The Gay Metropolis (8 page)

In January 1942, Reynolds boarded a ship in Manhattan. “Our destination was Egypt. The volunteers were kind of a mishmash—many 4-F who couldn't get into the American army, and a generous sprinkling of ‘the boys.'

“We did all the front line work for the British army—
all of it
. We had the highest casualty rate of any organization in the Second World War. We were small, but we had the most captured and killed and wounded. My great friend Arthur Jeffries wallpapered his ambulance. It had all kinds of roses in it. He was part of a group affectionately known as the Taffeta Twelve. We wore uniforms, most of them custom-made. Many of us wore two or three gold identity bracelets. It was somewhat outrageous. That nut who wrote
Auntie Mame
was in: Patrick Dennis was his name. He was kind of boring. He got married to a very nice girl and then he ran off with a Mexican boy. He died in Mexico City, I think. That'll give you just a rough idea.”

In the desert, there was terror and loneliness—and, Reynolds believed, something in the food to suppress the passions of troops cooped up in foxholes. “One day Cecil Beaton came out to photograph the troops. As he got out of the staff car, someone heard him remark,

“My dear! It's beige!'

“We ate bully beef in vast quantities,” said Reynolds. “I don't know how I lived through that sleeping in a foxhole in the desert with fleas and rats. The first day we got to the desert I modestly inquired about the lavatory facilities and they threw a shovel at me. We were allowed one pint of water a day, with which we had to wash, make tea, shave. You shaved in tea is what you did.”

But then there was also rest and recreation in Cairo.

“When we were on leave, we lived like princes. You could stay at Shepherd's Hotel for $5 a night in Cairo. And then drinks were cheap. There were twenty thousand troops in Cairo who were not allowed to sleep with the women because they would get syphilis—it was an army order!
You cannot!
Twenty thousand men would walk around two or three blocks—clomp, clomp, clomp. And it was like selecting a necktie: you just said,
'That
one.' We were terrible. There was a restaurant called Le Gavroche. It was a very good French restaurant. And the bar was adrift with guardsmen—Coldstream, Irish. And you'd say, ‘What do you want?'
And for one pound—which was $5—you could have anything you want. My God! We had a very good time. We laughed and screamed. I was miserable some of the time. I was terribly lonely. I was away too long.

“I had a lot of Egyptian friends. And the Egyptians all entertained every night. They had dances and parties and champagne and caviar. When you think the Germans were less than fifty miles away and the Egyptians lived as if they were on the edge of the volcano! You'd see Farouk, the king, all the time. He was a fat slob. He had an American girlfriend and I'm told he used to screw her in the swimming pool. I think that's probably true. I remember there was a woman called Princess Latfellah. She gave a huge dance—about three hundred of us—and she had a big tent. Suddenly she threw a switch and on every bloom in this huge garden there was a lightbulb. You would have thought we were in Paris. Caviar! You would have never thought there was war.”

One of Reynolds's best friends in Egypt was Burt Shevelove, who later wrote the book for the Broadway musical
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. “He was the loveliest man who ever lived. He had a sensational sense of humor. We used to call Hitler ‘Helen.' And we'd be in the desert, and there'd be a lot of German planes, and we'd say, ‘Helen's angry today. God, she's mad!' I remember one night we were walking down the streets of Cairo. And the king of Greece came toward us. He was plastered with medals, had a red band around his hat, and he had a fly whisk, which many of us did. And as we passed by, Burt said, ‘Too much! Back to wardrobe!”
^*

Later, Reynolds would serve in Italy, France, and Germany. “I worked with the Coldstream Guards for a couple of weeks. And they were the most wonderful boys. Mostly kids. They were all square. But we got to Perugia, and we were stationed in the Perugina chocolate factory. And the Coldstream were there. We were all walking through the streets. Then they saw a woman's hat shop, and they said, ‘Let's go in.' And they all put on women's hats with their uniforms—just to be campy. So many of those wonderful boys were killed.”

On leave in Paris, Stanley Posthorn was astonished when he found himself inside the Boeuf sur le Toit: “It was a
great
gay nightclub. Beef on the roof! You walked in, and suddenly you realized the
size
of homosexuality—the total global reach of it! There were hundreds of guys from all over the world in all kinds of uniforms: there were free Poles dancing
with American soldiers; there were Scotsmen dancing with Algerians; there were Free French; there were Russians. It was like a U.N. of gays. It was just incredible. I mean there were men dancing with each other! I had never seen that before in my
life!
There was lots of singing at the bar, and lots of arms around each other's shoulders. For me, it was sort of like a V-E Day for gays—before the real V-E Day.”
^*

AROUND THE WORLD
, the army's extensive sponsorship of drag shows was its most unlikely official encouragement of any aspect of gay culture. Though not every drag performer was gay, it gave those who were a secret opportunity to communicate with one another—and with their comrades-in-arms in the audience. James Atcheson played the heroine in
She Was More to Be Pitied Than Censured
, a showboat melodrama. “My God!” he recalled. “My dance card filled up very quickly. I said, ‘Isn't this nice.'”

The army set up a special school at Fort Meade to promote theater arts for soldiers' entertainment. Its most successful production was the Irving Berlin all-soldier show,
This Is the Army
, which played a thousand performances in front of two and a half million GIs around the world. Then it became a movie with Ronald Reagan and George Murphy. “It has everything except girls,” the
New York Herald Tribune
reported, “and the terrible truth is that you don't miss them.”

Most ironically, the army sponsored numerous all-male productions of
The Women
, Clare Boothe Luce's brilliantly bitchy 1936 Broadway melodrama. Turned into a movie by the gay director George Cukor in 1939,
The Women
would be essential viewing for many gay men for the rest of the century. The cattiness of its characters made it a model for the camp culture embraced by one segment of gay male society. Mrs. Luce visited backstage with the cast of one of the army's all-male productions. The headline in
Life
(a magazine invented by Henry Luce at his wife's suggestion) read “
MEN IN KHAKI TAKE OVER THE WOMEN
.”

“Despite their hairy chests, size-12 shoes and bulging biceps,” the soldiers “did a good job with the play,”
Life
reported. “This play shows that, after all, there is very little difference between men and women,” Mrs. Luce told
Life's
correspondent. Naturally, the story made no reference to the gay subtext of the production, but the ten accompanying photographs captured it perfectly.

Arthur Laurents, who would become a celebrated playwright after the war, was a soldier at Fort Aberdeen, Maryland, when Mrs. Luce attended a
performance. “I was wandering through the woods and I saw this sign. I can see it to this day, ‘An All-Male Soldier Cast in John Frederic's Hats in
The Women.
'

“As I tell it, I sound sophisticated, but it was really like Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole,” Laurents continued. “I could not believe any of this. They did
The Women
with all these guys and they had bras and they walked around in underwear and they had the big scene with Crystal in the bathtub. She stood up and had a jockstrap on. But it was done straight. The only one who wasn't was the one who played Sylvia, the Rosalind Russell role, who really was a bitch, and that was obviously the real McCoy. Even I knew that. But nobody said boo. And they played it very seriously: ‘How dare you take my husband!' Clare Boothe Luce ran up onstage, took a bow, and said: ‘Crystal has the prettiest back of any Crystal I've ever seen.' Of course I thought nobody in the world knew about this production but me. It never occurred to me that they would do anything like that. God! The army was a strange place.”

Even Dwight David Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe, put his official imprimatur on these transvestite performances. “You are not fighting with machine guns—but your job is just as important,” he told the all-male cast of the Yard Bird Review in Algiers. “As long as you are doing your job well—and you are doing it extremely well—you will be rendering a service and a great one, to your fellow soldiers and your country.”

BACK IN MANHATTAN
, the steady influx of thousands of men and women in uniform created scores of new locales with homoerotic undertones—everywhere from the balconies of 42d Street moviehouses to six-year-old Franklin Macfie's living room on the Upper West Side. In 1943 young Franklin was living with six older sisters and three older brothers. “My sisters were all teenagers and older than teenagers during the war. It was very sexy to me because they were all so pretty. In my eyes, they all looked like Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. They had tons of boyfriends, and the house was like the USO. There were always uniforms sitting in the living room waiting for the girls, and I was bounced on their knees, being as cute as I knew how to be.”

Macfie also went to Central Park with his sisters: “The lawns were littered with absolutely lovely girls in summer dresses and sailors and soldiers, you know, lying and not quite making love but being very close to making love. Necking and so on. By the tennis courts, when I was very
young, we often saw people fucking because the back of the tennis courts was very hidden.” Dimouts and blackouts made the parks particularly amorous after dark.

JERRE KALBAS
was twenty-four in 1942. She was working on the assembly line at the Ford Instrument Company in Queens, and she didn't know how to do “
any thing
feminine. I couldn't carry a purse. I had a paper bag with my comb in it and my cigarettes in it and my change; I didn't even think to get an envelope.” Then she met Patty, a professional dancer ten years her senior who looked a lot like Gertrude Lawrence—tall and slender—and they wore their hair the same way. At seventeen Patty was dancing all over Europe: “She even doubled for Garbo in
Mata Hari
. Garbo sent her roses. But Patty's mother sent them back.”

Kalbas moved into Patty's house on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, and often they dined out on popovers at Patricia Murphy's popular restaurant nearby. “Patty was a very bright girl. She could do anything! At the time we could get parachutes for $3. She took them and dyed them green. And those were our drapes in the apartment.” Patty was also “ultrafeminine,” and she went to work on Kalbas. “I was walking like a truck driver, and she was making me into a lady. There were no nylons available because of the war, and she taught me how to use makeup to draw stockings on my legs. She even drew the lines on her legs, but I wouldn't do that—that was going too far!”

The spirit of war opened lives up in all kinds of surprising ways. “People sort of did with their gay behavior what they did with everything else. Which was take chances and risks and try to enjoy things because who knows where you might be sent tomorrow,” Stuart Loomis remembered. “Manhattan parties got to be a little bit wild,” said Bob Ruffing, “because this war spirit was starting to invade everything.”

“During the war, when I think of my own sleeping around, my hair stands on end,” remembered the composer Ned Rorem. “The
thousands
of people I went to bed with! Much of that had to do with being a teenager, but it had to do with the war too. Although I was not in the army, I'm sure that had a lot to do with the military.”

When Arthur Laurents was stationed in New York, he wrote radio propaganda for civilians. “New York in wartime was the sexiest city in the world,” said Laurents.
“Everybody
did it—in numbers. And everybody drank. Bill Holden and I were in the army together, and on payday we'd have a contest to see who could drink the most martinis. And once I drank fifteen. Can you imagine that? I can't.” During basic training, an MP made
a pass at Laurents. “We did it, but I was terrified. I mean, it was like a cop. And again, I was totally bewildered. And felt it was wrong. This is why later I went into analysis.

“There were two great bars in Manhattan,” Laurents said. “The Oak Bar at the Plaza and the bar at the Savoy Plaza. Oh, the cream of the crop. All you had to do was just go. You wouldn't get in if you didn't have a uniform on. I felt guilty, I wanted to change—and I loved it. I never had so much sex in my life. It was incessant.” Gore Vidal agreed: “Everybody was released by the war; people were doing things they hadn't dreamed of in the villages from whence they came. Under the right circumstances, everyone was available.”

Donald Vining was a pacifist who admitted his homosexuality to his draft board because his mother needed his support, and he could not afford to be placed in a camp for conscientious objectors. Twenty-four years old when America joined the war, Vining kept a diary in which he recorded affairs with soldiers, sailors, marines, and civilians. Many of these encounters occurred at the Sloane House YMCA in Manhattan, where he worked as a desk clerk. In 1942, he wrote, “Just as I put on my robe to leave the shower room, in comes a nice-looking well-built boy. Something destroyed my usual timidity and I walked right up and ran my hands over him. ‘Do you mind?' I asked, without a quaver in my voice. ‘No,' he said casually, as he went on drying himself. I would have had him come to my room, but he had a double room with a fellow, who came to hunt him up.”