The Gay Metropolis Read online

  “Weaving interviews, media coverage, fictionalised accounts of gay life in the city, and reports of wider social and political changes, Kaiser charts the march out of the shadows and into the mainstream … There is a great story being told here.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  “A dramatic, often affecting account of the emergence of gay people from fear and self-hatred into uncloseted, self-confident participation in society.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Entirely engrossing … Kaiser is to be congratulated on presenting in such human terms what, in some respects, has been an epic struggle … a cogently argued, gripping, heartening and ultimately moving narrative.”

  —Gay Times

  “The Gay Metropolis is the nonfiction equivalent of the fictional The City and the Pillarby Gore Vidal. It is truly sensational. Kaiser’s masterpiece brilliantly weaves together the lives of the heroes of the gay rights movement with the lives of the young men and women who must still overcome enormous prejudice based on their sexual orientation. This book should be read by thousands of young men and women who think they are alone. Charles Kaiser’s sensational book will give them heart and pride.”

  —Ed Koch, former mayor of New York

  “For each of the decades Kaiser selects characters from the rich, the glamorous and the ordinary. The obvious and often delicious voices of Gore Vidal and Truman Capote mix with the harsh self-hating tones of Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy … Kaiser is too good a writer to avoid complexity.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Fascinating … He shares juicy gossip, quotes catty remarks, refutes long-held myths, and recasts the role of gay men as he charts their major gains and significant setbacks over the last 50 years. A sweeping saga written with wit, insight and poignancy.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

  CHARLES KAISER

  Copyright © 1997 by Charles Kaiser

  Afterword copyright © 2007 by Charles Kaiser

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published in 1997 by Houghton Mifflin

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4831-6

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Charlotte and Emily and Daniel and Thomas

  In memory of Bart Gorin, Tom Stoddard, Rod Routhier, Louis Brown, Murray Gitlin, Larry Josephs, Stormy Sabine, Mike Osias, John Wallace, James N. Baker, Scot Haller, Greg Robbins, Luis Sanjurjo, Richard White, Richard Hunt, Jack Fitzsimmons, Serafin Fernandez, Walter Perini, Peter Day, and Murray Kempton

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  I • THE FORTIES

  II • THE FIFTIES

  III • THE SIXTIES

  IV • THE SEVENTIES

  V • THE EIGHTIES

  VI • THE NINETIES

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Joseph, Mary, pray for those Misled by moonlight, and the rose.

  —W. H. AUDEN

  Introduction

  Adversity has its advantages.

  A journalist once remarked to James Baldwin, “When you were starting out as a writer you were black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’”

  “No,” the novelist replied. “I felt I’d hit the jackpot.”

  This book tells the story of an amazing victory over adversity: how America’s most despised minority overcame religious prejudice, medical malpractice, political persecution and one of the worst scourges of the twentieth century to stake its rightful claim to the American dream—all in barely more than half a century.

  No other group has ever transformed its status more rapidly or more dramatically than lesbians and gay men. When World War II began, gay people in America had no legal rights, no organizations, a handful of private thinkers, and no public advocates. As recently as 1970, Joseph Epstein could write in Harper’s* “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth”—and only gay activists thought that statement was outrageous.

  Three decades later, gay people have completed the first stages of an incredible voyage: a journey from invisibility to ubiquity, from shame to self-respect, and, finally, from the overwhelming tragedy of AIDS to the triumph of a rugged, resourceful and caring community.

  As the great architectural historian Vincent Scully pointed out, ours is “a time which, with all its agonies, has … been marked most of all by liberation.” In the Jefferson Lecture of 1995, “The Architecture of Community,” Scully declared,

  I think especially of the three great movements of liberation which have marked the past generation: black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation. Each one of those movements liberated all of us, all the rest of us, from stereotypical ways of thinking which had imprisoned us and confined us for hundreds of years. Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred. Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.

  America’s best instincts have always been toward equality and inclusiveness. Especially in this century, the idea of a steadily widening embrace has been the genius behind the success of the American experiment. The main effects of these multiple liberations have been more openness, more honesty, and more opportunity—changes that have benefited everyone.

  But despite all this progress, coming out to a parent remains the single most difficult thing a teenager can do at the dawn of the twenty-first century. If you doubt that, consider the reaction of a Holocaust survivor to his son’s announcement of his homosexuality:

  “This,” said the father, “is worse than the Holocaust.”

  Such incidents prove the terrible persistence of prejudice. Far too often, openly gay teenagers still face fierce harassment from their parents and their peers. But a handful of parents have changed their attitudes altogether. In 1994 the psychiatrist Richard Isay listened to these anguished words from a mother in New Jersey: “We know our son is gay,” she said. “But he insists on dating girls and he wants to get married. What are we going to do?”

  BARELY THIRTY YEARS AGO, most of society’s glittering prizes were reserved for white heterosexual men. Today the job descriptions that the previously disenfranchised can reasonably aspire to include senator, law partner, rabbi, psychiatrist and corporate president. The only glass ceiling that remains is the one that some white executives still maintain by grooming successors who resemble themselves as much as possible.

  Because it was the example of the black civil rights movement which made the gay liberation movement possible, it is especially appropriate that one of the most eloquent philosophers of liberation in the nineties was the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, a black gay Baptist with an “Anglican over-soul” who is the chief minister at Harvard University. He also
happens to be a Republican who delivered the benediction at Ronald Reagan’s second presidential inauguration.

  Gomes outed himself to the Harvard community in 1991, after a conservative campus publication cited everyone from Freud to the Bible to prove that gay life was “immoral” and “pitiable.”

  “Gay people are victims not of the Bible, not of religion, and not of the church, but of people who use religion as a way to devalue and deform those whom they can neither ignore nor convert,” Gomes declared. Then he identified himself as “a Christian who happens as well to be gay. … These realities, which are unreconcilable to some, are reconciled in me by a loving God, a living Saviour, a moving, breathing, healthy Holy Spirit whom I know intimately and who knows me.”

  Gomes offers an elegant argument that there is no intrinsic conflict between a Judeo-Christian God and a homosexual. In The Good Book, which Gomes published in 1996, he points out that when the Bible was written, its authors “never contemplated a form of homosexuality in which loving, monogamous, and faithful persons sought to live out the implications of the gospel with as much fidelity to it as any heterosexual believer. All they knew of homosexuality was prostitution, pederasty, lasciviousness, and exploitation. These vices, as we know, are not unknown among heterosexuals, and to define contemporary homosexuals only in these terms is cultural slander of the highest order.”

  Murray Kempton identified another ironic aspect of this debate. In 1994, he described the “early history” of the Anglican Church.

  Origin: a king’s insistence on pursuing his freedom of choice in fleshly matters over the objections of the Bishop of Rome. The Book of Common Prayer, envy of the Romans: a masterpiece that would not exist if it had not been screened through Queen Elizabeth and found suitable for her doctrinal taste through its last amen. The King James Version: overseen by the most openly homosexual monarch in British history. Thus the founder of our church was a libertine, its ritual could only be authorized by a decision of a woman, its most enduring Bible is owed to the patronage of a homosexual, and yet its House of Bishops still has a fair quota of eminences disinclined to ordain women and gays.

  The reconciliation of homosexuality and religion made possible by philosophers like Gomes has led to the founding of hundreds of gay synagogues and churches of every conceivable denomination. This development is among the most remarkable of all, because, as we will discover, it was the triumph of science over religion which made gay liberation possible in the first place.

  THE EVENTS that opened the path for the twentieth-century revolution depicted in these pages began about 150 years ago. More than anything else, it was the rise of science in the middle of the nineteenth century which would eventually enable a handful of iconoclasts to challenge some of Western civilization’s oldest assumptions about liberty and life.

  It was a two-step process that began a fundamental reordering of Western thought. First, science had to be completely divorced from religion, to make it more truly scientific; then, a significant number of opinion makers had to begin to invest secular knowledge with as much importance as their ancestors had given the Sacraments. After that, very gradually, science became powerful enough to undermine some of the ancient dogmas of the Old Testament.

  In the minds of many of his colleagues, Charles Darwin opened a crucial division between science and religion when he described his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species in 1859.* Sigmund Freud accelerated that separation with the invention of psychoanalysis, which gradually developed for some into an alternative to religion.

  As Richard Isay has pointed out, Freud said “almost everything about homosexuality, including that it was biological, and that you couldn’t change homosexuals into heterosexuals. But he also said it was caused by jealousy of siblings, and a number of interpersonal, early dynamic issues. He was not consistent.” In 1937, Freud wrote, “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.” However, during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, most of Freud’s disciples promoted the idea that homosexuality was a curable illness.

  At the dawn of this new age, at the same time that Freud was researching The Interpretation of Dreams, his contemporary Magnus Hirschfeld was launching the first gay liberation movement of the modern era in Germany. In 1897 Hirschfeld distributed more than six thousand questionnaires to Berlin factory workers and university students. He concluded that 2.2 percent of all German men were homosexuals and published his findings in one of the twenty-three volumes of Jahrbuch, the first avowedly gay publication of the twentieth century. A few years later, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Research, which collected twenty thousand books and thirty-five thousand photographs. He also organized the World League for Sexual Reform, which held annual conferences in Copenhagen, London and Vienna, between 1928 and 1932. He campaigned continuously for the repeal of paragraph 175, the law banning sodomy in Germany. A petition asking the Reichstag to annul that law attracted the signatures of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein.

  Hirschfeld conducted his research at a time when Weimar Germany nurtured a rich gay culture, which included costume balls and luxurious bars and nightclubs for gay men and lesbians. But after barely three decades, the Nazis would put an end to all of Hirschfeld’s activities. Nazi toughs attacked him during public appearances. Four months after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, while Hirschfeld was out of the country, the Institute for Sexual Research was ransacked and its contents were burned in a public ceremony.

  The fact that the Nazis seized power from a regime that had tolerated homosexuality would color American attitudes toward sexual permissiveness for thirty years afterward. American writers would regularly compare the Weimar period to the debauchery of ancient Rome—and then conclude that any culture that permitted gay life to flourish was obviously doomed to catastrophe.

  The subject was further complicated by the fact that the Nazis themselves had tolerated openly gay men among their own leaders, even though “the official party apparatus had” assailed “all immorality, especially love between men” as early as 1928. This uneven tolerance ended in 1934, when Ernst Roehm, the gay commander of the Nazi S.A., and dozens of his allies were massacred during the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler said afterwards that these men deserved to die for their “corrupt morals alone,” but the historian William L. Shirer wrote that the Führer “had known all along … that a large number of his closest … followers were sexual perverts and convicted murderers.”

  What American journalists and historians neglected altogether was the vicious persecution that gay people suffered at the hands of the Nazis once Roehm and his friends had been eliminated. Historians of the Holocaust estimate that during the Third Reich at least ninety thousand homosexuals were arrested, more than fifty thousand were sent to prison and between ten and fifteen thousand ended up in concentration camps, where they were identified by pink triangles.

  Most Americans considered Hitler’s obliteration of the German Jewish population so horrifying that it did more to discredit anti-Semitism than any other single event. But Nazi oppression of homosexuals failed to increase sympathy for them in the United States or anywhere else.

  ALTHOUGH World War II did nothing to improve the way most Americans viewed homosexuality, it would have a dramatic effect on the way thousands of lesbians and gay men viewed themselves. The United States Army acted as a great, secret unwitting agent of gay liberation by creating the largest concentration of homosexuals inside a single institution in American history. That is why this volume begins with World War II.

  People from all over the country who had assumed that they were unique learned that they were not alone. Soldiers and sailors also got a chance to sample gay culture all over the world—and discovered that large gay communities already existed in American ports of entry like San Francisco and New York City.

  It was also during this war that the word gay became “a magic
by-word in practically every corner of the United States where homosexuals might gather.” (Some historians have traced the use of the word gaie as a synonym for homosexual all the way back to sixteenth-century France.)

  In the postwar period, New York City became the literal gay metropolis for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from within and without the United States: the place they chose to learn how to live openly, honestly and without shame.

  But the figurative gay metropolis is much larger: it encompasses every place on every continent where gay people have found the courage and the dignity to be free.

  Some of the ordinary and extraordinary citizens who nurtured the spectacular growth of that larger metropolis are the main subjects of this book. While the women I have written about are among the most compelling characters in this saga, men gradually became my principal focus—because their story is also mine.

  I

  The Forties

  “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

  —E. B. WHITE

  “I think the trick is to say yes to life.”

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  SANDY KERN grew up on Amboy Street, the Brooklyn block where the boys from Murder, Incorporated, used to shoot craps in front of Olesh’s Candy Store. These were the Jewish mobsters of Brownsville before the war began. “We kids would stand and watch for the cops,” Kern remembered, “and we would signal them. And when we didn’t do it in time and the cops did raid them—they did it right in the street, of course—the cops would come, they would run away, these guys. And when the cops got to the site where they were playing craps, they would take all the coins that were on the floor and toss them up in the air, and the kids would scramble for the money.”

  Kern laughed at the vivid memory, a faraway moment when she already knew she was unlike everyone else, but didn’t yet know how. “Of course the war stopped all that, and a lot of the guys never came back.” She was twelve in 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “I always thought I was very, very special, because I was very different from everybody in the neighborhood. And I always imagined that there was a ray of light beaming down from the sky onto me. Following me all over because I was very special. And I didn’t know why until we were in the midst of an air-raid drill.