The Gay Metropolis (50 page)

But while thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to these changes by publicly declaring who they were, thousands more still assumed that safety, comfort, and prosperity would continue to flow from inside a closet. And most gay people still believed that a public declaration of their homosexuality would mean losing the chance to rise to the pinnacle of their profession. In his first career as a film executive, even a future firebrand like Larry Kramer was careful to bring a woman friend with him to the Monday-night executive screenings. “I was more interested in learning what my professional talents might be and how to get to the next step on the ladder of success,” Kramer explained.

Mixed messages from all kinds of American institutions encouraged this timidity. After the tennis star Billie Jean King was publicly identified as a lesbian in 1981, she continued to do commentary for tennis tournaments, but her lucrative product endorsements disappeared. Similarly, while both NBC and CBS prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, NBC also had a policy forbidding employees “from getting involved in a public way in controversial subjects.” An NBC executive
told the
Columbia Journalism Review
in 1982 that this meant that any correspondent who “came out publicly as gay” would automatically be asked to leave the network. “The biggest enemies are the totally closeted people who have real power,” the same executive said.

And the silent convictions of the senior executives at CBS News became clear when CBS Reports presented “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” in April 1980. Narrated and coproduced by George Crile, this “documentary” about gay political power in San Francisco made Mike Wallace's 1967 effort look like a model of fairness and enlightenment. Crile's work bore little resemblance to objective journalism. This was straightforward, antigay propaganda, with a heavy emphasis on drag queens and sadomasochism, including a description of an S and M parlor where the sexual activities were “so dangerous that they have a gynecological table there with a doctor and nurse on hand to sew people up.” Crile's source for this particular tidbit was the city coroner, who subsequently admitted that his own information was based on hearsay. Crile's critics also pointed out that the S and M establishment he highlighted in the broadcast was actually patronized almost exclusively by
heterosexuals.
The program even included Crile's very traditional question to a gay activist about whether the toleration of homosexuality wouldn't automatically lead to disaster, as the producer believed it had in Weimar Germany. “It was a very decadent society, if you remember it,” said Crile. “Isn't it a sign of decadence when you have so many gays emerging, breaking apart all the values of a society?”

Crile reported that gay influence over the city's politicians had become so strong that many elected officials felt obliged to bow to even the most exotic gay concerns. The program caused an uproar in San Francisco. “It's shocking that CBS News, home of Walter Cronkite, would partake of such bigotry,” Jeff Jarvis wrote in the
San Francisco Examiner,
while in the
Chronicle,
Terrence O'Flaherty called it a “dreadful little program” which “is deadly for everyone it touches.”

The only suggestion of social progress occurred during one of the commercial breaks, which was filled by an example of what sociologist Laud Humphreys described as “gay window advertising,” which permitted gay and straight consumers to receive different messages from the same advertisement. In the commercial sponsoring the documentary, a man strolled with a woman in one hand and a bottle of Old Spice in the other. But in the final shot, he tossed the Old Spice to another attractive man, making his intentions seem rather ambiguous.

Randy Alfred, a freelance reporter in San Francisco, spent three hundred
hours researching “Gay Power, Gay Politics” after it aired. His friends held a cocktail party to raise money to cover his expenses. Then he filed a formal protest detailing its inaccuracies to the National News Council, a short-lived effort at self-regulation by the news industry which never gained much clout, partly because
The New York Times
refused to cooperate with it.

The council found that “by concentrating on certain flamboyant examples of homosexual behavior,” Crile's program “tended to reinforce stereotypes.” It also “exaggerated political concessions to gays and made those concessions appear as threats to public morals and decency.” In October, CBS reported the council's verdict on the air, and acknowledged that in at least one instance there had been a violation of the network's “own journalistic standards.” This was the first time a major news organization had issued a formal apology to gay activists.
^*

Crile's work resembles a couple of antigay propaganda films produced by the religious right in the nineties,
The Gay Agenda
and
Equal Rights, Special Rights,
which stressed sadomasochism, while also featuring antigay sound bites from Republican custodians of morality like former Secretary of Education William Bennett and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi. But these programs were never broadcast on a major network. They were shown on Christian cable networks. Copies were also distributed by fundamentalists throughout the country.

TO EVERYONE WHO
still cherished the generous spirit of the sixties, two events at the end of 1980 made it feel as though America was entering a bleak new era, while a third incident sent a tremor through the gay community in Manhattan.

The first omen was the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan on November 4, coupled with the arrival of the first Republican majority in the Senate in more than a quarter century. The Republican gains marked a sharp turn to the right, and sparked a new reverence for all kinds of conspicuous consumption. In the age of Reagan, no one would be encouraged
to worry about anyone less fortunate than himself. The new president's sole preoccupations would be lower taxes and a bloated defense budget.

The election also meant a greatly expanded political role for Evangelical Christians. Robert J. Billings, a cofounder of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, had served as Reagan's liaison on religious issues during the campaign, and fundamentalist Christians were given major credit for the Republican sweep. Not since the presidential runs of William Jennings Bryan had Protestant fundamentalism played such a large role in a national campaign.

When Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy unsuccessfully challenged Jimmy Carter for the presidential nomination in 1980, Kennedy became the first significant major party candidate to actively pursue gay voters. A total of seventy-six gay delegates and alternates attended the Democratic National Convention that year in New York, and the party's platform acknowledged their growing influence. It said, “We must affirm the dignity of all people and … protect all groups from discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex or sexual orientation.” Though almost unnoticed by the national media at the time, this modest statement of nondiscrimination gave the Republicans another opportunity to exploit antigay prejudice in a national campaign—just as they had during the hysteria of the McCarthy period in the 1950s.
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Twelve days before the election, Christians for Reagan, a supposedly independent lobby organized to capture the fundamentalist vote for the Republican nominee, announced that it would pay for a barrage of advertisements throughout the south, which attacked President Carter for “catering” to homosexuals. Citing the language of the Democratic party platform, Gary Jarmin, national director of Christians for Reagan, described the purpose of the campaign this way: “If there's any reason at all they should oppose Carter, this is it.” On one spot, an announcer intoned, “The gays in San Francisco elected a mayor; now they're going to elect a president.” Before the ads began, polls had shown that Carter, a born-again Christian, still had considerable support among the Evangelicals. But the hard-hitting TV spots were extremely effective, and they helped Reagan carry every Southern state except Georgia, where Carter had been governor. Partly because the commercials never aired in New York or Washington, most people outside the South were never aware of them.
The
Times
mentioned them only once—in a single paragraph two weeks before the election.

THE SECOND LACERATING EVENT
at the end of 1980 was the murder of John Lennon. New Yorkers had proudly claimed the Liverpudlian as one of their own; but they had also respected his privacy, even when they spotted him cavorting in Central Park with his wife and son. The late-night shooting by a crazed “fan” on December 8, in the doorway of the Dakota apartment building on West 72d Street, was the most depressing murder that Manhattan had endured in decades.

For six days, thousands made a daily pilgrimage past the assassination site, until Yoko Ono specified a moment for mourning and more than one hundred thousand of the faithful gathered in Central Park for what was supposed to be a ten-minute moment of silence. Within the huge throng in front of the Naumberg Bandshell, there was inexpressible sadness—but no silence at all, because a huge flotilla of helicopters hired by the press hovered low during the entire event.

Lennon had believed in brotherhood and peace and creativity, and he had done as much as any artist to shape the sensibility of his generation. The progress of the gay movement in the seventies, and its veneration of diversity and iconoclasm, all owed a great deal to that sensibility. The confluence of Lennon's death with the impending inauguration of a deeply reactionary president filled millions of Americans with a feeling of foreboding.

ANOTHER SENSELESS SHOOTING
was the third incident to traumatize the gay community in New York City and spark fears of a backlash against its growing visibility. In the middle of November, Ronald Crumpley, a former New York City transit policeman, stole his father's year-old white Cadillac and drove it to Virginia. Outside Richmond, he stole an Uzi submachine gun and three other weapons from a sporting goods store. Then he drove thirty miles away and robbed a bank.

The following evening, Wednesday, November 19,1980, Crumpley took the car to Greenwich Village and went on a shooting spree at three different locations, firing forty bullets from three guns. Two men were killed and six were wounded.

Just before 11:00
P.M
., Crumpley opened fire on three men near Sim's Deli at the corner of 10th and Washington streets. He fired eight times and wounded two people. Then he drove to the Ramrod Bar at 394 West Street. There he aimed at a group of men standing outside the Ramrod
and an adjoining bar, Sneakers. Victims crumpled as he fired twenty-four rounds in a few seconds. Jing Wenz and Vernon Kroenig were both fatally wounded.

Jack Gamrecki was standing inside the Ramrod with about 150 others when he heard something that he thought sounded like firecrackers; then he saw “a lot of people fall down.” Bullets rained through the window of the bar, and at least one person inside was wounded.

Then Crumpley drove away again, stopping at 10th and Greenwich streets, where he fired eight more shots into another group of men, but this time all of them missed. As police cars approached, he sped away. After abandoning his car, he hid under a van, clinging to the undercarriage, until he was arrested.

Crumpley immediately admitted to the killings. He told the police he had committed them because he hated homosexuals. “I want to kill them all,” he told detectives. “They're no good. They ruin everything.”

“It's frightening for everyone to think that there are people sick enough to go around doing this kind of thing,” Lee Pietrangelon, manager of the Ramrod, told the
Times.
Most people thought the paper had underplayed the story, putting it on the first page of the second section, instead of the front page.

Although gay men had often been beaten on the streets of Greenwich Village, nothing this violent had occurred within any resident's memory. The night after the shootings, more than four hundred demonstrators gathered in Sheridan Square, wearing black armbands. One carried a sign reading, “There is no justice in America if you are gay.” Then they marched down Christopher Street, singing “We Shall Overcome.”

The following year, Crumpley went on trial. His lawyer said, “This defendant is crazy, as nuts as they come.” A defense psychiatrist testified that Crumpley believed that “demons in the guise of homosexuals” were “stalking him” and that “he was merely protecting the nation and himself by attacking them.” Crumpley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to a state mental institution, where he remained incarcerated in 1996.

ALTHOUGH RONALD REAGAN
was elected president with the explicit support of groups that exploited antigay prejudice, before he entered the White House his positions on gay issues had been somewhat unpredictable. First elected governor of California in 1966, he had originally hoped to run for president in 1968. That effort was derailed after two of his top aides were fired in 1967—and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson
reported that it was because they were homosexuals. “From this blow, the Reagan campaign never recovered,” Theodore White wrote in
The Making of the President, 1968.
^*

After he became governor, Reagan indicated that he would veto any attempt to repeal the state's antisodomy statute; it was his successor, Jerry Brown, who signed that reform into law. But after Reagan left the governorship, he made a surprising contribution to the gay rights movement.

In 1978, California became the site of the first statewide electoral battle over gay rights when state senator John Briggs introduced Proposition 6, which would have forbidden homosexuals from teaching in any public school. Briggs used inflammatory language. “Homosexuals want your children,” he asserted. “They don't have any children of their own. If they don't recruit children or very young people, they'd all die away. They have no means of replenishing. That's why they want to be teachers.”