The Gay Metropolis (80 page)

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‘The Inquiring Fotographer of the
Daily News
polled men in the street and got a unanimous reply: they would rather read about murder than about war news.
(Newsweek
, November 8,1943)

^†
Time
was mistaken. On November 22,1914, George Bernard Shaw decried the “forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin” in a piece in
The New York Times
about how to defeat Germany.

^*
Actually enacted by Congress at FDR's request in September 1940.

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“I raised my hand to knock and then I thought better of it,” Analise Schoenberg testified at Lonergan's trial. “The knowledge that this witness had stood within only a few feet of where Mrs. Lonergan was fighting for her life, and did not know it, seemed to awe the courtroom listeners,” Meyer Berger reported in
The New York Times
, March 29,1944.

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Reynolds also heard about the Wayne Lonergan case while he was in Egypt because the names of several of his Manhattan friends appeared in Lonergan's address book—and all of them were contacted by the police after Lonergan's arrest.

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Victory in Europe

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A similar provision survived into President Clinton's “reform” of regulations governing gays in the military, which went into effect in 1994.

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After Eisenhower picked the General Motors executive Charlie “Engine” Wilson to become defense secretary, Wilson actually said, “We at General Motors have always felt that what was good for the country was good for General Motors as well,” but most people remembered it the other way. (David Halberstam,
The Fifties,
118)

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This sentence may have been Capote's only literary quarry from his romance with an air-conditioning repairman.

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Friedman said he “probably” did not know that Cohn was gay at that time—and that “most people thought I was crazy to want to work with him.” (Author's interview with Stanley M. Friedman, November 30,1994)

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Allen W. Dulles, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said, “So long as there is sex it is going to be used in espionage.” He declined to say whether the CIA used such techniques, but acknowledged that “we recognize the existence of sex and the attraction of sex.”
(New York Times,
July 21,1962)

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This advice was typical of Washington. When Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank first discussed the possibility of disclosing his homosexuality publicly, most of his powerful heterosexual friends urged him to remain in the closet.

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Later evidence suggested that the diary entries were not contemporary, but a creative reconstruction made several years later. (Humphrey Burton,
Leonard Bernstein,
187)

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Butler and Ethan Geto were the only people I interviewed who fit into this category.

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Heston also portrayed Michelangelo in
The Agony and the Ecstasy,
but he told the filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman that he 'knew for a fact” that Michelangelo was
not
a homosexual.
(The Advocate,
March 19,1996)

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Edward Villela was a (heterosexual) star of the New York City Ballet.

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This democratic aspect was already part of gay life in nineteenth-century England. The testimony at the trials of Oscar Wilde contains many of the prosecutor's sarcastic references to Wilde's habit of dining with a groom and a valet. (Donald Webster Cory,
The Homosexual in America,
152)

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Clemons wrote a lightly fictionalized account of this experience in his short story “Nana Shellbean.”

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Gore Vidal published a paperback original under the pen name Katharine Everhard. “It's a straight romantic novel,” said Clemons. “[The pseudonym] was just an inside joke.”

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The book included an appendix that reprinted every state law forbidding sodomy. Oklahoma had a typical statute: “every person who is guilty of the detestable and abominable crime against nature, committed with mankind or with a beast, is punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary not exceeding ten years.… Any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the crime against nature.” In 1995, twenty states still carried anti-sodomy laws on their books.
(New York Times,
March 24,1995)

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A style quite similar to the book adopted by ACT UP in the late eighties.

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Although it took the name of the older organization, it had no connection to the national, which had dissolved itself the previous spring. (Letter from Frank Kameny to the author. December 19,1995)

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The same year, the publishing business was shocked when Harper and Row announced the publication of a children's book that included a homosexual episode in the lives of two thirteen-year-old boys. Written by John Donovan, it was called
I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. (New York Times,
April 3,1968)

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While gays explicitly emulated black radicals, collaboration between them was rare, and some blacks resented any comparison of the two movements. However, in an unusual expression of solidarity, Huey Newton wrote in
The Black Panther
on August 21,1970, “Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women … we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. … I know through reading and through my life experience … that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed people in the society. A person should have freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants to. That's not endorsing things in homosexuality that we wouldn't view as revolutionary. But there's nothing to say that a homosexual cannot be a revolutionary … Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary…. When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies and demonstrations there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women's liberation movement. … The terms ‘faggot' and ‘punk' should be deleted from our vocabulary.” (Quoted in David Deitcher, ed.,
The Question of Equality
, 33.) More typically, Eldridge Cleaver wrote in
Soul on Ice,
“Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become head of General Motors.” (Quoted in
New York Times,
January 17,1971)

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In 1969, the Internal Revenue Service told the
Advocate
that it had never ruled on whether the government would accept a joint tax return from a gay couple. But the following year, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler told the magazine that President Nixon “doesn't think that people of the same sex should marry.” (Mark Thompson, ed.,
The Long Road to Freedom,
20, 37)

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Margo Jefferson pointed our that “Little Richard was an advance man for mass culture's acceptance of camp,” and from what we can now call the “gay theatrics” of Liberace, Little Richard, and Jackie Wilson, Elvis Presley “got glamour and self-parody.”
(New York Times,
March 5,1995; and October 26,1994)

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Iphigene Sulzberger, who was the daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother of publishers of
The New York Times,
was particularly squeamish about the coverage of sex. When she thought it was getting too much space in the paper in 1968, she wrote a note to her son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. “Why not put sex in perspective?” she asked. “It went on in my day too.” (Gay Talese,
The Kingdom and the Power,
517)

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On the other hand, in 1969, when Gay Talese published
The Kingdom and the Power,
his history of the
Times,
he referred to the page-one piece as a “superb article.” (Gay Talese,
The Kingdom and the Power,
373)

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“The Homosexuals” was not, however, the first television documentary on this subject. “The Rejected,” produced by John Reavis, was broadcast by affiliates of the Educational Television Network in September 1961. Originally entitled “The Gay Ones,” it was filmed mostly in the studio. Its only location shots were inside the Black Cat, one of San Francisco s most famous gay bars (author's interview with Edward Alwood, November 6,1995). In New York City, Channel 13's “Intertel” series had also broadcast a one-hour documentary about gay men and lesbians produced by Associated Rediffusion in England.

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“Larson was furious after the program aired because he had been led to believe that it would provide a much more positive picture of gay life in America. (Author's interview with Edward Alwood, November 6,1995)

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Thirty years later, Nichols said that he didn't realize he was making an “inborn” argument. “I've never really thought heterosexuality or homosexuality to be inborn states,” Nichols wrote. “In my more experimental days when I was about twenty, I saw that I could easily seduce hosts of ‘straight' guys and that they'd do
everything
sexually except kiss—or talk about it in the morning.” (Letter from Jack Nichols to the author, December 12,1995)

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Actually, a UPI dispatch identified two of the pickets as married women. A Mattachine spokesman explained that the organization accepted members “without regard to race, religion, sex, or ‘sexual orientation.'” In the UPI photograph of the event, Jack Nichols was the first person visible in the picket line, holding a sign that read, “Fifteen million U.S. Homosexuals
Protest
Federal Treatment.” Kameny was right behind him. The lesbian activist Lilli Vincenz is third. Kameny said, “There were always women on our picket lines, including at least one, and more usually two, of the nongay ones, in our Washington pickets.”
(New York Times,
May 30,1965; UPI Bettmann; and letters from Jack Nichols, December 12,1995, and Frank Kameny, December 19,1995, to the author)

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Kauffmann said that he could not recall “a single instance” in which he “voted against a gay group because it was gay.” He added that to have done so “would have been inconsistent” with the views he expressed in his
Times
article. (Letter from Stanley Kauffmann to the author, April 16, 1997)

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Not every gay artist was aware of the pop art conspiracy. When Paul Cadmus ran into Andy Warhol in the sixties, Cadmus asked him what he was up to. Warhol said, “Now I'm into pop art.” And Cadmus replied, “Pop Hart, why should anyone be interested in Pop Hart?” The older artist thought Warhol was referring to George Overbury “Pop” Hart, who was born in Cairo, Illinois, in 1866 and reared in Rochester, New York.

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Vidal's growing militancy on this subject had one significant effect on his literary output during the sixties. When he decided to write a revised version of
The City and the Pillar,
he finally heeded the advice of Tennessee Williams and Chrisopher Isherwood: he made the ending less catastrophic. Instead of murdering the object of his unrequited affection, Jim merely raped him.

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Lehmann-Haupt didn't want Rosenthal to hire Broyard, either. Lehmann-Haupt told Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that when Rosenthal asked him for “five reasons” why Broyard shouldn't get the job, the critic “thoughtlessly blurted out, ‘Well, first of all, he is the biggest ass man in town.' And Rosenthal rose up from his desk and said, ‘If that were a disqualification for working at
The New York Times
'—and he waved—‘this place would be empty!'”
(The New Yorker,
June 17,1996)

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What would you call that hairstyle you're wearing?” a reporter asked Harrison in
A Hard Day's Night.
“Arthur,” he replied.

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Rabbi Shlomo Goren was the chief military chaplain in 1967 and the first person to lead a prayer service at the Western Wall after Israeli soldiers captured the Old City. Between 1972 and 1983, he served as Israel's Ashkenazic chief rabbi. In December 1993, he enraged the Israeli government by asserting that the Law of Moses overshadowed government policies and that Israeli soldiers must disobey any order to evacuate Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of seventy-seven.
(New York Times,
October 30,1994)

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Barr and Woodward were involved in a workshop with Edward Albee, but according to Murray Gitlin, Albee refused to be associated with their new project. “From the word go, Edward did not want
anything
to do with it. He hated that play, hated everything about it, didn't want to be associated with it
at all”
That may have been because many people felt that Crowley had borrowed the form (and some of the substance) of Albee's smash hit,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The repartee between Michael and Harold was particularly reminiscent of the clash between Albee's George and Martha—but Michael had eight guests to attack at his party, instead of just two.

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In his autobiography,
Young Man from the Provinces: A Gay Life before Stonewall
the actor Alan Helms offered this description of his drug consumption in the era when
Boys
was playing Off-Broadway. “We bought by the pound—eighty to one hundred dollars for superb grass with odd names and accompanying myths: ‘Ice Pack' was grown on top of a sacred mountain in Mexico that was under ice half the year. … Hash followed soon after, then seco synatan (a … ‘set-up,' part upper and part downer, speed without the jagged edges) which we called the ‘love pill' since it allowed us to have marathon sex. Then acid and mescaline and cocaine occurred somewhere in there, along with kef and occasionally opium and always Tuinals and Valiums and Percocets and Placidils (all sleeping pills or pain killers) and once we encountered it MDA whenever we could get it. And of course Methedrine, the Dom Perignon of speed. The poppers had been there from the beginning; then Ben, my barber, began shooting me up…. Was there anyone in the late sixties who didn't take drugs except Nixon and Kissinger?” The original working title of Helms's book was
Damaged Goods.
(Alan Helms,
Young Man from the Provinces,
p. 130)