The Gay Metropolis (6 page)

This type, known as a bi-sexual or pervert, is a degenerate in the moral sense. While he can be helped at times by psychoanalytical treatment, his real cure depends upon his own desire to behave normally.

Such persons—both men and women—have nothing distinctive
about their physical appearance or public behavior to set them apart. They are frequently very attractive to persons of the opposite sex.

Included in the type are often married persons, of the so-called sophisticated set. Possessed of too much money, jaded by normal activities, they turn to the unnatural for diversion.

Although married and frequently the parents of children, this type, when moneyed, spread their evil frequently through the adoption of “proteges,” younger people willing to corrupt themselves in exchange for money and social position.

The latter, in turn, continue the cycle of degeneracy by either attracting imitators or seeking to corrupt others.

Because this basic type usually does have money and leadership, the behavior of its members tends to become a more or less accepted part of society, particularly in world centers like New York City.

Placed beyond the law through position, clever, unscrupulous, contemptuous of decent people, their influence is sinister and profound. No accurate estimate on their number can be determined.

Those of the second basic type, from a medical viewpoint, are far more to be pitied than condemned, are in need of treatment rather than the imprisonment so many receive.

Members of this type are known as sex inverts, or sex-variants, and are degenerate in the physical rather than the moral sense. Such persons are beyond self-help when their cases are pronounced.

The cause of their condition is widely believed to be an upset in the normal secretion into the blood stream of hormones governing secondary sexual characteristics and behavior.

All persons have both female and male hormones in their blood streams, with the more female hormones present, the more feminine the individual and vice versa. Great variations occur. When these variations reach a danger point, a person of one sex will begin to think, feel and act almost entirely like one of the opposite.

In such physiological disturbances, men will develop mincing walks, unnatural timidity and feminine emotions while women similarly affected become rough, aggressive and impatient of such womanly attributes as long hair.

These, then, were the words and phrases associated with homosexuality: “vice,” “damage,” “social cancer,” “monster,” “unnatural,” “moral leper,” “pervert,” “degenerate,” “evil,” “unscrupulous,” “contemptuous of decent people,” and “sinister.”

The piece neatly summarized the panoply of prejudices facing lesbians and gays a quarter of a century before the beginning of the modern gay
liberation movement. And its class distinctions were a malignant version of Otis Bigelow's view of the wealthy world in which he lived. The assertion that “because this basic type usually does have money and leadership, the behavior of its members tends to become a more or less accepted part of society” suggests just how much protection wealthier gays did enjoy in Manhattan, as long as they remained discreet. Finally, the veiled reference to the gay liberation movement in pre-Nazi Germany (and its alleged connection to the rise of Hitler) is another typical refrain. Writing a year earlier in the
Herald Tribune
, Richard Watts, Jr., decried
By Jupiter's
“dubious joking about sexual decadence, which the Germans, too, used to think was funny when Hitlerism was being born,”

A few months later,
Time
echoed the
Journal-American
. The newsweekly ran a picture of Lonergan above the caption “Was he born or made?”
Time
opined, “Contrary to popular legend, homosexuals are not necessarily physically abnormal, though sometimes a glandular disturbance is involved,” Seduction in childhood is “the commonest precipitating cause. Other causes: 1) a tendency to varied and primitive sexual outlets; 2) an inherited tendency … Lonergan would seem to fall into the varied and primitive sexual outlet group.”

“The majority of people just thought we were the worst characters in the world,” remembered William Wynkoop, who was twenty-seven in 1943. “But among those who were enlightened, we were sick. Sick and abnormal.”

On April 17,1944, Lonergan was sentenced to thirty-five years to life in prison. After he was sent to Sing Sing he tried to get access to his wife's estate, but a surrogate judge ruled that because of his life sentence he was “civilly dead.” During his first few years in prison, Lonergan sent humorous Christmas cards to his former gentleman callers. Ten years after Lonergan went to jail, his twelve-year-old son, who changed his name to William Anthony Burton, inherited $7 million from the estate of his great-grandfather, Max Bernheimer. In 1965, Lonergan challenged his confession on the grounds that it had been coerced. He testified that someone whom he could not see had repeatedly struck the back of his head with the heel of a hand during the ten hours preceding his confession. He also said he was “appalled” by the publicity describing him as a homosexual and had agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a promise that the nasty leaks to the press would end. Lonergan said he “made up” his confession because an assistant district attorney told him it was required to get a judge to accept the manslaughter plea, but once he had
signed the incriminating statement, the promises of leniency were forgotten. In 1967, he was paroled and immediately deported to Canada. He died of cancer in Toronto in 1986.

THE IDEA
that some forms of homosexuality were caused by hormonal imbalances was widely accepted before the war. Roy Strickland, a native of Huntington, Long Island, was twenty in 1938 when his sister decided he needed medical treatment. “Just after I'd graduated from high school I'd gotten a job as a beach attendant at this club in Huntington and met this very attractive young chap who was five years younger than I,” Strickland recalled. “And one rainy Saturday, Morton and I had gone to the movies, and I was holding hands with him up in the balcony. My sister came into the theater, and that night she came up to my room.

“'Roy,' she said, ‘what does this mean? I saw you holding hands with Morton in the movies.'

“Well, I told her,” Strickland continued. “I said I was very fond of this fellow and we liked to be together. We'd had no sex yet, but we loved to be together. We'd walk along the beach at night singing popular songs and go skinny dipping and that sort of thing.

“She said, ‘I think you need some help.' So she arranged for me to go to a doctor who had arrived in Huntington from Hitler's Austria. He heard my story, and he said, ‘Roy, I will advise you to stop seeing this chap, cultivate the friendship of girls, and I'm going to give you male sex hormones.' Which he did. For six sessions, my sister paying twenty-five bucks a session, which she could ill afford. In those days it was a hell of a lot of money.

“This was the standard procedure. He was going to turn me from a homosexual into a heterosexual by sticking that damn thing up my rear end. So, after six sessions I finally went to my sister, and I said, ‘Look, this is doing me
absolutely
no good. It's only making me hornier.' And she didn't even know what the word meant. But I did stop the shots.”

Long before he met Morton, Strickland knew he was gay: like so many other men and women he was aware that he was different from most of his friends at a very early age. “I knew it from when I was three or four or five years old. I used to love to try my mother's hats on and go up in the attic and put on old dresses that she had. And I enjoyed playing with the girls on the block rather than baseball with the boys. In high school, I didn't go out for baseball or football or basketball. I went out for tennis and loved to swim.

“I always knew I was gay and I didn't fight it. While I was still in high
school, a chap who lived two doors above us—this fellow was a
real
basketball star and track star—came one day, and said, ‘Roy, do you want to go up in the woods and shoot some crows?'

“He had a BB gun. So we went into the woods, and we didn't shoot any crows. But we had sex, and it was absolutely incredible! Then he said, ‘Would you like to meet me at the doctor's one evening?'

“I said, ‘Sure,' and he told his family he was going to the library.

“He was a bit older. And I went down and met him at the house of a doctor who was there in Huntington. I did this fairly often that winter, and it was quite an experience. Because the doctor had been married, had children. His wife had died, and his family had moved away. But he loved to entertain young men.

“He did not participate in it. He stood by the bed and told us what to do. And supplied Vaseline. Simply incredible experience. We went about once a week. That was my visit to the library in the evenings. It was really quite amazing.

“And then I learned from this chap that I was not the only one he was taking down there. He was taking four other guys, two of whom were basketball stars in high school. Simply amazing. Later I heard that this guy had married and fathered a couple of children—this guy who had taken me to the doctor's.”

NOTHING WOULD HAVE
a greater impact on the future shape of gay life in America than the explosive growth of the United States Army during World War II. Six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 14,000 men were entering 250 different training centers every day. The wartime draft
^*
pulled all kinds of men together from every hamlet and metropolis. The army then acted like a giant centrifuge, creating the largest concentration of gay men inside a single institution in American history. Volunteer women who joined the WACS and the WAVES enjoyed an even more prevalent lesbian culture.

The army's attitude toward homosexuals during World War II created a new kind of official stigmatization. But it also provided gay men and lesbians with a dramatic new vision of their diversity and ubiquity. To a few, it even suggested how powerful they might one day become.

The combination of friendship and discrimination experienced by homosexuals in uniform created one of the great ironies of gay history: this mixture made the United States Army a secret, powerful, and unwitting
engine of gay liberation in America. The roots formed by this experience would nourish the movement that finally made its first public appearance in Manhattan twenty-four years after the war was over. World War I did not have a comparable effect because it was not the same kind of mass experience in America; by the end of our relatively brief involvement in Europe, only 1,200,000 American troops were stationed in France. During World War II, about twenty million Americans were in uniform.

World War II gnawed away at all kinds of ancient taboos. Most importantly, although it was fought with a religious fervor, this conflict probably did more to loosen the religious constraints on a puritan society than any previous event. And for many who came of age in this era, the awesome force of the atomic bomb encouraged the notion that twentieth-century man was now just as powerful as God. The war would also give the generation that fought it an extraordinary sense of accomplishment—a feeling that bordered on nobility—since the Nazi defeat was universally viewed as a magnificent achievement.

Because the war brought women into factories and offices for the first time in large numbers to replace the men who departed for the front, it was at least as important to the eventual liberation of women as it would be to the liberation of gays. The overwhelming success of women who became workers and soldiers, and gay men who became warriors, proved the falseness of centuries-old stereotypes.

To win their rightful place inside the armed forces, gay men theoretically had to evade a whole new set of barriers. Before 1940, the army and navy had only prosecuted acts of sodomy, rather than attempting a systematic exclusion of homosexuals from their ranks. It was only after the beginning of the draft in 1940 that the psychiatric profession began a campaign to convince the Selective Service System to perform psychiatric as well as physical examinations of all draftees.

In
Coming Out Under Fire
, a superb study of homosexuals who served in the American military during the Second World War, Allan Bérubé reports that the psychiatric establishment used an economic argument to convince the War Department of the need for psychiatric screenings. The government had spent more than $1 billion caring for the psychiatric casualties of World War I; in 1940, these victims still occupied more than half the beds in veterans' hospitals.

On the eve of the Second World War, three members of the American Psychiatric Association's Military Mobilization Committee became the key advisers to army generals on this question. Winfred Overholser, Harry
Steckel, and Harry Stack Sullivan, coeditor of the journal
Psychiatry
, argued that the country could save millions by excluding potential psychiatric cases before they became patients in veterans wards. Sullivan was extremely well known and widely admired within the Washington psychiatric community. He also happened to be a gay man who lived with his lover in Bethesda, Maryland.

Thus began an unholy alliance between the War Department and psychiatry, a specialty still disdained by much of the medical profession. The war provided psychiatrists with a unique opportunity for legitimization: the official imprimatur of the federal government This affiliation would help them shed their reputation as members of a fey discipline. Now they would be able to act as robust patriots, eager to prevent the encroachment of perverts on the nation's armed forces.

Ironically, Sullivan's original plan for psychiatric screening did not include any reference to homosexuality. Understandably, Sullivan believed homosexuals should be “accepted and left alone,” a position that made him a dissident in his own profession. And Overholser tried to convince the military that homosexuals should be handled by psychiatrists rather than prison guards. “The emotional reaction of the public against homosexual activity is out of all proportion to the threat which it represents to personal rights, or even to public order,” he told the navy. But Overholser also believed the public could not think rationally about the subject because it was “so overlaid with emotional coloring that the processes of reason are often obscured.”