The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Yale University, “Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities: The Architecture of Community,” Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., May 1995. Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Edward Sagarin. John D’Emiio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, The University of Chicago Press, copyright © 1983 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Allen Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 1990 by Allan Bérubé. Gore Vidal, United States, Essays, 1952–1992. Copyright © 1993 by Gore Vidal. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Max Lerner, “Washington Sex Story” New York Post, July 10, 12, 20, 21, 22, 1950. Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Rights, 1945–1990. Copyright © 1992 by Eric Marcus. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Inc. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Copyright © 1987 by Randy Shilts. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press Incorporated. A. J. Bacevich, “Gays and Military Culture” The National Review, April 26, 1993. Copyright © by National Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission. CBS Reports, “The Homosexuals,” 1967. Reprinted by permission of CBS News, a Division of CBS Inc. Christopher Isherwood letter to Gore Vidal, 1948. Reprinted by permission of Don Bachardy. Frank Rich, “The Gay Decades,” Esquire, November 1987, © Frank Rich. Aaron Latham, “An Evening in the Nude,” New York, July 9, 1973. Reprinted by permission of Aaron Latham. Larry Kramer interview with Arthur Laurents, The Advocate, May 16, 1995. Reprinted by permission of Larry Kramer. Jules Elphant, interview in the SAGE Archive. Reprinted by permission of Jules Elphant. James Michener, “God Is Not a Homophobe,” New York Times, March 30, 1993, © 1993, reprinted by permission of the New York Times. A. M. Rosenthal, “General Powell and the Gays” New York Times, January 26, 1993, © 1993, reprinted by permission of the New York Times. Maureen Dowd, “For Victims of AIDS, Support in a Lonely Siege” New York Times, December 5, 1983, © 1983, reprinted by permission of the New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981, © 1981, reprinted by permission of the New York Times. Robert C. Doty, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern” New York Times, December 17, 1963, © 1963, reprinted by permission of the New York Times. Robin Marantz Henig, “AIDS: A New Disease’s Deadly Odyssey,” New York Times Magazine, February 6, 1983, copyright © Robin Marantz Henig, 1983. Merle Miller, “What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” New York Times Magazine. Copyright © 1971 by Merle Miller. First appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Published by The New York Times Magazine. Reprinted by Curtis Brown, Ltd. David Leavitt, “The Way I Live Now,” New York Times Magazine. Copyright © 1989 by David Leavitt, reprinted with the permission of the Wylie Agency, Inc.

  *When Willie Morris was its editor.

  *In 1860, the bishop of Oxford made a brutal attack on Darwin’s hypothesis. But after Thomas Henry Huxley responded vociferously on Darwin’s behalf, the Church of England never made a formal challenge to science again.

  *The New York Times scorned the book: a brief Sunday review predicted that it might “set homosexuality back at least twenty years.” Bigelow also disliked it. (New York Times Book Review, April 26,1970, and author’s interview with Otis Bigelow, October 25,1994)

  *Two years Later, Gallowhur married Nackey E. Scripps, the granddaughter of E. W. Scripps, the newspaper publisher. They were divorced in 1949. Three years later, Mrs. Gallowhur married William Loeb, the fiercely conservative publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader in New Hampshire. Upon Loeb’s death in 1981, she succeeded him as the paper’s publisher. George Gallowhur died in Miami Beach in 1974. He was sixty-nine.

  *‘The Inquiring Fotographer of the Daily News polled men in the street and got a unanimous reply: they would rather read about murder than about war news. (Newsweek, November 8,1943)

  †Time was mistaken. On November 22,1914, George Bernard Shaw decried the “forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin” in a piece in The New York Times about how to defeat Germany.

  *Actually enacted by Congress at FDR’s request in September 1940.

  *“I raised my hand to knock and then I thought better of it,” Analise Schoenberg testified at Lonergan’s trial. “The knowledge that this witness had stood within only a few feet of where Mrs. Lonergan was fighting for her life, and did not know it, seemed to awe the courtroom listeners,” Meyer Berger reported in The New York Times, March 29,1944.

  *Reynolds also heard about the Wayne Lonergan case while he was in Egypt because the names of several of his Manhattan friends appeared in Lonergan’s address book—and all of them were contacted by the police after Lonergan’s arrest.

  *Victory in Europe

  *A similar provision survived into President Clinton’s “reform” of regulations governing gays in the military, which went into effect in 1994.

  *After Eisenhower picked the General Motors executive Charlie “Engine” Wilson to become defense secretary, Wilson actually said, “We at General Motors have always felt that what was good for the country was good for General Motors as well,” but most people remembered it the other way. (David Halberstam, The Fifties, 118)

  *This sentence may have been Capote’s only literary quarry from his romance with an air-conditioning repairman.

  *Friedman said he “probably” did not know that Cohn was gay at that time—and that “most people thought I was crazy to want to work with him.” (Author’s interview with Stanley M. Friedman, November 30,1994)

  *Allen W. Dulles, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said, “So long as there is sex it is going to be used in espionage.” He declined to say whether the CIA used such techniques, but acknowledged that “we recognize the existence of sex and the attraction of sex.” (New York Times, July 21,1962)

  *This advice was typical of Washington. When Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank first discussed the possibility of disclosing his homosexuality publicly, most of his powerful heterosexual friends urged him to remain in the closet.

  *Later evidence suggested that the diary entries were not contemporary, but a creative reconstruction made several years later. (Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 187)

  *Butler and Ethan Geto were the only people I interviewed who fit into this category.

  *Heston also portrayed Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, but he told the filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman that he ’knew for a fact” that Michelangelo was not a homosexual. (The Advocate, March 19,1996)

  *Edward Villela was a (heterosexual) star of the New York City Ballet.

  *This democratic aspect was already part of gay life in nineteenth-century England. The testimony at the trials of Oscar Wilde contains many of the prosecutor’s sarcastic references to Wilde’s habit of dining with a groom and a valet. (Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America, 152)

  *Clemons wrote a lightly fictionalized account of this experience in his short story “Nana Shellbean.”

  *Gore Vidal published a paperback original under the pen name Katharine Everhard. “It’s a straight romantic novel,” said Clemons. “[The pseudonym] was just an inside joke.”

  *The book included an appendix that reprinted every state law forbidding sodomy. Oklahoma had a typical statute: “every person who is guilty of the detestable and abominable crime against nature, committed with mankind or with a beast, is punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary not exceeding ten years.… Any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the crime against nature.” In 1995, twenty states still carried anti-sodomy laws on their books. (New York Times, March 24,1995)

  *A style quite similar to the book adopted by ACT UP in the late eighties.

  *Although it took the name of the older organization, it had no connection to the national, which had dissolved itsel
f the previous spring. (Letter from Frank Kameny to the author. December 19,1995)

  *The same year, the publishing business was shocked when Harper and Row announced the publication of a children’s book that included a homosexual episode in the lives of two thirteen-year-old boys. Written by John Donovan, it was called I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. (New York Times, April 3,1968)

  *While gays explicitly emulated black radicals, collaboration between them was rare, and some blacks resented any comparison of the two movements. However, in an unusual expression of solidarity, Huey Newton wrote in The Black Panther on August 21,1970, “Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women … we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. … I know through reading and through my life experience … that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed people in the society. A person should have freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants to. That’s not endorsing things in homosexuality that we wouldn’t view as revolutionary. But there’s nothing to say that a homosexual cannot be a revolutionary … Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary…. When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies and demonstrations there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement. … The terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary.” (Quoted in David Deitcher, ed., The Question of Equality, 33.) More typically, Eldridge Cleaver wrote in Soul on Ice, “Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become head of General Motors.” (Quoted in New York Times, January 17,1971)

  *In 1969, the Internal Revenue Service told the Advocate that it had never ruled on whether the government would accept a joint tax return from a gay couple. But the following year, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler told the magazine that President Nixon “doesn’t think that people of the same sex should marry.” (Mark Thompson, ed., The Long Road to Freedom, 20, 37)

  *Margo Jefferson pointed our that “Little Richard was an advance man for mass culture’s acceptance of camp,” and from what we can now call the “gay theatrics” of Liberace, Little Richard, and Jackie Wilson, Elvis Presley “got glamour and self-parody.” (New York Times, March 5,1995; and October 26,1994)

  *Iphigene Sulzberger, who was the daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother of publishers of The New York Times, was particularly squeamish about the coverage of sex. When she thought it was getting too much space in the paper in 1968, she wrote a note to her son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. “Why not put sex in perspective?” she asked. “It went on in my day too.” (Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power, 517)

  *On the other hand, in 1969, when Gay Talese published The Kingdom and the Power, his history of the Times, he referred to the page-one piece as a “superb article.” (Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power, 373)

  *“The Homosexuals” was not, however, the first television documentary on this subject. “The Rejected,” produced by John Reavis, was broadcast by affiliates of the Educational Television Network in September 1961. Originally entitled “The Gay Ones,” it was filmed mostly in the studio. Its only location shots were inside the Black Cat, one of San Francisco s most famous gay bars (author’s interview with Edward Alwood, November 6,1995). In New York City, Channel 13’s “Intertel” series had also broadcast a one-hour documentary about gay men and lesbians produced by Associated Rediffusion in England.

  *“Larson was furious after the program aired because he had been led to believe that it would provide a much more positive picture of gay life in America. (Author’s interview with Edward Alwood, November 6,1995)

  *Thirty years later, Nichols said that he didn’t realize he was making an “inborn” argument. “I’ve never really thought heterosexuality or homosexuality to be inborn states,” Nichols wrote. “In my more experimental days when I was about twenty, I saw that I could easily seduce hosts of ‘straight’ guys and that they’d do everything sexually except kiss—or talk about it in the morning.” (Letter from Jack Nichols to the author, December 12,1995)

  *Actually, a UPI dispatch identified two of the pickets as married women. A Mattachine spokesman explained that the organization accepted members “without regard to race, religion, sex, or ‘sexual orientation.’” In the UPI photograph of the event, Jack Nichols was the first person visible in the picket line, holding a sign that read, “Fifteen million U.S. Homosexuals Protest Federal Treatment.” Kameny was right behind him. The lesbian activist Lilli Vincenz is third. Kameny said, “There were always women on our picket lines, including at least one, and more usually two, of the nongay ones, in our Washington pickets.” (New York Times, May 30,1965; UPI Bettmann; and letters from Jack Nichols, December 12,1995, and Frank Kameny, December 19,1995, to the author)

  *Kauffmann said that he could not recall “a single instance” in which he “voted against a gay group because it was gay.” He added that to have done so “would have been inconsistent” with the views he expressed in his Times article. (Letter from Stanley Kauffmann to the author, April 16, 1997)

  *Not every gay artist was aware of the pop art conspiracy. When Paul Cadmus ran into Andy Warhol in the sixties, Cadmus asked him what he was up to. Warhol said, “Now I’m into pop art.” And Cadmus replied, “Pop Hart, why should anyone be interested in Pop Hart?” The older artist thought Warhol was referring to George Overbury “Pop” Hart, who was born in Cairo, Illinois, in 1866 and reared in Rochester, New York.

  *Vidal’s growing militancy on this subject had one significant effect on his literary output during the sixties. When he decided to write a revised version of The City and the Pillar, he finally heeded the advice of Tennessee Williams and Chrisopher Isherwood: he made the ending less catastrophic. Instead of murdering the object of his unrequited affection, Jim merely raped him.

  *Lehmann-Haupt didn’t want Rosenthal to hire Broyard, either. Lehmann-Haupt told Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that when Rosenthal asked him for “five reasons” why Broyard shouldn’t get the job, the critic “thoughtlessly blurted out, ‘Well, first of all, he is the biggest ass man in town.’ And Rosenthal rose up from his desk and said, ‘If that were a disqualification for working at The New York Times’—and he waved—‘this place would be empty!’”(The New Yorker, June 17,1996)

  *What would you call that hairstyle you’re wearing?” a reporter asked Harrison in A Hard Day’s Night. “Arthur,” he replied.

  *Rabbi Shlomo Goren was the chief military chaplain in 1967 and the first person to lead a prayer service at the Western Wall after Israeli soldiers captured the Old City. Between 1972 and 1983, he served as Israel’s Ashkenazic chief rabbi. In December 1993, he enraged the Israeli government by asserting that the Law of Moses overshadowed government policies and that Israeli soldiers must disobey any order to evacuate Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of seventy-seven. (New York Times, October 30,1994)

  *Barr and Woodward were involved in a workshop with Edward Albee, but according to Murray Gitlin, Albee refused to be associated with their new project. “From the word go, Edward did not want anything to do with it. He hated that play, hated everything about it, didn’t want to be associated with it at all” That may have been because many people felt that Crowley had borrowed the form (and some of the substance) of Albee’s smash hit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The repartee between Michael and Harold was particularly reminiscent of the clash between Albee’s George and Martha—but Michael had eight guests to attack at his party, instead of just two.

  *In his autobiography, Young Man from the Provinces: A Gay Life before Stonewall the actor Alan Helms offered this description of his drug consumption in the era when Boys was playing Off-Broadway. “We bought by the pound—eighty to one hundred dollars for superb grass with odd names and accompanying myths: ‘Ice Pack’ was grown on top
of a sacred mountain in Mexico that was under ice half the year. … Hash followed soon after, then seco synatan (a … ‘set-up,’ part upper and part downer, speed without the jagged edges) which we called the ‘love pill’ since it allowed us to have marathon sex. Then acid and mescaline and cocaine occurred somewhere in there, along with kef and occasionally opium and always Tuinals and Valiums and Percocets and Placidils (all sleeping pills or pain killers) and once we encountered it MDA whenever we could get it. And of course Methedrine, the Dom Perignon of speed. The poppers had been there from the beginning; then Ben, my barber, began shooting me up…. Was there anyone in the late sixties who didn’t take drugs except Nixon and Kissinger?” The original working title of Helms’s book was Damaged Goods. (Alan Helms, Young Man from the Provinces, p. 130)

  *Murray Gitlin directed one of the Tokyo productions: “Some of it was easily translatable, but some of it wasn’t. For example, there was no word that had the pejorative connotation of cunt. There was a word that’s used in physiology but that wasn’t right. If you said vagina,’ that certainly doesn’t have the impact. So we had to give it up”

  †In The Season, William Goldman reported that of the fifty-eight Broadway shows presented during the 1967-1968 season, 31 percent were produced by gays, and at least 38 percent were directed by them. The New York Times reported that a Cinema Center Films advertisement for the movie version of Boys was the first film ad to contain the word homosexual. (New York Times, June 5,1969, quoted by John Reid in New York, September 24,1973)