The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  I can never be sure, of course, will never be sure. I know it shouldn’t bother me. That’s what everybody says, but it does bother me … every time I enter a room in which there is anyone else. Friend or foe? Is there a difference?

  Miller’s piece had all of the knowledge, nuance and humanity that Epstein’s lacked. The only things the two men agreed about were that “nobody seems to know why homosexuality happens” and “the great fear is that a son will turn out to be homosexual,” as Miller put it. But the gay writer added, “Not all mothers are afraid that their sons will be homosexuals. Everywhere among us are those dominant ladies who welcome homosexuality in their sons. That way the mothers know they won’t lose them to another woman.”

  Miller described himself as a bookish youth who “read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn’t care all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates … but for years nobody in any of the books I read was ever tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me.” As an adult, he was a closeted liberal who belonged to twenty-two organizations devoted to improving the lot of the world’s outcasts; homosexuals were the only group he “never spoke up for.” He recalled the silence of the ACLU in the fifties when gay people were being fired from “all kinds of government posts. … And the most silent of all was a closet queen who was a member of the board of directors, myself.”

  He displeased some young activists by saying he would have preferred to have been straight. But the piece still represented a tremendous leap forward, simply because it did so much to humanize the homosexual’s predicament. During the next ten months Miller received more than two thousand letters, including one from an American army installation in Germany: “I was on leave in Paris and a French boy gave [your article] to me … I read it, after which I burned it. … Thank you, though, just seeing something like that in print has meant more to me than you can rightly imagine.”

  Miller said the most common themes from his correspondents were “nothing I have ever read has helped as much to restore my own self-respect” and “so much of what you have to say I have experienced myself and have rarely been able to trust anyone to ‘let go.’”

  A “great many” straight readers realized for the first time “that homosexuals were people, too, with feelings, just like anybody else.” Most telling was the reader who suddenly felt all the guilt that Epstein had specifically disavowed: “I’ve always reacted with horror and indignation at words like ‘Kike, Dago, Spic, Nigger, Pollack,’ and yet for every time I’ve said homosexual, I’ve said ‘fag’ a thousand times. You’ve made me wonder how I could have believed that I had modeled my life on the dignity of man while being so cruel, so thoughtless to so many.”

  To placate the young activists who were upset because he had said that he would have preferred to be straight, Miller explained in his follow-up article: “The assumption seems to have been that I consider straightness more virtuous, somehow superior. That is not what I meant. I meant that in this place and time, indeed in most others since the Hellenic Age … being straight is easier.” But even that sentiment was one that very few of the new young activists agreed with.

  Although Miller’s roommate at their house in the country had purchased a shotgun for protection the day before the original piece had appeared, like virtually everyone else who finally comes out of the closet, Miller was buoyed by the whole experience. He said that he had received “more than 2,000 pieces of evidence” that “most people are basically decent.”

  FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER he had written that “nothing [my sons] could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual,” Epstein chose to cloud the record. By now he was a prominent neoconservative, and the art critic Hilton Kramer’s closest friend. In an article called “True Virtue” in The New York Times Magazine, Epstein described his “rage” after a student reporter called to ask whether he had ever said that he would prefer that his sons “be murderers or dope addicts than homosexuals.”

  “I could not, after 15 years, recall all that I had written in that essay,” Epstein wrote. Apparently, he didn’t save his clips, either. “I was, nonetheless, quite certain that I could not have said that I would rather have my sons be murderers or dope addicts than homosexuals, and this for a simple reason: I believe no such thing, nor have I ever believed it.”

  When Willie Morris published his memoirs in 1993, the former Harper’s editor offered no apology for Epstein’s invective. And his description of the controversy was completely disingenuous: “several dozen homosexuals arrived en masse … to demand redress for a paragraph [emphasis supplied] in an article by Joseph Epstein which they considered unsympathetic to homosexuality.”

  THE MONTH AFTER Merle Miller’s article appeared, the conservative psychiatric establishment aired its point of view in two stories in the Times by Jane Brody, the paper’s “personal health” expert. The first one, on the “Women’s Page,” carried the headline “Homosexuality: Parents Aren’t Always to Blame.” It quoted Dr. Lawrence J. Hatterer of New York Hospital’s Payne Whitney Clinic, who “believes that environmental and cultural factors are becoming increasingly important contributors to the development of homosexuality.” Among the influences the doctor cited were the “$1 billion hard core homosexual pornography industry,” “the growing public tolerance of homosexuality; which may make some men feel, ‘Maybe it’s easier, and why not?’” and “the blending of traditional male and female roles that can lead to confusion in a boy’s mind as to what is male and what is female.” Nowhere in Brody’s artide did anyone suggest that a parent’s proper role might be to accept a child’s sexual orientation.

  The mother of a gay son who wrote to Merle Miller put it best a few months later: “Being a nice human being, people everywhere accept [my son]. Above all, as he grows older he knows his family loves him always. … Families of gay young men should not treat them as ‘sick.’ Different, yes, but not sick. I think we’d have less suicides and better adjusted ‘different males’ if the family unit stayed close to these boys. … The whole problem in our generation is that we worry so much about what our neighbors think. Thank God this young generation doesn’t give a damn.”

  Brody’s editors put her second article on the front page eighteen days after her previous story about homosexuality had appeared. The headline read “More Homosexuals Aided to Become Heterosexual.” It reported the work of three therapists treating those “strongly motivated” to become heterosexual, although Brody conceded at the beginning of her story that “the vast majority of homosexuals are not interested in psychiatric treatment” and “most of those who do enter therapy do not want to become heterosexual.”

  The article began with the crucial moment in The Boys in the Band, when Harold tells Michael, “You are a sad and pathetic man. … You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be. But there is nothing you can do to change it.” Recognizing the revolutionary implications of that statement, Brody’s expert psychiatrists denied that inevitability; but their prescriptions made them sound naive. Once again, Dr. Hatterer was one of Brody’s principal sources. Among the latest “techniques” he cited for successful conversions included telling patients to “stop frequenting ‘gay’ bars and go to ‘straight’ ones instead” and asking them to “substitute Playboy magazine and images of women for homosexual pornography and images of men.” A medical team used a more extreme technique, giving patients “mild electric shocks when shown pictures of naked men.” A doctor using the electric shock method admitted that he didn’t have enough data to evaluate its effectiveness, but that didn’t stop him from offering his “impression” anyway: “’about 75 percent’ of patients become heterosexually oriented after about six months of therapy.”

  Gay people who had begun to accept who they were read a clear subtext from Brody’s omission of any description of homosexuals who were comfortable with their orientation: the only worthy homosexual was the one who was
determined to transform himself into a heterosexual. The reporter ended the article with a psychiatrist’s prediction that some day there might be a “Homosexuals Anonymous,” to “do for homosexuals what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for many alcoholics.”

  A much shorter accompanying article without a byline was the only place any doctor was quoted as suggesting that homosexuality might be normal. Dr. Evelyn Hooker, whose landmark study had been so important in the fifties, said her work had revealed no “’demonstrable pathology’ that would differentiate” homosexuals “in any way from a group of relatively normal heterosexuals.”

  A colleague remarked to Brody that she was the first Times reporter to “turn the penis into a beat.”

  “I try to get it in whenever I can,” Brody replied.

  Twenty-five years later, after Brody was asked to reread her articles, she said she had no idea that they had been offensive to gay readers when they appeared. “I love my stories actually,” Brody said in an interview in 1996. “You have to remember this was 1970 or so. … They were really ahead of their time.” Brody acknowledged in 1996 that it was “much easier” to use psychoanalysis to become comfortable with one’s sexuality than it was to change it—but she never made that point in either of her stories in 1971 because “that was not what the pieces were intended to do.”

  Despite their one-sidedness, Brody denied that the articles expressed her own opinions; that would have made them editorials instead of news articles, she explained. She said the second story was for those people who were homosexual because of “reasons such as having been seduced as young adolescents.” Most researchers now believe that homosexuality is caused by a genetic predisposition, very early childhood experiences (before the age of three)—or a combination of the two.

  But in 1996 Brody still believed that adolescent seduction was a cause. She said, “I know it is a cause because I know people this has happened to, and who subsequently, when they got over their fear and became informed that there were options” realized that “just because they had had sex with a man when they were thirteen didn’t mean that that was the only type of sexuality that they were ever capable of expressing.”

  Brody said she had “a minimum of a dozen homosexual friends in 1971. … To suggest that I was writing these pieces as a homophobic person is absurd because it was quite the opposite. I was very empathetic. I knew people who were very content with their homosexuality and lived happily that way and had stable relationships.” But like Mike Wallace in the previous decade, Brody did not discuss those happy homosexuals in these two stories. “I also knew people who were very unhappy,” she said.

  “SARAH WATERS” (a pseudonym) was a product of the migration that brought thousands of African Americans from the south to New York in the fifties and the sixties. She turned fourteen in 1970, and she benefited from the generosity of the Lindsay administration because “there was a lot of art money then,” and she became a member of the New York City Theater Workshop.

  It was as a teenager in the theater group that she first witnessed gay lovemaking. “The cast was made up of folk from nine to twenty-five years old. I was the youngest member in the company, and so I was babied by all of these other ninety-nine actors. I saw a lot: I saw two women making love, ‘cause I just happened to wander in their room one day. I saw two men making love in the company. I saw two women and one man making love. And I saw it was okay. ‘Cause it wasn’t a big thing, it wasn’t a discussion. It was just people loving each other. I never told anybody about the things that happened there. Because, God, my mother’d probably make me come back home.”

  Although she did not act on it until she was twenty-one, Sarah had first recognized her attraction to women in the second grade. “I knew that I wanted to touch the girls, that I didn’t want to touch the boys.” She remembered a lesbian who lived in her neighborhood when she was a child, who was called a “bull dagger.”

  “My mom told us, ‘Never let that woman touch you. Because if she ever touches, you’ll never want a man.’ So the kids, whenever they saw her, they would run from her. But my mom let her in our house. We just couldn’t let her touch us. And then there was a drag queen who lived in our neighborhood. And we used to all run down the block to see him when he went to a ball. He was a fabulous queen.

  “Sexuality, period, was a secret. And it was reserved to be discussed with somebody who was your life partner. And not before. And that was it.”

  Waters’s mother had come from South Carolina in 1947, and Sarah was the sixth of seven children. Her Alabama-born father was a window dresser for stores like Bergdorf Goodman, but he left the house when Sarah was only nine months old. After her father disappeared, the family was evicted during a snowstorm, and her mother came home to find all her children in the street with their babysitter. Sarah’s mother went to the local police precinct and pleaded for a chance to keep her children. For once, New York’s labyrinthine system of social services worked, and the family was given an apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx so they could stay together. They lived in a former army officers barracks, “so they had backyards and front yards and upstairs and downstairs.” It was “a real integrated neighborhood,” with Irish and Italians and Jews.

  Waters’s mother arranged for each of her children to have godparents in the neighborhood. Sarah’s godmother was a runway model, and her godfather was an engineer. “Each set of godparents were either working-class or had pretty good jobs and came from pretty good families,” Waters remembered. Her mother had “five different jobs” and worked for “wealthy Jewish families,” including a couple who were both psychiatrists. “My aunt was their full-time maid. And my mom believed that we had to work. And so we always worked.” Besides holding down five different jobs, her mother was also going to school, “so when we sat at the table and did our homework, she sat at the table and did her homework. And so she had godparents and other primary people in our lives to make sure that we had gotten everything that we needed. It was good.” All seven of the children attended college.

  As a child, Sarah had a lot of boyfriends, “only because when you’re a southern girl child, from the day you’re born, you’re trained how to have a husband.”

  When she was twenty-one in 1977, she had a fling with a married man, but “none of these things satisfied me or made me happy. Because I felt like I could always kind of predict what they were going to do. And it was too simple for me. It wasn’t complex enough.” But rebelliousness had nothing to do with her being a lesbian:

  “No way!

  “I think that the appeal for me, in being gay and loving women, is the gentleness of it. The relationships that I enjoy most with men are not ones of intimacy, but are ones of battles and ones of admiration. And also ones of protection. I like the way that men protect women when they do. But I don’t like the dues you have to pay for the protection. So I like the protection of males in friendships. And I also like the bonding of men with women in secrets. I like the secrets that they share. I would never want to be a man because I wouldn’t want the responsibility that our society places on you when you are a man.”

  Waters never saw herself as a feminist, partly because she never hated men. “I wasn’t angry at men. I didn’t become a lesbian because I hated men. I loved men! I still love men! I don’t love men intimately. I love men as comrades. I love men as friends.”

  She met her first female lover in an acting company of thirty-five women which she had organized herself. “There was a great love between us. And we had decided that, one day, that we were going to rent a hotel room for a weekend. And it was like one of those Holiday Inn kind of rooms, on Ninth Avenue at 40-something. And we stayed in the hotel for the weekend. And we only went out at night. We didn’t sleep together, actually, until our last night there. Because we were acting like silly girls. And we had made up all the excuses in the world why we were at this hotel. It’s very complicated, the mechanics of it all. ‘Cause we didn’t know what to do!

/>   “And we bought all this junk. Our first lovemaking came out of a food fight. ‘Cause we were throwing food across the room. And some food landed on her face, or something like that. And she says, ‘Now you have to lick it off.’ And I said, ‘Ooooohhh shit!’ ‘Cause I didn’t know what to do. And the rest was history.”

  They were together for five years, and they rented a house near Riverdale in the Bronx. “We created our own world. Because the black lesbian community was very specific, in a way. It had two worlds to it. You were either very Afrocentric and you had to play instruments and be real grassroots and wear African garments. Or you had to be this other group of well-known, upper-middle-class, fancy. The Audre Lorde kind, you know. I didn’t like any of them.”

  Then Waters and her lover started a daycare center for working, single women in Waters’s mother’s Baptist church. “We pretty much gave up our lives and our real jobs and we went into this little church and we renovated it with our own hands. They really weren’t payin’ no more than like $10 a week And we took their children, some of the most difficult children that nobody else would take because they hadn’t been toilet-trained and all these different things.

  “The minister of the church saw this as this moneymaking opportunity, and he wanted it back. And after we had renovated the space, he suddenly decided he needed to use this space all the time now.”

  At the time, Waters and her lover knew two women who fascinated them because “they were a couple and they were out and it scared us. They didn’t flaunt it, it was that they had no problems loving women. And they were beautiful black, black, black women, and they would wear all of the African garments and large jewelry and big things on their heads. And they came to visit us at the daycare center one day to do an art project with the kids. They were artists. And the minister saw them.