The Gay Metropolis (28 page)

“I take the stand that not only is homosexuality … not immoral,” said Kameny, “but that homosexual acts engaged in by consenting adults are moral, in a positive and real sense, and are right, good and desirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which they live.”

Kameny and his Washington cohort forced federal officials to meet with them to discuss their exclusionary policies as early as October 1962, the same month as the Cuban missile crisis. They didn't change any minds, but they made the bureaucrats aware of their existence. In the summer of 1963, Kameny, Nichols and five others formed their own (unidentified) gay contingent in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, March on Washington. A few months later, Kameny recruited his first significant ally from the liberal heterosexual community. In March 1964, he persuaded the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the Civil Service Commission's regulations excluding gays from federal employment. Five months later, the D.C. ACLU condemned the government's exclusion of homosexuals as “discriminatory” and urged an end to the policy of “rejection of homosexuals.” Then the ACLU took the case of Bruce Scott, who had been rejected for a federal job because of “convincing evidence” of gay conduct. At its convention in 1964, the national ACLU adopted the position of its Washington chapter, a major victory for the gay movement. (Since 1957, the ACLU had explicitly supported the constitutionality of sodomy laws and federal regulations denying employment to gay men and lesbians.) In July 1965, the United States Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that the charges against Bruce Scott were too vague to disqualify him for federal employment.

The previous fall, Washington had been rocked by a “homosexual scandal” when Walter Jenkins, a top aide in Lyndon Johnson's White House, was arrested for lewd conduct in the basement men's room of a YMCA—just
weeks before a presidential election. Johnson immediately demanded Jenkins's resignation, and the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, decided not to make the incident a major issue in the campaign. However, in a speech for Goldwater, Richard Nixon asserted that Americans would “not stand for immorality in the White House” and called on Johnson to tell the nation everything he knew about this “sick man.”
The New York Times
declared that “the public can easily understand that men at the summit of government are subject to human frailty,” but added, “there can be no place on the White House staff … for a person of markedly deviant behavior.”

In the scandal's most surprising episode, J. Edgar Hoover inadvertently redirected attacks on the White House to himself when the press reported that he had sent flowers to Jenkins with a card inscribed “J. Edgar Hoover and Associates.” The
Times
wrote that right-wing critics had reacted to the gesture with “shock, disbelief, and even outrage.” Former Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota demanded to know whether the FBI or its director “was involved in such a way that it fears being hurt by some revelation Jenkins could make.” The congressman said the FBI had been “compromised” by Hoover's bouquet. A bureau spokesman confirmed that Jenkins and Hoover were good friends, but declined further comment. As usual, Washington's underlying fear of Hoover made him immune to all criticism.

JACK NICHOLS CONTINUED
to articulate the need to reject the medical establishment's view of homosexuality: “The mental attitude of our own people toward themselves, that they are not well—that they are not whole, that they are less than completely healthy—is responsible for untold numbers of personal tragedies and warped lives. By failing to take a definitive stand … I believe that you will not only weaken the movement ten-fold, but that you will fail in your duty to homosexuals who need more than anything else to see themselves in a better light.”

This was the fundamental philosophical insight that was necessary to the formation of an effective fighting force among gay men and women. Edward Sagarin had hinted at this idea in
The Homosexual in America
when he wrote that there was “no homosexual problem except that created by the heterosexual society.” He had also written, “It remains to be proved that there is anything neurotic about the preference for one's own sex,” but during the thirteen years since his landmark volume had been published, he had become increasingly reactionary. Now he led the fight
against the new young militants. “He could get very nasty when he chose to be,” Kameny said about Sagarin.

Kameny echoed Nichols in his speech to the New York Mattachine Society in July 1964. “The entire homophile movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether homosexuality is a sickness, and upon our taking a firm stand on it,” he declared. And he was right. The following spring, the Washington chapter overwhelmingly adopted this revolutionary statement: “The Mattachine Society of Washington takes the position that in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance or other pathology in any sense, but is merely a preference, orientation, or propensity, on par with, and not different in kind from heterosexuality.”

Sagarin vowed to quit the New York chapter if it adopted such a statement, and he ran as part of a slate determined to hold on to the notion that homosexuality
was
an illness. Kameny wrote to him: “You have fallen by the wayside. … You have become no longer the rigorous Father of the Homophile Movement, to be revered, respected and listened to, but the senile Grandfather of the Homophile Movement, to be humored and tolerated at best; to be ignored and disregarded usually; and to be ridiculed, at worst.”

In May 1965, the New York chapter elected the militant slate with two thirds of the vote. “It is very much a victory for all of us who are working hard and who don't want to see the clock turned backwards by the stick-in-the-muds and the ‘sickniks,'” Nichols enthused. Using his real name for the first time, instead of a pseudonym, Sagarin wrote a doctoral dissertation about the New York Mattachine Society in which he made scathing criticisms of the organization and dismissed the possibility that serious philosophical differences were at the heart of the dispute.

On July 4,1965, Kameny and Nichols organized the first of a series of annual pickets outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a tradition that continued through 1969. Kameny believed the sight of people identifying themselves as homosexuals in public had a decisive impact on the movement: “These demonstrations created the necessary mind-set for gays demonstrating in public.” Without them, he thought the crucial Greenwich Village explosion at the end of the decade might never have occurred.

“
IS GOD DEAD
?”
Time
magazine asked on its Easter cover in 1966. A sharp drop in religious faith during the sixties helped to put all the old puritan taboos in jeopardy. Because so much antigay prejudice was
grounded in religion, the challenges to religious orthodoxy were a necessary prerequisite for a general reconsideration of the subject.

There was tremendous ferment within the Christian denominations surrounding the subject of homosexuality. As early as 1964, the Episcopal Diocese of New York supported the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults. An Episcopal spokesman said that his church's position was part of its acceptance of “God's continuing and progressive revelation about man's nature”—the very reason why so many people would eventually reject the Bible's injunctions against homosexuality. The following year, even
The New York Times
editorial page quietly endorsed the repeal of the law forbidding homosexual acts in private. But the Catholic archdiocese mounted a fierce and successful battle to retain statutes making both adultery and homosexuality criminal acts in New York State. On July 22,1965, Governor Rockefeller signed two special bills to please the Catholics on these issues, after the legislature had passed a complete revision of the state's eighty-four-year-old penal code.

In 1967, ninety Episcopalian priests met at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and a large majority declared that homosexuality should no longer be dismissed as wrong “per se.” The Reverand Walter D. Dennis, canon of the cathedral and organizer of the conference, said, “A homosexual relationship between two consenting adults should be judged by the same criteria as a heterosexual marriage. That is, whether it is intended to foster a permanent relationship of love.” The keynote speaker at the conference was Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, who had coauthored
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
with Kinsey. Pomeroy attacked the “myths” that homosexuals were more likely than others to be child molesters, and that they were “effeminate and identifiable.” The event was front-page news in the
Times.

In October 1968, twelve gay worshippers met at the home of the Reverand Troy D. Perry in Los Angeles. Sixteen months later the tiny group had become the Metropolitan Community Church with 348 members, the first congregation in the country to identify itself publicly as a gay church. As Edward Sagarin had written seventeen years earlier, “Homosexuality is not an anti-religious force, although religion is anti-homosexual.” The truth of that statement would become clear as hundreds of gay churches and synagogues of every denomination were founded throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties.

At the same time, the church had lost its direct power over Hollywood after the film censorship office was finally abolished in 1968. It was replaced
by the G, R, and X ratings system, which is still administered by the Motion Picture Association of America.
^*

DRUGS WERE CHAMPIONED
by some as an important complement—if not an outright replacement—for religion. In a speech to Boston's Arlington Street Church in 1966, Allen Ginsberg proposed “that everybody, including the President and his … vast hordes of generals, executives, judges and legislators … go to nature, find a kindly teacher … and assay their consciousness with LSD. Then, I prophesy, we will all have seen some ray of glory of vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceable community.” LSD's strongest proponent, Timothy Leary, pushed the idea that the hallucinogenic had redemptive properties. Inside the sixty-room mansion Leary occupied in Millbrook, New York, the drug was treated with “a studied and religious air, as if one took LSD in the spirit of a communicant,” Thomas Powers reported.

In the spring of 1967,
The New York Times Magazine
displayed an unusual willingness to embrace a prophet of the counterculture by publishing Hunter Thompson's report from Haight-Ashbury. A few years later, Thompson would become famous for his “gonzo journalism” from Las Vegas and the presidential campaign trail, as well as his legendary drug consumption. But in 1967 he was still a little-known free-lance writer. “Who needs jazz, or even beer,” he asked in the
Times,

when you can sit down on a public curbstone, drop a pill in your mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums. … There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society. Submerged and uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable hands who want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.

Two other contradictory strains nurtured the atmosphere which gave birth to the modern gay liberation movement. One was the sentimental
embrace of peace and love, which began to attract national attention on January 14,1967, when twenty thousand celebrants joined Ginsberg, the antiwar activist Jerry Rubin and Timothy Leary for a Gathering of the Tribes in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. A press release explained that political activists would join forces with “the love generation” to “powwow, celebrate, and prophesy the epoch of liberation, love, peace, compassion and the unity of mankind.” In Manhattan, Roy Aarons remembered the “coming of the psychedelic era, and being flooded with a bunch of runaway kids, and the whole introduction of grass and psychedelics. It became a much looser scene where there was a lot of experimentation by these guys.”

The other leitmotif of the sixties was a feverish violence, which peaked in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy bracketed King's. After Bobby's killing, John Updike wondered if God had withdrawn his blessing on America. William Styron remembered this decade as an era when “one of those liberal well-intentioned people would say, ‘You don't mean, do you'—and James Baldwin would interrupt and say, ‘Yes, baby, they're going to burn your house down.'”

After King was killed, 65,000 troops were needed to quell riots in 130 cities across the country. The fires that swept through Washington were the worst since the British had burned the White House in 1814, and machine-gun nests sprouted on the steps of the Capitol. The Johnson administration worried that it might actually run out of troops to calm the uprisings. Thirty-nine people were killed and nearly twenty thousand were arrested across the country. The riots extinguished white America's waning interest in the plight of poor blacks inside teeming ghettos.

But these disturbances had a very different effect on another group of disenfranchised Americans. They planted seeds of disobedience inside the hearts of millions who were finally about to assert
their
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.