The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  A1943 policy published by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson provided an exception for a soldier who had a homosexual experience but was not a “confirmed pervert.”* After psychiatric examination and if “he otherwise possesses a salvage value,” this type of offender was to be reclaimed and returned to duty after “appropriate disciplinary action.” But periodic witch-hunts continued, and gay soldiers were routinely interrogated to obtain the names of anyone else they believed was gay.

  In 1944 a new directive required hospitalization for suspected homosexuals. And it was no longer necessary to commit sodomy to be targeted as an undesirable. As Bérubé noted, “Now merely being homosexual or having such ‘tendencies’ could entrap both men and women, label them as sick, and remove them from the service.” A psychiatrist interviewed each suspect, and a Red Cross worker wrote up his life history and contacted his family. If he refused a dishonourable discharge, he could be court-martialed and imprisoned.

  Stanley Posthorn met a man who had been hospitalized for six months because he had “gone down” on a private—“and it was very important to him to get the boy off. The boy was straight, very beautiful, and very amenable to being seduced. I don’t think he felt remorse about what he had done. They decided not to court-martial” the man who had seduced the private. “But he got a dishonorable discharge.”

  All those who received a dishonorable discharge paid a huge price when the war was over, because they were automatically denied the lavish benefits of the GI Bill, which financed the education and subsidized the mortgages of millions of other veterans. However, at least in the case of Posthorn’s friend in the hospital, his dishonorable discharge had no effect at all on his employment prospects.

  “Nobody asked to see it,” said Posthorn, who received an honorable discharge. “Nobody asked him and nobody ever asked me. But it was an ugly thing to have done to you.”

  When the army moved toward a policy of hospitalization for suspected homosexuals, it created an unprecedented opportunity for psychiatrists to study large numbers of gay men in one place. Many military psychiatrists were very surprised to discover that many gay men saw themselves as part of a superior elite—just as Otis Bigelow did—and rejected the idea that they were degenerates.

  One of the oddest projects was aimed at developing a new method to detect homosexuals. It involved inserting tongue depressors into the throats of 1,404 psychiatric patients. Researchers found that 89 percent of those who were diagnosed as sexual psychopaths “and who had ‘admitted fellatio’ did not show a ‘gag reflex’ due to ‘the repeated control of the reflex during the act of fellatio.’” The study couldn’t explain why one-third of the drug addicts in the study also showed no gag reflex.

  Although psychiatrists believed they were improving the plight of gay soldiers by lobbying for hospitalization rather than imprisonment, their efforts would have a decidedly negative effect on gay life in America over the next three decades. Practically everything psychiatrists urged the army to do—“forced hospitalization, mandatory psychiatric diagnoses, discharge as sexual psychopaths, and the protective sympathy of psychiatrists”—reinforced the notion that homosexuals were sick.

  A handful of psychiatrists who studied the gay experience in the armed forces reached remarkably enlightened conclusions. But this minority view received very little publicity, and negligible support from colleagues.

  Immediately after the war, Clements Fry and Edna Rostow examined the records of 183 servicemen. These Yale researchers concluded that the military had rarely enforced its official discharge policy and permitted most gay personnel to remain in the army and navy.

  Inside, most soldiers kept their sexual behavior secret. They had performed just as well as heterosexuals “in various military jobs,” including combat. The researchers also found no reason to believe that homosexuality alone “would make a man a poor military risk.… Homosexuals should be judged first as individuals, and not as a class.” Their report even suggested that military officials should “examine the question as to whether the military service should be interested in homosexuality as such, or only in the individual’s ability to perform his duties and adjust to military life.”

  This study was the first in a Pentagon series that contradicted the military’s official prejudice. A Defense Department committee in 1952 and the Navy’s Crittenden Board in 1957 both rejected the idea that gays represented exceptional security risks. But like the report of Fry and Rostow, these studies and nearly all the others devoted to homosexuals in the military were either suppressed or destroyed. In 1977, the army announced that its files revealed “no evidence of special studies pertaining to homosexuals,” and the navy couldn’t locate any either.

  In an unusual article, Newsweek reported in 1947 that the typical gay serviceman “topped the average soldier in intelligence, educaticin and rating.… As a whole, these men were law-abiding and hard-working. In spite of nervous, unstable and often hysterical temperaments, they performed admirably as office workers. Many tried to be good soldiers.” The Yale report might have been the source of this information, but it wasn’t credited in the piece.

  A study conducted in 1989 by the Defense Department’s Personnel Security Research and Education Center concluded that sexuality “is unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left- or right-handed.” It too was suppressed until 1989, when Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, the first openly gay man in Congress, made it public. An additional PERSEREC report concluded that personnel discharged because they were gay were better qualified and had fewer personal problems than the typical heterosexual in the military.

  WHEN THE WAR finally ended in Europe in the spring of 1945, Stephen Reynolds was stationed in Germany. “It was the most depressing day on earth,” he remembered. “I don’t know why. I was on a run. I was with someone in the ambulance. We were in Bavaria, and we stopped by the road for tea. And an American truck came roaring around the corner, and he said, ‘The war is over.’ We said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘The war is over.’

  “So we got in the car. My brother had been killed in the war. And there was no excitement. If we’d been in a city, there would have been an orgy. But we were out in the field in some ghastly place. And it just didn’t mean anything. Nobody celebrated. There was no way to celebrate.”

  But a few months later, when Japan surrendered after the United States dropped the second atomic bomb in August, Reynolds was back in Manhattan. And there he witnessed pandemonium: “That was a huge celebration. I was very young then. I was invited to the Colony for supper. It was the first time I’d ever been there. After that I went there a lot—it was the most marvelous restaurant in New York City. And the Windsors were there—they had a lot to celebrate. That was a wild night. There was great jubilation.”

  IN THE LATE 1940S, thousands of lesbian and gay soldiers who had streamed through New York City on their way to Europe settled in Manhattan, bolstering what was already the largest gay community in America. In 1945, they founded the Veterans Benevolent Association, one of the first gay organizations ever incorporated in New York State.

  The group met monthly and then twice a month on the fourth floor of a building on Houston Street near Second Avenue. Jules Elphant attended its meetings right from the start, when he was twenty-two. “A lot of it was uncomfortable because in those days we just didn’t talk about being gay,” Elphant remembered. “Of course in those days we weren’t ‘gay.’ I think we were just ‘queer.’ Or ‘sissies.’ Sissy was the word that took care of everything, but so many of us were so far from being sissies. I always found myself in a macho-type way.”

  The association’s dances attracted nearly two hundred men. The dances also attracted a couple of the veterans’ wives, including the woman married to James Lang, who founded the association and did most of the work that kept it together until 1954. “The women were all straight, but they knew their husbands were gay and they just went along with the husbands,” said Elphant.

  �
�Once we dressed in bathing suits,” he continued. “Everyone was introduced as Miss So-and-So. I was very uncomfortable with that. But I whipped up my own red, white, and blue costume—I was Miss Patriot. And I met a lot of interesting people because of that—‘Oh, you’ve got such powerful legs.’ This was one of the first socials I went to, and it brought me out. Suddenly I made more friends that way.

  “Sex was one of the things of course that made us part of the group. But sex was not the basic reason for it. It was social—they wanted to be together with people [like themselves] so they could relax more.” All the members were white, with lots of Jews, Irishmen, and Italians. And there were plenty of couples. “We also had a ‘Stitch and Bitch gang’—for sewing and gossiping. I was doing beaded fruit. I’ve been doing it for years. It’s expensive, but it’s wonderful therapy.

  “We had actual business meetings of the veterans association. We discussed general subjects and we had speakers—and a legal adviser. Occasionally someone was having problems in their job and we would discuss what we could do about it. Of course, the best thing you could do was keep your mouth shut. And try to stay out of problems. That was the easiest way in those days. When we were at our jobs, we had to be careful. I had to be careful. I didn’t show any signs of pansyism or anything like that. But other people who do have a little more feminism within themselves did have problems.”

  Elphant liked the association’s big gatherings because “you would get to meet two or three that you’d become interested in.… That’s how I met my lover in 1946. When I first joined, he was one of the young people at a house party. He was seventeen, and he was interested in me and I didn’t even know it. I was so shy about things. And somebody had to come over and tell me, ‘Do you know Richard is interested in you?’ And so I got friendly with Richard. We were inseparable after that for quite a while. On and off, we were together thirty-four years. But we never lived together.”

  IN 1947, AMERICA was shocked by a contradiction of one of its most strongly held prejudices—the idea that great athletes could never be homosexuals. William “Big Bill” Tilden was a national hero, a larger-than-life tennis player who had been the American champion from 1920 to 1925 and a three-time winner at Wimbledon. Along with Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Johnny Weissmuller, Jack Dempsey and Bobby Jones, he was one of the giants of the golden era of American sports.

  But at the age of fifty-three Tilden was sentenced to five years probation in Los Angeles after pleading guilty to a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a fourteen-year-old boy. “You have been the idol of youngsters all over the world,” said the sentencing judge. “It has been a great shock to sports fans to read about your troubles.” Later his probation was revoked when the police found him with a seventeen-year-old boy, and Tilden was forced to serve seven and a half months in jail.

  TWO BOOKS PUBLISHED at the beginning of 1948—a short novel and a giant scientific treatise—sparked a huge debate about sex in America. Both of them were controversial partly because they were so nonjudgmental. Precisely because each volume emphasized the sheer ordinariness of being gay, in the coming decades they would play a crucial role in a very long campaign to convince Americans that homosexuality wasn’t really an illness at all.

  The longer and more important book did more to promote sexual liberation in general and gay liberation in particular than anything previously published between hard covers. Because it was a dense scientific study, the publisher ordered an initial printing of only 5,000 copies. But just weeks after it first reached bookstores, there were an amazing 185,000 copies in print

  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Charles Kinsey and his associates Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, was an 804-page tome, nine years in the making, which drew its conclusions from detailed interviews with twelve thousand Americans. No one had ever seen anything like it before. It was crammed with tables and graphs, and its statistics startled nearly everyone, including its authors. The accuracy of those numbers has been debated continuously ever since they were first published. But while the book’s estimates about the prevalence of different kinds of sexual behavior captured most of the headlines, over the long term those numbers were much less important than the authors’ radical approach to their subject.

  What made Kinsey’s book revolutionary was its insistence that scientists had to divorce their judgments about sexuality from the “religious background” of the culture that had dominated “patterns of sexual behavior” for many centuries. “Ancient religious codes are still the prime source of the attitudes, the idea, the ideals, and the rationalizations by which most individuals pattern their sexual lives,” Kinsey declared.

  In his introduction, Dr. Alan Gregg wrote that “no aspect of human biology in our current civilization stands in more need of scientific knowledge and courageous humility than that of sex. … As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.”

  Because he adopted a disinterested tone and divorced all of his judgments from the traditional Judeo-Christian influences, Kinsey helped Americans to think about sex in a completely different way. “To each individual, the significance of any particular type of sexual activity depends very largely upon his previous experience,” the fifty-three-year-old zoologist explained.

  Ultimately, certain activities may seem to him to be the only things that have value, that are right, that are socially acceptable; and all departures from his own particular pattern may seem to him to be enormous abnormalities. But the scientific data which are accumulating make it appear that if circumstances be propitious, most individuals might have become conditioned in any direction, even into activities which they now consider quite unacceptable.… There is an abundance of evidence that most human sexual activities would become comprehensible to most individuals, if they could know the background of each other individual’s behavior.

  The questionnaire about homosexual activity was incredibly detailed, posing more than 120 queries, ranging from “frequency” and “age preferences” (and “reasons for age preferences”) to “positions involved (including 69)” and “blackmail, active and passive.” Kinsey’s most surprising conclusion was that “at least 37 percent of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age.” He described himself as “totally unprepared to find such incidence data,” but he added that the data about homosexual activity had been “more or less the same” in big cities and small towns all across the country.

  Kinsey had been a professor of zoology since 1920 and director of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University since 1942. He conducted hundreds of the interviews himself, and many of his subjects remembered him as a charismatic figure. Kinsey interviewed Otis Bigelow over several days at the Pennsylvania Hotel in Manhattan.

  “You started out shy, but after fifteen minutes you could tell him anything” Bigelow remembered. “He was a father—God the father figure. If you told him you had licked someone’s toes, he was fascinated to find out about it. And he was nonjudgmental. He wouldn’t have been able to get things out of people unless he was the person that he was.” After spending a couple of days with Kinsey, Bigelow decided that if the doctor had asked him to jump out of the window so he could observe his reactions going down, “I probably would have. He was a godfather in a good way. Somebody that you would trust with your life—and you did, of course, in those days.”

  Kinsey was fascinated with Bigelow because he had kept a list of all the men he had slept with. “I think it was around five hundred. I would say, ‘That one was in September in the 34th Street-Lexington Avenue John.’ That’s what one did in those days—you’d have four or five in an hour, if you were attractive and had some nerve.”

  Paul Cadmus, who also met Kins
ey in the late forties, remembered him as “gentle and quiet—and a little bit formidable because he was so terribly serious. One didn’t think of him as laughing or smiling very much. He took homosexuality just as calmly as he did his work with wasps. He interviewed me about my sex life—how many orgasms, how big it was, measure it before and after. He interviewed your friend at the same time. He interviewed Jerry French at more or less the same time to see what he had to say about our relationship.” Cadmus believed Kinsey was gay, but never suspected that the scientist had acted on that impulse, so the painter arranged for two friends to give the researcher a demonstration of gay lovemaking. “I think he viewed it probably very calmly,” Cadmus said. “We had a date with him and these two friends after the little exhibition, and he came to dinner at our house.” After dinner, Kinsey suddenly felt ill. “We had to put him in a hot bath and give him cognac. But he was all right after that. I don’t think he stayed very late after dinner.”

  In the report, Kinsey introduced his famous zero-to-six scale (completely heterosexual-to-completely homosexual), which left most people somewhere in between. Thirty-seven percent of the men interviewed for his study had reached orgasm with another man at least once after puberty. Kinsey estimated that twenty-five percent of the male population had “more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55,” and ten percent were “more or less exclusively homosexual.” Four percent were “exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, after the onset of adolescence.”