The Gay Metropolis (41 page)

In 1949, the family had moved to Paris so that Geto's father could study literature at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. At the end of the year, his parents split up, and the six-year-old Geto returned home alone with his mother. “When I was a little kid, I was emotionally disturbed, in no small part because of my mother's near clinical hysteria. And I was put away for four years from age ten through thirteen in an institution for emotionally disturbed children. I first went to Bellevue, and I was locked up for four months in the psychiatric ward instead of the standard two-week observation period because they couldn't figure out what to do with me. So I spent four months with every psychopathic kid in New York, mostly from
tough neighborhoods. I was this scared, Jewish, middle-class kid in the violent psycho ward. My mother called the police department, and said, ‘My son is poisoning me.' I was not. The truth is that I was an extremely fragile and withdrawn kid who stayed in my room all day long and played alone with my collection of one thousand toy soldiers.

“In Bellevue they tested me and said I had a genius IQ.” Geto was eventually sent to the Pleasantville Cottage School in Westchester, which was run by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Most of the counselors and teachers were highly educated Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany.

“It was a nice place. I was very sexually active there. We lived in cottages with twenty other boys. There was a house mother and a house father who lived downstairs. And we boys upstairs. The boys in my cottage were ten, eleven, twelve. And we had sex every night. It was heaven. We used to say to each other, ‘Pretend you're the girl!' And the other one would say, ‘No, pretend
you re
the girl!' And the ‘girl' would lie down on her tummy and the other boy would get on top of 'her,' insert his penis between her thighs or against her buttocks and have an orgasm. We were too young to ejaculate, but we had intense orgasms. I had crushes on a couple of boys. And I was really hot to get them in bed and sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn't.”

After four years Geto moved back into his mother's house in the Bronx. “When I was thirteen years old and I went home, all of a sudden I realized that there's something called a homosexual. When I entered puberty, I keyed into the fact that there were queers, fags, homosexuals. This is 1956. And my mother's attitude and my whole family, who were intellectual, liberal Jews, was that gay people were, at best, marginal characters in society. Not respectable people. And so I panicked. My experience all along, after that, was that the liberal Jews were always the most terrified and the most disdainful. Surprisingly, a lot of the working-class Italians and Irish were more accepting of gay people in New York.

“I remember my grandmother walking down the street with me when I was five or six years old, and saying, ‘Look! Look, sweetheart! There's one of those powder puffs!' And I said, ‘What is that, Grandma?' ‘Oh, you know, a cream puff—those men who think they're ladies.' So for six years, from the ages of thirteen to nineteen years old, which is 1956 to 1962,1 am totally in the closet. I didn't want to think about it. I didn't do anything. I didn't seek it out.

“My mother was a Freudian. And if you were homosexual, you were sick! Freud was God to Jewish intellectuals of my mother's generation. For
my family, it was Stalin and Freud. Those were the Gods. They could do no wrong. My father was a passionate idealist, dedicated to improving the lot of workers, fighting for civil rights, and he believed that American capitalism was the root of all evil. Like many young idealists of his generation, when he was in his twenties—during the 1930s—he joined the Communist party.

“This is my family background.”

When Geto turned twenty in 1963, he was a junior at Columbia College, living near the campus on 113th Street and hanging out at the West End, then the principal Columbia saloon. There, he spotted a “total, flitting queen—that's how I noticed him because I wouldn't know how to figure out another gay person. And I kept staring at him.” After gazing at his intended every night for three weeks, Geto finally got up the nerve to speak to him. “They're closing the bar, and I say, ‘Hey, how would you like to come up to my apartment for a drink?' So he says, ‘Oh, okay, but what else do you have in mind?' I said, ‘Well, I don't know. You seem like a nice person. I want to get to know you.' He says, ‘Oh, really. Oh, all right. Let's go!'

“So, I take this guy up. We have sex. I have a big crush on him. For three months, I didn't do any work. I almost dropped out of Columbia. I just hung out with him. He lived in a penthouse on 72d Street and West End Ave. And he was not rich. He was a librarian who worked for the federal government. He was very proper: he wore very conservative Brooks Brothers clothes to work. And I waited for him to come home every night. He gave me the keys to his apartment. He used to call up all his friends, and say, ‘Darling, guess what's doing me now! Cora, girl of twenty!' That was me. And I'd say, ‘Don't call me girls' names! What do you mean, Cora?! What does that mean?!' The first time I had sex with this guy, he said to me, ‘You might not want to do that tonight because I was just with someone else a couple of days ago and he called me up, and he says, ‘Sarah, I have the clap.' And I said, ‘I don't know what that is.'

“And I had sex with him and I got the clap for the first time. I'm twenty years old. I was terrified. He took me to a gay dermatologist doctor who was his buddy. And Gerald took care of all the boys when they got the clap or anything else. Everyone would go to Gerald. He was the ‘in' doctor for the gay set. So I'm twenty years old. I'm quaking in fear. My penis pouring this horrible, burning discharge. He shot me up with something, and then he gave me pills, and then he did a smear on a slide, and he says, ‘Oh, you got it, darling!' He says, ‘Mary, you've got
it!
What were you doing with Rodney?!' I was with him every day. Every day! He couldn't get rid of me. I
slept there. I ate there. Every day, we had sex all day. He was great. And he was in heaven. He was a riot. Anyway, he was in big trouble because he owed Macy's $600 that he couldn't pay on his Macy's credit card because he'd bought so much yarn to knit with. All he did was knit.”

After three months of this experiment, Geto decided that he was gay, which caused even more anxiety. Frightened, he chose what was still a common solution for this kind of “homosexual panic” in the early sixties: at the age of twenty-one, he decided to marry his childhood sweetheart, whom he had been dating since he was fifteen.

Geto's wife came from a “very refined Northern Italian family,” but Geto's mother was horrified because her new daughter-in-law wasn't Jewish. “The thing is,” Geto explained, “I've been bisexual my whole life. I strongly identify as gay, culturally, aesthetically, and politically, but sexually it's pretty much right in the middle. Maybe I'm one of the few people that say that and mean it. So we had a real sex life that I enjoyed, and everything else.” They had two children, and Geto would stay married for eight years, until he was twenty-nine.

Geto had spent his youth working in reform Democratic politics, and in 1964 he worked to elect Jonathan Bingham and James Scheuer, two distinguished liberal reformers who vanquished the ancient Bronx Democratic machine controlled by Charlie Buckley. In 1969, Robert Abrams became the second nonmachine Democrat in modern times to be elected Bronx borough president, and Geto became his press secretary and political adviser. In 1971, barely two years after the Stonewall riot, Geto was visited for the first time by a young man named Hal Offen.

“I demand to see Bob Abrams!” said Offen.

“Well, okay, what's the issue?” Geto asked.

“I represent BUG! Bronx United Gays! And we demand that Bob Abrams, who says he's a liberal, support gay people! We want Bob Abrams to support the gay rights bill that's being introduced for the first time next month in the city council.”

“So I'm sitting in my chair, and I'm saying, ‘Well, listen. I'm very sympathetic to your point of view and I, I, I, I—Bob Abrams is a great guy. I'm sure he'd be sympathetic' So he gives me this whole militant thing about ‘supporting gays is civil rights!' And I'm saying, ‘Well, no one's ever really thought of it that way. You may have some problems with that approach.' So he says, ‘Well it
is
civil rights! Think about it! It's the same as everybody else!”

Offen was a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, which was founded in 1970 when it broke away from the more radical Gay Liberation Front.
One of the first things that GAA decided to do was to reach out beyond Manhattan to the other four boroughs of New York City, and Offen was in charge of the Bronx. “He had a couple of lesbians and himself—that was Bronx United Gays,” said Geto. “But he had a lot of guts.”

When Geto first went to see Abrams, he had the same experience that Mike Wallace had with Fred Friendly five years earlier. “Abrams wasn't quite sure what the entire definition of a homosexual was.” After Geto explained the orientation, Abrams was inclined to support the bill, but he wanted to check with his other advisers first. “Abrams, by instinct, was always an extraordinarily decent and progressive person,” said Geto.

But the rest of Abrams's advisers—all longtime liberal activists—were appalled at the idea. “Are you crazy?” they asked. “It's the most radical fringe thing. Your problem already is that people think you're too left-wing. And you're a thirty-three-year-old bachelor!”

For the “first and last time” in his life, Geto began to cry during a meeting with his boss. “I was so overcome with emotion because I was in the closet, and it was so personal, and I was tormented by my own conflicts. And I'm saying to Bob, ‘These are people that need your help. You've got to do this! You've got to go to city hall! No one else will stand up for these people.' And I started to cry.”

Geto's appeal was successful: Bob Abrams became one of the first elected officials in New York to support the gay rights bill in New York City. “He went to city hall, and people were flabbergasted.”

Abrams himself remembered “catcalls from the balcony of city hall. People said, ‘How could you do this?' There was fingerpointing and screaming and then I came back to my office, and my secretary said, ‘What did you do today? The phones have not stopped ringing.' But I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“We were flooded with phone calls,” said Geto. “You couldn't make a phone call because the lines were flooded, people protesting. Jewish people, Catholic people. Supporting homosexuals was disgusting! They'd never vote for Abrams again! How dare he! It was the absolute beginning of the end of New York.”

Abrams rode out the huge reaction, and during the next twenty-five years, he would always be a fervent supporter of gay rights.

JUST AS STONEWALL
was energizing gay activists across America, it was also having an equal—and opposite—effect on many traditional liberals. Although the American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of politicians like Ed Koch, Bela Abzug, Arthur Goldberg, and Bob Abrams had
acknowledged the need to protect the basic rights of gay Americans, many opinion makers were encouraging a backlash. The
Washington Post
columnist and “60 Minute” commentator Nicholas von Hoffman attacked Jack Paar for inviting members of the Gay Activists Alliance on his late-night talk show and permitting their opinions to go unchallenged. Five years later, von Hoffman complained bitterly about the proliferation of attractive gay characters on network television. “The old-style Chinese have the Year of the Tiger and the Year of the Pig,” he wrote. “The new-style Americans are having the Year of the Fag. Is a new stereotype being born? Is network television about to kill off the bitchy, old-time, courageous fruit and replace him with a new-type homo?…
The Nancy Walker Show
has a continuing major fag character whose representation is monitored by representatives of the Gay Task Force on the set. …” Eighteen years later, von Hoffman said he could no longer remember any of the programs he had written about. “While I am pleased with the vigor of my prose, on further cogitation after twenty years, I am slightly aghast,” said von Hoffman. “I guess I went over the top.”

As late as 1978, Bobby Kennedy's former speechwriter Jeff Greenfield argued vehemently against legislation to protect gays from discrimination in housing and employment. In a front-page article in the
Village Voice
entitled “Why Is Gay Rights Different from All Other Rights?” Greenfield asserted that “the cultural majority always sets the rules, and minorities have the choice of conforming, defying those rules, or finding a community where
they
are the cultural majority.” He implied that gays had to remain inside the closet to avoid discrimination because “it is not a denial of a fundamental right to be refused promotion because of your companions.” He also described the fight for an antibias law for gay people as “a diversion from the business of working for political and social justice.” In the 1980s, Greenfield campaigned in his newspaper column for the expulsion of Gerry Studds from Congress, after the Massachusetts representative acknowledged that he was gay and admitted having had sex with a seventeen-year-old congressional page. (Greenfield's effort was a failure; Studds was reelected.) And in 1996, when Greenfield was making $1 million a year as an ABC correspondent, his colleagues reported he was still cracking gay “jokes” at the office—even when he knew gay people were present. “Jeff is one of those people who is so wrapped up in himself, the idea of giving offense to anyone else is always a second thought,” said one ABC newsman. “He's convinced that he's a classic liberal—but he's not.”

But tbe article that drew by far the most attention was published in
Harper's
just fifteen months after Stonewall. Written by the Chicago academic
(and future neoconservative) Joseph Epstein, the story offered vivid confirmation of Ethan Geto's observation that liberal Jews were often “the most terrified and the most disdainful” whenever the “homosexual question” was discussed.