JOSEPH ALSOP, the scion of a prominent Connecticut Yankee family and a distant relative of the Roosevelts, was one of the few known victims of a Soviet attempt to compromise a prominent American homosexual. A famous Washington newspaperman for almost fifty years, Alsop spent his entire life in the closet. But his humiliation in the Soviet Union was well known to a number of Washington insiders.
During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1957, Alsop was seduced by a male agent of the KGB, with whom he had sex in his hotel room. Because American visitors to Moscow were routinely warned about Russian attempts to entrap important tourists of all persuasions, Alsop’s blunder was surprising.* Perhaps it resulted from his well-known weakness for copious amounts of fine wine.
But Alsop’s behavior contradicted the popular notion that homosexuals were easier to blackmail than heterosexuals. Instead of succumbing to the Soviet attempt to intimidate him, he immediately reported the incident to his editors and to the Central Intelligence Agency. His editors declined his offer to stop writing his column. The CIA made him write a detailed report about the incident, and then forwarded a copy to Hoover at the FBI. But neither his editors nor the agency leaked the incident to Alsop’s enemies right away, and the columnist never altered the anti-Soviet slant of his columns.
For the rest of Alsop’s life, the Washington establishment behaved very much as it did immediately after Sumner Welles tried to seduce a railroad porter. It kept the columnist’s transgression a secret from the public while selectively using it against him in private.
In 1959, Alsop attacked President Eisenhower for permitting a nuclear “missile gap” to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union. Though this charge was used with considerable success by John Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign, like many of Alsop’s speculations about the communist menace, it was eventually proved to be completely false.
Eisenhower’s aides were furious about Alsop’s accusation. The president’s press secretary, James Hagerty, told one of the columnist’s friends on the New York Herald Tribune that the administration was planning to lift Alsop’s White House press pass. “The guy’s a pansy,” said Hagerty. “The FBI knows all about it.”
A memorandum written by Hoover revealed that Eisenhower’s attorney general, William Rogers—who later served as Richard Nixon’s secretary of state—had visited the FBI director to discuss the Alsop matter. “The Attorney General… commented that he was going to see that certain individuals were aware of Alsop’s propensities … but he would not take the responsibility for such information going any further,” Hoover wrote in a memorandum to the file. Thirty-six years later, Rogers refused to comment on his meeting with Hoover.
In 1961, Alsop married Susan Mary Patten. A year later, a KGB agent defected to the United States and told the CIA that the Soviets “had the goods” on Alsop. But the CIA knew that Alsop was a good friend of President Kennedy, so it removed this item from its report about the KGB man. John and Robert Kennedy both knew about the blackmail attempt anyway. And they were happy to go on protecting their friend from any public embarrassment.
In 1970, the Russians renewed their campaign against Alsop. They sent pictures of the incriminating incident to two writers they considered Alsop’s enemies—the humorist Art Buchwald and the columnist Charles Bartlett. Buchwald was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, while Alsop was one of its strongest supporters. An unsigned note accompanying the pictures asserted that they had been taken by the Israelis, and that was why Alsop was such a strong supporter of the Jewish state.
Fifteen years later, Buchwald told a Washington Post reporter that he had torn the pictures up as soon as he received them. “I don’t give a damn what a guy’s sexual proclivities are,” said the columnist, “as long as they don’t involve me.” Bartlett mailed his copies to Alsop, with a note reading, “I thought you should have these. I’m not signing this because I don’t want it to be an embarrassment to us when we meet.” A couple of days later, Alsop asked Bartlett if he had sent him the pictures. After Bartlett confirmed Alsop’s suspicion, Alsop never mentioned the subject again.
Alsop did consider a public confession about the incident, to make any future blackmail attempt impossible. But a friend talked him out of the idea, saying that it would embarrass his wife and stepchildren.* Alsop separated from his wife in 1972, and toward the end of his life he became more open about his homosexuality with some of his younger friends. But no one ever wrote about his proclivities until after his death in 1989.
ALMOST EVERY New York City newspaper reference to lesbians and gay men in the fifties was connected to a crime. “Perverts Called Government Peril,” “Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked,” and “Perversion Cited in Security Unit”: these were all headlines in The New York Times.
A feature story in Coronet in September 1950 reported that “psychiatric case histories bear eloquent testimony to the thousands of warped lives that follow in the wake of associations with perverts.… Some male sex deviants do not stop with infecting their often-innocent partners: they descend through perversions to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism and even murder. Once a man assumes the role of homosexual, he often throws off all moral restraints.”
Most local newspaper stories on this subject concerned periodic cleanups of gay bars and sweeps of the streets of Times Square. “23 More Undesirables Are Seized in Times Square as Round-Up Spreads” was the headline over a four-column-wide picture on the front page of the Times one Sunday during the summer of 1954. It showed the back sides of five identically clad young men leaning against the booking table at the West 47th Street station house. Each one wore a black T-shirt, blue jeans turned up three inches at the bottom, sneakers, and “wide leather motorcycle belts, ornamented with artificial, glittering ‘gems’”—a uniform, the article reported, that had “become almost standard.”
The arrests were part of “the spreading campaign to rid the city of unsavory individuals on its streets.” With the subtlety typical of the times, Deputy Chief Inspector James B. Leggett explained that the raids were necessary because “the rise of organized young hoodlums and the patent increase of homosexuals on the city’s streets had brought a wave of rape, muggings and other crimes of violence often culminating in murder.”
Most of those arrested pled guilty to disorderly conduct and paid $2 fines. “One of the immediate results of the police campaign appeared to be that many of the bars, usual hangouts of the undesirable persons, were oddly deserted last night in contrast to the normal Saturday crowds,” the Times reported. At the end of the decade, Lee Mortimer closed several gay bars in Manhattan by repeatedly listing them in his column in the Daily Mirror and taunting the police into raiding them.
There was a thriving hustler scene on the streets surrounding Times Square in the fifties and early sixties. “In those days it wasn’t as scummy,” remembered “Sam Baron” (a pseudonym), a young journalist who had grown up in the Bronx and first discovered the wiles of 42d Street in the mid-fifties. “There was a safer feeling about it. The boys were teenagers on into their twenties, a mix of whites and some Puerto Ricans. Not a lot of blacks. They cost $5; $10 was expensive. The thing that astonished me was, I couldn’t believe that these beautiful, magnificent specimens of manly beauty would be so pliable and agreeable in bed.”
“The hustlers were mostly at the Silver Dollar bars,” Jack Dowling recalled. “There was one on Sixth Avenue and 43d Street that had a wonderful selection of hustlers and gay guys, gay older men looking for hustlers, whores, sailors—sort of like the mood of the story ‘Tralala’ in Last Exit to Brooklyn. It was also known that if you wanted to get picked up or pick somebody up and it involved money, you went to the Astor Bar, but you went in a suit and tie. If the hustler wanted some decent money and dinner, he went to the Astor Bar. On the street $10 was a lot, but not in a bar.”
GAY LIFE in New York City in the 1950s was by turns oppressive and exhilarating, a world of persecution
and vast possibilities. Plainclothesmen tried to entrap men, even inside gay bars in Manhattan, and uniformed officers harassed women dressed like men because women were legally required to wear at least one article of women’s clothing whenever they appeared in public. Knowingly serving a drink to a gay person automatically made a bar disorderly under state law, and it was illegal for two men to be on a dance floor together without a woman present.
Blackmail of the closeted was a constant danger, and in some cases criminals impersonated corrupt policemen to extort money from the frightened. A man robbed by someone he had brought home for sex never reported such an incident to the police. And gay murder victims were among the police department’s lowest priorities. Joe Schoener, an Associated Press reporter at police headquarters during the fifties, recalled how the New York press treated gay murders. “When a dead man was found murdered inside an apartment, we would all go to the scene to wait for the coroner” Schoener remembered. “Then we would wait for him to examine the victim. If the coroner came out, and said, ‘Loose sphincter,’ that meant the victim was gay. Then we would all leave—because that meant there was no story.”
FROLICKING IN THE FIFTIES in Central Park and on the gay beach at Riis Park, Sandy Kern was an attractive young woman with a shy smile, a compact body, thick black hair, and powerful legs. But she never thought of herself as good-looking: “I always felt ugly. I never felt gorgeous at all.” Forty years on, her passionate account of the outlandish escapades of her youth was tempered by a wry amusement at the absurdity of life.
Sandy Kern was not her real name; she had it legally changed because she despised her father. She chose “Sandy” because it sounded androgynous—so she could use it to try to pass as a man. “Kern” was in honor of Jerome, one of her musical idols. Kern’s lawyer for the name change was Pauli Murray, an African American activist who first challenged segregation on an interstate bus in 1940. When Kern met her, Murray was just out of law school. In the fifties, Murray was a lawyer at the famous Manhattan firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. In 1977, after her graduation from the General Theological Seminary in New York City, she became the first American black woman to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. To the public, Murray was a well-known civil rights activist. To Kern, she was “the first black lesbian lawyer that ever was.”
In 1947 Kern graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and got a job working in the garment district for $30 a week. Like many other young New York Jews of this era, her main political concern was equality for black people. “I felt sorry for them. I lived in poverty, but they lived even worse. So my main objective was to get them out of their hell and make things better for the black people.” When a “very black” man named Oscar asked her for a date, she was immediately intrigued. “I thought to myself, God, I could get back at my father if I had this black guy come to the apartment to pick me up for a date.” She laughed at the memory of her rebelliousness. “You know, all white and Jewish neighborhood—and Oscar.
“My father nearly had a coronary. Oh God! I was a very, very bad kid.”
After just two dates, Oscar told her he was in love with her. But Kern was not interested. “It’s not because you’re black,” she explained. “I’m a lesbian.
“He said, ‘What!? You’re a lesbian? What a fucking waste!’”
Oscar sent Kern to see a social worker who was his cousin. The social worker told Kern she had a “very good friend” who used to be a lesbian but had cured herself. The exlesbian lived in Greenwich Village, and Kern became very excited because she had never been there. “And when I heard the Village, I used to think of little private cottages with beautiful little gardens with white picket fences. But I knew that’s where lesbians were—because of what I would read from time to time about the Village.”
It was 1949. Kern was twenty and still a virgin. “These women that I loved and I had fantasies about—the sex was hardly present. It was just the purity of love: you know, with music and the moonlight and the blue sky.”
So she drove to Thompson Street and met “Linda Savage” (a pseudonym) the “reformed” lesbian, who, it turned out, hadn’t changed quite so much as her social worker friend believed she had.
“I was very nervous. I remember my impression of the apartment was awful. It was a five-flight walk-up. And even though on Amboy Street we lived in what I considered to be poverty; this place was worse. There was no steam heat. Oh, it was disgusting! But I was very excited about meeting her, and she was looking at me, I knew, in a way that … hmmm. And she was very beautiful She looked like a heavy version of Madeleine Carroll”—the blond star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent and The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Savage was a governess who worked for a wealthy family. “It might have happened at the first meeting; it certainly happened by the second: this so-called straight woman seduced me.” After the third meeting, they were living together. “I took my records, my hi-fi, my books, and my toothbrush. All in the back of my car.
“I always felt very caged up in Brooklyn. Because I knew I couldn’t express my feelings there. But in the Village I was a freed uncaged tiger! I loved it.”
Audre Lorde was a self-described “black lesbian feminist warrior poet” who also lived in the Village in the fifties. “We knew we were outside the pale,” said Lorde, who four decades later would become the poet laureate of New York State, in 1991. “We were dykes. A lot of us were artists. We hated typing. We didn’t want straight jobs. We were the fringe. And that was because of the fifties. It was like the gay girls version of the beatniks.”
The historian Joan Nestle remembered, “Just going to the bar meant taking on fifties America. It meant being a woman who was different from the protected woman, the domesticated woman. It felt subversive just going out in the streets at two o’clock in the morning, knowing that I was going to a place that was illegal.”
Sandy Kern’s new girlfriend was forty—exactly twice her age. Although she was not in love with Savage, Kern was enjoying herself because she realized for the first time that “sex is beautiful,” instead of “the filthy horrible thing that I thought it was. And we were very good partners. I felt here was this big woman, and I was satisfying her. I felt so strong, you know: like a big-time operator!”
When Savage went away to Switzerland for the summer with the family that she worked for, Kern “met a lot of young, gorgeous women. Bars were all over the place in those days. They kept opening and closing. They were raided and there would be a signal: when they knew that the cops were coming, the lights would flash on and off.
“I would run away because I used to dress in drag and I would bind my breasts. My underpants were men’s—I hated the women’s stuff. And I didn’t want to be in court, because I knew they would put me in prison, because there was a law against cross-dressing in those days. My friends have all been to prison. They were never held, of course. They were booked and then let go.
“In those days it was terrible. I looked obviously like a lesbian. Never like a boy. They would call filthy names and even throw things at me. I remember once in Prospect Park a gang of young hoodlums ran after me and my lover.… We had to run for our lives.”
But none of this ever stopped her from being who she was: “Even in the daytime I would try to pass as a boy.” She came to hate being a secretary in the garment district, so she found a job in Long Island City, in Queens, at an optical frame company. “It was great! I was polishing these frames and using the men’s bathroom, and I really thought that I was passing.”
Kern’s life got a lot more complicated after Savage discovered that her lover was cheating on her. “Oh, my God, she was a violent woman! She did terrible things to me. She said, ‘Hell hath no fury as a scorned woman!’ She reported me to the police department because I didn’t pay my parking tickets. Then she reported me to the IRS. She broke my most cherished records. My Rachmaninoff—the Second Piano Concerto was my favorite in all the world, and she stomped on it
! With Rachmaninoff himself playing the piano.”
Kern fell in love with another woman named “Cathy” (a pseudonym) and moved to a new apartment on Bank Street. She didn’t tell her first lover her new address, but Savage found out about Kern’s new girlfriend and followed her home. “Somehow Savage made a duplicate key of the apartment that I was living in. And she would let herself in when my current lover was there, and it was terrible. My current lover was terrified of her.”
Savage said, “’This city is not big enough for the both of us. You have to leave. Otherwise I’m going to kill you and your lover.’ And I believed her. She was crazy. I was such a dumb kid. And so I have to leave. Where am I going to go? So, she sent me away to California.” Kern laughed at the memory of her innocence. “I was a very naive person.”
One reason for Kern’s willingness to leave was that Cathy “didn’t like being a lesbian. And she decided she’s going to try to become straight. So she met this guy who was also gay, and he didn’t want to be gay either. I think the two of them met at Julius’s”—a venerable Village saloon that still attracts a motley clientele on West 10th Street. “They decided that they were going to get married. So she left me to marry him in 1953.”
Seven months later, Cathy tracked Kern down in Los Angeles. “She was pregnant, and she says to me, ‘We couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t do it, and I want to come back to you.’ I said, ‘Are you crazy? I’m not gonna take you with a belly. I’m not going to be responsible for a child.’ This was in the fifties, and I was terrified. And I’m not going to bring up a child in a homosexual atmosphere.
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