“He wasn’t threatened with exposure,” said Arthur Laurents, who was unable to get his passport renewed during this period because of his own former connections with leftist organizations. “It was very simple. I knew him very well at that time. It was the same thing as with Kazan. They wanted movie careers. That was it. He wanted to do The King and I, and he did. Jerry said, ‘It won’t be for years until I know whether I did the right thing.” I said, ‘Oh, I can tell you now. You were a shit.” But I wasn’t so pristine myself. I worked with him afterwards and I knew he’d been an informer.”
When Laurents first arrived in Hollywood after the war, he found it “wildly exciting intellectually: there were really bright people and all the cream of the European refugees, like Thomas Mann.” But after the blacklisting period, most of those people left the movie business for good. “The blacklist destroyed Hollywood,” Laurents said.
James Baldwin described his own homosexuality with frankness and ambivalence in Giovannis Room, the novel he published in 1956. The book came out of “something which tormented and frightened me: the question of my own sexuality,” Baldwin explained many years later. One reason he wrote it was to eliminate the nagging problem that other closeted writers faced in the fifties. Baldwin said the book “simplified” his life because it “meant that I had no secrets. You couldn’t blackmail me. You didn’t tell me, I told you.”
Coming out of the closet gave Baldwin the freedom that thousands of his contemporaries would not experience until they emulated him two, three, or four decades later. Of course, thousands of others would never emulate him at all.
“It’s only the twentieth century which is obsessed with the details of somebody’s sex life,” Baldwin said on another occasion. “I don’t think the details make any difference. Love comes in very strange packages. I love a few men and I love a few women. I suppose it’s saved my life.”
Alfred A. Knopf had published Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953. A semiautobiographical account of a poor boy growing up in Harlem during the 1930s, the book was a critical success. “I’d been a boy preacher for three years,” said Baldwin. “That is what turned me into a writer really.… My father frightened me so badly I had to fight him so hard, nobody has ever frightened me since.”
But when he submitted Giovanni’s Room a couple of years after his first big success, Knopf rejected it. “I guess they were scared,” said William Cole, who was Knopf’s publicity director—and the first person to bring Baldwin to the publisher’s attention. “Homosexuality wasn’t on the books in those days and they turned it down,” Cole recalled. When he learned the young author’s second novel had been rejected, Cole was “horrified.”
BELIEVING THAT HOMOSEXUALS in the federal government could become a potent new campaign issue, right-wing Republicans greeted the State Department’s disclosures gleefully. John O’Donnell, a rabid right-winger, wrote in his syndicated column that the “primary issue” was that “the foreign policy of the United States, even before World War II, was dominated by an all-powerful, supersecret inner circle of highly-educated, socially-highly-placed sexual misfits in the State Department, all easy to blackmail, all susceptible to blandishments by homosexuals in foreign nations.”
O’Donnell also reported that of the first 2,500 letters McCarthy received in response to his campaign against the State Department, “a preliminary sampling of the mail shows that only one out of four of the writers is excited about the red infiltration into the higher branches of the government; the other three are expressing their shocked indignation at the evidence of sex depravity.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Guy Gabrielson mailed a newsletter to seven thousand party workers to alert them to the new “homosexual angle” in Washington. “Sexual perverts … have infiltrated our government in recent years,” wrote Gabrielson, and they were “perhaps as dangerous as actual communists.” He said the Republican party had a special responsibility to spread the news because “decency” constrained the media from “adequately presenting the facts.” This occasion was the first of many over the next fifty years when the Republican party would try to exploit anti-gay prejudice to win votes on election day.
Senator Kenneth Wherry, a Nebraska Republican, issued the first of two Senate reports on the “pervert problem.” He told Max Lerner, “You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.… There should be no people of that type working in any position in the government.”
JOE MCCARTHY HIMSELF never did much to exploit the gay issue, perhaps because of the swirling rumors about the Wisconsin senator’s own bisexuality. On January 14,1952, Drew Pearson, the liberal investigative columnist, made the following entry in his diary:
[Maryland Democratic Senator] Tydings has an amazing letter which a young army It. wrote to Senator Bill Benton of Connecticut telling how McCarthy performed an act of sodomy on him after picking him up in the Wardman Park Bar. The letter was sent to Benton about January 1, but two weeks have gone by and apparently nothing has been done. Tydings and I, knowing how McCarthy operates when he knows a witness is against him, thought we had better interview the It. immediately. So Tydings got Benton on the phone in New York. Benton was evasive and appears to have done little. Therefore, Tydings thought I should arrange for Jack [Anderson] to go to New York.
However when I called Benton as a precautionary measure, he told me that the White House had stepped in and that the It. was being handled by the FBI. I am a little skeptical as to how the FBI interviews certain witnesses, especially with James Mclnerny, head of the Justice Department Criminal division, playing cozy with McCarthy for the last two years.
Two days later, Pearson wrote in his diary, “This is the third report on McCarthy’s homosexual activity,” but when the FBI interviewed the young lieutenant in New York, he denied writing the letter to Tydings, and “claimed it was planted by another homo who was jealous.”
Like Hoover, McCarthy was never publicly accused of being gay during his own lifetime. But Lerner pointed out in the summer of 1950 that McCarthy seemed uncertain about how to handle the homosexual issue. “The portrait of the Wisconsin Senator as a tortured Hamlet is novel enough to stir some reflections about what may have caused his paralysis of action in the face of a sure-fire issue.… The answer is when you try to use the twisted sex issue as a weapon for twisted political purposes, there is a danger of a boomerang.”
In one of his frequent attempts to be “one of the boys” with reporters who covered him, McCarthy once remarked, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be a communist or a cocksucker.” Then the senator roared with laughter. To journalists like Pearson that must have sounded like a bizarre double entendre.
Ben Bradlee believed “there was a lot of time spent investigating” the possibility that McCarthy was gay, but “nobody ever came dose to proving it. What a wonderful solution to this problem it would have been.” McCarthy’s appointment of Roy Cohn as his chief counsel rekindled all the private speculation about the senator’s sexuality, especially after Cohn threatened to “wreck the Army” if it failed to give special treatment to his close friend David Schine. In a speech on the Senate floor, Ralph Flanders, a Vermont Republican and McCarthy’s enemy, said the Army-McCarthy hearings needed to get to the “real heart” of the matter—the “mystery concerning the personal relationships of the army private, the staff assistant, and the senator.” And when Cohn himself became a witness before the committee, Arkansas Democrat John McClellan asked him if he had “any special interest in Mr. Schine.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘special interest,’” Cohn replied. “He’s a friend of mine.”
But the transfixing moment for millions of American television viewers occurred when the army’s counsel, Jose
ph Welch, interrogated former FBI agent James Juliana about a photograph that had been cropped to imply that Schine was close enough to Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens to be alone with him at an air force base. The altered picture was supposed to disprove the idea that Cohn and Schine might want to blackmail the army. Welch discovered that the original photo had been “shamefully cut down” to eliminate the other men near Schine and Stevens, thereby creating an unwarranted impression of closeness between them. “Did you think this came from a pixie?” Welch demanded of Juliana. “Where did you think that this picture I hold in my hand came from?”
“I have no idea,” Juliana replied. Then McCarthy interrupted, “Will counsel for my benefit define—I think he might well be an expert on it—what a pixie is?”
“Yes.” said Welch.” “I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.… Have I enlightened you?”
The audience in the hearing room exploded with laughter. McCarthy managed to smile for the live cameras, but Cohn was grim-faced. As the historian Neil Miller pointed out, Cohn had become “an easy target for the kind of gay baiting he himself had practiced,” and he soon resigned and returned to New York to practice law. Inspired by Cohn’s devotion to Schine, Lillian Hellman referred to Cohn, Schine, and McCarthy as “Bonnie, Bonnie and Clyde.”
Cohn was a homosexual, and he became quite promiscuous, but he always denied that he was gay, even after he began to surround himself with a coterie of young men in public. His lifelong cultivation of a tough-guy image may have been partly motivated by his desire to disguise his sexuality from others—and perhaps, on some level, even from himself.
“Anybody who knows me, and knows anything about me or who knows the way my mind works or knows the way I function … would have an awfully hard time reconciling that with any kind of homosexuality,” Cohn told the reporter Ken Auletta. “Every facet of my personality, of my, ah, aggressiveness, of my toughness, of everything along those lines is just totally, I suppose, incompatible with anything like that.”
Years after Cohn had worked for McCarthy, Gore Vidal enraged Cohn when they appeared together on a New York television program. Vidal remembered saying, “The only thing I really found attractive about McCarthy was of course the fact that he was homosexual—and was extremely tolerant of having them around him.” Cohn’s hands started to twitch, and he said, “’Well, you would, of course.’ And I said, ‘I am sure you would too.’”
Then Vidal asked, “’How is Mr. Schine?’
“And [Cohn] said, ‘He’s all right. He’s out in California.’
Vidal said, ‘“We regarded the two of you as the Damon and Pythias of the homosexual movement.’ Well, by then he was shaking all over in a ghastly way.”
Despite Cohn’s apparent crush on Schine, there is no evidence that they had a sexual relationship. “In Schine’s case, he denied it,” said “Bill Gillman” (a pseudonym), a young lawyer who saw Cohn frequently during the last ten years of his life. On the other hand, Cohn refused to answer Gillman when he asked about the sexuality of Hoover, or Cohn’s close friend Cardinal Spellman.
Ethan Geto, a gay activist and Democratic political operative in New York City, remembered the televised confrontation between Vidal and Cohn as one of those “thrilling moments.” As Geto remembered it, Vidal seemed about to ask his adversary directly if he was gay, and Cohn fled from the show during a break. “Gore Vidal was great,” said Geto. “Roy Cohn, who had dominated every debate he was ever in, was so cowed, so shaken, and so rattled. He turned ashen!”
In the 1970s, Geto was having dinner with Doug Ireland, a New York journalist, at Uncle Charlie’s, a popular gay restaurant on Third Avenue. When Ireland spotted Cohn at a nearby table, surrounded by attractive young men, he went over to speak to him.
“Roy, it’s great to see you!” said Ireland. “Especially here in a gay restaurant. It shows you’re really surfacing!”
And Cohn jumped up from the table and said, “This is a gay restaurant?”
Bill Gillman said Cohn “did not acquire a coterie of effeminate men around him. The guys that hung out with him were a bunch of jocks, frankly, and they spent more time watching football. I doubt that they ever went to a fashion show. He didn’t think of himself as gay. He thought a gay person at that time was a hairdresser or a poodle walker. It reminds me of the retired Wall Street lawyer down in North Carolina who says, ‘Hell, I’m not gay, I just like to suck cock. You and all your fancy friends that go to decorating shows—now that’s gay!’
“Being gay was only one part of Roy’s life,” Gillman continued. “I certainly don’t think it was the most important thing. He was probably gay the hour before he went to bed. The rest of the time he was many, many other things. He was a lawyer, an employer, a son, a nephew, a friend. He was a very busy man.”
“Roy was a lot of different people in one,” said Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx political leader who became one of Cohn’s law partners in 1978.* “Roy was whatever the situation called for. He could sit with royalty. And he could sit with gangsters. And everybody was comfortable with him. Roy did all the categories.”
Friedman questioned the idea that Cohn needed to be powerful to compensate for his sexual orientation. “You’re presupposing that Roy grew up gay,” said Friedman. “If I’m right, he was a tough guy before he was gay—because we know he was a tough guy when he was a kid. I have a hunch he was a mean SOB tough guy before he knew he was gay. Because when do you become aware that you’re gay? I think he would be in the category of being a late bloomer. I’m guessing. When you were born in the late twenties or early thirties, which is my generation—I was born in thirty-six—it was a disgrace to be gay, There’s something wrong with you. You’re an embarrassment to your family—you’re a ‘sissy,’ you’re a ‘fairy’, you’re a ‘pansy.’ Whatever the appropriate words were of that era.
“I think he wanted to be powerful from the very beginning because he had a father who he considered to be influential, but not strong, and he had a mother who was strong, but without influence,” Friedman continued. “And he thought he could be as good or as powerful or as influential as they were, plus some. He enjoyed being sought after; being feared, respected. I think he saw what it meant to ‘make’ a judge. He saw what it meant to be able to use a judge, to be able to influence people’s lives, to control people’s property. To dictate things that happened—laws that would be passed. Did he need that to make up for some defect which he believed that he was impaired with? We don’t know that, because we didn’t have the luxury of growing up with him.”
AT THE END of 1950, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations issued a lengthy report on the “pervert problem.” These were some of its conclusions:
Homosexuals and other sex perverts are not proper persons to be employed in government for two reasons. First they are generally unsuitable, and second, they constitute security risks. Aside from the criminality and immorality involved in sex perversion such behavior is so contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engage in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society generally.…
Law enforcement officers have informed the subcommittee that there are gangs of blackmailers who make a regular practice of preying upon the homosexual. These blackmailers often impersonate police officers in carrying out their blackmail schemes.… There is an abundance of evidence to sustain the conclusion that indulgence in acts of sex perversion weakens the moral fiber of an individual to a degree that he is not suitable for a position of responsibility. … Eminent psychiatrists have informed the subcommittee that the homosexual is likely to seek his own kind because the pressures of society are such that he feels uncomfortable unless he is with his own kind. Due to this situation the homosexual tends to surround himself with other homosexuals, not only in his social, but in his business life. Under these circumstances if a homosexual attains a position in government where he can influence the hiring of personnel it is almost
inevitable that he will attempt to place other homosexuals in government jobs.
The committee noted approvingly that the Civil Service Commission had stepped up its efforts against homosexuals, and acted in 382 “sex perversion” cases during the previous seven months versus a total of only 192 during the three years before that. The senators also berated the Washington, D.C., Police Department for failing to turn over automatically the names of the 457 government employees who had been arrested in “perversion cases” during the previous four years. And it noted that Washington’s municipal judges had promised to halt the “slipshod practice” under which most homosexuals were booked on charges of disorderly conduct, and then allowed to make “forfeitures of small cash,” instead of being brought to trial.
News of this homosexual scourge was spread across the nation by Lee Mortimer, a columnist for Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, who wrote a series of Confidential books that combined Kinsey’s statistics with the Senate’s conclusions. “Homosexuality became an epidemic infecting the nation,” wrote the historian John D’Emilio. Mortimer said “10,000 faggots” had avoided detection by the FBI and that the government was “honeycombed in high places with people you wouldn’t let in your garbage-wagons.”
Most damaging of all to gay government employees was a new executive order signed by President Eisenhower shortly after his inauguration in 1953. For the first time, “sexual perversion” was listed as sufficient and necessary ground for disbarment from federal jobs. During the next sixteen months, at least 640 homosexuals were removed from government employment. That number probably understates the real figure because many were allowed to resign without being forced to disclose their sexuality.
The fear fostered by congressional investigators created a hideous rivalry among the executive departments. Federal agencies competed with one another to prove which one was the most vigilant in its campaign to root out “perverts” and subversives. In 1954 The New York Times actually published a “U.S. Agency Box Score on the ‘Security Risks.’” It showed 1,057 “security” dismissals from seven agencies in 1953, as well as 40 fired as “alleged loyalty risks.” Every year in the early fifties, the State Department fired more than twice as many homosexuals as it did suspected communists. During the three and a half years ending in July 1953, 381 employees at State lost their jobs because they were gay, compared with 150 who were considered security risks for other reasons.
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