The Gay Metropolis (81 page)

^*
Murray Gitlin directed one of the Tokyo productions: “Some of it was easily translatable, but some of it wasn't. For example, there was no word that had the pejorative connotation of
cunt.
There was a word that's used in physiology but that wasn't right. If you said vagina,' that certainly doesn't have the impact. So we had to give it up”

^†
In
The Season,
William Goldman reported that of the fifty-eight Broadway shows presented during the 1967-1968 season, 31 percent were produced by gays, and at least 38 percent were directed by them.
The New York Times
reported that a Cinema Center Films advertisement for the movie version of
Boys
was the first film ad to contain the word
homosexual. (New York Times,
June 5,1969, quoted by John Reid in
New York,
September 24,1973)

^*
Seven weeks after Kennedy's assassination, the television audience had risen “in a body and gave her the most genuine standing ovation I have ever witnessed,” Mel Tormé remembered. (Shipman,
Judy Garland,
463)

^*
One theory was that the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had discovered that the bottles at the Stonewall didn't have any federal stamps; then the Feds had discovered the payoffs to the local precinct and pressured police headquarters to carry out the raid with men who were not on the take from the bar. (Martin Duberman,
Stonewall,
194)

^*
To demonstrate disruptively

^†
Later the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force

^*
It was also a big step forward from Schlesinger's first American film,
Midnight Cowboy,
released in 1969. Jon Voight played a male hustler who hated “faggots,” and beat up one of his Johns. “I deserve this,” moaned his victim, played by Barnard Hughes. “I brought this on myself, I know I did.”

^*
Its nonmusical precursor,
I Am a Camera,
starring Julie Harris, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play in 1952.

^†
York asked Isherwood if he had ever gone to bed with the real Sally Bowles. “Once,” Isherwood replied, when the flat had been “overfilled with friends.” (Michael York,
Travelling Player,
220)

^*
In the British version of the film, the line is “Fuck Maximilian!”

^*
While Gore Vidal has always dismissed the categories of “hetero” and “homo,” he strongly believes in “tops” and “bottoms”—placing himself firmly in the former category.

^*
Arthur Bell wrote about the “Rockefeller Five” in his first article for the
Village Voice.
He later became the weekly's first openly gay columnist. (Toby Marotta,
The Politics of Homosexuality,
159)

^*
In 1974, ten gay activists disrupted a lecture by Reuben and accused him of being a “criminal” because of his views on homosexuality.
(New York Times,
June 19,1974)

^*
A heterosexual therapist who coined the word
homophobia
in 1970.

^*
In 1955 Allen Ginsberg had a similar experience with a psychoanalyst in Berkeley. “Shouldn't I be a heterosexual?” Ginsberg asked.

“Why don't you do what you want?” the doctor replied.

“So,” said Ginsberg, “in a sense he gave me permission to be free, not to worry about consequences.” (Allen Young,
Gay Sunshine Interview
with Allen Ginsberg, 22)

^*
The letter was also signed by APA vice presidents Harold M. Visotsky and Mildred Mitchell-Bateman.
(New York Times,
May z6,1974, and letter in author's collection)

^*
Barry Manilow backed her up on piano.

^*
Four years later, in 1977, Robert L. Livingston became the first gay activist appointed to the New York City Human Rights Commission by Mayor Abraham Beame.

^*
The proprietor of Rick's in Casablanca.

^*
Three years later William Westmoreland sued Crile and CBS for libel and asked for $120 million in damages because of a new documentary Crile had produced, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.” After a five-month trial and millions of dollars in legal fees, Westmoreland dropped his suit in 1985 in return for a statement in which the network said it “never intended to assert, and does not believe, that General Westmoreland was unpatriotic or disloyal in performing his duties as he saw them” during his tour as American commander in Vietnam.
(New York Times,
February 19, 1985)

^*
See pages 73–74.

^*
The football star and future Republican officeholder Jack Kemp worked for the fired chief aide and invested in a house the aide owned in Lake Tahoe. Kemp has said that he is not a homosexual—and he hadn't known that his boss was either.
(New York Times,
June 28, 1987)

^*
That view was expressed in the
Southern Medical Journal
James Fletcher in 1984. “We see homosexual men reaping not only expected consequences of sexual promiscuity, suffering even as promiscuous homosexuals the usual venereal diseases, but other unusual consequences as well. Perhaps, then, homosexuality is not alternative behavior at all, but as the ancient wisdom of the Bible states, most certainly pathologic.” (Quoted in Richard A. Isay,
Being Homosexual,
80; and Dennis Altman,
AIDS in the Mind of America,
66)

^*
Early in the 1970s, two obviously gay men had come to the
Times
to be interviewed by a reporter in the culture department. As they sauntered out of the newsroom—but while they were still within earshot—Phil Dougherty, the paper's legendary advertising columnist, rose up from his desk, and shouted, “All right, everybody out of the closet!”

^*
The first name given the disease was gay-related immune deficiency. At a meeting in July 1982 about the blood supply, leaders of the blood industry, hemophiliac groups, gay community organizations, and representatives from the federal government agreed to rename it acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

^*
In the 1980s, the words
anal intercourse
had appeared in the
Times
only once before, in a review of
Time of Desecration,
a novel by Alberto Moravia.

^*
See page 252.

^*
A cancer researcher from Belgium.