“The difference was, for the first time, everybody at the grassroots level found all these taboos wanting and unpersuasive and irrational,” said Frank Kameny. “And that’s what changed.” In April 1969, Playboy published an interview with Allen Ginsberg in which the poet even made positive comments about being gay.
In 1967, Rita Hauser, a prominent Republican lawyer from New York City, made a speech that was remarkably radical for its time. In a forum of the American Bar Association on “Women’s Liberation and the Constitution,” she declared that laws banning marriages between people of the same sex were unconstitutional. Mrs. Hauser said such laws were based on an antiquated notion that reproduction is the purpose of marriage. Because of overpopulation, she called that rationale outmoded. Limiting reproduction was the new social goal, “And I know no better way of accomplishing this than marriage between the same sexes.”*
Dan Stewart, a landscape architect, made his first visit to Cherry Grove on Fire Island in 1967, when he was thirty-seven. “I was scared to death to go because I thought everybody was totally sexually crazed out there. And I didn’t know how to deal with that at the time. If I knew somebody—knew who they were and liked them—I’d do anything, okay. But to do anything with someone I didn’t know was very frightening to me. And that’s what Fire Island represented. I will never forget that first weekend in the Grove. We stayed at the Belvedere, a guest house place that looks like an Italian palazzo. It’s still there: it’s unreal. It was one of those nights when the sunset was pink, and it lasted for three hours. So you had all this pink light, and here were all these muscle builders and all this stuff going on. It was Fellini for days.” But no one asked Stewart to participate. “I was also miserable about that. You know, my fear must have shown.”
As early as 1964, the New York Academy of Medicine provided hard evidence of the arrival of the sexual revolution: a surge in reported cases of venereal disease. The incidence of syphilis in New York City increased almost sevenfold, from seven new cases per one hundred thousand reported in 1955 to forty-five new cases in 1963. The academy cited these reasons for the change: a “releasing of moral and cultural values in present-day society, [the elevation of sex] to a status of glamour, success and happiness, salacious literature directed at youth, a breakdown in the home and family life, the automobile, and the feminist movement.” It also noted the “organized and aggressive action” by homosexuals to “gain at least tolerance, hopefully to achieve” acceptance, “and most ambitiously to have it recognized as a noble way of life.”
THE INTENSE CROSS-CULTURAL exchange between America and Britain produced additional fuel for what gradually became a general cultural and political conflagration—the necessary preamble for a fundamental revolution in the way Americans thought about sex. One reason the country changed so rapidly in the sixties was a colossal infusion of energy from the largest generation of adolescents America had ever produced.
“It’s at that age when you really feel you can make things happen,” Bob Dylan explained. “Things matter.”
By the middle of 1967, the Beatles had become much more than Britain’s most successful cultural export since Shakespeare. By synthesizing the best of American rock and roll from the fifties (Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, among others) into their own spellbinding soundtrack for the sixties, they managed to embody the entire British-American fifties-into-sixties cultural transformation. Their beguiling public persona was shaped by Brian Epstein, their closeted gay manager, who fell in love with all of them as soon as he laid eyes on them. According to Paul McCartney, the Beatles were more baffled than upset by their new manager’s sexual orientation. “We were more confused by it than turned off,” said McCartney. “We really didn’t know what it meant to be gay at the time.”
George Martin, who signed them to their first record contract, described a similarly intense (though nonsexual) reaction to the Merseyside quartet. While Martin wasn’t particularly impressed when he first heard their music, as soon as he met them he was entranced. “They exuded exuberance,” said Martin. “Sparks flew off them.”
Their magic combination of charm and cheerfulness was first displayed in theaters everywhere in 1964 when Richard Lester directed their smash black-and-white film debut, A Hard Day’s Night. This was the first film to capture the emerging countercultural spirit for the masses. “While I was watching that movie my hair started to grow,” the film critic Roger Ebert remembered.
Although it was aimed at kids, almost everyone adored it. “You didn’t take your eyes off them because you never knew at what moment they would do something unexpected,” said Lester, while Andrew Sarris considered the film “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals.” For millions of rockers of all ages, the impishness of these sexy performers transformed ancient notions of how macho a “real” man had to act and look. Suddenly humor was hipper than brawn. The gay activist Jack Nichols considered the Beatles the “undisputed troubadours of the revolution I represented” because “they showed true care for one another,” which was “unheard of by 1950s standards.”
By becoming the most celebrated artists on the planet, the Beatles pushed postadolescent male sexuality to the center of Western culture. Their triumph completed a twenty-year process that began when Marlon Brando starred on Broadway in a torn T-shirt, gained momentum with Elvis Presley,* and reached its first plateau when John Kennedy entered the White House. “In the age of Calvin Klein’s steaming hunks, it must be hard for those under 40 to realize that there was ever a time when a man was nothing but a suit of clothes, a shirt and tie, shined leather shoes, and a gray, felt hat,” Gore Vidal wrote. “If he was thought attractive, it was because he had a nice smile and a twinkle in his eye.”
In a subtle way, the national veneration of the long-haired Kennedy and the longer-haired Beatles may even have contributed to a painfully slow acceptance by gay men of their own desires. With the “male as sex object” at our “culture’s center stage,” as Vidal put it, one man’s obsession with another stopped seeming quite so unnatural as it had been before. Or, to put it more concretely, it no longer felt so odd to a fourteen-year-old boy who discovered that he worshipped George Harrison, when so many of his male classmates seemed to feel just as strongly about John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr (and strove to look exactly like them). Allen Ginsberg thought, “The Beatles provided an example to youth around the world: that guys could be friends.” Ringo explained, “It was four guys who really loved each other”—and everyone else noticed.
Janis Joplin accomplished a different kind of gender-bending feat for women. As the critic Ellen Willis pointed out, Joplin’s “metamorphosis from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight-Ashbury” meant that “a woman who was not conventionally pretty, who had acne and an intermittent weight problem and hair that stuck out” could “invent her own beauty out of sheer energy, soul, sweetness, arrogance and a sense of humor”—and thereby alter our very “notions of attractiveness.”
The sixties celebration of diversity was most apparent in the world of music. At no other moment in American history have so many different musical styles been promoted on commercial radio stations—everyone from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to the Supremes and Jefferson Airplane.
Dylan was a direct descendant of the Beats. “It was Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who inspired me at first,” he explained—and Ginsberg was in the studio with him when he first recorded “The Chimes of Freedom” for Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. “Listen,” exulted Ginsberg, quoting a lyric, “he’s singing for ‘every hung-up person in the whole wide universe!’” Dylan paid homage to his friend by giving the poet a cameo in the opening scene of the brilliant documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of Britain, Don’t Look Back.
The celebrity of Dylan, the Beatles, Janis Joplin and dozens of other iconoclasts sent another important subliminal message to an emerging generation of lesbians and gay men: these role models proved that outsiders—ev
en outlaws—could become heroes in an age like this.
For almost a decade, cultural and political ferment in England had provided much more explicit encouragement to the nascent gay liberation movement in America. Ever since the Wolfenden Report had recommended the decriminalization of homosexual acts between adults in 1957, a spirited debate in Great Britain about whether the law should regulate sexual activity between consenting adults had received considerable attention in the American newsmagazines and The New York Times.
This controversy stimulated the production of Victim, a landmark British film about the routine blackmail of homosexuals. The film in turn intensified the political debate, leading to a dramatic legal reform. But at the end of i960, the man who would direct Victim, Basil Dearden, had almost given up on getting it made. Just before Christmas, Dearden sent the script to Dirk Bogarde, a fine British actor who was discovered by Hollywood at end of the fifties, but now hungered to do something that would have real meaning. Before the script arrived at the actor’s country home in Beaconsfield, a few miles west of London, Dearden telephoned Bogarde to warn him that every other actor he had approached had rejected it.
“Thanks,” said Bogarde. “What’s it about, paedophilia?”
“No,” said Dearden. “Homosexuality, actually. Middle-aged married man with a yen for a bloke on a building site. … If it’s any comfort we don’t call anyone a queer, homo, pouf, nancy or faggot.” (Invert was the word that the screenwriter had selected.)
Bogarde seized the chance to play the leading role: a London barrister whose ex-boyfriend kills himself rather than disclose the barrister’s identity to a blackmail ring or to the police. The barrister jettisons his career in order to crush the blackmailers. Bogarde wrote in his autobiography,
It was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life. It is extraordinary in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make. [But] it was, in its time, all three. … Some critics complained that it was only a thriller with a message tacked on rather loosely. But the best way to persuade a patient to take his medicine is by sugaring the pill—and this was the only possible way the film could have been approached in those early days. Whatever else, it was a tremendous success, pleasing us and confounding our detractors. The countless letters of gratitude which flooded in were proof enough of that. … I had achieved what I had longed to do for so long, to be in a film which disturbed, educated and illuminated.
“It was the first film in which a man said ‘I love you’ to another man,” said Bogarde. “I wrote that scene in. I said, ‘There’s no point in half-measures. We either make a film about queers or we don’t.’”
The film was propaganda: it was explicit and effective. This exchange took place between the two policemen in charge of the investigation:
Senior Detective:
If only these unfortunate devils had come to us in the first place.
Junior Detective:
If only they led normal lives they wouldn’t need to come at all.
Senior Detective:
If the law punished every abnormality we’d be kept pretty busy, son.
Junior Detective:
Even so, sir, this law was made for a very good reason. If it were changed, other weaknesses would follow.
Senior Detective:
I can see you’re a true puritan, Bridy.
Junior Detective:
Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, sir.
Senior Detective:
Of course not. There was a time when that was against the law, you know.
In the film, a barber who is being blackmailed tells Bogarde, “I can’t help the way I am, but the law says I’m a criminal. I’ve been to prison four times. Couldn’t go through that again. Not at my age. I’m going to Canada. I’ve made up my mind to be ‘sensible,’ as the prison doctor used to say. Don’t care how lonely, but sensible. Can’t stand any more trouble. … Nature played me a dirty trick. I’m going to see I get a few years peace and quiet in return.” Another blackmail victim asks, “Do you ever wonder about the law that makes us all victims of any cheap thug who finds out about our natural instincts?” The movie was also careful to address the most common objection to the reform of laws regulating homosexual behavior. “Of course youth must be protected,” said one of the gay characters. “We all agree about that. But that doesn’t mean that consenting males in private should be pilloried by an antiquated law.”
The film was a critical and financial success in Great Britain, and it had a dramatic effect on the political debate about homosexuality. Just four years after it was released, the twelfth marquess of Queensberry—the great-grandson of the man who accused Oscar Wilde of having an affair with his son—rose in the House of Lords to support a bill that would decriminalize homosexual acts between adults. “I do not believe that our laws on this subject are a solution,” the thirty-five-year-old marquess declared in his maiden speech to his fellow lords. “They have, if anything, helped to produce a nasty, furtive underworld which is bad for society and bad for the homosexual”—the very world depicted in Victim. Dr. Arthur M. Ramsay, the archbishop of Canterbury, also endorsed the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report. Two years later, in 1967—with the support of the Church of England, the Methodists, and even the Roman Catholics—the bill received final approval from the House of Commons, a milestone recorded in a page-one story by Anthony Lewis in The New York Times.
Victim might have ignited a similar debate in America, but it never got into general release here. Always alert to the dangerous connections between culture and politics, the Catholic-dominated censorship office in Hollywood refused to give Victim its seal of approval. According to the film historian Vito Russo, the first objection was to the use of the words homosexual and homosexuality, “which had never before been uttered on screen.” A spokesman for the Production Code Administration explained that the film was unacceptable because of its “candid and clinical discussion of homosexuality” and its “overtly expressed plea for social acceptance of the homosexual, to the extent that he be made socially tolerable.” A handful of art houses in big cities did exhibit Victim, despite the absence of censorship office endorsement. Murray Gitlin went to see the film in Chicago with an actor friend. “We came out, and Woody said to me, ‘Well, our secret is out!’” Gitlin remembered. “This is, like, sixty-two. And that may have been the beginning of an awareness that had not been around before. A very important moment.”
Ironically, the censorship office acted to keep Victim out of general release just five weeks after Arthur Krim, the president of United Artists, had petitioned the Motion Picture Association of America to loosen the code to permit some references to homosexuality. Krim was concerned because his company was in the process of producing The Children’s Hour, inspired by the Lillian Hellman play in which an evil child’s accusation of lesbianism destroys the lives of two teachers, and Advise and Consent, the film based on the Allen Drury novel in which a senator commits suicide because of the revelation of a homosexual incident in his past. Because neither film “promoted” homosexuality, the MPAA granted Krim’s request. But the fact that Victim advocated reform of the law was more than the censorship office could stomach.
In 1961 a virulent homophobia remained routine for many of America’s most influential film critics. Time magazine called Victim “a coyly sensational exploitation of homosexuality as a theme—and what’s more offensive—an implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice. … Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious but often curable neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.” Another British offering that year, A Taste of Honey, included an affectionate portrayal of an effeminate gay character named Geoff, played by Murray Melvin. After the film received a favorable review in The New York Times from Abe Weiler, a junior critic on the paper, his superior, Bosley Crowther, immediately objected. “Certainly you’d think the gru
bby people who swarm through [the film] might shake out one disagreeable individual whose meanness we might despise,” wrote Crowther, who was chief film critic for the Times for three decades. “The homosexual could do with some sharp and dirty digs. No one is more easily rendered odious than an obvious homosexual.” Five years later, Crowther wrote that “too many people who should know better in the steamy front offices of Hollywood” used “adult theme” as a synonym for “abnormal sex.”
IN 1963 The New York Times published a landmark piece about homosexuals on its front page. The article was inspired by the convictions of the man who would dominate the news department for more than twenty years. His opinions would often have a decisive effect on the way gay employees were treated and gay issues were covered by the Times.
A. M. Rosenthal was a brilliant, ambitious, volatile and fiercely opinionated newsman. The son of Russian Jews who first settled in Canada before moving to the Bronx, he started his career at the Times while still an undergraduate at City College. In 1963 he had returned from Japan, the last of four foreign postings, to become the paper’s metropolitan editor. Six years later, he would be named managing editor, and in 1977, he became executive editor, a job that gave him control of the entire news department. He held that position until 1986.
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