The Gay Metropolis (4 page)

On this subject, Bigelow was wholly misinformed. Across town from the Park Avenue swells who entertained him so lavishly in their duplex apartments, a completely different kind of gay life was thriving in Times Square. Obvious “fairies” (many of them heavily made-up) created their
own flamboyant culture in the theater district. On either side of Broadway, there were gay bars, gay restaurants and even gay cafeterias. Automats were especially popular with the gay demimonde and even “the large cafeterias in the Childs chain” could be “astonishingly open,” according to the historian George Chauncey. Some proprietors encouraged their reputation as “gay hangouts” to attract late-night sightseers.

Soldiers and sailors swarmed through this teeming crossroads, and gay men pursued them with abandon. Tennessee Williams loved to cruise Times Square with Donald Windham in the forties. Williams recalled making “very abrupt and candid overtures, phrased so bluntly that it's a wonder they didn't slaughter me on the spot.” First the soldiers stared in astonishment; then they usually burst into laughter. Finally, after a brief conference, “as often as not, they would accept” the playwright's invitation.

Unlike the hermetic existence Bigelow enjoyed, which was protected by enormous wealth, the lives of ordinary lesbians and gay men were much more precarious. Because they had to be clandestine, the gay speakeasies that flourished in the twenties and thirties were usually very safe places to congregate. After Franklin Roosevelt ended Prohibition in 1933, the speakeasies were replaced by a continually changing constellation of gay bars. These saloons tended to be more open, but that meant they were also subject to much more harassment. Even inside gay bars, plainclothes policemen would practice entrapment, actually displaying erections in the bathroom to trick customers into propositioning them—a practice that continued in New York until the end of the 1960s. Payoffs to policemen by bar owners were frequent and utterly brazen. Roy Strickland, who would become a very successful window designer for department stores, remembered the routine at the Old Colony, a popular cruising spot on West 8th Street in the forties. “You'd see a cop walk in and go toward the rear and meet with the proprietor, and the proprietor would put his hand out—obviously with cash in it—and the cop would walk out. That's the way these places kept open.”

Cleanup campaigns were also quite common, especially just before elections, or the opening of world's fairs in 1939 and 1964. During one three-year period, fifteen thousand sex offenders were arrested for disorderly conduct in New York City. Sometimes they were referred to a rehabilitation center run by the Quakers.

The “respectable” (and deeply closeted) gay men whom Bigelow knew were honest about their homosexuality only among themselves; they were
horrified by the brazen displays of the Times Square crowd. Despite enormous changes, the same syndrome is sometimes still apparent today, as closeted Park Avenue lawyers and wealthy Wall Street investment bankers cringe at the flamboyance of anyone less inhibited than themselves.

In the forties, money protected the wealthy from most forms of harassment. One of their favorite places to congregate in public was the old Metropolitan Opera House, on Broadway just below Times Square, where the presumed safety from police raids inspired outlandish attire. One opera lover was particularly famous for wearing his pants backward in the standing section—with the fly in the back—to permit a particular kind of ecstatic experience during the performance. Gay men also assembled in elegant men's bars like the Oak Room in the Plaza and, most famously, at the Astor, on Seventh Avenue at 45th Street. A red tie was sometimes worn as a secret signal, as well as matching tie and handkerchief ensembles. The balcony at the Sutton Theater was extremely active, and for a time a matron was employed to warn the patrons of incoming policemen.

The protocol at the Astor suggested the need for extreme discretion when wealthier gay men mingled with the rest of society. At the Astor's oval bar, gay men gathered on one side, heterosexuals on the other. While heterosexual patrons could touch each other as much as they wanted, whenever the gay customers became slightly outlandish, the bar's managers would immediately warn them to tone down their behavior.

Discretion was also the watchword within all of society's fancier families. “The sexual scene I'm sure was exactly the same, but it was much more discreet,” said “Stephen Reynolds” (a pseudonym), the son of a wealthy New England manufacturer who first started visiting Manhattan in the late 1930s. Reynolds's family was extremely rich, and his father was unaffected by the Crash.

At the Choate School, Reynolds was in the same form as John Kennedy. “Nobody liked him very much,” Reynolds recalled. “I wasn't crazy about him personally. But if I had known he was going to be president, I would have been so nice to him. It never crossed our mind. We voted him ‘Most Likely to Succeed' because his father was ambassador to Great Britain, and we naturally thought, Well, he'll be taken care of. But we never dreamed he would be president. He was very loud and—I don't like to use the word, but I'm going to—very
common
. My family background is New England, and you know what they thought of the Kennedys. They thought they were pushy Irish. He had kind of fire engine hair—it all flew around—and he had a roommate called Lemoyne Billings.” Billings,
who happened to be gay, remained close to John and Bobby Kennedy all his life.

Before the war Reynolds used to come to New York from Yale for the weekend with $30, which would pay for a luxurious interlude. “On that, I would stay at the hotel, go to the theater, go up to Harlem. A restaurant was $1.25. A
good
restaurant. The Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue charged me $7.50 a night for a nice room. And you'd go back with $2 or $3.

“We went to the Stork Club because Sherman Billingsley was so thrilled to have the college crowd that he didn't charge you anything. There was a band. And there was a thing called the Cub Room, which always had Walter Winchell in it and stars of the stage. The Cub was where you went if you didn't want to hear the music. We never sat there because we wanted to be where the band was.

“There were one or two extraordinary characters who maybe went so far as to wear natural nail polish, which we thought was terribly daring,” Reynolds recalled. “Or they might wear a slightly outré shirt. But there were certain subjects one just didn't talk about. You just said, ‘Oh, you know, he's difficult.' Or ‘The family is having problems with him.' You certainly didn't say, ‘He wears an evening dress,' I can tell you that.”

Fifty years later, Reynolds was nostalgic for the understatement of the thirties and forties. “People didn't shove it down your throat,” he remembered. “When I see two boys walking down the street holding hands, it doesn't offend me; I don't care if they walk around naked. But liberation carried to such an extent to where there's no law at all—I don't see how you can get the full enjoyment of it. It seems to me that there are no rules today at all. You can pretty much do what you want. Thank God there are a few people who have a little sense of manners and decency. But, by and large, people are sleeping together when they're fifteen and sixteen. I mean, that was unheard of in my day. If you had a girl who spent the night, you practically put a maid in the same room with her. I just wonder whether the kind of fun we had would be gone, if you're just permitted to do anything you want to.”

Jack Dowling was a teenager in the forties. He had first gotten caught fooling around with another boy in the first grade. “We were at that early age when we knew it was something mysterious. It didn't occur to me that it was an inclination; it seemed perfectly natural. I knew it was a no-no for some reason, but I thought it was a no-no because of the sex, not because it was with another boy. I just thought you weren't supposed to have any kind of sex, or touch anyone, boy or girl.”

The painter Paul Cadmus felt “the naïveté of the public was a great
benefit if one didn't want to be exposed. I don't think I ever worried about exposure exactly—although I like reticence and I don't like flaunting. But then the world has gotten much more extreme.

“There were never magazines like
Screw,”
Cadmus continued. “The only gay publication that I knew in those days was published in Switzerland, called
Der Kreis/Le Cercle
. It was bilingual; I think it had French and English. It published some of my drawings and paintings. George Piatt Lynes used the pseudonym Roberto Rolf when the magazine published his photos. It printed very good art and had very good stories—not necessarily very gay things but generally homoerotic, I suppose. Not porn. It was quite a charming magazine actually. I would send them photographs of my drawings. It was mailed in a plain wrapper, but it was not junk. I think they published Thomas Mann.”

“James Atcheson” (a pseudonym) left Harvard in 1938 to become a Broadway actor. “I grew up and came out in the theater, and there was a lot of it going on. I think the theater was perhaps less subterranean because it really didn't matter as long as you showed up on time for rehearsals and you were fun and you were talented. I don't think anyone gave a damn about people's private lives. They knew it maybe, or suspected it, but it didn't
really
matter. But you didn't go down wearing signs.”

And any obvious gay reference onstage was quickly criticized by reviewers—and would continue to be, for the next thirty years. When Rodgers and Hart's
By Jupiter
opened in the fall of 1942, Richard Watts, Jr., was generally enthusiastic in the
Herald Tribune
. But he included this caveat: “What seems to me infinitely wearying [and] infinitely annoying is the attempted humor that is supposed to spring from homosexuality and kindred forms of degeneracy.” He found those quips “dirty and offensive” and “the kind of thing that we might very well do without.”

One of Atcheson's first acting jobs was in the Chicago company of
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, which starred Clifton Webb. “Webb was playing the part that Monty Woolley played in New York,” Atcheson recalled. “I'm sure everyone knew about Clifton, but he would have been mortally offended if anyone said, ‘You silly fag.' Nobody did that. One's private life was private. I think it was a little bit like that thing Mrs. Patrick Campbell said: ‘My dear, I don't care what people do as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.' I think a lot of people in New York felt that way about their homosexual friends. I think that meant: don't be a roaring faggot and don't be a roaring bull dyke because that's offensive—not because of the direction of the sex drive, but because it's not subtle.”

Atcheson was put off by some of the things the men he met wanted to do in bed—a sentiment he shared when he first met the legendary Tallulah Bankhead. “Oh God!” she replied. “I know just what you mean. After all, I've tried everything. If I go down on a man it chokes me and if I go down on a woman it gags me. If I get buggered it hurts me like hell and if I get fucked it gives me acute claustrophobia. So I've just gone back to reading, love!”

Shortly before the war, a young Harvard undergraduate named Leonard Bernstein made one of his first visits to Manhattan. On November 14,1937, Aaron Copland, the great gay American composer, invited the budding musician to a birthday party at his New York loft on West 63d Street. The room was filled with gay and bisexual intellectuals, including Paul Bowles (then known only as a composer) and Virgil Thomson. When Copland learned that Bernstein loved his
Piano Variations
, he dared the Harvard boy to play them. “It'll ruin the party,” said Bernstein. “Not
this
party,” Copland replied, and the guests were mesmerized by Bernstein's performance.

During the next decade, Copland would become an important father figure for Bernstein, as well as his composition adviser. One of Bernstein's biographers, Humphrey Burton, believes Bernstein and Copland may also have been lovers. “He taught me a tremendous amount about taste, style and consistency in music,” Bernstein said of his mentor. So many important New York musicians were gay that one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern. Bernstein's exposure to gay life in Manhattan over the next couple of years convinced him that not everyone felt guilty about being homosexual, although he himself remained undecided about his ultimate orientation. Twenty years later, Bernstein would collaborate with three gay men to produce one of the most extraordinary Broadway musicals of all time.

THE DEGREE OF PROTECTION
some American aristocrats enjoyed in the forties was demonstrated most dramatically by Sumner Welles, a confidant of FDR's (and a page boy at his wedding) who became undersecretary of state in 1937. Roosevelt relied on Welles as his main ally at the State Department, an arrangement that enraged Welles's superior, Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

In the fall of 1940, Welles was part of a huge Washington delegation that attended the Alabama funeral of House Speaker William Brockman Bankhead (Tallulah's father), who had died of a heart attack on September 15. On the special train back to Washington, Welles got very drunk and then
retired to his compartment. There, he repeatedly rang for the black porters attending the passengers and made brazen advances at several of them.

One of the porters complained to his employer, the Southern Railway Company, which was headquartered in Philadelphia. William Bullitt, who had been FDR's ambassador to France, lived in Philadelphia. He heard the story and immediately started to spread it. Bullitt was a friend of Hull and an enemy of Welles, and he viewed Welles's indiscretion as the perfect opportunity to get rid of the undersecretary.

Roosevelt too had heard rumors about the train incident and asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate. In January 1941, Hoover made his report to the White House: “Mr. Welles had propositioned a number of the train crew to have immoral relations with them.”