The Gay Metropolis (23 page)

Streisand was “discovered” three years later by Arthur Laurents, when he directed her in
Can Get It for You Wholesale
on Broadway in 1962. “One day this girl came in [wearing] these bizarre thrift-shop clothes,” Laurents recalled. “She was nineteen. She started to sing, and I thought,
My God, Yve never heard anything like this.”
But the show's producer, David Merrick, agreed with Walter Clemons. Merrick kept saying, “She's so unattractive,” and he tried to get Laurents to fire her “every night of rehearsal and out of town.” But Streisand “knew she was going to be a star right then and there,” said Laurents. “And she made sure you knew.”

JACK DOWLING
first reached Manhattan by bicycle when he was thirteen, in 1945, right after the war ended. He pedaled there from Sewaren, thirty miles away, near the Jersey Shore. “It took me all day to get here and then all day to get home, which left about a half an hour to explore the city. I remember leaving in the morning on a Sunday and getting here late afternoon, passing through Staten Island and taking the ferry.

“When I started to come by bus I was fourteen or fifteen. I wasn't quite sure of what I was looking for. It would have been something that wasn't happening where I was living, something that wasn't happening at home. The beat of the city fascinated me. I needed to see whatever city life might eventually hold.”

By the mid-fifties he had a pretty good idea of gay life's parameters. He recalled one night in Manhattan in 1951: “You go to a bar like New Verdi on Verdi Square on the east side of Amsterdam. There's not even a bar there now. Hang out drinking beer with a lot of other people that you know. Then you all get in a cab and race down the West Side Highway and go to Mary's on 8th Street. Go down the street to Main Street and the Old Colony, and then decide the Village is dead—mostly because nobody has cruised you. So you get back in another cab, with another group, and go back to the West Side. There was
another bar on 72d Street, the Cork Club, and we would hit that. By now it's getting close to closing and somebody suggests an after-hours party. There was a church a few blocks from the bar, and somebody knows the guy who is the rector. The rector is gay. So this whole gang pours into the rectory—this is after four in the morning—and then somebody discovers the unlocked door from the rectory into the church, so then everybody pours into the church. There wasn't sexual carrying on, but there was a lot of camping. Music was being played on the organ. By now it's past five o'clock in the morning. People are drunk, taking down drapes and wearing them. And then it suddenly dawned on everybody that the church was going to be used pretty soon. We were smoking in there, and people had beer. The place was a mess. So we rushed around and tried to make it all right. It was not exactly a wild night as far as sex goes, but there was always that edge, much more so than now—running on danger—since it was dangerous everywhere. You were always playing and teasing with that aspect of life in the city.

“We also used to go to Lucky's in Harlem. It was a big bar where the waiters and waitresses would sing, and the patrons would sing, and people would come and listen to jazz. It was a straight bar, but there were a lot of gay people from downtown, and there were a lot of gay black guys there.

“Nights went on forever in New York. It was hot. You could take the subways and in minutes be in other gay places. It was dark and shadowy because the streetlights were not as bright as they are now.

“It was a very casual time. I used to leave the San Remo when it closed in my Packard convertible. With a friend, I would take the car off the road in Central Park and drive across the meadow. We would cruise the park, then pick cherry blossoms from behind the Metropolitan Museum, filling up the rumble seat. On the way home, we would drop the boughs off at sleeping friends' apartments before going home to bed ourselves. Although there was police repression against gays, the police were really quite naive. You could go cruising across the lawns of Central Park in an old car, and if they saw you, they probably wouldn't believe it.”

FOR LESBIANS AND GAY MEN
coming of age in this period, the Kinsey Report made an enormous difference. Despite all the emphasis on conformity, for the first time in the country's history, there was at least a muted minority point of view about what it meant to be a homosexual.

Three other events of the fifties were crucial to the birth of the gay liberation movement at the end of the following decade, and two of them occurred in 1951. The first was the founding of the Mattachine Society in
Los Angeles by Harry Hay, whose political awakening had started when he joined the Communist party and participated in a general strike in San Francisco in 1934. Mattachine took its name from the court jesters of the Middle Ages who were permitted to speak brutal social truths from behind their masks. In the summer of 1950, Hay tried to accumulate names for a gay rights organization by circulating a petition against the Korean War on gay beaches in Los Angeles. But when he raised the subject of growing federal harassment of homosexuals, the petition signers were far too fearful to join an avowedly gay organization. “We didn't know at that point that there had ever been a gay organization of any sort, anywhere in the world before,” said Hay. “Absolutely no knowledge of that. So we thought that we had to be very, very careful” because “if we made a mistake, and got into the papers the wrong way, we could hurt the idea of a movement for years to come. And we were terrified of doing that.”

After months of discussion with four cofounders, in the winter of 1951 Hay decided to model the society's organization on the structure of the Communist party, with strict secrecy and a carefully defined hierarchy. The first goal would be to change the self-image of gay people to produce a “new pride—a pride in belonging, a pride in participating in the cultural growth and the social achievements of… the homosexual minority.” A New York chapter soon followed, but it would take another twenty years before that pride became the common goal of thousands of gay Americans.

After the founding of the Mattachine Society, for the first time sophisticated heterosexuals had somewhere to go when they wanted to find gay American men who considered themselves well-adjusted. The first person to take significant advantage of this opportunity was Dr. Evelyn Hooker, an iconoclastic psychologist at the University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Hooker had plenty of gay friends, including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and his lover, Don Bachardy. Isherwood described her in the same way that many people had described Kinsey, which may explain why she and Kinsey reached such dramatically different conclusions from other scientists of this period. “She never treated us like some strange tribe,” said Isherwood, “so we told her things we never told anyone before.”

Hooker had been invited to attend some of the first public meetings of the Mattachine Society, and some of her gay friends urged her to analyze their behavior. She decided to apply for a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study homosexual men. To her astonishment, despite the wave of McCarthyite attacks coming out of Washington, her grant
application was accepted. But she always denied that her action had required any courage: “Curiosity and empathy were what compelled me to do my study,” she said.

The Mattachine Society helped her to recruit thirty gay men; then she found another thirty heterosexual men to act as her control group, including policemen and firemen. The two groups were matched in IQ, age, and education levels. All of the men were given three standard personality tests, including the Rorschach inkblot test. Because nearly all psychologists and psychiatrists in this period believed that homosexuality was a symptom of mental illness, “Every clinical psychologist… would tell you that if he gave those projective tests he could tell whether a person was gay or not,” Dr. Hooker said. “I showed that they couldn't do it. I was very pleased with that.”

The psychologist presented her findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1956 and published them the following year in “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” in
The Journal of Projective Techniques
. The conservative psychoanalytic establishment immediately attacked her and tried to prove that she was “crazy.” But her gay friends were thrilled: “This is great,” they said. “We knew it all the time!” Using widely accepted standardized tests, she had proved for the first time that “gay men can be as well adjusted as straight men and some are even better adjusted than some straight men.”

Although it would be years before she convinced many of her colleagues of the accuracy of her findings, Dr. Hooker's work provided the framework that made it possible for the American Psychiatric Association to rethink its position on this subject seventeen years later. It also gave gay men hope, when they needed it most, that the psychiatric establishment might some day change its attitude toward their orientation. Dr. Hooker's work made her one of the earliest and most important heterosexual allies of lesbians and gay men in America. In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, she would be the star of many gay-pride events. She died at her home in Santa Monica in 1996, at the age of eighty-nine.

THE THIRD CRITICAL
intellectual event for homosexuals in the 1950s was the publication of a book that would become the bible of the early gay movement. William Wynkoop was a college English professor when he walked into a Doubleday bookstore in Detroit in 1951 and learned about it. He was talking to the store's gay manager about “how
terrible
” conditions were for gay people at the time.

“We were old enough then to really see the horror that was being perpetrated on us,” Wynkoop recalled four decades later. “And the manager said, ‘Well, something is happening! It's the beginning of a change! We've got to organize.'” He had just received a review copy of this new book: “‘It lays it on the line! And it's a very
fearless
book.'”

The book was called
The Homosexual in America
, and it was the first essential document of gay liberation in the United States. It was published under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory. The author was a man with a wife and son, whose family knew nothing about his secret life as a gay oracle. His real name was Edward Sagarin, and he lived in Brooklyn. Sagarin was the friend of a printer who did work for Greenberg, which had published a few gay novels. The printer introduced Sagarin to a Greenberg editor named Brandt Aymar. After the war, Aymar and Jae Greenberg had been indicted on a federal charge of sending obscene materials through the mail.

The offending books were three volumes of gay fiction—
Quatrefoil
, a fine wartime novel by James Fugate;
The Divided Path;
and
The Invisible Glass
. Vociferous complaints from the mother of one of their mail-order customers resulted in the indictment. After the charges had dragged on for five years, they were settled for a fine of $3,500—and a promise to keep the three novels out of print.

But no official ever challenged the right to publish
The Homosexual in America
. “It was well accepted all over the country,” Aymar remembered forty-four years after he published it. There were seven printings of the book between 1951 and 1957. For the thousands of gay readers who discovered it at stores across the country, it was a revelation. Sagarin had participated in “American life as a homosexual” since the 1920s, and he provided the most comprehensive description of gay male life in America ever written. He also sketched a broad plan to revolutionize American attitudes on the subject. Two appendixes referred the reader to 59 nonfiction works and 213 novels and dramas with a gay theme or character.

William Wynkoop was overwhelmed when he read it. “I said,
'This
is amazing! This is a breakthrough that has never occurred in history before!'” His lover Roy Strickland agreed: “This was a
revolutionary
book.”

Sagarin's preface recorded the author's typical, tortured journey, which made it clear that like nearly all lesbians and gay men, he did not feel that he was a victim of recruitment. He recounted his first attraction to another man, his complete ignorance of “any facts about homosexuality,” and his “deep shock” when a teacher in high school took him aside and
explained to him that there were people “called inverts.” After that Sagarin read every book he could find on the subject, and “sought to understand why I could not be like others.”

He felt “deeply ashamed of being abnormal and was aware of the heavy price that must be paid if anyone were to discover my secret.… I struggled against my homosexuality, sought to discipline myself to overcome it, punished myself for failures to resist sinful temptations. But the struggles did nothing to diminish the needs within me.” And like many of the men studied by the army during World War II, he alternately felt “trapped by a human tragedy to which I could never adjust, or blessed as one of the elite of the world.”

But Sagarin's experiences with men discouraged him from believing in the possibility of a long-term homosexual relationship: “Passionate infatuations that seemed permanent were torn asunder after only a short period of time.… It appeared to me that I faced a life of dissipation, a hopeless dead-end.” So when he discovered at twenty-five that he was “capable of consummating a marriage,” he married his childhood sweetheart. His final solution was typical of his generation—a marriage that lasted until the end of his life, and a simultaneous love affair with a black boyfriend.

The Homosexual in America
was a call to arms, an attack on every anti-homosexual prejudice. As the historian John D'Emilio pointed out, it “not only provided gay men and women with a tool for reinterpreting their lives; it also implied that the conditions of life had changed sufficiently so that the book's message might find a receptive audience.”