The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  —MARTIN DUBERMAN

  “We are not living in experimental times.… We are not producing real tragedy. On the other hand we are not producing real satire either. The caution prevents it, all the fears prevent it, and we are left, at the moment, with an art that is rather whiling away the time until the world gets better or blows up.”

  —LEONARD BERNSTEIN, 1953

  “The fifties was the bad decade.”

  —GORE VIDAL

  MOST AMERICANS who lived through the fifties—the triumphant warriors of World War II and their teeming progeny—remember this decade with affection. Millions of returning GIs (with honorable discharges) received subsidized college educations, good jobs in a growing economy and cheap mortgages for their new houses in the suburbs. Inflation was low, gasoline was cheap—less than thirty-five cents a gallon—and white middle-class American families became the best-fed, best-dressed and best-sheltered bourgeoisie in the history of the world. By the end of the decade, millions of Americans seemed as self-confident as Detroit’s consummate symbol of conspicuous consumption: a 1959 Cadillac with four headlights, dual exhaust pipes and towering tail fins.

  Mass entertainment was careful to promote the values of what remained a remarkably puritan and (publicly) innocent place. Even after the loosening effects of World War II, sex and death remained unmentionable, abortion was illegal, divorce was difficult for anyone who couldn’t afford a quick trip to Nevada, the segregation of public schools was still legal, and the Lord’s Prayer was a morning staple in most of those public schools. The suburban family with three children, a barbecue, and a two-car garage was good for business—and almost no one was questioning the notion that whatever was good for General Motors was also good for the United States.*

  Conformity of every kind was king.

  The establishment of the Hays Office in 1934 ensured the strict censorship of Hollywood movies. Every picture needed its seal of approval; without one, filmmakers risked a disaster at the box office because of a boycott ordered by the Catholic Legion of Decency. The code’s purpose was dearly stated: “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin” and “correct standards of life … shall be presented” because “correct entertainment raises the whole standard of a nation. Wrong entertainment lowers the whole living conditions and moral ideals of a race.”

  The function of the official censors “was to protect us from the truth and to saddle us with comfortable illusions,” Gerald Gardner wrote in his history of the Hays Office. The censors would “root out all signs of the disagreeable facts of life, and many of the agreeable facts as well.”

  Adultery and murder could never go unpunished; drug addiction could never be glamorized (nor the profits emphasized); a child could never be kidnapped, unless returned unharmed; and no film could “infer that casual or promiscuous sex relationships are the accepted or common thing.” Furthermore, “Lustful and open-mouthed kissing” was prohibited, and passion had to be “treated in such manner as not to stimulate the baser emotions.” Obscenity “in words, gesture, reference, song, joke or by suggestion, even when likely to be understood by only part of the audience” was also forbidden. Abortion could “never be more than suggested,” and whenever it was referred to, it had to be condemned.

  Banned words and phrases included chippie, fairy, goose, madam, pansy, tart in your hat and nuts. Even hell and damn were excised from many scripts until the sixties. And, needless to say, “sex perversion or any inference of it” was strictly forbidden. (When the censors of the thirties ordered Charlie Chaplin to eliminate “the first part of the ‘pansy’ gag” in Modern Times, he immediately complied.)

  As the fifties progressed, television gradually supplanted the movies as the dominant form of popular entertainment—and TV was even more puritanical than the cinema. Although network television still featured serious drama and even symphony orchestras in the fifties, producers were pressured to appeal to a steadily lower common denominator. But for everyone who could identify with the flickering black-and-white images of this exploding new medium—pictures of idealized white suburban families on “Leave It to Beaver,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” and “Father Knows Best”—the fifties felt like a wonderful time to be alive.

  “I Love Lucy” became a gigantic hit, watched by as many as fifty million people by the middle of the decade—but first Lucy had to overcome the vehement opposition of CBS executives in gray flannel suits. The network and its confederates at Philip Morris, which sponsored the show, were certain that the casting of Lucy’s real-life Cuban husband would be a catastrophe. They wanted their idea of an ail-American man (with an all-American accent) to play that part. No one would believe Lucy could be married to a Cuban bandleader. “What do you mean?” Lucy demanded. “We are married!” Eventually CBS relented, but there was still strong opposition after some top entertainers screened the first pilot in New York. “Keep the redhead but ditch the Cuban,” Oscar Hammerstein recommended.

  Lucy’s real-life pregnancy caused a new crisis at CBS. Ultimately the network permitted her condition to be written into the show, but only after realizing that it wouldn’t be practical to keep her hidden behind counters and couches at all times. Nevertheless, the word pregnant could never be spoken, even after Lucy was allowed to suffer from morning sickness.

  These battles with the bosses at CBS illustrate an essential fact of life in the fifties: in this era the American establishment was uncomfortable with all public manifestations of sexuality, not just homosexuality. The New York Times, the daily bible of the liberal elite, was particularly squeamish. The historian George Chauncey considered the decade an “utter anomaly” because a larger percentage of the American population was married than at any other time in the nation’s history.

  The gap between the carefree comedy served up every week by Lucy and Desi and the reality of their rocky marriage mirrored the gulf between real life in America and the white-bread TV version that Americans gobbled up. Unpleasant realities of any kind—from infidelity to racism—were all unfit subjects for programs designed to sell great American products like Marlboros, Alka Seltzer, Geritol and Johnson’s baby shampoo.

  According to Lucille Ball, “Half of the nicest girls in Hollywood” were having an affair with her husband. And Desi Arnaz, Jr., remembered learning “to relate to ‘I Love Lucy’ as a television show and to my parents as actors on it.… There wasn’t much relationship between what I saw on TV and what was really going on at home. Those were difficult years—all those funny things happening on television each week to people who looked like my parents, then the same people agonizing through some terrible, unhappy times at home.”

  THESE POSTWAR TENDENCIES toward conformity and obedience were sharply reinforced by the dreadful morality play staged throughout the decade in congressional hearing rooms and federal courts. In a frightening replay of the Red Scare that had gripped the country after the First World War, Americans in nearly every profession learned that the penalty for even momentary nonconformity could be the termination of their careers—sometimes decades after their alleged indiscretions.

  Congressional Republicans—joined by quite a few Democrats—began their anti-Communist crusade in earnest after Mao Tse-tung defeated Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, and President Harry Truman was accused of “losing China.” Ruthless investigators decreed that even the oldest and briefest flirtation with the Communist party should be incapacitating for nuclear physicists and Hollywood screenwriters alike. For members of Hollywood’s elite, the cost of continuing their careers often included the annihilation of some of their colleagues—because only those who revealed the ancient party memberships of their former “comrades” were deemed fit to continue in their chosen professions.

  Joseph McCarthy was a Wisconsin Republican who was first elected to the Senate in 1946. He was a heavy drinker and compulsive gambler, and
the Senate press gallery named him America’s worst senator three years after his election. In February 1950, McCarthy pretended to have a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department and known to the secretary of state. It was the first in a long series of charges for which no serious evidence would ever be forthcoming.

  The Communist witch-hunt conducted by McCarthy and his cohort is the nightmare remembered by most liberals who lived through this period. But a parallel persecution of lesbians and gay men began in 1950, with devastating effects. And just as the Lonergan case had inspired the first extended discussion of homosexuality in print, this new “scandal” would again stimulate extensive coverage of the subject in the New York press.

  What one liberal columnist described (ironically) as Washington’s “homosexual panic” began after a State Department official shocked a congressional committee by disclosing that ninety-one employees had been dismissed between 1947 and 1949 because they were homosexual—far more than had been fired for being suspected Communists.

  This 1950 bombshell inspired two congressional investigations and a spate of jokes about “cookie-pushers” inside the nation’s diplomatic corps. The Washington Post reported that a man on line for the movies provoked titters just by mentioning his employment at State, while an Alan Dunn cartoon in The New Yorker carried this caption: “It’s true, sir, that the State Department let me go, but that was solely because of incompetence.”

  The scandal at State also revived an explosive World War II rumor that was constantly repeated without any public evidence to support it. According to Washington insiders, Adolf Hitler had maintained a secret list of homosexuals in high government posts all over the world, and used it to blackmail them at will. The list had supposedly fallen into Stalin’s hands after the Russian army entered Berlin in 1945.

  This rumor fit perfectly with the main intellectual justification for the persecution of homosexuals in government jobs—the prevailing notion that they were more vulnerable to blackmail than their heterosexual counterparts. But when the New York Post columnist Max Lerner researched an unprecedented twelve-part series on the “Washington Sex Story” he made a remarkable discovery: “At no point, whether I talked with State Department officials, Civil Service Commission officials, or Senators, was I able to track down a single case” of a homosexual being blackmailed. “Almost in every case, when I had kept pushing my questions, I was told ‘Well, Hoover says they’re more vulnerable.’”

  The irony of J. Edgar Hoover’s role in this harassment was lost on the typical newspaper reader. Many Americans were unaware that the FBI director had what appeared to be a homoerotic relationship for forty-four years with his top assistant, Clyde Tolson—though the mystery of whether the relationship was actually consummated remains hidden from history. Hoover’s biographer Richard Gid Powers described the relationship as “spousal” and “so close, so enduring, and so affectionate that it took the place of marriage for both bachelors.” Every morning, the FBI chauffeur picked up Hoover at his house, then Tolson at his. Then the chauffeur would let them out before they reached the office, so they could walk the last few blocks to headquarters together.

  The director was too powerful and much too feared for most reporters to speculate about the implications of this arrangement during his lifetime, although Life magazine did publish a rather suggestive photograph of Hoover and Tolson on vacation, riding together in a golf cart. Truman Capote, bolder than most journalists, described Hoover as a “killer fruit,” a “certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream.”* But the presidents who were his theoretical bosses were almost uniformly terrified of him. For example, after a story by Ben Bradlee in Newsweek suggested that Lyndon Johnson was searching for Hoover’s successor, the president called a press conference to announce that Hoover would retain his position for life.

  Max Lerner was a liberal iconoclast, a son of Russian immigrant parents, who had graduated from Yale and taught political science before and after becoming a columnist for the New York Post. His twelve-thousand-word series in 1950 was a breakthrough for daily journalism in America. Never before had anyone treated the subject of homosexuality so extensively and seriously in a New York newspaper.

  While he was careful to write, “No one argues the question of homosexuals in the government service should be ignored,” Lerner broke ranks with almost all of his contemporaries by arguing that it was necessary to distinguish between different kinds of homosexuals—and “which posts they must be kept out of.”

  Lener interviewed Kinsey and made it clear that the scientist’s findings were a major reason for the reporter’s groundbreaking approach. “More drastically than anything that has happened in our time, [Kinsey’s figures] have revealed the gap between our moral and legal codes and our actual behavior,” Lerner wrote.

  Hoover may have been too frightening to mock, but Lerner had a field day interviewing the hapless Washington detective who had electrified a congressional committee with his testimony identifying 5,000 Washington residents as homosexuals—including 3,750 employed by the federal government. It turned out that 5,000 was not the actual number of people who had been apprehended and charged with disorderly conduct, but a rather creative extrapolation.

  Lieutenant Roy E. Blick had produced his official estimate this way: first he took sixty percent of the men arrested, and added the names of all the friends whom they had identified as homosexuals. Then he took the other forty percent of the list and multiplied it by five. “It’s 60–40,” he explained. Lerner wrote: “This adventure in higher mathematics had exhausted both of us. … I reflected grimly, thinking back to the reverent way in which Senators and security officers used Blick’s estimate of 5,000 homosexuals in Washington, with 3,750 in the government. This was how a statistic got to be born.”

  Ben Bradlee was a young Washington Post reporter in 1950—“low, low, low general assignment”—and Roy Blick was part of his beat. “Blick specialized in young apple-cheeked police recruits who did the worst things in the world,” Bradlee recalled. “They hung around the cans in Lafayette Square and in first-run movie theaters. They’d hang out in the John and wave their tallywackers around and see if anybody was interested. The newspapers at that time were not modern. Shall we put it that way? And if they got a senator’s aide, or especially someone in the CIA or the State Department, it was just too good to be true.

  “Blick was a poisonous man,” Bradlee continued. “He loved it and he relished it. At first he hadn’t gotten any ink at all in the vice squad because nobody was particularly interested in rubbing out prostitution or little after-hours clubs. They were all terribly sad stories—most of the guys probably married. Even if you weren’t in any way enlightened, you felt there was something terrible about this. There was entrapment, and the joy that this asshole Blick took out of it was wrong.

  “He was a nasty little man.”

  In 1950, “The lack of sensitivity or awareness was total,” said the newspaperman. “We’re not talking about unenlightenment or enlightenment, we’re talking about ignorance.” Bradlee hated these stories: “I couldn’t get off from this sort of thing”—and they were one reason he ended his first stint at the Post in 1951. After he returned fourteen years later, he became the executive editor—and one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation.

  Lerner urged his readers to distinguish between men who might have had occasional homosexual experiences and what he called “the compulsive” who was unable to control his impulses. He also pointed out that “alcoholics, reckless and compulsive gamblers, or sexual adventurers who get themselves into frequent scrapes with women” were just as vulnerable to blackmail as any gay person. Lerner compared the new campaign to eliminate homosexuals from all government posts to the attitude of the Soviets and Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984.

  “When the security officers of government agencies start firing people because their sexual habits seem strange it is a case of the sick being pursued
by the sicker,” Lerner wrote. “For while homosexuals are sick people, the ruthless campaign against them is symptomatic of an even more dangerous sickness in the social atmosphere.… The communist regime in Russia takes command not only of the political thinking of its people, but also of their private lives, including their sex habits.”

  This emphasis on the sickness of the homosexual hardly sounds progressive five decades later. But at the time, it was not only the attitude of almost every psychiatrist; it was also the way most homosexuals viewed themselves.

  Ironically, while no one gave Lerner any proof that Communists were successfully blackmailing homosexuals, there were rumors about congressional investigators threatening to blackmail American homosexuals if they refused to discuss their previous ties to the Communist party. When the renowned choreographer Jerome Robbins testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in New York City in 1953, he disclosed his own three-year membership in the party and named eight other former party members. Some of his friends believe that Robbins agreed to testify only after committee investigators threatened to expose him as a homosexual.

  The day after Robbins testified, Peter Kihss wrote in The New York Times, “While other witnesses denounced the committee for staging what they called a ‘circus’ and relying on ‘stool pigeons,’ Mr. Robbins said he was testifying because ‘I think I made a great mistake before, entering the Communist party, and I feel I’m doing the right thing as an American.’”

  Robbins denied that he testified after a threat to expose him as a homosexual. But Victor Navasky wrote in Naming Names, a history of the McCarthy period, that Robbins’s testimony was “so compliant… it had the aura of social blackmail.” Ring Lardner told Navasky, “I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but if you were Jerome Robbins, wouldn’t you like to have people believe that’s the reason you did it?”