The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  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.”

  Unfortunately, as Bérubé explains, Sullivan and his colleagues “had carved out the territory on which others would build an antihomosexual barrier and the rationale for using it.” Sullivan’s belief in the relative insignificance of “sexual aberrations” in establishing mental illness was undermined as his plan was digested by the Washington bureaucracy. By the middle of 1941, the army and the Selective Service both included “homosexual proclivities” in their lists of disqualifying “deviations.”

  At a series of government-sponsored seminars at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan in 1941, psychiatrists expanded on their theory of homosexuality as a mental illness. Homosexuality was discussed as “an aspect of three personality disorders: psychopaths who were sexual perverts, paranoid personalities who suffered from homosexual panic, and schizoid personalities” who displayed gay symptoms. In 1942, army mobilization regulations were expanded to include a paragraph entitled “Sexual Perversions.” It was written by Lawrence Kubie, a Manhattan psychiatrist who was famous for his treatment of show business patients tormented by doubts about their sexual orientation—from Clifton Webb to Tennessee Williams and Moss Hart.

  EVERY ARGUMENT made against the admission of lesbians and gays to the military in the nineties has its own echo in the forties, including the idea that effeminate men would become “subject to ridicule and joshing, which will harm the general morale and will incapacitate the individual for Army duty.”

  “Malingerers” were those who pretended to be gay to avoid duty at the front; “reverse malingerers”—a term invented by military psychiatrists—described gay recruits who pretended to be heterosexual so they could perform their patriotic duty. By 1943 doctors had devised the Cornell Selectee Index, which used “occupational choice” questions to screen out dancers, window dressers, and interior decorators because they would have difficulty with their “acceptance of the male pattern.”

  The media periodically spread this new official prejudice. The Washington Star noted that navy psychiatrists would “be on the lookout for any number of mental illnesses or deficiencies that would make the recruit a misfit,” including homosexuality, and Time reported that “How do you get along with girls?” was one of the questions “machine-gunned” at the inductee during his physical.

  These press reports produced all kinds of unlikely fears. When Murray Gitlin enlisted in the navy, he was “very afraid that they would undress me during the physical examination, and they’d know, looking at me, that I was gay. That’s how innocent I was. Well they didn’t—and they couldn’t have cared less.”

  Two factors discouraged nearly all gay men from using their status as members of a sexual minority to avoid the military: the fear of a permanent stigma, because the reason for exclusion was recorded on draft records available to future employers, and an overwhelming desire to participate in the defining experience of a generation. Charles Rowland was drafted at the age of twenty-five. He knew “an awful lot of gay people, but nobody, with one exception, ever considered not serving. We were not about to be deprived of the privilege of serving our country in a time of great national emergency by virtue of some stupid regulation about being gay.”

  Stanley Posthorn was twenty-three in 1941; he enlisted eight months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “I wanted to go in,” said Posthorn, who grew up in Cincinnati and settled in Manhattan when the war was over. “You had real villains, and if you were Jewish, they were sizable villains. And you had heroes. Roosevelt was a great man. And Churchill was a great man. Also, it was the experience of my generation. And I wanted to get away from home. It was a big deal to get away: a big adventure.

  “I remember a man who did get out while I was still in basic training,” Posthorn continued. “A man from Cincinnati, who got out based on family need. He said, ‘Sure I want to avenge Pearl Harbor.’ But he wanted out. He was not gay; he was a straight man who was a coward, who wanted to make money, and who didn’t want to be in the army. I thought he was awful.”

  Posthorn had been in love with a man named Alan for four years before he went into the army: “There was no one ever more beautiful in my whole life. Ever! I always felt very lucky to have attracted that man. He was Nijinsky and I was Diaghilev. I was very lucky to have that leaper.” After Posthorn enlisted, he and Alan got together one more time when Posthorn came home to Cincinnati for a twelve-day leave.

  “We spent three days in a hotel room—a rather seedy hotel—and I couldn’t leave because if I were seen, I would be in terrible trouble with my folks, who didn’t know I was home yet. So I stayed in there with my clothes off for three days, and he’d go down and sneak a sandwich. It was just heaven! It was like being enslaved to this thing we were doing constantly. It was a total cure.

  “The war was on now: it was 1942.1 think there was a radio in the room, but I don’t think we listened. We had so much to talk about. We were very idealistic. You know, it was Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart time—Casablanca. We’re going off, and we might never see each other again.”

  Two years later Alan was posted to Iceland and he sent Posthorn a Dear John letter. “I was in France,” said Posthorn. “Alan loved this person, and what was he going to do? The man didn’t even know about it. I was so hurt. You know, saving myself! My eggs were all in his basket. I didn’t write him for a long time, but I kept getting letters. And then I got sick and I wrote him. And I just wished him luck. I said, ‘I can’t talk to you. I just can’t!’ All I wanted to do was to go back to big Al. And now I had nothing to go back to.”

  Posthorn became a captain by the end of the war, but unlike some other veterans he never felt pride in his success as a gay man in the army. “Pride? No. There was fear, uncertainty; also the feeling of not being quite fit for what you were doing. You’re softer; you didn’t have the macho. I felt in danger. I felt in jeopardy. I always felt vulnerable, that somebody might catch up with me. I thought I was passing: softly passing. I couldn’t drill as well as anyone else, I wasn’t as good on the athletic field or in the morning exercises. I could do other things. I excelled where I could excel. Here’s a smart Jew—but he can’t down the beers in the canteen, you know. I was considered snobbish—which I didn’t really want to be. I didn’t play craps; I didn’t get into big poker games; and I didn’t go out and fall down drunk. I felt I really didn’t belong there in the army because I didn’t have the muscles and I didn’t have the mind-set for it. And I think maybe that’s why I worked so hard—to stay with it, to hang in.”

  Those who got in generally fell into one of two categories: either they had long ago learned to mask their sexual identity in civilian life, or they were too young to have realized that they were gay. And despite the elaborate new regulations developed to discriminate against gays in the army, the only obstacle many of them encountered at the induction center was the “Do you like girls?” question.

  George Buse remembered, “One of the worst of the stereotypes was the lie that all homosexuals are effeminate—and you’re not really a man, you’re more like a girl. So a lot of us at that time who were gay had to prove our manhood. So I joined the toughest, most masculine military organization in the country—and that was the Marine Corps. ‘The Marine Corps builds men.’”

  Of the eighteen million men examined for military service, fewer than five thousand were excluded because of their sexual orientation. No records were kept on the exclusion of lesbians. Once inside, many gay soldiers were astonished to discover how common their o
rientation was. Charles Rowland’s first assignment was in the induction station at Fort Snelling, which was “instantly called the seduction station,” he said. “I found that all of the people I had known in the gay bars in Minneapolis-St. Paul were all officers who were running this ‘seduction station.’ Recruits would be lined up by the thousands every morning outside our windows. All of us would rush to the windows and express great sorrow that all these beautiful boys were going to be killed or maimed or something in the war.”

  Posthorn had met only one other gay man (besides Alan) during his first four years in the army. But then he visited Seventh Army Headquarters in Deauville, France, in 1945. “I never saw so many gays in my life as that weekend in Deauville,” he recalled. “When I went to the theater, they were yoo-hooing and waving. It was incredible! A flaming crew of gays running that outfit.” But he did not identify with them at all; their flamboyance made him uneasy. “I resented them. I did not want to be considered their equal. I’d been in the field. They’d been living a very soft life, probably with boas in their closet.

  “On my way back I stopped to see Liechtenstein. I went to the movies and I met a beautiful soldier, who really didn’t know I was after him. But we went for a walk in this gorgeous park. And I scored. Yeah. I got even with Alan again.” Posthorn’s first gay experience with a stranger in uniform had taken place earlier when he was posted in California. “I was a second lieutenant and I took a four-day pass by myself to get laid. I went to Carmel, California. So lovely. And there was a whole crew of guys there from the cavalry. Which never went overseas because there was no need for a cavalry. But they looked great: jodhpurs and the boots and the whole thing. And there was one who eyed me and I eyed him, and he said he had a room.