JACK NICHOLS CONTINUED to articulate the need to reject the medical establishment’s view of homosexuality: “The mental attitude of our own people toward themselves, that they are not well—that they are not whole, that they are less than completely healthy—is responsible for untold numbers of personal tragedies and warped lives. By failing to take a definitive stand … I believe that you will not only weaken the movement ten-fold, but that you will fail in your duty to homosexuals who need more than anything else to see themselves in a better light.”
This was the fundamental philosophical insight that was necessary to the formation of an effective fighting force among gay men and women. Edward Sagarin had hinted at this idea in The Homosexual in America when he wrote that there was “no homosexual problem except that created by the heterosexual society.” He had also written, “It remains to be proved that there is anything neurotic about the preference for one’s own sex,” but during the thirteen years since his landmark volume had been published, he had become increasingly reactionary. Now he led the fight against the new young militants. “He could get very nasty when he chose to be,” Kameny said about Sagarin.
Kameny echoed Nichols in his speech to the New York Mattachine Society in July 1964. “The entire homophile movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether homosexuality is a sickness, and upon our taking a firm stand on it,” he declared. And he was right. The following spring, the Washington chapter overwhelmingly adopted this revolutionary statement: “The Mattachine Society of Washington takes the position that in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance or other pathology in any sense, but is merely a preference, orientation, or propensity, on par with, and not different in kind from heterosexuality.”
Sagarin vowed to quit the New York chapter if it adopted such a statement, and he ran as part of a slate determined to hold on to the notion that homosexuality was an illness. Kameny wrote to him: “You have fallen by the wayside. … You have become no longer the rigorous Father of the Homophile Movement, to be revered, respected and listened to, but the senile Grandfather of the Homophile Movement, to be humored and tolerated at best; to be ignored and disregarded usually; and to be ridiculed, at worst.”
In May 1965, the New York chapter elected the militant slate with two thirds of the vote. “It is very much a victory for all of us who are working hard and who don’t want to see the clock turned backwards by the stick-in-the-muds and the ‘sickniks,’” Nichols enthused. Using his real name for the first time, instead of a pseudonym, Sagarin wrote a doctoral dissertation about the New York Mattachine Society in which he made scathing criticisms of the organization and dismissed the possibility that serious philosophical differences were at the heart of the dispute.
On July 4,1965, Kameny and Nichols organized the first of a series of annual pickets outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a tradition that continued through 1969. Kameny believed the sight of people identifying themselves as homosexuals in public had a decisive impact on the movement: “These demonstrations created the necessary mind-set for gays demonstrating in public.” Without them, he thought the crucial Greenwich Village explosion at the end of the decade might never have occurred.
“IS GOD DEAD?” Time magazine asked on its Easter cover in 1966. A sharp drop in religious faith during the sixties helped to put all the old puritan taboos in jeopardy. Because so much antigay prejudice was grounded in religion, the challenges to religious orthodoxy were a necessary prerequisite for a general reconsideration of the subject.
There was tremendous ferment within the Christian denominations surrounding the subject of homosexuality. As early as 1964, the Episcopal Diocese of New York supported the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. An Episcopal spokesman said that his church’s position was part of its acceptance of “God’s continuing and progressive revelation about man’s nature”—the very reason why so many people would eventually reject the Bible’s injunctions against homosexuality. The following year, even The New York Times editorial page quietly endorsed the repeal of the law forbidding homosexual acts in private. But the Catholic archdiocese mounted a fierce and successful battle to retain statutes making both adultery and homosexuality criminal acts in New York State. On July 22,1965, Governor Rockefeller signed two special bills to please the Catholics on these issues, after the legislature had passed a complete revision of the state’s eighty-four-year-old penal code.
In 1967, ninety Episcopalian priests met at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and a large majority declared that homosexuality should no longer be dismissed as wrong “per se.” The Reverand Walter D. Dennis, canon of the cathedral and organizer of the conference, said, “A homosexual relationship between two consenting adults should be judged by the same criteria as a heterosexual marriage. That is, whether it is intended to foster a permanent relationship of love.” The keynote speaker at the conference was Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, who had coauthored Sexual Behavior in the Human Male with Kinsey. Pomeroy attacked the “myths” that homosexuals were more likely than others to be child molesters, and that they were “effeminate and identifiable.” The event was front-page news in the Times.
In October 1968, twelve gay worshippers met at the home of the Reverand Troy D. Perry in Los Angeles. Sixteen months later the tiny group had become the Metropolitan Community Church with 348 members, the first congregation in the country to identify itself publicly as a gay church. As Edward Sagarin had written seventeen years earlier, “Homosexuality is not an anti-religious force, although religion is anti-homosexual.” The truth of that statement would become clear as hundreds of gay churches and synagogues of every denomination were founded throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties.
At the same time, the church had lost its direct power over Hollywood after the film censorship office was finally abolished in 1968. It was replaced by the G, R, and X ratings system, which is still administered by the Motion Picture Association of America.*
DRUGS WERE CHAMPIONED by some as an important complement—if not an outright replacement—for religion. In a speech to Boston’s Arlington Street Church in 1966, Allen Ginsberg proposed “that everybody, including the President and his … vast hordes of generals, executives, judges and legislators … go to nature, find a kindly teacher … and assay their consciousness with LSD. Then, I prophesy, we will all have seen some ray of glory of vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceable community.” LSD’s strongest proponent, Timothy Leary, pushed the idea that the hallucinogenic had redemptive properties. Inside the sixty-room mansion Leary occupied in Millbrook, New York, the drug was treated with “a studied and religious air, as if one took LSD in the spirit of a communicant,” Thomas Powers reported.
In the spring of 1967, The New York Times Magazine displayed an unusual willingness to embrace a prophet of the counterculture by publishing Hunter Thompson’s report from Haight-Ashbury. A few years later, Thompson would become famous for his “gonzo journalism” from Las Vegas and the presidential campaign trail, as well as his legendary drug consumption. But in 1967 he was still a little-known free-lance writer. “Who needs jazz, or even beer,” he asked in the Times,
when you can sit down on a public curbstone, drop a pill in your mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums. … There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society. Submerged and uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable hands who want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where a man’s image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing
to lose.
Two other contradictory strains nurtured the atmosphere which gave birth to the modern gay liberation movement. One was the sentimental embrace of peace and love, which began to attract national attention on January 14,1967, when twenty thousand celebrants joined Ginsberg, the antiwar activist Jerry Rubin and Timothy Leary for a Gathering of the Tribes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A press release explained that political activists would join forces with “the love generation” to “powwow, celebrate, and prophesy the epoch of liberation, love, peace, compassion and the unity of mankind.” In Manhattan, Roy Aarons remembered the “coming of the psychedelic era, and being flooded with a bunch of runaway kids, and the whole introduction of grass and psychedelics. It became a much looser scene where there was a lot of experimentation by these guys.”
The other leitmotif of the sixties was a feverish violence, which peaked in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy bracketed King’s. After Bobby’s killing, John Updike wondered if God had withdrawn his blessing on America. William Styron remembered this decade as an era when “one of those liberal well-intentioned people would say, ‘You don’t mean, do you’—and James Baldwin would interrupt and say, ‘Yes, baby, they’re going to burn your house down.’”
After King was killed, 65,000 troops were needed to quell riots in 130 cities across the country. The fires that swept through Washington were the worst since the British had burned the White House in 1814, and machine-gun nests sprouted on the steps of the Capitol. The Johnson administration worried that it might actually run out of troops to calm the uprisings. Thirty-nine people were killed and nearly twenty thousand were arrested across the country. The riots extinguished white America’s waning interest in the plight of poor blacks inside teeming ghettos.
But these disturbances had a very different effect on another group of disenfranchised Americans. They planted seeds of disobedience inside the hearts of millions who were finally about to assert their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
UNDER PRESSURE from the Mattachine Society, the New York City Police Department announced in 1966 that it would stop using undercover cops to entrap homosexuals. Harold Bramson, a thirty-three-year-old schoolteacher, believed that he was the last person to be entrapped by a rookie undercover cop inside a gay bar before the policy was changed. Criminal Court Judge Arthur Braun dismissed the case because of “reasonable doubt,” and Bramson kept his job in the public school system.
In 1967, the State Supreme Court of New Jersey threw out a regulation that permitted the state to close any bar that allowed “apparent homosexuals to congregate at their licensed premises.” An investigator for the State Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control had complained that gay patrons had “looked into each other’s eyes when they conversed” and “swished and swayed down to the other end of the bar.” But the Supreme Court justices ruled unanimously that “so long as their public behavior violates no legal proscriptions, [homosexuals] have the undoubted right to congregate in public.”
On the other hand, the blackmail that Max Lerner had been unable to confirm in Washington during the 1950s emerged as a serious problem for famous homosexuals in the 1960s. Federal and state law enforcement officials announced in 1966 that they had broken up a national extortion ring with seventy members who had bilked more than a thousand victims of millions of dollars, including an East Coast congressman who paid more than $40,000 to thieves posing as policemen. At least thirteen people were indicted for extortion, and several were sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. Officials said the ring was headed by a former detective from the Chicago police force.
In one case, two gang members posing as New York City detectives marched into the Pentagon, and marched out with a senior officer. After they shook him down for several thousand dollars, the officer killed himself—the night before he was scheduled to testify before a Manhattan grand jury.
Other victims included “a general and an admiral,” “a British producer,” “two deans of East Coast colleges,” “a musician who has made numerous appearances on television,” “a partner in a well-known night-spot,” “a leading motion picture actor,” “a nuclear scientist,” “a number of professors,” and “a much-admired television personality.”
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY made national headlines in 1967 when it became one of the first colleges to give formal recognition to a gay students organization. The Student Homophile League claimed a dozen members and issued a thirteen-point declaration of principles which asserted “the fundamental human right” of every homosexual “to develop and achieve his full potential and dignity as a human being.” It said that gay people should have the right to declare themselves without risking ostracism from school or loss of employment, as well as living “free from unwelcomed pressures to conform to the prevailing heterosexuality.”
“At first the students seemed to think it was some sort of April Fool hoax,” said Charles Skoro, who wrote about the organization in The Spectator, the student newspaper. “But now they realize it is for real.” In an editorial, The Spectator praised the creation of the organization.
Gay sex was still a mostly furtive thing in Manhattan in the mid-sixties. Nearly all the gay bars had been closed in another “cleanup” campaign just before the 1964 World’s Fair. But there were the glimmerings of a new kind of community.
John Koch was an Iowa farmboy who had moved to New York in 1964, thinking he would return home after a single summer. But he never left. In 1965, he moved up to 74th Street and Central Park West from the Village, and he discovered the Ramble. This heavily wooded area in the middle of Central Park had been an active gay meeting ground (and bird-watching area) at least since the forties, but now the men who went there were using a new system to protect one another. “If someone saw the cops coming, they’d take a stick and start beating it,” Koch recalled. “And all of a sudden you’d hear these clothes being put on and rustle, rustle, rustle. It was a good system. It really was. And the cops would come and we’d just be standing there because in those days it wasn’t illegal to be in the park or anything, so they couldn’t do anything to you. I felt totally safe there. Central Park West was a place to pick people up and take them home. Central Park was where you did it.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1968, Frank Kameny explicitly emulated the example of radical blacks after he saw Stokely Carmichael on television leading a group of protesters in a chant of “Black is beautiful!” Kameny said, “I understood the psychodynamic at work here in a context in which black is universally equated with everything that is bad.” He realized at once the need to do something similar for gays.
In July 1968, Kameny coined the slogan “Gay is good.” He said, “If I had to specify the one thing in my life of which I am most proud, it is that.” He described the phrase as a direct response to the “unrelieved, relentless barrage of negativism coming to us from every source.”*
Later in 1968, the violent confrontations between Chicago policemen and antiwar protesters during the Democratic National Convention briefly fostered the impression of a society on the brink of anarchy. These scenes on national television created a political reaction that resulted in the election (by a tiny margin) of Richard Milhous Nixon, the quintessential white man of the fifties. Paradoxically, on a social level, these paroxysms of violence also contributed to a steady loosening of the puritan bonds that had kept the lid on American attitudes and activities throughout the previous decade.
ABC News hired Gore Vidal and the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., to provide commentary for the convention. During a debate over one of the police riots in Chicago, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley shouted back, “Now listen, you queer … I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” The bickering continued in Esquire the following year, when the magazine published a telegram that it said Buckley had intended to send to Vidal: “Please inform Gor
e Vidal neither I nor my family is disposed to receive lessons in morality from a pink queer.” Vidal replied in the following issue: “I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom. There will always be morbid twisted men like Buckley, sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others.”
The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations also met in Chicago that summer and sent questionnaires to all the candidates’ headquarters, requesting their views on a “homosexual bill of rights” that would decriminalize sexual acts between consenting adults and remove all government strictures on the employment of gay people. At Kameny’s urging, NACHO also adopted “Gay is good” as its official slogan. But even the liberal New Republic seemed skeptical about the whole undertaking: “History indicates that politicians generally prefer to leave such embarrassments in obscurity,” the magazine observed, “but the homosexuals profess determination to make an issue of this serious problem for society.”
THE LOUDEST REVERBERATION from the collapse of the old order was a revolution in the way Americans thought about sex. The widespread use of the Pill at the beginning of the sixties made sex simpler, more accessible and seemingly less consequential. It also encouraged public acceptance of a truly radical notion for a prudish nation: the idea that sex might actually be valuable for its own sake. That idea represented a sea change in the way millions of Americans of all orientations thought about copulation; in fact, it was the fundamental philosophical leap, the indispensable step before homosexual sex could gain any legitimacy within the larger society. By definition, until sex was given a value unconnected to procreation, sex between two people of the same gender could only be worthless and “unnatural.” As one Episcopalian opponent of reform put it in 1967, homosexual acts “must always be regarded as perversions because they are not part of the natural process of rearing children.” But as John D’Emilio has pointed out, once the Pill gained widespread acceptance, the defense of heterosexual intercourse as the only “natural” act became increasingly difficult because “modern technology was obstructing the ‘natural’ outcome” of that act.
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