The Gay Metropolis Page 4

  Frustrated by Roosevelt’s recalcitrance, Hull and Bullitt leaked the story of Welles’s indiscretion to a Republican senator, R. Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster then went to Roosevelt’s attorney general and threatened to hold hearings on the matter unless Welles was fired. Roosevelt could not hold out any longer, and Welles announced his resignation on September 25,1943, three years after the original incident

  Although the facts of the case were whispered about throughout Washington, the press never reported them. Apparently Roosevelt had been right: the lurid details of what had happened were literally too scandalous to print. Newspapers attributed Welles’s resignation to his rift with the secretary of state.

  But Roosevelt never forgave Bullitt for forcing the resignation of his friend. When Bullitt approached the president later to ask him to support his run for mayor in Philadelphia, Roosevelt was furious: “If I were the angel Gabriel and you and Sumner Welles should come before me seeking admission into the Gates of Heaven, do you know what I’d say? I would say: ‘Bill Bullitt, you have defamed the name of a man who toiled for his fellow men, and you can go to hell. And that’s what I tell you to do now.’”

  While a very famous man might occasionally enjoy the protection of his president, homosexuals barely had any public advocates in the forties. Even Roosevelt was not consistently broad-minded on this issue. When New York newspapers reported in 1942 that Senator David I. Walsh had allegedly visited a male brothel near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Roosevelt told Senator Alben Barkley that the army handled this sort of thing by discreetly offering an offending officer the opportunity to commit suicide.

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was already well established, and some northern college campuses witnessed civil rights demonstrations protesting the treatment of African Americans, but gays remained outside any liberal’s agenda—and remained there for the next three decades. Virtually every politician considered their orientation unspeakable and their cause indefensible. As a result, when the New York State Liquor Authority declared that the mere presence of homosexuals in a bar made it disorderly and bar owners posted signs reading “If You Are Gay, Please Stay Away,” no one even tried to challenge them.

  Before the Second World War it was easy to grow up in America without ever seeing any public reference to gay people. This invisibility was the sad product of society’s toxic prejudice and a persistent self-hatred among homosexuals. “Biblical condemnations of homosexual behavior suffused American culture from its origin,” the historian John D’Emilio observed. “A society hostile to homosexual expression shaped the contours of gay identity.”

  A SPECTACULAR BEEKMAN HILL murder case mesmerized the readers of Manhattan’s tabloids in the fall of 1943. Fifty years before a young Virginia manicurist mutilated her husband, John Wayne Bobbit, with an eight-inch butcher knife, a similar act of passion produced one of Manhattan’s most celebrated homicides—a case “so sordid,” Newsweek reported, that “it shocked even the hardened police.”* It also sparked the earliest extended discussion of homosexuality in the history of New York newspapers—including what Time magazine thought was the very first use of the word homosexual on the front page of The New York Times.†

  Wayne Thomas Lonergan, “a tall, powerfully built and undeniably handsome youth” from Toronto, arrived in New York in 1939 at the age of twenty-one “with no more equipment than his good looks,” according to a contemporary account. Almost immediately, he found a job pulling a rickshaw at the world’s fair, a period perquisite for anyone too rich to explore the Flushing Meadow fairgrounds on foot. One of his first customers was William Burton, the forty-three-year-old playboy son of a Manhattan brewer who had accumulated a $7 million fortune. Once they had met, Newsweek noted, “Lonergan no longer worried about a job” and the two men quickly became “intimate companions.”

  Burton had attended the Yale School of Fine Arts and the Art Students League. He called himself a portrait painter, but he spent most of his time depleting his father’s fortune. “He was a gay one,” the Journal-American reported: “Cannes, Biarritz, San Sebastian—those were his playgrounds.” Another article said he was “known to have lent several young men a helping hand.” In Cannes, Burton had employed a Georgian prince as his chauffeur.

  Unfortunately for Lonergan, his patron was in frail health. Barely a year after they met, Burton died of heart failure in his Ritz Tower apartment. Faced with imminent separation from Burton’s fortune, Lonergan made a dramatic shift in his affections: he became the fervent suitor of his dead lover’s daughter, Patricia.

  Presumably because she had learned about Lonergan’s affair with her deceased husband, Patricia’s mother violently disapproved of this union, and she spirited her daughter off to California. But Lonergan followed both of them to the coast. In the summer of 1941, just four months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they eloped to Las Vegas.

  Their marriage produced one son and endless rows, as Lonergan continued to see at least one wealthy male friend on the side. Less than a year after their marriage, Wayne and Patricia separated, and Wayne was cut out of her will. Lonergan tried to join the army, but he was classified 4-F after his draft board decided he was gay. Then he returned to his native Canada, where he managed to enlist as a cadet in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

  On October 23,1943, Lonergan flew to New York on a weekend pass. He stayed out all night Saturday and well into Sunday, club-hopping. Separately, his estranged wife Patricia did the same, arriving home at 6:00 A.M. after stops at El Morocco and several other watering holes. The Times reported that she wore a mink jacket, a black silk dress, black hat, nylon hose and black shoes. Her companion for the evening was one Mario Enzo Gabelline, a forty-three-year-old man-about-town who later confided to New York detectives that he enjoyed beguiling married women by turning a “neat soufflé,” or making them “exceptional salads,” an art he had “highly developed.”

  When Patricia got home, “She had torn off her girdle with her nylon hose still attached and had thrown them on the crescent-shaped chaise longue at the foot of her massive Empire bed,” according to Meyer Berger’s extraordinarily detailed account in the Times. At 8:45 on Sunday morning, Lonergan climbed the stoop of Patricia’s “lavish” triplex at 313 East 51st Street. “It was quiet in Fifty-first Street, the quiet of the Sabbath,” Berger reported. “The front door was open. Lonergan ascended the common staircase. The carpets took up his footfalls. He knocked at the master bedroom door. Mrs. Lonergan heard him and opened the door for him.”

  What happened next was never reported by the Times. But the unprintable details of Lonergan’s confession quickly became known in all the better-connected boudoirs in Manhattan. In his obituary forty-three years after the crime, the Times reported only that “he admitted he had killed his estranged wife while she was inflicting ‘great physical pain’ on him”—but even that detail was omitted from contemporary accounts. The estranged couple fell into bed, where passion quickly turned into uncontrolled violence. While performing fellatio on her husband, Patricia tried to bite off his penis. Lonergan responded by attempting to strangle her. When Patricia began to gouge his face with her fingernails, he grabbed a huge candlestick and bludgeoned her to death. “I was in the army when that case broke,” Gore Vidal recalled. “We thought it was a lot of fun in the military.”

  Although his uniform was covered with blood, Lonergan managed to return to the friend’s apartment where he was staying for the weekend without attracting anyone’s notice—not even the nanny who was in charge of his one-year-old son in the room next to his wife’s bedroom, or the upstairs neighbor who nearly knocked when she heard “shrill screams” coming out of Patricia’s bedroom, but instead decided to continue downstairs to the front stoop to retrieve the Sunday papers.*

  Lonergan ordered breakfast from the servant at his host’s East 79th Street apartment, but, lacking an appetite, he hid his unfinished plate in a corner sideboard, where it was later discovered. Aft
er the meal he went upstairs to apply makeup to the scars inflicted by his wife during their struggle. Then he cut up his blood-splattered uniform. He packed it in a bundle with a barbell borrowed from his host, then hopped on the 79th Street bus to the East River. There he hurled the incriminating clothing into the Hell’s Gate current. It was never recovered.

  The murderer fled to Toronto, where he insisted he was innocent. New York detectives teased him back to Manhattan by promising him a visit with his infant son. In custody he offered what the police described as a “degrading” alibi to explain his uniform’s disappearance: early Sunday morning he had picked up a soldier named “Maurice Worcester” and taken him to the apartment where he was staying for the weekend. When Lonergan made a pass at him, the soldier scratched his face. Then Worcester stole his uniform.

  The alibi collapsed when the real Maurice Worcester appeared at the station house. Reacting to the relentless goading of his fellow factory workers, Worcester—a “respectable” married man with a wife and two children, who said he knew of no one else with his name—had come to clear himself of Lonergan’s libel.

  When Worcester was led into the room where Lonergan was being interrogated, the suspect showed no sign of recognition. “Have you ever seen this man before?” the assistant district attorney inquired.

  “No,” the befuddled suspect replied. Then Worcester’s identity was announced. An hour later, Lonergan broke down and confessed. “After more than four days of merciless grilling, half-hysterical and trembling, the sex-twisted Café Society playboy admitted strangling [Patricia] to death, then bludgeoning her with a massive candlestick,” the Journal-American reported. “‘Yes. I did it! I did it!’ he shouted in the District Attorney’s office.”

  The victim’s great-grandfather, Frederick Housman, was philosophical about the tragedy. “You can’t keep your eye on children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all the time,” he told the New York Post. “When they marry, one’s responsibility ceases to some extent.”

  In its first story mentioning Lonergan’s orientation, the Times reported on the top of the front page that Worcester had been unmercifully teased because Lonergan, “openly labeled in newspapers as ‘homosexual’ and ‘bisexual,’ pinned his murder alibi on a ‘Maurice Worcester.’ … The prosecutor’s staff made a fine distinction in Lonergan’s makeup after his confession. ‘Bisexual would seem a better word,’” said the prosecutor.

  With so many “sordid” details essential to the story, a fiercely competitive press could no longer resist the temptation to discuss what had hitherto been unmentionable. “For the first time in its haughty history,” the paper of record “let words like homosexuality creep into its columns,” Time magazine mistakenly reported. Two days after Lonergan’s confession, Hearst’s Journal-American printed a lengthy feature to clarify this perplexing condition for its “normal” readers. The article, which bore no byline, suggests the popular wisdom in 1943. Like most pieces published on the subject during the next twenty-five years, it gave a lurid picture of a deeply threatening sexual minority:

  PSYCHIATRISTS GIVE VIEWS ON LONERGAN REFER TO HISTORY IN DISCUSSION OF CHARACTER

  Throughout the pattern of the Lonergan murder case are woven the deep purple threads of whispered vices whose details are unprintable and whose character in general is unknown to or misunderstood by the average normal person.

  Well known, however, to both history and psychiatrists are the types of some individuals whose presence in the Beekman Hill slaying resulted in a rash of such loosely applied expressions as “twisted sex.”

  In the standard popular histories the activities of these individuals are glossed over, the damage they have done to numerous civilizations merely incorporated with descriptions of broader social declines.

  And in the current history of our day, because of the sordid nature of the facts, little public light is shed upon the social cancer feeding in our midst.

  Yet it is there, in all walks of life, a monster whose growth always prefaces social collapse of one kind or another—whether in ancient Rome or pre-Hitler Germany.

  To present the fundamentals of the danger, a survey of opinion and analysis was sought from the city’s outstanding psychiatrists.

  Reluctant to be quoted individually, differing extensively on precise phraseology involved, all agreed on the following basic facts and conclusions.

  Generally speaking and contrary to a popular conception, persons who engage in unnatural relationships with others of their own sex are not all of the same type although the law makes no distinction.

  To experts in the medical profession, one of the two basic types is nothing more or less than a moral leper, deserving of condemnation because his actions are largely the result of his own decision.

  This type, known as a bi-sexual or pervert, is a degenerate in the moral sense. While he can be helped at times by psychoanalytical treatment, his real cure depends upon his own desire to behave normally.

  Such persons—both men and women—have nothing distinctive about their physical appearance or public behavior to set them apart. They are frequently very attractive to persons of the opposite sex.

  Included in the type are often married persons, of the so-called sophisticated set. Possessed of too much money, jaded by normal activities, they turn to the unnatural for diversion.

  Although married and frequently the parents of children, this type, when moneyed, spread their evil frequently through the adoption of “proteges,” younger people willing to corrupt themselves in exchange for money and social position.

  The latter, in turn, continue the cycle of degeneracy by either attracting imitators or seeking to corrupt others.

  Because this basic type usually does have money and leadership, the behavior of its members tends to become a more or less accepted part of society, particularly in world centers like New York City.

  Placed beyond the law through position, clever, unscrupulous, contemptuous of decent people, their influence is sinister and profound. No accurate estimate on their number can be determined.

  Those of the second basic type, from a medical viewpoint, are far more to be pitied than condemned, are in need of treatment rather than the imprisonment so many receive.

  Members of this type are known as sex inverts, or sex-variants, and are degenerate in the physical rather than the moral sense. Such persons are beyond self-help when their cases are pronounced.

  The cause of their condition is widely believed to be an upset in the normal secretion into the blood stream of hormones governing secondary sexual characteristics and behavior.

  All persons have both female and male hormones in their blood streams, with the more female hormones present, the more feminine the individual and vice versa. Great variations occur. When these variations reach a danger point, a person of one sex will begin to think, feel and act almost entirely like one of the opposite.

  In such physiological disturbances, men will develop mincing walks, unnatural timidity and feminine emotions while women similarly affected become rough, aggressive and impatient of such womanly attributes as long hair.

  These, then, were the words and phrases associated with homosexuality: “vice,” “damage,” “social cancer,” “monster,” “unnatural,” “moral leper,” “pervert,” “degenerate,” “evil,” “unscrupulous,” “contemptuous of decent people,” and “sinister.”

  The piece neatly summarized the panoply of prejudices facing lesbians and gays a quarter of a century before the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement. And its class distinctions were a malignant version of Otis Bigelow’s view of the wealthy world in which he lived. The assertion that “because this basic type usually does have money and leadership, the behavior of its members tends to become a more or less accepted part of society” suggests just how much protection wealthier gays did enjoy in Manhattan, as long as they remained discreet. Finally, the veiled reference to the gay liberation movement in pre-Nazi Germany (and its
alleged connection to the rise of Hitler) is another typical refrain. Writing a year earlier in the Herald Tribune, Richard Watts, Jr., decried By Jupiter’s “dubious joking about sexual decadence, which the Germans, too, used to think was funny when Hitlerism was being born,”

  A few months later, Time echoed the Journal-American. The newsweekly ran a picture of Lonergan above the caption “Was he born or made?” Time opined, “Contrary to popular legend, homosexuals are not necessarily physically abnormal, though sometimes a glandular disturbance is involved,” Seduction in childhood is “the commonest precipitating cause. Other causes: 1) a tendency to varied and primitive sexual outlets; 2) an inherited tendency … Lonergan would seem to fall into the varied and primitive sexual outlet group.”

  “The majority of people just thought we were the worst characters in the world,” remembered William Wynkoop, who was twenty-seven in 1943. “But among those who were enlightened, we were sick. Sick and abnormal.”

  On April 17,1944, Lonergan was sentenced to thirty-five years to life in prison. After he was sent to Sing Sing he tried to get access to his wife’s estate, but a surrogate judge ruled that because of his life sentence he was “civilly dead.” During his first few years in prison, Lonergan sent humorous Christmas cards to his former gentleman callers. Ten years after Lonergan went to jail, his twelve-year-old son, who changed his name to William Anthony Burton, inherited $7 million from the estate of his great-grandfather, Max Bernheimer. In 1965, Lonergan challenged his confession on the grounds that it had been coerced. He testified that someone whom he could not see had repeatedly struck the back of his head with the heel of a hand during the ten hours preceding his confession. He also said he was “appalled” by the publicity describing him as a homosexual and had agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a promise that the nasty leaks to the press would end. Lonergan said he “made up” his confession because an assistant district attorney told him it was required to get a judge to accept the manslaughter plea, but once he had signed the incriminating statement, the promises of leniency were forgotten. In 1967, he was paroled and immediately deported to Canada. He died of cancer in Toronto in 1986.