The Gay Metropolis (30 page)

By becoming the most celebrated artists on the planet, the Beatles pushed postadolescent male sexuality to the center of Western culture. Their triumph completed a twenty-year process that began when Marlon Brando starred on Broadway in a torn T-shirt, gained momentum with Elvis Presley,
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and reached its first plateau when John Kennedy entered the White House. “In the age of Calvin Klein's steaming hunks, it must be hard for those under 40 to realize that there was ever a time when a man was nothing but a suit of clothes, a shirt and tie, shined leather shoes, and a gray, felt hat,” Gore Vidal wrote. “If he was thought attractive, it was because he had a nice smile and a twinkle in his eye.”

In a subtle way, the national veneration of the long-haired Kennedy and the longer-haired Beatles may even have contributed to a painfully slow acceptance by gay men of their own desires. With the “male as sex object” at our “culture's center stage,” as Vidal put it, one man's obsession with another stopped seeming quite so unnatural as it had been before. Or, to
put it more concretely, it no longer felt so odd to a fourteen-year-old boy who discovered that he worshipped George Harrison, when so many of his male classmates seemed to feel just as strongly about John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr (and strove to look exactly like them). Allen Ginsberg thought, “The Beatles provided an example to youth around the world: that guys could be friends.” Ringo explained, “It was four guys who really loved each other”—and everyone else noticed.

Janis Joplin accomplished a different kind of gender-bending feat for women. As the critic Ellen Willis pointed out, Joplin's “metamorphosis from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight-Ashbury” meant that “a woman who was not conventionally pretty, who had acne and an intermittent weight problem and hair that stuck out” could “invent her own beauty out of sheer energy, soul, sweetness, arrogance and a sense of humor”—and thereby alter our very “notions of attractiveness.”

The sixties celebration of diversity was most apparent in the world of music. At no other moment in American history have so many different musical styles been promoted on commercial radio stations—everyone from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to the Supremes and Jefferson Airplane.

Dylan was a direct descendant of the Beats. “It was Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who inspired me at first,” he explained—and Ginsberg was in the studio with him when he first recorded “The Chimes of Freedom” for
Another Side of Bob Dylan
in 1964. “Listen,” exulted Ginsberg, quoting a lyric, “he's singing for ‘every hung-up person in the whole wide universe!'” Dylan paid homage to his friend by giving the poet a cameo in the opening scene of the brilliant documentary of Dylan's 1965 tour of Britain,
Don't Look Back.

The celebrity of Dylan, the Beatles, Janis Joplin and dozens of other iconoclasts sent another important subliminal message to an emerging generation of lesbians and gay men: these role models proved that outsiders—even outlaws—could become heroes in an age like this.

For almost a decade, cultural and political ferment in England had provided much more explicit encouragement to the nascent gay liberation movement in America. Ever since the Wolfenden Report had recommended the decriminalization of homosexual acts between adults in 1957, a spirited debate in Great Britain about whether the law should regulate sexual activity between consenting adults had received considerable attention in the American newsmagazines and
The New York Times.

This controversy stimulated the production of
Victim,
a landmark British film about the routine blackmail of homosexuals. The film in turn
intensified the political debate, leading to a dramatic legal reform. But at the end of i960, the man who would direct
Victim,
Basil Dearden, had almost given up on getting it made. Just before Christmas, Dearden sent the script to Dirk Bogarde, a fine British actor who was discovered by Hollywood at end of the fifties, but now hungered to do something that would have real meaning. Before the script arrived at the actor's country home in Beaconsfield, a few miles west of London, Dearden telephoned Bogarde to warn him that every other actor he had approached had rejected it.

“Thanks,” said Bogarde. “What's it about, paedophilia?”

“No,” said Dearden. “Homosexuality, actually. Middle-aged married man with a yen for a bloke on a building site. … If it's any comfort we don't call anyone a queer, homo, pouf, nancy or faggot.”
(Invert
was the word that the screenwriter had selected.)

Bogarde seized the chance to play the leading role: a London barrister whose ex-boyfriend kills himself rather than disclose the barrister's identity to a blackmail ring or to the police. The barrister jettisons his career in order to crush the blackmailers. Bogarde wrote in his autobiography,

It was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life. It is extraordinary in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make. [But] it was, in its time, all three. … Some critics complained that it was only a thriller with a message tacked on rather loosely. But the best way to persuade a patient to take his medicine is by sugaring the pill—and this was the only possible way the film could have been approached in those early days. Whatever else, it was a tremendous success, pleasing us and confounding our detractors. The countless letters of gratitude which flooded in were proof enough of that. … I had achieved what I had longed to do for so long, to be in a film which disturbed, educated and illuminated.

“It was the first film in which a man said ‘I love you' to another man,” said Bogarde. “I wrote that scene in. I said, ‘There's no point in half-measures. We either make a film about queers or we don't.'”

The film was propaganda: it was explicit and effective. This exchange took place between the two policemen in charge of the investigation:

In the film, a barber who is being blackmailed tells Bogarde, “I can't help the way I am, but the law says I'm a criminal. I've been to prison four times. Couldn't go through that again. Not at my age. I'm going to Canada. I've made up my mind to be ‘sensible,' as the prison doctor used to say. Don't care how lonely, but sensible. Can't stand any more trouble. … Nature played me a dirty trick. I'm going to see I get a few years peace and quiet in return.” Another blackmail victim asks, “Do you ever wonder about the law that makes us all victims of any cheap thug who finds out about our natural instincts?” The movie was also careful to address the most common objection to the reform of laws regulating homosexual behavior. “Of course youth must be protected,” said one of the gay characters. “We all agree about that. But that doesn't mean that consenting males in private should be pilloried by an antiquated law.”

The film was a critical and financial success in Great Britain, and it had a dramatic effect on the political debate about homosexuality. Just four years after it was released, the twelfth marquess of Queensberry—the great-grandson of the man who accused Oscar Wilde of having an affair with his son—rose in the House of Lords to support a bill that would decriminalize homosexual acts between adults. “I do not believe that our laws on this subject are a solution,” the thirty-five-year-old marquess declared in his maiden speech to his fellow lords. “They have, if anything, helped to produce a nasty, furtive underworld which is bad for society and bad for the homosexual”—the very world depicted in
Victim.
Dr. Arthur M. Ramsay, the archbishop of Canterbury, also endorsed the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report. Two years later, in 1967—with the support of the Church of England, the Methodists, and even the Roman Catholics—the bill received final approval from the House of Commons, a milestone recorded in a page-one story by Anthony Lewis in
The New York Times.

Victim
might have ignited a similar debate in America, but it never got into general release here. Always alert to the dangerous connections between
culture and politics, the Catholic-dominated censorship office in Hollywood refused to give
Victim
its seal of approval. According to the film historian Vito Russo, the first objection was to the use of the words
homosexual
and
homosexuality,
“which had never before been uttered on screen.” A spokesman for the Production Code Administration explained that the film was unacceptable because of its “candid and clinical discussion of homosexuality” and its “overtly expressed plea for social acceptance of the homosexual, to the extent that he be made socially tolerable.” A handful of art houses in big cities did exhibit
Victim,
despite the absence of censorship office endorsement. Murray Gitlin went to see the film in Chicago with an actor friend. “We came out, and Woody said to me, ‘Well, our secret is out!'” Gitlin remembered. “This is, like, sixty-two. And that may have been the beginning of an awareness that had not been around before. A very important moment.”

Ironically, the censorship office acted to keep
Victim
out of general release just five weeks after Arthur Krim, the president of United Artists, had petitioned the Motion Picture Association of America to loosen the code to permit
some
references to homosexuality. Krim was concerned because his company was in the process of producing
The Children's Hour,
inspired by the Lillian Hellman play in which an evil child's accusation of lesbianism destroys the lives of two teachers, and
Advise and Consent,
the film based on the Allen Drury novel in which a senator commits suicide because of the revelation of a homosexual incident in his past. Because neither film “promoted” homosexuality, the MPAA granted Krim's request. But the fact that
Victim
advocated reform of the law was more than the censorship office could stomach.

In 1961 a virulent homophobia remained routine for many of America's most influential film critics.
Time
magazine called
Victim
“a coyly sensational exploitation of homosexuality as a theme—and what's more offensive—an implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice. … Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious but often curable neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.” Another British offering that year,
A Taste of Honey,
included an affectionate portrayal of an effeminate gay character named Geoff, played by Murray Melvin. After the film received a favorable review in
The New York Times
from Abe Weiler, a junior critic on the paper, his superior, Bosley Crowther, immediately objected. “Certainly you'd think the grubby people who swarm through [the film] might shake out one disagreeable individual whose meanness we might despise,” wrote Crowther, who was chief film
critic for the
Times
for three decades. “The homosexual could do with some sharp and dirty digs. No one is more easily rendered odious than an obvious homosexual.” Five years later, Crowther wrote that “too many people who should know better in the steamy front offices of Hollywood” used “adult theme” as a synonym for “abnormal sex.”

IN
1963
The New York Times
published a landmark piece about homosexuals on its front page. The article was inspired by the convictions of the man who would dominate the news department for more than twenty years. His opinions would often have a decisive effect on the way gay employees were treated and gay issues were covered by the
Times.

A. M. Rosenthal was a brilliant, ambitious, volatile and fiercely opinionated newsman. The son of Russian Jews who first settled in Canada before moving to the Bronx, he started his career at the
Times
while still an undergraduate at City College. In 1963 he had returned from Japan, the last of four foreign postings, to become the paper's metropolitan editor. Six years later, he would be named managing editor, and in 1977, he became executive editor, a job that gave him control of the entire news department. He held that position until 1986.

One of the first things Rosenthal noticed after he returned to New York after a long absence was how obvious homosexuals had become on the city's streets. To explain this phenomenon, he assigned the kind of story he would become famous for: a huge attention-getting account that purported to tell the reader everything he needed to know about a particular subject.

In the early 1960s,
The New York Times
was much more than the newspaper of record. It was the bible of the eastern liberal establishment, the media outlet that set the tone for the coverage of every important story in America. Its news judgment was considered unimpeachable by all other serious newspapers and every network news broadcast. In this period before Watergate and Ben Bradlee made the
Washington Post
a significant competitor, the
Times was
the newspaper almost every ambitious print reporter dreamed of working for. Its long page-one stories on sociological subjects were studied by the intelligentsia as if they were the secular equivalent of papal encyclicals.