One Saturday night Ethan Geto was on his way to the firehouse when he got behind a group of people on the street who were looking for a bathroom. “This was before SoHo was SoHo,” said Geto. “This was when SoHo was totally an industrial district. And it was gloomy and dark and foreboding. And in this one place, in the middle of this block on Saturday night, all of a sudden you hear this thumping disco music! And you see dozens of people streaming in and they’re milling around out on the sidewalk and smoking cigarettes.
“So someone in this group says, ‘Oh, there’s a place!’ And I’m walking in right behind this guy ‘cause I’m going to the dance. His friends are a mixed crowd of straight people. They stay outside and he goes up to the door of the firehouse. And I’m right behind him. And he says, ‘Hey! Ya got a bathroom in here?’ And the guy supervising the door says, ‘That’ll be two dollars.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but I’m not comin’ in here to dance. I don’t even know what this is. What is this here?’ And the guy at the door says, ‘This is the headquarters of the Gay Activists Alliance.’ And the other guy says, ‘Oh. Well, ya got a bathroom?’
“And this voice sounds so familiar to me. So I sort of lean over because he’s right in front of me, and it’s Bob Dylan. And the guy at the door doesn’t recognize Bob Dylan! So Bob Dylan says, ‘Hey, listen, man! You’re a gay place in here? Aren’t you gays supposed to be for the people!’ So the guy at the door, some grungy guy, says, ‘Hey, listen. Anybody could come in here and say they want to go to the bathroom. We need money to support this organization! Two fucking dollars or beat it!’ Bob Dylan says, ‘Wait a minute. You say this is the gay activist group here! Aren’t you, like, radical people?!’ So finally Bob Dylan in total disgust throws his two dollars on the table, and says to him, ‘Fuck you!’ and heads for the bathroom. And I walk in, and I say, ’That’s Bob Dylan!’
“And this guy says, ‘I don’t care if it’s the fucking queen of England!’”
After Geto left his wife, he moved in with Morty Manford on 14th Street. They were very close friends—not lovers—and they were “working day and night on gay rights politics, very militant stuff.”
But Geto was still “totally in the closet to the straight world—to my career and in politics. I was totally hiding. And when Abrams would come over to the apartment, which he did often, I would put away anything that was gay, like magazines, or a gay calendar. It was really nerve-racking. And I’d tell my roommate, the famous Manhattan gay leader, Morty Manford, not to be there. It was really very upsetting and you felt sleazy. It was very unpleasant, the closet of that period. Or any period. Or anybody that feels they have to be in one.”
In 1973, the Bronx Democratic machine mounted a big effort to get rid of Abrams and recapture the patronage of the borough president’s office, and Geto took a leave of absence from his job as Abrams’s press secretary to become his campaign manager. In June, they beat the machine and won the primary election. Now Geto was urging Abrams to run for state attorney general in 1974. But he could not go on without telling his boss the whole truth about his life.
“We sat down on a bench in City Hall Park, right outside city hall. He had no idea what I was going to tell him. And I made a big deal of it, like ‘it’s real serious.’ So he says, ‘Go ahead, what’s on your mind?’
“I’ll never forget this as long as I live. I said, ‘All right, Bob, here’s the story. I’m gay. And not only am I gay, I’m a gay activist. And I’ve been working with the Gay Activists Alliance, secretly, for the last two years. Now you are about to run for attorney general. You and I have had a terrific professional relationship for these three years. I admire you and I want to continue to work for you and be associated with you and manage your career in politics, but I will resign if you want me to. I don’t think someone should resign a job because they’re gay. I don’t think there’s anything bad about being gay.’ And I said, ‘Look, I’ll tell you what I will do and what I won’t do. I won’t be an open, public spokesperson for the gay rights movement because it’s inconsistent with my role as a campaign manager or a governmental employee on your staff at a high level. I won’t project myself as a gay leader. But I will have relationships with men. I may walk down the street holding hands with another man.’ This is 1973. I said, T will not hide my sexuality. And if you feel now, having heard this and, especially, because you’re a bachelor’—he was the straightest person I’ve ever met in my life, believe me—‘but because you’re a bachelor and because you’re thinking of running for state attorney general, if you think it will be a terrible handicap to have an openly gay person as your chief aide, I will resign quietly and I won’t have any hard feelings.’”
There was a long pause, and Geto had no idea what Abrams would say. Finally, his boss spoke: “Ethan, I respect you. You’re my friend. I care about you. And I will support you in all of this. And I can accept everything you said. And I need you and want you on my team. And I will back you up. And I will take whatever negatives come along with this, if people try to attack me because you’re gay.”
For Geto, it was “a wonderful moment.” He “felt totally free. To be able to hear this, in those days, that the guy was so supportive and so committed and would let me keep my job. I saw myself attached to him, managing him into big-time politics. It was very important to me in my career. It was just a wonderful thing. And I was very lucky because for years after that, very, very few other people in politics or government came out the way I did.”
V
The Eighties
“I don’t think people’s sex lives are very interesting, unless they destroy the person.”
—JOHN FAIRCHILD
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true. … The problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact?”
—EDMUND WHITE, 1980
“What everyone had wanted was bringing them death.”
—RANDY SHILTS
“Out of the closets and into the streets!”
—ACT UP CHANT
THE SEVENTIES had been a time of amazing progress and almost nonstop celebration for much of the gay community. By the end of the decade, gay invisibility was just a distant memory, with the proliferation of gay characters on network TV sitcoms and frequent political battles over gay civil rights laws. Even damaging defeats, like Anita Bryant’s successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami, were not without incidental benefits. Such reversals proved once again how much the movement could be strengthened by adversity.
Ethan Geto, who had temporarily decamped from New York to Miami to help fight Bryant’s effort, saw the Florida fight as “a watershed.” He said, “I thought this was the first great opportunity nationally to mobilize the gay community with a political consciousness. I hoped that gay rights would mature into a major civil rights issue on the national agenda. And it happened. We were on the nightly news a million times. We got letters and notes that came in by the thousands. They were like this: ‘I live in rural Indiana. And we can’t really say we’re gay here, but there is a place where we do hang out once a week on Sunday afternoons. It becomes like a gay bar, but nobody really knows it. There are three women and five men. We didn’t have much money, but we said we’ll take one week’s pay check from everybody and send it to you people in Dade County because you’re standing up for homosexuals.’”
By 1980, in response to the growing clamor for equality, 120 of the largest corporations, including AT&T and IBM, had adopted personnel policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and 40 towns and cities had passed similar laws or issued executive orders. (Mostly because of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church—whose lobbyist was Roy Cohn—New York City remained pointedly absent from this list at the beginning of the decade.)
Twenty-two states had ended all restrictions on sexual relations between consenting adults, and on
the tenth anniversary of Stonewall, seventeen-year-old Randy Rohl took twenty-year-old Grady Quinn to the senior prom in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The National Gay Task Force announced that this was the first time two acknowledged homosexuals had attended a high school prom together in America.
But while thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to these changes by publicly declaring who they were, thousands more still assumed that safety, comfort, and prosperity would continue to flow from inside a closet. And most gay people still believed that a public declaration of their homosexuality would mean losing the chance to rise to the pinnacle of their profession. In his first career as a film executive, even a future firebrand like Larry Kramer was careful to bring a woman friend with him to the Monday-night executive screenings. “I was more interested in learning what my professional talents might be and how to get to the next step on the ladder of success,” Kramer explained.
Mixed messages from all kinds of American institutions encouraged this timidity. After the tennis star Billie Jean King was publicly identified as a lesbian in 1981, she continued to do commentary for tennis tournaments, but her lucrative product endorsements disappeared. Similarly, while both NBC and CBS prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, NBC also had a policy forbidding employees “from getting involved in a public way in controversial subjects.” An NBC executive told the Columbia Journalism Review in 1982 that this meant that any correspondent who “came out publicly as gay” would automatically be asked to leave the network. “The biggest enemies are the totally closeted people who have real power,” the same executive said.
And the silent convictions of the senior executives at CBS News became clear when CBS Reports presented “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” in April 1980. Narrated and coproduced by George Crile, this “documentary” about gay political power in San Francisco made Mike Wallace’s 1967 effort look like a model of fairness and enlightenment. Crile’s work bore little resemblance to objective journalism. This was straightforward, antigay propaganda, with a heavy emphasis on drag queens and sadomasochism, including a description of an S and M parlor where the sexual activities were “so dangerous that they have a gynecological table there with a doctor and nurse on hand to sew people up.” Crile’s source for this particular tidbit was the city coroner, who subsequently admitted that his own information was based on hearsay. Crile’s critics also pointed out that the S and M establishment he highlighted in the broadcast was actually patronized almost exclusively by heterosexuals. The program even included Crile’s very traditional question to a gay activist about whether the toleration of homosexuality wouldn’t automatically lead to disaster, as the producer believed it had in Weimar Germany. “It was a very decadent society, if you remember it,” said Crile. “Isn’t it a sign of decadence when you have so many gays emerging, breaking apart all the values of a society?”
Crile reported that gay influence over the city’s politicians had become so strong that many elected officials felt obliged to bow to even the most exotic gay concerns. The program caused an uproar in San Francisco. “It’s shocking that CBS News, home of Walter Cronkite, would partake of such bigotry,” Jeff Jarvis wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, while in the Chronicle, Terrence O’Flaherty called it a “dreadful little program” which “is deadly for everyone it touches.”
The only suggestion of social progress occurred during one of the commercial breaks, which was filled by an example of what sociologist Laud Humphreys described as “gay window advertising,” which permitted gay and straight consumers to receive different messages from the same advertisement. In the commercial sponsoring the documentary, a man strolled with a woman in one hand and a bottle of Old Spice in the other. But in the final shot, he tossed the Old Spice to another attractive man, making his intentions seem rather ambiguous.
Randy Alfred, a freelance reporter in San Francisco, spent three hundred hours researching “Gay Power, Gay Politics” after it aired. His friends held a cocktail party to raise money to cover his expenses. Then he filed a formal protest detailing its inaccuracies to the National News Council, a short-lived effort at self-regulation by the news industry which never gained much clout, partly because The New York Times refused to cooperate with it.
The council found that “by concentrating on certain flamboyant examples of homosexual behavior,” Crile’s program “tended to reinforce stereotypes.” It also “exaggerated political concessions to gays and made those concessions appear as threats to public morals and decency.” In October, CBS reported the council’s verdict on the air, and acknowledged that in at least one instance there had been a violation of the network’s “own journalistic standards.” This was the first time a major news organization had issued a formal apology to gay activists.*
Crile’s work resembles a couple of antigay propaganda films produced by the religious right in the nineties, The Gay Agenda and Equal Rights, Special Rights, which stressed sadomasochism, while also featuring antigay sound bites from Republican custodians of morality like former Secretary of Education William Bennett and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi. But these programs were never broadcast on a major network. They were shown on Christian cable networks. Copies were also distributed by fundamentalists throughout the country.
TO EVERYONE WHO still cherished the generous spirit of the sixties, two events at the end of 1980 made it feel as though America was entering a bleak new era, while a third incident sent a tremor through the gay community in Manhattan.
The first omen was the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan on November 4, coupled with the arrival of the first Republican majority in the Senate in more than a quarter century. The Republican gains marked a sharp turn to the right, and sparked a new reverence for all kinds of conspicuous consumption. In the age of Reagan, no one would be encouraged to worry about anyone less fortunate than himself. The new president’s sole preoccupations would be lower taxes and a bloated defense budget.
The election also meant a greatly expanded political role for Evangelical Christians. Robert J. Billings, a cofounder of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, had served as Reagan’s liaison on religious issues during the campaign, and fundamentalist Christians were given major credit for the Republican sweep. Not since the presidential runs of William Jennings Bryan had Protestant fundamentalism played such a large role in a national campaign.
When Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy unsuccessfully challenged Jimmy Carter for the presidential nomination in 1980, Kennedy became the first significant major party candidate to actively pursue gay voters. A total of seventy-six gay delegates and alternates attended the Democratic National Convention that year in New York, and the party’s platform acknowledged their growing influence. It said, “We must affirm the dignity of all people and … protect all groups from discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex or sexual orientation.” Though almost unnoticed by the national media at the time, this modest statement of nondiscrimination gave the Republicans another opportunity to exploit antigay prejudice in a national campaign—just as they had during the hysteria of the McCarthy period in the 1950s.* Twelve days before the election, Christians for Reagan, a supposedly independent lobby organized to capture the fundamentalist vote for the Republican nominee, announced that it would pay for a barrage of advertisements throughout the south, which attacked President Carter for “catering” to homosexuals. Citing the language of the Democratic party platform, Gary Jarmin, national director of Christians for Reagan, described the purpose of the campaign this way: “If there’s any reason at all they should oppose Carter, this is it.” On one spot, an announcer intoned, “The gays in San Francisco elected a mayor; now they’re going to elect a president.” Before the ads began, polls had shown that Carter, a born-again Christian, still had considerable support among the Evangelicals. But the hard-hitting TV spots were extremely effective, and they helped Reagan carry every Southern state except Georgia, where Carter had been governor. Partly
because the commercials never aired in New York or Washington, most people outside the South were never aware of them. The Times mentioned them only once—in a single paragraph two weeks before the election.
THE SECOND LACERATING EVENT at the end of 1980 was the murder of John Lennon. New Yorkers had proudly claimed the Liverpudlian as one of their own; but they had also respected his privacy, even when they spotted him cavorting in Central Park with his wife and son. The late-night shooting by a crazed “fan” on December 8, in the doorway of the Dakota apartment building on West 72d Street, was the most depressing murder that Manhattan had endured in decades.
For six days, thousands made a daily pilgrimage past the assassination site, until Yoko Ono specified a moment for mourning and more than one hundred thousand of the faithful gathered in Central Park for what was supposed to be a ten-minute moment of silence. Within the huge throng in front of the Naumberg Bandshell, there was inexpressible sadness—but no silence at all, because a huge flotilla of helicopters hired by the press hovered low during the entire event.
The Gay Metropolis Page 36