“He felt who they were. He felt their energy. He felt the difference in their womanness. And he went back in the church and he told the congregation that we were all lesbians and he knew it. And he wanted the daycare center closed. And that Sunday he stood up and he put me out of the church, in my mother’s church, in front of that congregation. And my mother fought for me in that church. She said, I know my daughter. My daughter’s not a lesbian. As God is my witness and my judge.’ And she said, ‘If you can’t have my daughter here you can’t have me ‘cause she worked hard to build the daycare center.’ And he threw me out of the church in front of the congregation.”
Waters never did come out to her mother, partly because she thought she would be “letting down her race. You know, you’re taught everything is connected to race. Can’t let down your people. Just being black is enough. Because if you do something wrong, you’ve embarrassed the race and, ‘Oh, we’ve been through so much.’ And, ‘Oh Lord, help the people. If we do anything we’re gonna bring the whole race down and we all work so hard.’ And it’s such a responsibility. All the time. It never stops. The expectation is that you’re always gonna uphold the race.
“Because within the black community, it’s believed that gay and lesbianism is a white people’s curse. That white people made this thing up and it has nothing to do with black people. It’s one more of those things that white folks came up with so that they could keep us down.” Waters thinks that’s one reason for the virulence of the homophobia in so much of the black community—“because it’s a white folks’ thing.
“This has never been about us. This is destroying the family. They would rather you could be pregnant! You could have fifty-five children. Anything but this. Incest is more tolerable. Anything but this! But they’re still a part of the community. That’s the confusion. More the gay men than the lesbian.
“It’s so funny: in that very same damn church that that minister threw me out of, the church treasurer was a lesbian. And my mother found out later on, after she left the church, that the church treasurer and the church secretary were having an affair.”
Waters’s first lover married a Senegalese man and moved to Dakar. But Waters doesn’t believe that people become straight: “I think that they want something different. I had another lover for seven years. Then one day, in our seventh year of relationship, she got up, and she said, ‘I don’t want to be gay anymore.’ And I said, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ And she says, ‘I don’t want to be gay anymore. I want to be a mother of children. I want to raise children and I want to do all those kinds of things.’
“And I said, ‘Well, why can’t you do that and have a lover/’ And she said, ‘Because it’s going to be hard enough for my children being black. And for them to have two black mothers, you know, I can’t live like this. So I’m outta here.’”
MERLE MILLER WROTE that the psychiatric establishment had come out “in full force” against his article. One Park Avenue therapist even offered to treat him for free, for a time—“because it is clear from your tone that you are in desperate, even frantic need of help”—even though nothing in the article suggested desperation.
Given the vehemence with which antigay psychiatrists continued to express themselves, it’s easy to understand why Miller predicted that “most of the psychiatric establishment will continue to insist that homosexuality is a disease.” But the writer had underestimated the pace of social change in the new decade. The gay movement’s most important victory was now less than four years away.
Frank Kameny had been among the first to point out in the early sixties that “an attribution of mental illness in our culture is devastating” and that this accusation of sickness was going to be “one of the major stumbling blocks” to real progress. He recognized that this battle would be more important than any single election or the passage of any piece of legislation. Most importantly, it turned out to be a battle that could be won.
In 1970 Kameny overcame the initial resistance of the Gay Activists Alliance in New York and convinced them they needed to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to reverse its position on homosexuality. For nearly a century, the APA had listed homosexuality as an illness and Kameny and his cohort were determined to change that.
As usual, there was a two-prong strategy. Privately, Dr. Charles Silverstein, a GAA activist, met with Dr. Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons who was in charge of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Publicly, the activists invaded the APA’s annual convention at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington in 1971 and demanded the right to challenge the association’s position on homosexuality. The following year a panel discussion included Barbara Gittings, a veteran lesbian activist from Philadelphia; Frank Kameny; and a psychiatrist from Philadelphia who wore a mask and used a microphone that disguised his voice. “It was a very dramatic session with this fellow speaking with a grotesque mask on,” a conference participant recalled.
At this point Kameny did not know any openly gay psychiatrists within the organization: “In those days gay psychiatrists were not out. Period. End. That’s why the one gay psychiatrist wore a mask.” But the gay activists did have many important heterosexual allies. Probably most important were Evelyn Hooker, the researcher who had done groundbreaking work confirming the sanity of gay men; and Dr. Judd Marmor, who was an officer of the APA. Each of them played a heroic role in changing the official psychiatric orthodoxy on homosexuality.
In 1969, Hooker was part of a panel of the National Institute of Mental Health which recommended the repeal of all laws prohibiting sex in private between consenting adults, and Marmor had always been open-minded on the subject of homosexuality.
Thirty years earlier, Marmor was a young Hollywood analyst, and in 1947 Arthur Laurents was one of his patients. Laurents remembered that Marmor had greeted him with the usual question: “Why are you here?”
“I’m afraid I’m homosexual.”
“So?”
“What do you mean ‘So?’ You know it’s dirty and disgusting.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
Then Marmor said something that would change Laurents’s life forever: “All I know is whoever or whatever you are, if you lead your life with pride and dignity, that’s all that matters.”*
Marmor had always been an iconoclast: he once presented a paper on infidelity which suggested that coveting your neighbor’s wife might be healthy. Right from the start Marmor was “appalled by the stereotypic generalizations being made about homosexuals” by the psychiatrists he knew. “I was still a young analyst, but … I’d hear about the homosexual personality and about the fact that homosexuals were vindictive and aggressive, couldn’t have decent relationships, and were not to be trusted—all terribly nasty, negative disparaging things. I knew gay men and women. This view just didn’t make sense to me. I felt we were making generalizations about people who were really very different from one another, just as heterosexuals are.” To correct some of these misconceptions, in 1965 he published Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality. In it he argued that “our attitudes toward homosexuality were culturally determined and influenced.” At the time, that statement was considered “relatively revolutionary,” from a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
In the third year of the activists’ campaign, the APA met in Hawaii. A formal debate about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s listing for homosexuality was scheduled. The participants included Richard Green, Robert Stoller, Charles Socarides, Irving Bieber, and Judd Marmor. “It was a very, very dramatic debate,” said Marmor, and one of the association’s largest meetings ever, with “several thousand psychiatrists” in the audience. Marmor argued eloquently that it was time for the organization to end a policy that misused psychiatry and had detrimental “social and legal consequences” for gay people. He said the association categorized homosexuality as a sickness mostly because “soci
ety disapproves of this behavior.” Psychiatrists who labeled it an illness were merely acting as agents of a cultural value system. And he reminded the audience that only one hundred years earlier, medical authorities were certain that a dependency on masturbation was evidence of a serious mental disturbance.
Behind the scenes at the same convention, Frank Kameny was meeting in a gay bar on Waikiki Beach with Ron Gold of GAA and Robert Spitzer, who was still in charge of the APA diagnostic manual. “Right there we wrote the resolutions,” said Kameny. “There were two resolutions: one had to do with security clearances, and the other was the sickness one.” The GAYPA, an informal and very closeted gay caucus of the association, was also meeting in the same bar that evening. “They were very, very, very shocked when we came in and sat down in the bar,” said Kameny. “They felt their cover was being blown. But there was no malice aforethought on our part.”
Marmor thought his side had won the debate, and the activists left Hawaii filled with optimism. But they would not know the final outcome until the APA’s Board of Trustees met in Washington seven months later. On December 15,1973, an enormous burden was lifted from every gay American: the board announced its 13-0 vote to remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders. The news was reported on front pages all over the country.
Across America there was exhilaration within the community—and gigantic relief. A single action had removed the official psychiatric curse that had hung over every homosexual. Robert Spitzer said the APA had acted because homosexuality did not “regularly cause emotional distress” or generally create “impairment of social functioning.” In New York, Ron Gold was ecstatic: “We have won the ball game,” he declared. Then he added, a little too optimistically, “No longer can gay people grow up thinking they’re sick.”
Marmor considered it a crucial step because those who wanted to discriminate against gay people could no longer say “psychiatrists call it an illness” and consider it “a sexual perversion.”
Psychiatrists like Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber had not only based their professional lives on the doctrine that all homosexuals required treatment; that idea had also been their ticket to celebrity. When the Board of Trustees repudiated them, they were apoplectic. These men had prospered in the fifties by promoting conformity and intolerance. Now their very livelihood was at stake. They might become irrelevant in an era that deplored prejudice and celebrated diversity.
For the first time in the history of the APA, Socarides demanded a referendum of the membership to overturn the trustees’ action, because he was certain that most psychiatrists would be “aghast” at the decision.
Socarides had been tangling with Kameny since 1965, when the psychiatrist had testified as a hostile witness in one of Kameny’s security cases before the Pentagon. “His rhetoric has not changed by a syllable in thirty years,” Kameny said. And when Socarides began to describe himself as a “civil libertarian” in 1973, Kameny circulated his remarks at the 1965 hearing to discredit him.
The referendum was held simultaneously with the election for a new president of the APA, and Marmor was one of the candidates. Both of his opponents—Herbert Modlin and Louis West—were also strong supporters of gay rights, and all three of them signed a letter urging APA members to confirm the action of the trustees.* The letter noted that the decision to remove homosexuality per se from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual had been approved unanimously by the Council on Research and Development and the Reference Committee as well as the trustees. It had also been ratified by the Assembly of District Branches. The National Gay Task Force raised $3,000 to pay for a mailing of this letter to all eighteen thousand members of the association. The authors warned that “it would be a serious and potentially embarrassing step for our profession to vote down a decision which was taken after serious and extended consideration.”
On April 9,1974, Frank Kameny and Bruce Voeller, executive director of the National Gay Task Force, were present in the APA boardroom in Washington to hear the outcome of the vote. The result of the referendum was the last item on the agenda. Nervousness turned into optimism after the announcement that Marmor had become the APA’s new president. Then the crucial news was finally announced: 58 percent had voted to remove homosexuality from the list of illnesses, and 37.8 percent had voted against.
“We were ecstatic,” Kameny recalled.
Still Socarides refused to give up. He described the letter financed by the task force as an unfair campaign practice—because it hadn’t mentioned who had paid for it. The psychiatrist demanded a new election, but this time the association rejected his protest. The men who had dominated the public debate about homosexuality for thirty years were now officially outsiders in their own profession.
The losers considered the result illegitimate because they thought the APA had been manipulated by gay activists. “They claimed the whole thing was handled within the APA on a political basis,” said Kameny. “It was not. It was a mixture of efforts from the inside and the outside. Those were times of rapid cultural change. Things were being looked at that hadn’t been looked at before. I think our effort precipitated the internal action. I don’t think it would have happened for a very, very long time, if ever, otherwise. As often happens in a culture that was pervaded by democratic principles, it was a good, sound, scientific decision, administered by a political process. But there’s a very real difference between that and saying that the whole thing was political, which it was not.”
Marmor agreed: “I don’t in any way want to minimize the importance of the gay liberation movement,” he told the historian Eric Marcus. “But there were people like myself and Evelyn Hooker … who were independently developing their views about the wrongness of our attitudes toward homosexuality.”
For Frank Kameny and the rest of the movement, the action of the APA was a stunning achievement. It came just nine years after Kameny and Jack Nichols had been forced to wage a battle within the movement to convince gay people to think of themselves as healthy human beings. The psychiatric establishment had been one of the biggest roadblocks to that early victory. Now, in less than a decade, Kameny and his friends had converted the movement’s most potent enemy into an important ally.
“We stated that there was no reason why … a gay man or woman could not be just as healthy, just as effective, just as law abiding and just as capable of functioning as any heterosexual,” said Marmor. “Furthermore, we asserted that laws that discriminated against them in housing or in employment were unjustified. So it was a total statement, and I think it was a very significant move.”
The Stonewall riot had served as the movement’s de facto Declaration of Independence. Just four years later, psychiatrists had become the wildly unlikely ratifiers of its Constitution.
ONE BENEFIT of the sexual revolution, combined with the action of the APA, was the obliteration of the doubts that haunted so many gay men in the fifties—even radicals like William Wynkoop—who had to convince themselves that “the pleasure of most homosexuals in sexual activities is equal in passion and enjoyment to that which the majority of heterosexuals experience.” In the seventies, gay New Yorkers never doubted their ability to have as much fun as anyone else.
Some Greenwich Village saloon owners decided to catch the wave of the new revolution by changing the nature of their businesses. The Ninth Circle, which occupied the bottom two floors of a row house at 139 West 10th Street, had been a very successful steak house in the sixties with a slightly bohemian and overwhelmingly heterosexual clientele. In its heyday, waiters there made as much as $150 a night, a huge sum in that period. It was just a couple of blocks north of the Stonewall Inn, but the Circle was “totally straight” and “totally antigay.” John Koch started there as a dishwasher but quickly worked his way up to bar manager. “They used to get on the microphone, and say, ‘If you’re gay go away,’ Koch recalled. “Everybody would laugh. I don’t know if it was meant seriously or what.”
The rent w
as a bargain: the restaurant owner, Bobby Krivit, who was a veteran of the carnival business on the Jersey Shore, leased the entire building for $600 a month. But by the end of 1971, business had dropped off sharply, and Krivit decided to go in a new direction. His partner had already left him to found Max’s Kansas City, a famous East Village watering hole.
In January 1972 Krivit told Koch he wanted the Ninth Circle to become a gay bar. At the time, Koch wasn’t sure whether Krivit, who was straight, knew that Koch was gay. The owner asked Koch if he could hire a whole new staff within two weeks, and his manager told him he thought he could. Koch believed this was the first straight establishment in Greenwich Village to “go gay” overnight in the seventies.
The old staff was fired, and the bar bought an ad in Michael’s Thing, a guide to New York nightlife, to announce the makeover. The response was instantaneous—and “overwhelming.” The owner hedged his bets a bit by keeping the restaurant going for a while on the lower floor after he converted the upstairs into a gay bar. This transition caused a certain amount of amusement because the men’s room was downstairs, forcing gay bargoers to walk through the straight restaurant to relieve themselves. But within a few weeks the gay part of the business had taken over the whole place. However, the big black and white sign outside announcing the “Ninth Circle Steakhouse” remained unaltered; no one saw any need to change it. Within a month, it was the hottest gay bar in Manhattan, a distinction it retained for most of the decade. Practically every night of the week, both floors were jammed from wall to wall with beautiful young men, eager to sample the spoils of the Stonewall revolution.
“It was like a victory for gay people or something,” said Koch. “They conquered this straight bastion. We really weren’t ready for it. And it just went up and up and up from that.”
There were two separate bars, a long one upstairs with a row of low tables in front of it, and a smaller one below, with a dance floor and a pool table. Everyone from Andy Warhol to Harvey Fierstein was an occasional customer. An autographed poster of Janis Joplin next to the front door nurtured the myth that the singer had once been a customer. The garden in the back provided a third place to sit on languid summer evenings, and patrons lined up at the same table every night to purchase their drug of choice. Nearly everyone smoked joints outdoors, and no one bothered to be discreet about it. When Koch suggested to the owner that such flagrant commerce in illicit substances might be imprudent, Krivit was always dismissive. “You don’t understand this younger generation,” the owner would say. “It’s good for business.”
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