The Gay Metropolis (29 page)

UNDER PRESSURE
from the Mattachine Society, the New York City Police Department announced in 1966 that it would stop using undercover cops to entrap homosexuals. Harold Bramson, a thirty-three-year-old schoolteacher, believed that he was the last person to be entrapped by a rookie undercover cop inside a gay bar before the policy was changed. Criminal Court Judge Arthur Braun dismissed the case because of “reasonable doubt,” and Bramson kept his job in the public school system.

In 1967, the State Supreme Court of New Jersey threw out a regulation
that permitted the state to close any bar that allowed “apparent homosexuals to congregate at their licensed premises.” An investigator for the State Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control had complained that gay patrons had “looked into each other's eyes when they conversed” and “swished and swayed down to the other end of the bar.” But the Supreme Court justices ruled unanimously that “so long as their public behavior violates no legal proscriptions, [homosexuals] have the undoubted right to congregate in public.”

On the other hand, the blackmail that Max Lerner had been unable to confirm in Washington during the 1950s emerged as a serious problem for famous homosexuals in the 1960s. Federal and state law enforcement officials announced in 1966 that they had broken up a national extortion ring with seventy members who had bilked more than a thousand victims of millions of dollars, including an East Coast congressman who paid more than $40,000 to thieves posing as policemen. At least thirteen people were indicted for extortion, and several were sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. Officials said the ring was headed by a former detective from the Chicago police force.

In one case, two gang members posing as New York City detectives marched into the Pentagon, and marched out with a senior officer. After they shook him down for several thousand dollars, the officer killed himself—the night before he was scheduled to testify before a Manhattan grand jury.

Other victims included “a general and an admiral,” “a British producer,” “two deans of East Coast colleges,” “a musician who has made numerous appearances on television,” “a partner in a well-known night-spot,” “a leading motion picture actor,” “a nuclear scientist,” “a number of professors,” and “a much-admired television personality.”

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
made national headlines in 1967 when it became one of the first colleges to give formal recognition to a gay students organization. The Student Homophile League claimed a dozen members and issued a thirteen-point declaration of principles which asserted “the fundamental human right” of every homosexual “to develop and achieve his full potential and dignity as a human being.” It said that gay people should have the right to declare themselves without risking ostracism from school or loss of employment, as well as living “free from unwelcomed pressures to conform to the prevailing heterosexuality.”

“At first the students seemed to think it was some sort of April Fool hoax,” said Charles Skoro, who wrote about the organization in
The
Spectator,
the student newspaper. “But now they realize it is for real.” In an editorial,
The Spectator
praised the creation of the organization.

Gay sex was still a mostly furtive thing in Manhattan in the mid-sixties. Nearly all the gay bars had been closed in another “cleanup” campaign just before the 1964 World's Fair. But there were the glimmerings of a new kind of community.

John Koch was an Iowa farmboy who had moved to New York in 1964, thinking he would return home after a single summer. But he never left. In 1965, he moved up to 74th Street and Central Park West from the Village, and he discovered the Ramble. This heavily wooded area in the middle of Central Park had been an active gay meeting ground (and bird-watching area) at least since the forties, but now the men who went there were using a new system to protect one another. “If someone saw the cops coming, they'd take a stick and start beating it,” Koch recalled. “And all of a sudden you'd hear these clothes being put on and rustle, rustle, rustle. It was a good system. It really was. And the cops would come and we'd just be standing there because in those days it wasn't illegal to be in the park or anything, so they couldn't do anything to you. I felt totally safe there. Central Park West was a place to pick people up and take them home. Central Park was where you did it.”

IN THE SUMMER
of 1968, Frank Kameny explicitly emulated the example of radical blacks after he saw Stokely Carmichael on television leading a group of protesters in a chant of “Black is beautiful!” Kameny said, “I understood the psychodynamic at work here in a context in which
black
is universally equated with everything that is bad.” He realized at once the need to do something similar for gays.

In July 1968, Kameny coined the slogan “Gay is good.” He said, “If I had to specify the one thing in my life of which I am most proud, it is that.” He described the phrase as a direct response to the “unrelieved, relentless barrage of negativism coming to us from every source.”
^*

Later in 1968, the violent confrontations between Chicago policemen and
antiwar protesters during the Democratic National Convention briefly fostered the impression of a society on the brink of anarchy. These scenes on national television created a political reaction that resulted in the election (by a tiny margin) of Richard Milhous Nixon, the quintessential white man of the fifties. Paradoxically, on a social level, these paroxysms of violence also contributed to a steady loosening of the puritan bonds that had kept the lid on American attitudes and activities throughout the previous decade.

ABC News hired Gore Vidal and the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., to provide commentary for the convention. During a debate over one of the police riots in Chicago, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley shouted back, “Now listen, you queer … I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.” The bickering continued in
Esquire
the following year, when the magazine published a telegram that it said Buckley had intended to send to Vidal: “Please inform Gore Vidal neither I nor my family is disposed to receive lessons in morality from a pink queer.” Vidal replied in the following issue: “I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom. There will always be morbid twisted men like Buckley, sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others.”

The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations also met in Chicago that summer and sent questionnaires to all the candidates' headquarters, requesting their views on a “homosexual bill of rights” that would decriminalize sexual acts between consenting adults and remove all government strictures on the employment of gay people. At Kameny's urging, NACHO also adopted “Gay is good” as its official slogan. But even the liberal
New Republic
seemed skeptical about the whole undertaking: “History indicates that politicians generally prefer to leave such embarrassments in obscurity,” the magazine observed, “but the homosexuals profess determination to make an issue of this serious problem for society.”

THE LOUDEST REVERBERATION
from the collapse of the old order was a revolution in the way Americans thought about sex. The widespread use
of the Pill at the beginning of the sixties made sex simpler, more accessible and seemingly less consequential. It also encouraged public acceptance of a truly radical notion for a prudish nation: the idea that sex might actually be valuable for its own sake. That idea represented a sea change in the way millions of Americans of all orientations thought about copulation; in fact, it was
the
fundamental philosophical leap,
the
indispensable step before homosexual sex could gain any legitimacy within the larger society. By definition, until sex was given a value unconnected to procreation, sex between two people of the same gender could only be worthless and “unnatural.” As one Episcopalian opponent of reform put it in 1967, homosexual acts “must always be regarded as perversions because they are not part of the natural process of rearing children.” But as John D'Emilio has pointed out, once the Pill gained widespread acceptance, the defense of heterosexual intercourse as the only “natural” act became increasingly difficult because “modern technology was obstructing the ‘natural' outcome” of that act.

“The difference was, for the first time,
everybody
at the grassroots level found all these taboos wanting and unpersuasive and irrational,” said Frank Kameny. “And
that's
what changed.” In April 1969,
Playboy
published an interview with Allen Ginsberg in which the poet even made positive comments about being gay.

In 1967, Rita Hauser, a prominent Republican lawyer from New York City, made a speech that was remarkably radical for its time. In a forum of the American Bar Association on “Women's Liberation and the Constitution,” she declared that laws banning marriages between people of the same sex were unconstitutional. Mrs. Hauser said such laws were based on an antiquated notion that reproduction is the purpose of marriage. Because of overpopulation, she called that rationale outmoded. Limiting reproduction was the new social goal, “And I know no better way of accomplishing this than marriage between the same sexes.”
^*

Dan Stewart, a landscape architect, made his first visit to Cherry Grove on Fire Island in 1967, when he was thirty-seven. “I was scared to death to go because I thought everybody was totally sexually
crazed
out there. And I didn't know how to deal with that at the time. If I knew somebody—knew who they were and liked them—I'd do anything, okay. But to do anything with someone I didn't know was very frightening to me. And
that's what Fire Island represented. I will never forget that first weekend in the Grove. We stayed at the Belvedere, a guest house place that looks like an Italian palazzo. It's still there: it's unreal. It was one of those nights when the sunset was pink, and it lasted for three hours. So you had all this pink light, and here were all these muscle builders and all this stuff going on. It was Fellini for days.” But no one asked Stewart to participate. “I was also miserable about that. You know, my fear must have shown.”

As early as 1964, the New York Academy of Medicine provided hard evidence of the arrival of the sexual revolution: a surge in reported cases of venereal disease. The incidence of syphilis in New York City increased almost sevenfold, from seven new cases per one hundred thousand reported in 1955 to forty-five new cases in 1963. The academy cited these reasons for the change: a “releasing of moral and cultural values in present-day society, [the elevation of sex] to a status of glamour, success and happiness, salacious literature directed at youth, a breakdown in the home and family life, the automobile, and the feminist movement.” It also noted the “organized and aggressive action” by homosexuals to “gain at least tolerance, hopefully to achieve” acceptance, “and most ambitiously to have it recognized as a noble way of life.”

THE INTENSE CROSS-CULTURAL
exchange between America and Britain produced additional fuel for what gradually became a general cultural and political conflagration—the necessary preamble for a fundamental revolution in the way Americans thought about sex. One reason the country changed so rapidly in the sixties was a colossal infusion of energy from the largest generation of adolescents America had ever produced.

“It's at that age when you really feel you can make things happen,” Bob Dylan explained. “Things matter.”

By the middle of 1967, the Beatles had become much more than Britain's most successful cultural export since Shakespeare. By synthesizing the best of American rock and roll from the fifties (Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, among others) into their own spellbinding soundtrack for the sixties, they managed to embody the entire British-American fifties-into-sixties cultural transformation. Their beguiling public persona was shaped by Brian Epstein, their closeted gay manager, who fell in love with all of them as soon as he laid eyes on them. According to Paul McCartney, the Beatles were more baffled than upset by their new manager's sexual orientation. “We were more confused by it than turned off,” said McCartney. “We really didn't know what it meant to be gay at the time.”

George Martin, who signed them to their first record contract, described a similarly intense (though nonsexual) reaction to the Merseyside quartet. While Martin wasn't particularly impressed when he first heard their music, as soon as he met them he was entranced. “They exuded exuberance,” said Martin. “Sparks flew off them.”

Their magic combination of charm and cheerfulness was first displayed in theaters everywhere in 1964 when Richard Lester directed their smash black-and-white film debut,
A Hard Day's Night.
This was the first film to capture the emerging countercultural spirit for the masses. “While I was watching that movie my hair started to grow,” the film critic Roger Ebert remembered.

Although it was aimed at kids, almost everyone adored it. “You didn't take your eyes off them because you never knew at what moment they would do something unexpected,” said Lester, while Andrew Sarris considered the film “the
Citizen Kane
of jukebox musicals.” For millions of rockers of all ages, the impishness of these sexy performers transformed ancient notions of how macho a “real” man had to act and look. Suddenly humor was hipper than brawn. The gay activist Jack Nichols considered the Beatles the “undisputed troubadours of the revolution I represented” because “they showed true care for one another,” which was “unheard of by 1950s standards.”