the bar. “We’re the Pink Panthers!” someone cried and people attacked the bar, throwing a trash can at the plywood-covered window and then setting the wood on fire. Fire engines arrived. Police returned to free the cops trapped by the crowd. Riot police in helmets filled the street. Unlike the riots in Chicago the summer before, no TV cameras recorded the event. In fact, there is only one photo of the riot itself, showing a pack of grinning street kids framed by the shoulders of cops shoving them back. The picture was taken the first night and printed on the front page of the Daily News the next day.

  Craig Rodwell of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop watched the beginning of the riot from the stoop of a nearby brownstone. He raced home and telephoned the newspapers. He returned the next night, when the crowd reassembled and there was a fresh confrontation with the police, larger and louder than the first night. Early Sunday morning, Rodwell typed up a flyer that called for political action. He made copies and distributed them outside the bar.

  Allen Ginsberg was in town that weekend. After Chicago, he had moved to a farm in Cherry Valley in upstate New York, where he spent the winter setting William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to music. He came down to New York to record the songs for Verve Records. He visited Christopher Street on Sunday night and saw the words “Gay Power!” chalked on the front of the building. He told a Village Voice reporter, “We’re one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.” He entered the reopened bar, and came out again, saying the patrons were “beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

  Mart Crowley was busy with the movie production uptown and only read about the riots in a small article in the inside pages of the Times. For him as for most people, gay or straight, the great public events of the summer were Woodstock and the moon landing.

  The riots passed; nobody knew what they meant yet. Edmund White closed his letter to the Corns by saying, “Who knows what will happen this weekend, or this week. I’ll keep you posted. Otherwise nothing much. I’ve been going out with a mad boy who tried to kill me last Friday. He’s very cute and I’m sure it�
��d be a kick, but I think I’ll take a rain check on the death scene.”

  The Stonewall riots were an expression of change, not a cause of it—not by themselves, anyway. There had already been similar protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco that are now forgotten. Stonewall might have been forgotten, too, except that a year later, in 1970, a group of activists including Craig Rodwell marked the riot with a march. Instead of doing the Annual Reminder in Philadelphia on July 4, Rodwell suggested they do it a week earlier as a protest march in New York, commemorating the street battles of last year. History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

  Two theater pieces, one a play, the other raw street theater, took place in the same city but were not directly connected. Yet both were expressions of the same social change that they augmented and continued. Boys in the Band would run for another year and three months, a total of a thousand and one nights. When the Katie Kelly article on the movie ran in the Times two weeks after Stonewall, she did not mention the riots. Nevertheless, the world was already changing. New political groups sprung up over the next months. When the movie opened in Los Angeles in March 1970, it was picketed by six members of an organization called the Gay Liberation Front. They were barely visible in the large crowd outside the theater. Crowley didn’t see or hear them, although he was told afterward that one protester carried a cowbell.

  The movie went on to play in every major city across the country that summer. It was like a national advertisement for homosexuality. More people heard about Boys than heard about Stonewall that first year. You didn’t need to see the movie to know about it. The ad campaign ran in daily newspapers from Portland, Oregon, to Norfolk, Virginia, featuring a photo of Leonard Frey with the caption, “Today is Harold’s birthday.” Next to it was a photo of Robert La Tourneux as the hustler, Cowboy, over the caption, “And this is his present.”

  III

  The Seventies

  11. Old and Young

  The next big literary change was under way, the most important shift yet. But it happened slowly at first. Time was needed for magazines to be started, for bookstores to open, and, most important, for new work to be written. Poems and even plays can sometimes happen quickly, but most literature, especially novels, require long gestations followed by months of writing and rewriting. The first major gay literary work to appear after Stonewall was an English novel that was nearly sixty years old.

  E. M. Forster wrote Maurice in 1913 but did not want it published while his mother was still alive. She lived a very long life. He showed the manuscript to like-minded friends, including young Christopher Isherwood, who admired the book. “Does it date?” Forster asked. “Why shouldn’t it date?” Isherwood truthfully replied. Finally the mother died, but Forster still delayed publication, fearing the novel would hurt his reputation. Unable to write what he cared about, he had written no novels since A Passage to India in 1924. He too lived a long life, and didn’t die until 1970, when he was ninety-one. Maurice was published the following year under Isherwood’s supervision. Forster’s fears came true. A long coming-out story, the novel is rather old-fashioned in both its emotion and discretion, but many critics disliked it. They were disappointed to learn their hero was a homosexual or they used the fact to claim he’d never been a major writer anyway. “Maurice, bad as it is, nevertheless is Forster’s only truthful book,” declared Marvin Mudrick, “full of nerves, hysteria, infatuations, bitterness.”

  Also published posthumously in 1971 was The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. O’Hara had died after he was struck by a car one night on a beach on Fire Island in 1966. He was only forty. We will talk about him more in the next chapter, but his sexuality wasn’t freely acknowledged until after his death—and after gay liberation.

  Several early gay rights battles were fought in the literary pages. In September 1970, a few months after the world’s first gay pride march, Harper’s ran as a cover story, “Homo/Hetero: the Struggle for Sexual Identity,” an essay by critic Joseph Epstein. At great length, Epstein carefully explored what he admitted was his unexamined fear of homosexuality, using quotes from Freud, André Gide, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and “Elliott, the hairdresser of a lady friend of mine.” But instead of overcoming his fear, Epstein ended by justifying it. “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.” He was most worried for his four sons, declaring in conclusion, “Nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if one of them were to become homosexual. For then I would know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men.” The idea that the world could be changed so that homosexuals (as well as black people) wouldn’t be oppressed never crosses Epstein’s mind.

  One month after his essay appeared, the Gay Activist Alliance “zapped” Harper’s: a dozen or so gay activists in long hair and jeans entered the building and occupied the offices for the day. Among the zappers were journalist Arthur Bell, Arnie Kantrowitz, later a college professor specializing in Whitman, and Vito Russo, who later wrote the groundbreaking film study, The Celluloid Closet. They gave the staff coffee and doughnuts and talked to them about gay rights. Harper’s stonefaced executive editor, Midge Decter, was not amused.

  Despite Epstein’s antigay credentials, or because of them, the New York Times Book Review chose him to review Maurice. Again he wrote at great length, this time struggling to separate Forster’s major novels, which he loved, from the homosexual who wrote them. “The homosexual influence in Forster’s other novels, if it exists at all, is so negligible as to be scarcely worthy of notice.” So much for the intense male friendships in The Longest Journey and A Passage to India. Epstein found Maurice disappointing for literary reasons, and assumed gay readers would be disappointed by its lack of “homosexual high jinks.” Yet the book was very popular and widely read by gay men. They helped to create the Forster revival of the next twenty years, one that included film adaptations as well as constant reissues of the novels.

  A new generation of gay writers began to appear, and they did not always speak the same language as their elders. The older writers didn’t see themselves as part of anything political; the young writers did. The established figures responded to the new gay politics in different ways. Some like Truman Capote paid no attention at all. Others like Tennessee Williams were annoyed, while Gore Vidal was coolly curious. Only Isherwood and Allen Ginsberg were completely open to the gay rights movement, but they were already open about their sexuality. Most homosexual artists spoke as if political activism were something the other guy did. O’Hara died before Stonewall, but his friend Joe LeSueur thought gay liberation was more Allen Ginsberg’s line than O’Hara’s. Another friend believed that if O’Hara had lived into the 1970s, he would’ve found the politics silly but he would love the GAA dances held at the Firehouse downtown.

  Gay Sunshine, a literary and cultural journal, was founded in Berkeley in 1970 by Winston Leyland and began to run full-length interviews with major gay figures. The new generation interviewed their elders with admiration and respect, usually. More important, they asked questions that weren’t being asked elsewhere. These long conversations with Vidal, Isherwood, Ginsberg, and others now provide us with a wealth of information about their private lives and attitudes. Ginsberg talked about having sex with Jack Kerouac; John Rechy, author of City of Night, the highly praised 1963 novel about hustlers, criticized gay S&M culture; Samuel Steward, creator of the erotic “Phil Andros” stories, described his different lives as a professor, a tattoo artist, a friend of Gertrude Stein, and a sex partner of Thornton Wilder; Isherwood took apart the ugly myth that the Nazis were homosexual; and Vidal discussed Howard Austen, his partner of twenty-three years, for the first time in print. (The interviewers introduced the subject by asking Vidal who would inherit
his money.) These frank interviews mark the rise of a gay literary world that was parallel yet separate from the culture at large. Mainstream readers didn’t visit this world, only other gay people. It was not that straight people were excluded, however; they just weren’t interested.

  The mainstream was more open, however, even television. In an interview with David Frost, also in 1970, Tennessee Williams replied to a pointed question about his sexuality with a big pussycat smile. “I don’t want to be involved in some kind of scandal,” he purred, “but I’ve covered the waterfront.”

  Williams had been living a very strange life since the death of Frank Merlo in 1963, floating in a haze of alcohol and sleeping pills. “I slept through the Sixties,” he later told Gore Vidal, who assured him he hadn’t missed a thing. But it was worse than that. He grew paranoid and wildly unpredictable. His friends avoided him. He hired a paid companion, who was often afraid of him. During rehearsals of a new play, The Kingdom of Earth, Williams laughed constantly and the actors didn’t know if he were laughing at them or at his own work. Kingdom opened on Broadway as The Seven Descents of Myrtle and closed a month later. His brother Dakin convinced him to enter a hospital in 1969. Williams was put in a psychiatric ward and suffered withdrawal without his pills. He later claimed to have had two heart attacks there.

  He woke up from the Sixties in time to find himself at the center of a curious war. A new play titled Nightride by a man writing under a pseudonym, “Lee Barton,” opened at the end of 1971. It featured a confrontation between an openly gay rock star and an aging gay playwright who has written nothing of value in ten years. The play was produced off-off-Broadway, but it was widely reviewed; at least one reviewer identified the old playwright as Williams. Then “Lee Barton” wrote about Williams for the Times.