After three months of this experiment, Geto decided that he was gay, which caused even more anxiety. Frightened, he chose what was still a common solution for this kind of “homosexual panic” in the early sixties: at the age of twenty-one, he decided to marry his childhood sweetheart, whom he had been dating since he was fifteen.
Geto’s wife came from a “very refined Northern Italian family,” but Geto’s mother was horrified because her new daughter-in-law wasn’t Jewish. “The thing is,” Geto explained, “I’ve been bisexual my whole life. I strongly identify as gay, culturally, aesthetically, and politically, but sexually it’s pretty much right in the middle. Maybe I’m one of the few people that say that and mean it. So we had a real sex life that I enjoyed, and everything else.” They had two children, and Geto would stay married for eight years, until he was twenty-nine.
Geto had spent his youth working in reform Democratic politics, and in 1964 he worked to elect Jonathan Bingham and James Scheuer, two distinguished liberal reformers who vanquished the ancient Bronx Democratic machine controlled by Charlie Buckley. In 1969, Robert Abrams became the second nonmachine Democrat in modern times to be elected Bronx borough president, and Geto became his press secretary and political adviser. In 1971, barely two years after the Stonewall riot, Geto was visited for the first time by a young man named Hal Offen.
“I demand to see Bob Abrams!” said Offen.
“Well, okay, what’s the issue?” Geto asked.
“I represent BUG! Bronx United Gays! And we demand that Bob Abrams, who says he’s a liberal, support gay people! We want Bob Abrams to support the gay rights bill that’s being introduced for the first time next month in the city council.”
“So I’m sitting in my chair, and I’m saying, ‘Well, listen. I’m very sympathetic to your point of view and I, I, I, I—Bob Abrams is a great guy. I’m sure he’d be sympathetic’ So he gives me this whole militant thing about ‘supporting gays is civil rights!’ And I’m saying, ‘Well, no one’s ever really thought of it that way. You may have some problems with that approach.’ So he says, ‘Well it is civil rights! Think about it! It’s the same as everybody else!”
Offen was a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, which was founded in 1970 when it broke away from the more radical Gay Liberation Front. One of the first things that GAA decided to do was to reach out beyond Manhattan to the other four boroughs of New York City, and Offen was in charge of the Bronx. “He had a couple of lesbians and himself—that was Bronx United Gays,” said Geto. “But he had a lot of guts.”
When Geto first went to see Abrams, he had the same experience that Mike Wallace had with Fred Friendly five years earlier. “Abrams wasn’t quite sure what the entire definition of a homosexual was.” After Geto explained the orientation, Abrams was inclined to support the bill, but he wanted to check with his other advisers first. “Abrams, by instinct, was always an extraordinarily decent and progressive person,” said Geto.
But the rest of Abrams’s advisers—all longtime liberal activists—were appalled at the idea. “Are you crazy?” they asked. “It’s the most radical fringe thing. Your problem already is that people think you’re too left-wing. And you’re a thirty-three-year-old bachelor!”
For the “first and last time” in his life, Geto began to cry during a meeting with his boss. “I was so overcome with emotion because I was in the closet, and it was so personal, and I was tormented by my own conflicts. And I’m saying to Bob, ‘These are people that need your help. You’ve got to do this! You’ve got to go to city hall! No one else will stand up for these people.’ And I started to cry.”
Geto’s appeal was successful: Bob Abrams became one of the first elected officials in New York to support the gay rights bill in New York City. “He went to city hall, and people were flabbergasted.”
Abrams himself remembered “catcalls from the balcony of city hall. People said, ‘How could you do this?’ There was fingerpointing and screaming and then I came back to my office, and my secretary said, ‘What did you do today? The phones have not stopped ringing.’ But I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“We were flooded with phone calls,” said Geto. “You couldn’t make a phone call because the lines were flooded, people protesting. Jewish people, Catholic people. Supporting homosexuals was disgusting! They’d never vote for Abrams again! How dare he! It was the absolute beginning of the end of New York.”
Abrams rode out the huge reaction, and during the next twenty-five years, he would always be a fervent supporter of gay rights.
JUST AS STONEWALL was energizing gay activists across America, it was also having an equal—and opposite—effect on many traditional liberals. Although the American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of politicians like Ed Koch, Bela Abzug, Arthur Goldberg, and Bob Abrams had acknowledged the need to protect the basic rights of gay Americans, many opinion makers were encouraging a backlash. The Washington Post columnist and “60 Minute” commentator Nicholas von Hoffman attacked Jack Paar for inviting members of the Gay Activists Alliance on his late-night talk show and permitting their opinions to go unchallenged. Five years later, von Hoffman complained bitterly about the proliferation of attractive gay characters on network television. “The old-style Chinese have the Year of the Tiger and the Year of the Pig,” he wrote. “The new-style Americans are having the Year of the Fag. Is a new stereotype being born? Is network television about to kill off the bitchy, old-time, courageous fruit and replace him with a new-type homo?… The Nancy Walker Show has a continuing major fag character whose representation is monitored by representatives of the Gay Task Force on the set. …” Eighteen years later, von Hoffman said he could no longer remember any of the programs he had written about. “While I am pleased with the vigor of my prose, on further cogitation after twenty years, I am slightly aghast,” said von Hoffman. “I guess I went over the top.”
As late as 1978, Bobby Kennedy’s former speechwriter Jeff Greenfield argued vehemently against legislation to protect gays from discrimination in housing and employment. In a front-page article in the Village Voice entitled “Why Is Gay Rights Different from All Other Rights?” Greenfield asserted that “the cultural majority always sets the rules, and minorities have the choice of conforming, defying those rules, or finding a community where they are the cultural majority.” He implied that gays had to remain inside the closet to avoid discrimination because “it is not a denial of a fundamental right to be refused promotion because of your companions.” He also described the fight for an antibias law for gay people as “a diversion from the business of working for political and social justice.” In the 1980s, Greenfield campaigned in his newspaper column for the expulsion of Gerry Studds from Congress, after the Massachusetts representative acknowledged that he was gay and admitted having had sex with a seventeen-year-old congressional page. (Greenfield’s effort was a failure; Studds was reelected.) And in 1996, when Greenfield was making $1 million a year as an ABC correspondent, his colleagues reported he was still cracking gay “jokes” at the office—even when he knew gay people were present. “Jeff is one of those people who is so wrapped up in himself, the idea of giving offense to anyone else is always a second thought,” said one ABC newsman. “He’s convinced that he’s a classic liberal—but he’s not.”
But tbe article that drew by far the most attention was published in Harper’s just fifteen months after Stonewall. Written by the Chicago academic (and future neoconservative) Joseph Epstein, the story offered vivid confirmation of Ethan Geto’s observation that liberal Jews were often “the most terrified and the most disdainful” whenever the “homosexual question” was discussed.
Many journalists still remember 1970 as a “hot” year for Harper’s, when it was edited by Willie Morris, a Mississippian who was the youngest editor in the magazine’s history. Morris showcased the work of some of the era’s most acclaimed journalists, including Seymour Hersh and David Halberstam, and he was lionized by the younger li
beral establishment.
Naturally not everything Morris published was brilliant; but the ignorance, virulence, and occasional incoherence of Epstein’s ten-thousand-word diatribe distinguished it from everything else Harper’s published during Morris’s regime.
The magazine’s cover advertised the piece with a picture of a muscular torso clothed in a tight red blouse. Inside, it was illustrated with pictures of a fey young man. Epstein saw evidence everywhere that “homosexuality is spreading” because the Zeitgeist was encouraging “hedonism in all its forms” and homosexuality was suddenly “where the action is.”
He described his fury at being “victimized” by a handsome, masculine army buddy named Richard. Had Epstein been the victim of an unwelcome advance from his colleague? Not at all. His friend Richard’s crime was his determination to be discreet about his sexual orientation. Epstein conceded that this discretion was “necessary,” but the writer was still furious after he learned the truth. Epstein felt “victimized by [Richard’s] duplicity … I never felt quite right about [him] again.” But honesty wouldn’t have helped Richard either. A few pages later Epstein wrote, “Men who are defiant about their homosexuality, or claim to have found happiness in it, will … require neither my admiration nor sympathy.”
Elsewhere in the piece, the writer hinted at why it had been so terrifying to discover that he had unwittingly shared an office with a good-looking gay man. “Heterosexuality has not been without its special horrors,” Epstein wrote; his own “once marvelous” marriage had ended in divorce. And on the subject of his fears about the possible homosexuality of one of his four sons, Epstein asked, “Uptight? You’re damn right! … My ignorance makes me frightened. … Read enough case histories and you soon begin to wonder how anyone has achieved heterosexuality.”
Picking up larger stones as he rolled along, Epstein described homosexuality as “anathema” and homosexuals as “cursed … quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck.” Consulting a hairdresser who was his personal expert on the subject, Epstein explained that he did not want to sleep with a man because he didn’t feel any desire to do so, and he didn’t place “that high a premium on experience for its own sake.” He told the hairdresser that “a whole cluster of interesting emotions go along with murdering a man, but I was not ready to murder to experience them.”
Incoherence began to overtake the writer when he asked, “Who’s repressing? Oppressing? No one I know, and certainly not most of the writers I read. … The truth is, when it comes to repression, why bother? Especially when so many voices are shouting to go the other way.” But then, just four sentences later, he cited Dr. David Reuben, the author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask, then a mammoth best-seller in the how-to category. And how did Dr. Reuben fit into this campaign to encourage a deviant hedonism? According to Epstein, even though Dr. Reuben made it perfectly clear that he hated homosexuality, gay people were just as likely as anyone else to use his book to try to make their sex lives more interesting.*
Because “private acceptance of homosexuality” did not exist in Epstein’s experience, even among “the most liberal-minded, sophisticated and liberated people,” he had a simple solution for the gay “problem”:
“If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth” because it caused “infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime … and because, wholly selfishly,” he was “completely incapable of coming to terms with it.”
Epstein preceded this statement with the boast that he had “never done anything to harm any single homosexual,” and he hoped he never would. Obviously, wishing for the obliteration of such an unhappy group of people could not possibly harm them.
Finally, Epstein concluded that there were many things that his four sons could do that might cause him “anguish” or “outrage” but “nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives … to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.”
The article caused an uproar in the gay community. Some people defended Epstein because of his “honesty” and considered the piece a fine example of the new journalism pioneered by Tom Wolfe. But the gay activist Arthur Evans pointed out that what Epstein had done was actually the equivalent of someone writing, “T look into myself and I discover that I really hate blacks—boy, do I hate blacks! I think they’re stupid, they’re too sensual and they eat watermelon.’ That’s the level of the Epstein article.” Nevertheless, Morris refused to print any of the rebuttals prepared by GAA members; he maintained that the publication of twenty letters about the Epstein piece was an adequate response.
Pete Fisher was selected to organize GAA’s protest, and he understood the importance of striking the right tone. He would stage a sit-in, but it would be “civilized, intelligent, educational, consciousness-raising, hospitable—no demands, no threats, no damages to office or files.” After they had invaded the Harper’s office, the demonstrators set up a table in the reception area with coffee and doughnuts; then they placed leaflets on every desk. As each Harper’s employee arrived for work, a protester greeted him: “Good morning, I’m a homosexual. Would you like some coffee?” Downstairs, other demonstrators handed out flyers urging passersby to “join us in our Surprise Visit to Harper’s. … Bring a sandwich on your lunch hour—have lunch with a homosexual.”
Harper’s executive editor Midge Decter defended Epstein’s piece as “serious and honest and misread,” but Arthur Evans was unmoved. “You knew that his article would contribute to the suffering of homosexuals,” he told Decter. “And if you didn’t know that, you’re inexcusably naïve.” By the end of the afternoon, three local television stations had turned up to cover the demonstration.
“That was a dreadful article,” Frank Kameny remembered.
The activist Eric Thorndale concluded that the “chronic affliction of Harper’s is cultural lag.” Thorndale had discovered that exactly one hundred years earlier the magazine had published an eight-page tirade against female suffrage. “The natural position of woman is clearly … a subservient one,” Harper’s stated. If women gained the right to vote, they would sell it “any day for a yard of ribbon or a tinsel brooch.” Thorndale concluded that if this cultural lag wasn’t “willfully vicious, it was “at least—like the Epstein article of a century later—cheap, canting, pretentious and wrong.”
THE MOST WIDELY read reply to Epstein’s article appeared four months later in an unlikely venue: The New York Times Magazine. Abe Rosenthal, who had commissioned the big front-page piece on the “growth” of homosexuality in 1963, had continued to consolidate his power over the daily news department: by now he was managing editor. But in 1971, there were still two separate New York Timeses—the daily paper, which reported to Rosenthal; and the Sunday sections, whose editors reported to Sunday editor Daniel Schwarz. Because of this division, there was real diversity within the news pages, and the Sunday paper often expressed distinctly different points of view from the daily—especially on the subject of homosexuality. (Rosenthal gained control of both the Sunday and the daily news departments in 1977.)
The editorial page remained independent of Abe Rosenthal, and from the mid-sixties onward, under John B. Oakes, Max Frankel, Jack Rosenthal, and Howell Raines, it consistently supported the repeal of sodomy laws and the enactment of basic civil rights protection for gay citizens. As early as November 1967, the Sunday Magazine had run a long piece advocating the repeal of sodomy laws and “civil rights for homosexuals,” although it also described homosexuality as “theoretically destructive of the species.”
The lead article in The New York Times Magazine on January 17,1971, was entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” This was a landmark
event because the author, Merle Miller, was a well-known and well-liked novelist, and The New York Times had given its imprimatur to his confession. At this early stage of the movement, Miller was by far the most famous writer ever to “come out” in the pages of the Times. The vehemence of the Harper’s piece made it perfectly clear how much courage that required.
Miller revealed many years later that Epstein’s piece had directly inspired his assignment from the Times. Soon after the Harper’s article was published, Miller had had lunch with two “liberal” Times editors, both of whom expressed their admiration for Epstein’s opinions. For the first time in his life, Miller finally spoke up. “Damn it,” he said, “I’m a homosexual!” The editors responded by commissioning Miller’s response.
The implication of Epstein’s piece was that homosexuals had no right to exist—and that society certainly had no obligation to temper its prejudices against them. Miller quoted part of what Epstein had written right at the start of his own article: “Nobody says, or at least I have never heard anyone say, ‘Some of my best friends are homosexual,’” Epstein had written. “People do say—I say—‘fag’ and ‘queer’ without hesitation—and these words, no matter who is uttering them, are put-down words, in intent every bit as vicious as ‘kike’ or ‘nigger.’”
“Is it true?” Miller asked.
Is that the way it is? Have my heterosexual friends … been going through an elaborate charade all these years? I would like to think they agree with George Weinberg,* a therapist … who says, “I would never consider a person healthy unless he had overcome his prejudice against homosexuality.” But even Mr. Weinberg assumes that there is a prejudice, apparently built-in, a natural part of the human psyche. … The late Otto Kahn, I think it was, said, “A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.” Is a fag a homosexual gentleman who has just stepped out? Me?
The Gay Metropolis Page 30