The Gay Metropolis (15 page)

“Yes.” said Welch.” “I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.… Have I enlightened you?”

The audience in the hearing room exploded with laughter. McCarthy managed to smile for the live cameras, but Cohn was grim-faced. As the historian Neil Miller pointed out, Cohn had become “an easy target for the kind of gay baiting he himself had practiced,” and he soon resigned and returned to New York to practice law. Inspired by Cohn's devotion to Schine, Lillian Hellman referred to Cohn, Schine, and McCarthy as “Bonnie, Bonnie and Clyde.”

Cohn was a homosexual, and he became quite promiscuous, but he always denied that he was gay, even after he began to surround himself with a coterie of young men in public. His lifelong cultivation of a tough-guy image may have been partly motivated by his desire to disguise his sexuality from others—and perhaps, on some level, even from himself.

“Anybody who knows me, and knows anything about me or who knows the way my mind works or knows the way I function … would have an awfully hard time reconciling that with any kind of homosexuality,” Cohn told the reporter Ken Auletta. “Every facet of my personality, of my, ah, aggressiveness, of my toughness, of everything along those lines is just totally, I suppose, incompatible with anything like that.”

Years after Cohn had worked for McCarthy, Gore Vidal enraged Cohn when they appeared together on a New York television program. Vidal
remembered saying, “The only thing I really found attractive about McCarthy was of course the fact that he was homosexual—and was extremely tolerant of having them around him.” Cohn's hands started to twitch, and he said, “'Well, you would, of course.' And I said, ‘I am sure you would too.'”

Then Vidal asked, “'How is Mr. Schine?'

“And [Cohn] said, ‘He's all right. He's out in California.'

Vidal said, ‘“We regarded the two of you as the Damon and Pythias of the homosexual movement.' Well, by then he was shaking all over in a ghastly way.”

Despite Cohn's apparent crush on Schine, there is no evidence that they had a sexual relationship. “In Schine's case, he denied it,” said “Bill Gillman” (a pseudonym), a young lawyer who saw Cohn frequently during the last ten years of his life. On the other hand, Cohn refused to answer Gillman when he asked about the sexuality of Hoover, or Cohn's close friend Cardinal Spellman.

Ethan Geto, a gay activist and Democratic political operative in New York City, remembered the televised confrontation between Vidal and Cohn as one of those “thrilling moments.” As Geto remembered it, Vidal seemed about to ask his adversary directly if he was gay, and Cohn fled from the show during a break. “Gore Vidal was great,” said Geto. “Roy Cohn, who had dominated every debate he was ever in, was so cowed, so shaken, and so rattled. He turned ashen!”

In the 1970s, Geto was having dinner with Doug Ireland, a New York journalist, at Uncle Charlie's, a popular gay restaurant on Third Avenue. When Ireland spotted Cohn at a nearby table, surrounded by attractive young men, he went over to speak to him.

“Roy, it's great to see you!” said Ireland. “Especially here in a gay restaurant. It shows you're really surfacing!”

And Cohn jumped up from the table and said, “This is a gay restaurant?”

Bill Gillman said Cohn “did not acquire a coterie of effeminate men around him. The guys that hung out with him were a bunch of jocks, frankly, and they spent more time watching football. I doubt that they ever went to a fashion show. He didn't think of himself as gay. He thought a gay person at that time was a hairdresser or a poodle walker. It reminds me of the retired Wall Street lawyer down in North Carolina who says, ‘Hell, I'm not gay, I just like to suck cock. You and all your fancy friends that go to decorating shows—now that's gay!'

“Being gay was only one part of Roy's life,” Gillman continued. “I
certainly don't think it was the most important thing. He was probably gay the hour before he went to bed. The rest of the time he was many, many other things. He was a lawyer, an employer, a son, a nephew, a friend. He was a very busy man.”

“Roy was a lot of different people in one,” said Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx political leader who became one of Cohn's law partners in 1978.
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“Roy was whatever the situation called for. He could sit with royalty. And he could sit with gangsters. And everybody was comfortable with him. Roy did all the categories.”

Friedman questioned the idea that Cohn needed to be powerful to compensate for his sexual orientation. “You're presupposing that Roy grew up gay,” said Friedman. “If I'm right, he was a tough guy before he was gay—because we know he was a tough guy when he was a kid. I have a hunch he was a mean SOB tough guy before he knew he was gay. Because when do you become aware that you're gay? I think he would be in the category of being a late bloomer. I'm guessing. When you were born in the late twenties or early thirties, which is my generation—I was born in thirty-six—it was a disgrace to be gay, There's something wrong with you. You're an embarrassment to your family—you're a ‘sissy,' you're a ‘fairy', you're a ‘pansy.' Whatever the appropriate words were of that era.

“I think he wanted to be powerful from the very beginning because he had a father who he considered to be influential, but not strong, and he had a mother who was strong, but without influence,” Friedman continued. “And he thought he could be as good or as powerful or as influential as they were, plus some. He enjoyed being sought after; being feared, respected. I think he saw what it meant to ‘make' a judge. He saw what it meant to be able to use a judge, to be able to influence people's lives, to control people's property. To dictate things that happened—laws that would be passed. Did he need that to make up for some defect which he believed that he was impaired with? We don't know that, because we didn't have the luxury of growing up with him.”

AT THE END
of 1950, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations issued a lengthy report on the “pervert problem.” These were some of its conclusions:

Homosexuals and other sex perverts are not proper persons to be employed in government for two reasons. First they are generally unsuitable, and second, they constitute security risks. Aside from the criminality and immorality involved in sex perversion such behavior is so contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engage in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society generally.…

Law enforcement officers have informed the subcommittee that there are gangs of blackmailers who make a regular practice of preying upon the homosexual. These blackmailers often impersonate police officers in carrying out their blackmail schemes.… There is an abundance of evidence to sustain the conclusion that indulgence in acts of sex perversion weakens the moral fiber of an individual to a degree that he is not suitable for a position of responsibility. … Eminent psychiatrists have informed the subcommittee that the homosexual is likely to seek his own kind because the pressures of society are such that he feels uncomfortable unless he is with his own kind. Due to this situation the homosexual tends to surround himself with other homosexuals, not only in his social, but in his business life. Under these circumstances if a homosexual attains a position in government where he can influence the hiring of personnel it is almost inevitable that he will attempt to place other homosexuals in government jobs.

The committee noted approvingly that the Civil Service Commission had stepped up its efforts against homosexuals, and acted in 382 “sex perversion” cases during the previous seven months versus a total of only 192 during the three years before that. The senators also berated the Washington, D.C., Police Department for failing to turn over automatically the names of the 457 government employees who had been arrested in “perversion cases” during the previous four years. And it noted that Washington's municipal judges had promised to halt the “slipshod practice” under which most homosexuals were booked on charges of disorderly conduct, and then allowed to make “forfeitures of small cash,” instead of being brought to trial.

News of this homosexual scourge was spread across the nation by Lee Mortimer, a columnist for Hearst's New York
Daily Mirror
, who wrote a series of
Confidential
books that combined Kinsey's statistics with the Senate's conclusions. “Homosexuality became an epidemic infecting the nation,” wrote the historian John D'Emilio. Mortimer said “10,000 faggots” had avoided detection by the FBI and that the government was “honeycombed in high places with people you wouldn't let in your garbage-wagons.”

Most damaging of all to gay government employees was a new executive order signed by President Eisenhower shortly after his inauguration in 1953. For the first time, “sexual perversion” was listed as sufficient and necessary ground for disbarment from federal jobs. During the next sixteen months, at least 640 homosexuals were removed from government employment. That number probably understates the real figure because many were allowed to resign without being forced to disclose their sexuality.

The fear fostered by congressional investigators created a hideous rivalry among the executive departments. Federal agencies competed with one another to prove which one was the most vigilant in its campaign to root out “perverts” and subversives. In 1954
The New York Times
actually published a “U.S. Agency Box Score on the ‘Security Risks.'” It showed 1,057 “security” dismissals from seven agencies in 1953, as well as 40 fired as “alleged loyalty risks.” Every year in the early fifties, the State Department fired more than twice as many homosexuals as it did suspected communists. During the three and a half years ending in July 1953, 381 employees at State lost their jobs because they were gay, compared with 150 who were considered security risks for other reasons.

JOSEPH ALSOP
, the scion of a prominent Connecticut Yankee family and a distant relative of the Roosevelts, was one of the few known victims of a Soviet attempt to compromise a prominent American homosexual. A famous Washington newspaperman for almost fifty years, Alsop spent his entire life in the closet. But his humiliation in the Soviet Union was well known to a number of Washington insiders.

During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1957, Alsop was seduced by a male agent of the KGB, with whom he had sex in his hotel room. Because American visitors to Moscow were routinely warned about Russian attempts to entrap important tourists of all persuasions, Alsop's blunder was surprising.
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Perhaps it resulted from his well-known weakness for copious amounts of fine wine.

But Alsop's behavior contradicted the popular notion that homosexuals were easier to blackmail than heterosexuals. Instead of succumbing to the Soviet attempt to intimidate him, he immediately reported the incident to his editors and to the Central Intelligence Agency. His editors declined his
offer to stop writing his column. The CIA made him write a detailed report about the incident, and then forwarded a copy to Hoover at the FBI. But neither his editors nor the agency leaked the incident to Alsop's enemies right away, and the columnist never altered the anti-Soviet slant of his columns.

For the rest of Alsop's life, the Washington establishment behaved very much as it did immediately after Sumner Welles tried to seduce a railroad porter. It kept the columnist's transgression a secret from the public while selectively using it against him in private.

In 1959, Alsop attacked President Eisenhower for permitting a nuclear “missile gap” to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union. Though this charge was used with considerable success by John Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign, like many of Alsop's speculations about the communist menace, it was eventually proved to be completely false.

Eisenhower's aides were furious about Alsop's accusation. The president's press secretary, James Hagerty, told one of the columnist's friends on the
New York Herald Tribune
that the administration was planning to lift Alsop's White House press pass. “The guy's a pansy,” said Hagerty. “The FBI knows all about it.”

A memorandum written by Hoover revealed that Eisenhower's attorney general, William Rogers—who later served as Richard Nixon's secretary of state—had visited the FBI director to discuss the Alsop matter. “The Attorney General… commented that he was going to see that certain individuals were aware of Alsop's propensities … but he would not take the responsibility for such information going any further,” Hoover wrote in a memorandum to the file. Thirty-six years later, Rogers refused to comment on his meeting with Hoover.

In 1961, Alsop married Susan Mary Patten. A year later, a KGB agent defected to the United States and told the CIA that the Soviets “had the goods” on Alsop. But the CIA knew that Alsop was a good friend of President Kennedy, so it removed this item from its report about the KGB man. John and Robert Kennedy both knew about the blackmail attempt anyway. And they were happy to go on protecting their friend from any public embarrassment.

In 1970, the Russians renewed their campaign against Alsop. They sent pictures of the incriminating incident to two writers they considered Alsop's enemies—the humorist Art Buchwald and the columnist Charles Bartlett. Buchwald was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, while Alsop was one of its strongest supporters. An unsigned note accompanying the
pictures asserted that they had been taken by the Israelis, and that was why Alsop was such a strong supporter of the Jewish state.

Fifteen years later, Buchwald told a
Washington Post
reporter that he had torn the pictures up as soon as he received them. “I don't give a damn what a guy's sexual proclivities are,” said the columnist, “as long as they don't involve me.” Bartlett mailed his copies to Alsop, with a note reading, “I thought you should have these. I'm not signing this because I don't want it to be an embarrassment to us when we meet.” A couple of days later, Alsop asked Bartlett if he had sent him the pictures. After Bartlett confirmed Alsop's suspicion, Alsop never mentioned the subject again.