The Gay Metropolis (43 page)

Although Miller's roommate at their house in the country had purchased a shotgun for protection the day before the original piece had appeared, like virtually everyone else who finally comes out of the closet, Miller was buoyed by the whole experience. He said that he had received “more than 2,000 pieces of evidence” that “most people are basically decent.”

FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER
he had written that “nothing [my sons] could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual,” Epstein chose to cloud the record. By now he was a prominent neoconservative, and the art critic Hilton Kramer's closest friend. In an article called “True Virtue” in
The New York Times Magazine,
Epstein described his “rage” after a student reporter called to ask whether he had ever said that he would prefer that his sons “be murderers or dope addicts than homosexuals.”

“I could not, after 15 years, recall all that I had written in that essay,” Epstein wrote. Apparently, he didn't save his clips, either. “I was, nonetheless, quite certain that I could not have said that I would rather have my sons be murderers or dope addicts than homosexuals, and this for a simple reason: I believe no such thing, nor have I ever believed it.”

When Willie Morris published his memoirs in 1993, the former
Harper's
editor offered no apology for Epstein's invective. And his description of the controversy was completely disingenuous: “several dozen homosexuals arrived en masse … to demand redress for
a paragraph
[emphasis supplied] in an article by Joseph Epstein which they considered unsympathetic to homosexuality.”

THE MONTH AFTER
Merle Miller's article appeared, the conservative psychiatric establishment aired its point of view in two stories in the
Times by
Jane Brody, the paper's “personal health” expert. The first one, on the “Women's Page,” carried the headline “Homosexuality: Parents Aren't Always to Blame.” It quoted Dr. Lawrence J. Hatterer of New York Hospital's Payne Whitney Clinic, who “believes that environmental and cultural factors are becoming increasingly important contributors to the development of homosexuality.” Among the influences the doctor cited were the “$1 billion hard core homosexual pornography industry,” “the growing public tolerance of homosexuality; which may make some men feel, ‘Maybe it's easier, and why not?'” and “the blending of traditional male and female roles that can lead to confusion in a boy's mind as to what is male and what is female.” Nowhere in Brody's artide did anyone suggest that a parent's proper role might be to accept a child's sexual orientation.

The mother of a gay son who wrote to Merle Miller put it best a few months later: “Being a nice human being, people everywhere accept [my son]. Above all, as he grows older he knows his family loves him always. … Families of gay young men should not treat them as ‘sick.' Different, yes, but not sick. I think we'd have less suicides and better adjusted ‘different males' if the family unit stayed close to these boys. … The whole problem in our generation is that we worry so much about what our neighbors think. Thank God this young generation doesn't give a damn.”

Brody's editors put her second article on the front page eighteen days after her previous story about homosexuality had appeared. The headline read “More Homosexuals Aided to Become Heterosexual.” It reported the work of three therapists treating those “strongly motivated” to become heterosexual, although Brody conceded at the beginning of her story that “the vast majority of homosexuals are not interested in psychiatric treatment” and “most of those who do enter therapy do not want to become heterosexual.”

The article began with the crucial moment in
The Boys in the Band,
when Harold tells Michael, “You are a sad and pathetic man. … You're a homosexual and you don't want to be. But there is nothing you can do to change it.” Recognizing the revolutionary implications of that statement,
Brody's expert psychiatrists denied that inevitability; but their prescriptions made them sound naive. Once again, Dr. Hatterer was one of Brody's principal sources. Among the latest “techniques” he cited for successful conversions included telling patients to “stop frequenting ‘gay' bars and go to ‘straight' ones instead” and asking them to “substitute
Playboy
magazine and images of women for homosexual pornography and images of men.” A medical team used a more extreme technique, giving patients “mild electric shocks when shown pictures of naked men.” A doctor using the electric shock method admitted that he didn't have enough data to evaluate its effectiveness, but that didn't stop him from offering his “impression” anyway: “'about 75 percent' of patients become heterosexually oriented after about six months of therapy.”

Gay people who had begun to accept who they were read a clear subtext from Brody's omission of any description of homosexuals who were comfortable with their orientation: the only worthy homosexual was the one who was determined to transform himself into a heterosexual. The reporter ended the article with a psychiatrist's prediction that some day there might be a “Homosexuals Anonymous,” to “do for homosexuals what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for many alcoholics.”

A much shorter accompanying article without a byline was the only place any doctor was quoted as suggesting that homosexuality might be normal. Dr. Evelyn Hooker, whose landmark study had been so important in the fifties, said her work had revealed no “'demonstrable pathology' that would differentiate” homosexuals “in any way from a group of relatively normal heterosexuals.”

A colleague remarked to Brody that she was the first
Times
reporter to “turn the penis into a beat.”

“I try to get it in whenever I can,” Brody replied.

Twenty-five years later, after Brody was asked to reread her articles, she said she had no idea that they had been offensive to gay readers when they appeared. “I love my stories actually,” Brody said in an interview in 1996. “You have to remember this was 1970 or so. … They were really ahead of their time.” Brody acknowledged in 1996 that it was “much easier” to use psychoanalysis to become comfortable with one's sexuality than it was to change it—but she never made that point in either of her stories in 1971 because “that was not what the pieces were intended to do.”

Despite their one-sidedness, Brody denied that the articles expressed her own opinions; that would have made them editorials instead of news articles, she explained. She said the second story was for those people who were homosexual because of “reasons such as having been seduced as
young adolescents.” Most researchers now believe that homosexuality is caused by a genetic predisposition, very early childhood experiences (before the age of three)—or a combination of the two.

But in 1996 Brody still believed that adolescent seduction was a cause. She said, “I know it is a cause because I know people this has happened to, and who subsequently, when they got over their fear and became informed that there were options” realized that “just because they had had sex with a man when they were thirteen didn't mean that that was the only type of sexuality that they were ever capable of expressing.”

Brody said she had “a minimum of a dozen homosexual friends in 1971. … To suggest that I was writing these pieces as a homophobic person is absurd because it was quite the opposite. I was very empathetic. I knew people who were very content with their homosexuality and lived happily that way and had stable relationships.” But like Mike Wallace in the previous decade, Brody did not discuss those happy homosexuals in these two stories. “I also knew people who were very unhappy,” she said.

“
SARAH WATERS
” (a pseudonym) was a product of the migration that brought thousands of African Americans from the south to New York in the fifties and the sixties. She turned fourteen in 1970, and she benefited from the generosity of the Lindsay administration because “there was a lot of art money then,” and she became a member of the New York City Theater Workshop.

It was as a teenager in the theater group that she first witnessed gay lovemaking. “The cast was made up of folk from nine to twenty-five years old. I was the youngest member in the company, and so I was babied by all of these other ninety-nine actors. I saw a lot: I saw two women making love, ‘cause I just happened to wander in their room one day. I saw two men making love in the company. I saw two women and one man making love. And I saw it was okay. ‘Cause it wasn't a big thing, it wasn't a discussion. It was just people loving each other. I never told anybody about the things that happened there. Because, God, my mother'd probably make me come back home.”

Although she did not act on it until she was twenty-one, Sarah had first recognized her attraction to women in the second grade. “I knew that I wanted to touch the girls, that I didn't want to touch the boys.” She remembered a lesbian who lived in her neighborhood when she was a child, who was called a “bull dagger.”

“My mom told us, ‘Never let that woman touch you. Because if she ever touches, you'll never want a man.' So the kids, whenever they saw her, they
would run from her. But my mom let her in our house. We just couldn't let her touch us. And then there was a drag queen who lived in our neighborhood. And we used to all run down the block to see him when he went to a ball. He was a fabulous queen.

“Sexuality, period, was a secret. And it was reserved to be discussed with somebody who was your life partner. And not before. And that was it.”

Waters's mother had come from South Carolina in 1947, and Sarah was the sixth of seven children. Her Alabama-born father was a window dresser for stores like Bergdorf Goodman, but he left the house when Sarah was only nine months old. After her father disappeared, the family was evicted during a snowstorm, and her mother came home to find all her children in the street with their babysitter. Sarah's mother went to the local police precinct and pleaded for a chance to keep her children. For once, New York's labyrinthine system of social services worked, and the family was given an apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx so they could stay together. They lived in a former army officers barracks, “so they had backyards and front yards and upstairs and downstairs.” It was “a real integrated neighborhood,” with Irish and Italians and Jews.

Waters's mother arranged for each of her children to have godparents in the neighborhood. Sarah's godmother was a runway model, and her godfather was an engineer. “Each set of godparents were either working-class or had pretty good jobs and came from pretty good families,” Waters remembered. Her mother had “five different jobs” and worked for “wealthy Jewish families,” including a couple who were both psychiatrists. “My aunt was their full-time maid. And my mom believed that we had to work. And so we always worked.” Besides holding down five different jobs, her mother was also going to school, “so when we sat at the table and did our homework, she sat at the table and did her homework. And so she had godparents and other primary people in our lives to make sure that we had gotten everything that we needed. It was good.” All seven of the children attended college.

As a child, Sarah had a lot of boyfriends, “only because when you're a southern girl child, from the day you're born, you're trained how to have a husband.”

When she was twenty-one in 1977, she had a fling with a married man, but “none of these things satisfied me or made me happy. Because I felt like I could always kind of predict what they were going to do. And it was too simple for me. It wasn't complex enough.” But rebelliousness had nothing to do with her being a lesbian:

“No way!

“I think that the appeal for me, in being gay and loving women, is the gentleness of it. The relationships that I enjoy most with men are not ones of intimacy, but are ones of battles and ones of admiration. And also ones of protection. I like the way that men protect women when they do. But I don't like the dues you have to pay for the protection. So I like the protection of males in
friendships.
And I also like the bonding of men with women in secrets. I like the secrets that they share. I would never want to be a man because I wouldn't want the responsibility that our society places on you when you are a man.”

Waters never saw herself as a feminist, partly because she never hated men. “I wasn't angry at men. I didn't become a lesbian because I hated men. I loved men! I still love men! I don't love men intimately. I love men as comrades. I love men as friends.”

She met her first female lover in an acting company of thirty-five women which she had organized herself. “There was a great love between us. And we had decided that, one day, that we were going to rent a hotel room for a weekend. And it was like one of those Holiday Inn kind of rooms, on Ninth Avenue at 40-something. And we stayed in the hotel for the weekend. And we only went out at night. We didn't sleep together, actually, until our last night there. Because we were acting like silly girls. And we had made up all the excuses in the world why we were at this hotel. It's very complicated, the mechanics of it all. ‘Cause we didn't know what to do!

“And we bought all this junk. Our first lovemaking came out of a food fight. ‘Cause we were throwing food across the room. And some food landed on her face, or something like that. And she says, ‘Now you have to lick it off.' And I said, ‘Ooooohhh shit!' ‘Cause I didn't know what to do. And the rest was history.”

They were together for five years, and they rented a house near Riverdale in the Bronx. “We created our own world. Because the black lesbian community was very specific, in a way. It had two worlds to it. You were either very Afrocentric and you had to play instruments and be real grassroots and wear African garments. Or you had to be this other group of well-known, upper-middle-class, fancy. The Audre Lorde kind, you know. I didn't like any of them.”