But the conclusions he drew from these statistics were even more devastating to traditional prejudices than the numbers themselves:
In view of the data which we now have on the incidence and frequency of the homosexual, and in particular on its co-existence with the heterosexual in the lives of a considerable portion of the male population, it is difficult to maintain the view that psychosexual reactions between individuals of the same sex are rare and therefore abnormal or unnatural, or even that they constitute within themselves evidence of neuroses or even psychoses [emphasis added]. If homosexual activity persists on as large a scale as it does, in the face of the very considerable public sentiment against it and in spite of the severity of the penalties that our Anglo-American culture has placed upon it through the centuries, there seems some reason for believing that such activity would appear in the histories of a much larger portion of the population if there were no social restraints.
This statement was obviously another attempt to encourage tolerance. However, its unsupported speculation that without discrimination, homosexuals might actually increase in number (rather than simply be less unhappy) contained the seeds of a provocative argument. Many opponents of gay rights still use this idea to promote prejudice against homosexuals—to prevent their numbers from multiplying. However, scientific evidence that homosexuality is primarily hereditary has accumulated steadily during the past decade.
Kinsey urged a reconsideration of the treatment of homosexuals because homosexual activity turned out to be so much more common than anyone had believed before he made his estimates:
The judge who is considering the case of the male who has been arrested for homosexual activity should keep in mind that nearly 40 percent of all the other males in the town could be arrested at some time in their lives for similar activity.… It is not a matter of individual hypocrisy which leads officials with homosexual histories to become prosecutors of the homosexual activity in the community. They themselves are the victims of the mores, and the public demand that they protect those mores. As long as there are such gaps between the traditional custom and the actual behavior of the population such inconsistencies will continue to exist.
“Homosexuality was thought to be a very rare phenomenon,” said Evelyn Hooker, who would do some groundbreaking research of her own a few years later. Before Kinsey, “There was nothing in the literature that concerned well-functioning gay males.… Kinsey gave great hope.” Gay people realized for the first time “that they were not a tiny minority but actually a very sizable proportion of the population.”
ALTHOUGH the New York Times would do quite a lot to impede the cause of gay rights over the next three decades, it greeted the Kinsey Report with respect. The sensitive job of reviewing the book fell to Dr. Howard Rusk. A favorite of the Times’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Rusk wrote a regular column for the Sunday paper (and later founded the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine).
Rusk may have been sympathetic to the book because he wasn’t a psychiatrist. Therefore, nothing in it challenged any of the basic tenets of his profession. Rusk wrote that the “end results” of the report “should be healthy. They should bring about a better understanding of some of our emotional problems, and the bases for some of our psychiatric concepts. … It presents facts that indicate the necessity to review some of our legal and moral concepts. It gives new therapeutic tools to the psychiatrist and the practicing physician. It offers a yardstick that will give invaluable aid in the study of our complex social problems” as well as “data that should promote tolerance and understanding.” He also predicted that “after decades of hush-hush,” the new book was certain “to create an explosion.”
Some of the initial criticism of the book was quite mild, but it built steadily through the spring. At a forum of the American Social Hygiene Association in Manhattan in April, Carle Zimmerman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard, suggested that “we have the right to ask the backers of the report what they plan for the future, since they indicate throughout the work that they are dissatisfied with the prevailing sex norms.” Helen Judy Bond, head of the department of home economics at Columbia University’s Teachers College, advocated “a law against doing research dealing exclusively with sex” because “sex is only part of the sum total of the behavior of each human being.”
In June the attacks grew harsher. Henry Van Dusen, head of Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, called Kinsey’s statistics evidence of a “degradation in American morality approximating the worst decadence of the Roman era,” while the president of Princeton compared the report to “the work of small boys writing dirty words on fences.”
But no one was angrier than the psychiatrists, because Kinsey’s conclusions struck at the heart of their notion that all gay men and lesbians were sick. By suggesting that homosexuality alone should not be considered evidence of psychosis or neurosis, Kinsey had implied that the entire psychiatric profession was guilty of massive medical malpractice.
Lawrence Kubie was the prominent Manhattan psychiatrist who six years earlier had expanded the army’s mobilization regulations to include a paragraph on sexual perversions. Now he led the attack on Kinsey’s conclusions. Time contended that Kubie had “stuck a scalpel into the heart” of Kinsey’s whole project by accusing him and his assistants of giving human memory “a precision it does not have: ‘they recognize that we can forget, but not that we can misremember.’ The statistics based on the interviews add up all right … but maybe an ‘accurate recording of inaccurate data.’”
Moss Hart, one of Kubie’s many celebrity patients, dedicated Lady in the Dark his musical about psychoanalysis, to Kubie. The actor James Atcheson was sent to Kubie by Clifton Webb. “He was a celebrity fucker,” said Atcheson of the doctor. Kubie lost interest in the young actor as soon as he implied that his father wasn’t wealthy. “Oh, I don’t think there’s anything very much the matter with you,” the psychiatrist declared. Then Atcheson mentioned that his grandfather was a name partner in one of Manhattan’s most famous law firms. “Kubie turned really brick red and gave me a look of total hatred,” Atcheson remembered. “Because I was onto him. He was also a money snob, you see. And very sinister. But there are people still alive who thought he was God.”
Some of Kubie’s sharpest comments were aimed at Kinsey’s conclusions about gays and lesbians: “The implication that because homosexuality is prevalent we must accept it as ‘normal,’ or as a happy and a healthy way of life, is wholly unwarranted.” This was undoubtedly his conviction, but it was also the inevitable point of view of a man with numerous patients who were paying him large sums to alter their sexual orientation.
“Kubie ruined Tennessee,” said Arthur Laurents. “He really did. Because Frankie Merlo was a wonderful man who held Tennessee together, and Kubie broke them up.” Then Merlo got lung cancer, and Williams returned to him. “But a little late,” said Laurents. “Frankie was a very nice man.” The widow of one of Kubie’s theater patients described the doctor as a “Rasputin type” and a control freak. He even insinuated himself into his patients’ social lives, explaining that out-of-office observations would assist him in deciding the proper course of treatment.
After Moss Hart married Kitty Carlisle, they spent their honeymoon in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where they were both performing in The Man Who Came to Dinner. An old friend who visited them there remembered, “All the so-called men were sitting around the pool, and Moss said, ‘Why don’t we take our suits off?’ I was in analysis at the time, and I thought, ‘This is not right. This is the groom. Something has gone askew here.’ Moss was a very kind man, crippled with an obvious problem.”
At the beginning, Kinsey dismissed the criticism from Kubie and his colleagues. In a speech at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan on June 4,1948, he reiterated that “most of the sexual behavior called abnormal in our particular culture is part and parcel of our inheritance as mammals, and is natural and normal biologically.” But Kin
sey’s work would continue to inspire violent attacks throughout the coming decade.
John D’Emilio points out that the Kinsey Report was important for gay people because it enhanced their sense of belonging to a larger group. “By revealing that millions of Americans exhibited a strong erotic interest in their own sex,” it encouraged everyone still struggling with his own sexual preference to accept his inclinations. In this way, Kinsey gave “an added push at a crucial time to the emergence of an urban gay subculture.”
THE OTHER BOOK published in January 1948 that would help thousands of gay people change the way they thought about themselves was Gore Vidal’s third novel, The City and the Pillar. His book told the story of Jim Willard’s obsessive love for Bob Ford, a childhood friend who makes love with him once when they are teenagers—an experience Jim can never forget.
The novel, written when Vidal was twenty-one, features remarkably modern portraits of Hollywood and Manhattan. A New York party ineludes gay writers, painters, composers, and athletes—“even a member of Congress”—as well as a Hollywood actor with whom Jim has had an affair. “In the old days [the actor] would never have gone to such a party,” Jim notes. “But now he was indifferent, even defiant.”
Another guest at the party mentions that the war “has caused a great change. Inhibitions have broken down. All sorts of young men are trying out all sorts of new things, away from home and familiar taboos.” His companion says, “Everyone is by nature bisexual” and “nothing is ‘right.’ Only denial of instinct is wrong.”
The Hollywood scenes feel equally authentic, probably because Vidal used to hitchhike there during the war from an army hospital in Van Nuys where he was recovering from the rheumatoid arthritis he developed while stationed in the Aleutian Islands. Vidal especially enjoyed hanging out at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. “You’d sit in the commissary, and Lana Turner would sweep by,” he remembered. Meanwhile, his mother was having an affair with Clark Gable. “She thought she was going to marry him too,” Vidal recalled. “Which proved not to be the case. But I saw a lot of Gable then.”
Laurents had a four-year affair with Farley Granger, who starred with John Dall in Rope, the 1948 Hitchcock thriller for which Laurents wrote the screenplay. Dall was also gay, as was a third actor in the film whom Laurents had also dated. “The studios didn’t care what anybody did about anything so long as it was kept private,” said Laurents. “There was wholesale fucking of all kinds in Hollywood then.” During his affair with Granger, Sam Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, asked Laurents to tea. “You know, you’re Farley’s best friend,” she said. “I would like to ask a favor. He takes out Miss Shelley Winters in public. We don’t care about what he does in private. But Miss Winters is too old and too vulgar for him. And if he insists on taking out a girl, could he please take out Ann Blyth?”—who also happened to be under contract to Goldwyn.
Loosely inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder case of 1924, Rope is about two young psychopaths who decide to murder a friend for the fun of it, and it is replete with homosexual overtones. “Hitch wanted Cary Grant and Monty Clift, and they both turned it down,” Laurents remembered. “And he said to me, ‘Well, of course I knew they would because they’re afraid—because of their own sexuality.’ And it was the truth. Hitchcock knew I was living with Farley, and he loved that. He loved what he thought was sexual perverseness.” Later, Laurents remarked, “I don’t think the censors at that time realized that this was about gay people. They didn’t have a clue what was and what wasn’t.”
Laurents remembered the sexual scene in Hollywood right after the war this way: “It didn’t matter whether you were straight or gay or bisexual. If a new attractive person came to town, the other stars felt free to call up and say, ‘Come on over and let’s fuck.’ And they did. They all did. … I remember a New Year’s Eve party at Sam Spiegel’s where you walked in and Jennifer Jones was sitting on David Selznick’s lap, and he was nursing her breast. That’s the only way I can put it. And on one side in the corner was an actor standing up fucking a starlet. And people were saying, ‘Hello, how are you? Have a drink! Oh, what a good party!’ Hollywood then was very sexual. It is not now. Now it’s about grosses. No one can stay in that town and not go downhill.”
BEPORE THE PUBLICATION of The City and the Pillar, Vidal had been acclaimed for his first two novels. But Orville Prescott, the daily critic at the Times, told Vidal’s editor that the subject of this third work disgusted him. “I will not only not review it, but I will never again read a book by Gore Vidal,” Prescott told Nicholas Wreden at E. P. Dutton. Prescott kept that promise for Vidal’s next five books. As a result, Vidal says he was forced to turn to the theater, movies, and television in the coming decades to earn a living. “I was quite aware by my second book that I was going to make a choice,” said Vidal. “And I am a rather short-tempered person and don’t put up with the sort of canting bullshit of Americans very easily. Sooner or later I was going to explode on the subject. I perhaps did it too soon, before my knives were sharp enough. But I did it anyway.” Like the Kinsey Report, The City and the Pillar was a largely nonjudgmental account of the gay experience. And though it was panned by the Sunday New York Times and ignored by many other newspapers, it quickly became a national bestseller. The Times ran just one advertisement for the book; Vidal believes the paper refused to accept any more after it learned the novel’s subject. The ad copy betrayed the ambivalence of his own publisher toward the topic. “A frightening glimpse of the submerged world,” read the headline. It went on to promise, “Never before in American letters has there been such a revealing and frank discussion of the sexually maladjusted, of those of the submerged world which lives beneath the surface of normality. … With sensitive understanding, Gore Vidal deals a powerful blow to hypocrisy and sensationalism in facing an existing social condition.”
Vidal said, “The fact that it was a commercial success kept me going as a writer—at least they kept publishing me. But everything I wrote was denounced or greeted with just silence. While I was getting marvelous reviews in England for the same books that were being ignored or attacked in America.” But he never regretted writing a gay novel so early in his career: “Of course not. I mean I was made for battle.”
Vidal hoped to show “the normality of this particular act,” and his matter-of-fact tone was a dramatic departure for a work of gay fiction. But in one respect, his book was exactly like its predecessors. In its original version, The City and the Pillar ended with a catastrophe. When Bob rebuffs Jim’s effort to repeat their previous lovemaking experience, Jim murders him in his hotel room.
This conventional conclusion aroused the indignation of many gay writers, including Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood, who thought the book—and the public—deserved a less disastrous finale. “You spoiled it with that ending,” Williams told Vidal. “You didn’t know what a good book you had.” Christopher Isherwood agreed. Isherwood was the British novelist whose short stories about Berlin in the thirties became the basis for the musical (in the sixties) and the movie (in the seventies) called Cabaret. He read The City and the Pillar in Lima, Peru, at the end of 1948. He wrote to Vidal to praise the book as “certainly one of the best novels of its kind yet published in English. It isn’t sentimental, and it is extremely frank without trying to be sensational and shocking.” He also predicted it would be “widely discussed and have a big success, well-deserved.”
But then he took Vidal to task, with words that hinted at the awakening of an important new consciousness:
This brings me to your tragic ending: Jim’s murder of Bob. Dramatically and psychologically, I find it entirely plausible. It could have happened, and it gives the story a climax.… What I do question is the moral the reader will draw. This is what homosexuality brings you to, he will say: tragedy, defeat and death. Maybe we’re too hard on these people—maybe we shouldn’t lock them up in prison; but oughtn’t they to be put away in clinics? Such misery is a menace to society.
… Now as a matter of fact, it is quite true that many homosexuals are unhappy; and not merely because of the social pressures under which they live. It is quite true that they are often unfaithful, unstable, unreliable. They are vain and predatory, and they chatter. But there is another side to the picture, which you (and Proust) don’t show. Homosexual relationships can be, and frequently are happy. Men live together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work, just as heterosexuals do. This truth is peculiarly disturbing and shocking even to “liberal” people, because it cuts across their romantic, tragic notion of the homosexual’s fate. Certainly, under the present social setup, a homosexual relationship is more difficult to maintain than a heterosexual one (by the same token, a free-love relationship is more difficult to maintain than a marriage), but doesn’t that merely make it more of a challenge and therefore, in a sense, more humanly worthwhile? The success of such a relationship is revolutionary in the best sense of the word. And, because it demonstrates the power of human affection over fear and prejudice and taboo, it is actually beneficial to society as a whole—as all demonstrations of faith and courage must be: they raise our collective morale.
No one has ever offered a more elegant explanation of why gay liberation would be valuable—and important—for everyone.
II
The Fifties
“In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society.”
—DAVID HALBERSTAM
“Undergraduates seemed uniformly committed to playing parts from a fifties script according to which paternal white men benignly ruled a prosperous country devoid of serious conflict.”
The Gay Metropolis Page 9