IN HIS 1954 short story, “Two on a Party,” Tennessee Williams offered a succinct description of the way the artistic demimonde viewed everyone outside the world they inhabited. This passage relates how Billy (in real life, the poet Oliver Evans) and Con (Marion Black Vaccaro) enjoyed cruising sailors together:
It was a rare sort of moral anarchy, doubtless, that held them together, a really fearful shared hatred of everything that was restrictive and which they felt to be false in the society they lived in and against the grain of which they continually operated. They did not dislike what they called “squares.” They loathed and despised them, and for the best of reasons. Their existence was a never ending contest with the squares of the world, the squares who have such a virulent rage at everything not in their book.
Within this self-consciously bohemian milieu, there was intense sexual and intellectual cross-pollination—not just among gay artists, but also between them and their more experimental heterosexual colleagues. In this era before the gay liberation movement, sexual nonconformists often felt less pressure to label themselves as exclusively homo- or heterosexual. With less political importance attached to one’s self-identification, it may have been easier to be bisexual, especially because most sexual encounters were dealt with so circumspectly.
Michael Butler was the extremely good-looking son of the founder of Butler Aviation, a Chicago businessman who occasionally dabbled in politics, and an internationally famous polo player. He was also a close friend and bad-boy companion of John Kennedy. In the sixties, he would become famous as the producer who brought the musical Hair to Broadway and to stages across America and around the world.
Butler is a self-described member of a tiny minority: those adults who are equally attracted to men and women.* In the early 1950s, he first became enamored of three-way romantic relationships after an extended affair with one of Hollywood’s biggest male stars and the actor’s wife.
In 1955 Butler married the nightclub singer Marti Stevens. After flying to England on their honeymoon, Butler bought a black Rolls-Royce Coupe de Ville convertible with gold trim from a British relative; then the bridal couple motored through Europe. “We mostly got married to get away from our families,” said Butler, although they also enjoyed each other’s company.
By the time they had reached Venice, Butler’s friends sensed that he was bored, so they introduced him to Rock Hudson. There was immediate chemistry between them. “Rock was a simple guy: very sweet,” said Butler. For the next two weeks the two of them drove around Italy—and flaunted their new affair from Butler’s Rolls-Royce convertible. Meanwhile, Marti Stevens went off to visit her close friend Marlene Dietrich.
Word of Hudson’s Italian liaison quickly reached his Hollywood handlers, who were horrified by his lack of discretion. They ordered him to take the next ship back to America—without Butler. “He always said I stood him up,” said Butler, “because he didn’t give a shit about the studio.” But Butler stayed in Europe, and visited Deauville with Michael Todd. There, Butler met a new lady whom he went “bonkers” over and took her to the Hotel du Cap d’Antibes outside Cannes.
Jack Kennedy was also touring Europe that summer with Jacqueline, although he was still recovering from his latest back operation. According to Butler, Kennedy left his wife to meet Butler in the south of France, and the two of them went sailing in the company of Butler’s new girlfriend on his 120-foot gaff-rigged schooner. “It was just the three of us,” said Butler. “You can imagine what happened. It was a scene. Jackie always thought I was the troublemaker. But Jack was also presidential timber in that category. He was still on crutches from the operation, but that didn’t stop him. He was something extra-special. I really loved him.”
In Newport a year later Butler and Kennedy repeated the same arrangement on another sailing trip with another “very famous” woman. “It was a good arrangement for us,” Butler said.
Gore Vidal, a child of the fifties, has always insisted “there are no homosexual or heterosexual persons, only acts.… I never in my life accepted that these two categories existed. And when they began on ‘gay sensibility’ back in the sixties and seventies, I said, ‘Well, if you think there is such a thing, what does Roy Cohn have in common with Eleanor Roosevelt?’ Other than they liked their own sex.”
The novelist, essayist, and biographer Edmund White is similarly skeptical about the notion of a gay sensibility. “What we can discuss … is the gay taste of a given period,” he wrote in States of Desire. “A taste cultivated (even by some heterosexuals) or rejected (even by many homosexuals). What we can detect is a resemblance among many gay works of art made at a particular moment—a resemblance partially intended and partially drawn without design from a shared experience of anger or alienation or secret, molten camaraderie.” Elsewhere, White argued that “any discussion of a group’s sensibility (the ‘black sensibility’? the ‘Jewish sensibility’?) is too general to be useful.”
Vidal thought the fifties were a time when “you got very good at projecting subtexts without saying a word about what you were doing.” His proudest achievement in this regard was to imply a homosexual relationship between Ben Hur and his Roman rival in William Wyler’s film. Vidal said Wyler permitted his subterfuge on the condition that he kept Charlton Heston ignorant of his mischief.* The censors were not “rocket scientists,” said the screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. “If a director was subtle enough and clever enough, he got away with it,” she said. One of the greatest on-screen contortions occurred when Rock Hudson pretended to be a gay man in Pillow Talk to try to get Doris Day into bed. It was “tremendously ironic,” said Armistead Maupin. “Here was a gay man impersonating a straight man impersonating a gay man.”
Tennessee Williams’s iconoclasm was very much on display when Vidal took him to lunch with Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy in Palm Beach a couple of years before JFK became president. According to Vidal, “At one point… the Bird [Williams] muttered in my ear, ‘Get that ass!’ I said, ‘Bird, you can’t cruise our next president.’ The Bird chuckled ominously. ‘They’ll never elect those two. They are much too attractive for the American people.’ Later, I told Jack that the Bird had commented favorably on his ass. He beamed. ‘Now, that’s very exciting,’” the future president said.
The painter Larry Rivers was “so convinced of being heterosexual I could be homosexual.” So the first time he met Frank O’Hara in 1950 at a party given by John Ashbery, he started kissing the New York poet behind a curtain. “From the earliest moments of our friendship we were enthusiastic about each other’s work,” Rivers remembered, and in 1957 they collaborated on a series of lithographs which combined O’Hara’s poetry with Rivers’s images. This partnership did not “exclude all sorts of sexual undercurrents,” Rivers recalled. “’What are you working on?’ was interwoven with ‘What are you doing later on?’” It was also the sort of era when someone as talented as O’Hara could go “pretty quickly from a Christmas job selling postcards at the Museum of Modern Art to being one of its most outstanding curators.”
To O’Hara’s biographer, Rivers explained. “I was in a rather conventional tradition of men who are mainly heterosexual… who when they get with men who are homosexual act as if they are allowing themselves to be had. So he would get me aroused enough by a blow job for me to get a hard on and then screw him in the ass. That was about what it was about.
… One night I’d be with him and the next night I’d be with a woman. It got to be funny.
“I was also introduced to the ever-critical pipe-smoking lay analyst Paul Goodman, who told me I must be sick for refusing to go to bed with him,” Rivers said. “’But, Paul, you’re married. You have a beautiful wife and child. What future would there be for me?’”
Gore Vidal recalled a romantic adventure with Jack Kerouac. “I wouldn’t go to bed with an actor or with a writer,” said Vidal. “Or with anyone well known. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t. As everybody in the world knows, I fucked Keroua
c. He rang me [in August 1953] and said, ‘I got this friend. He’s a junkie and he killed his wife, and he wants to meet you.’” The friend was the writer William Burroughs. “So we met at the San Remo,” an Italian restaurant and bar that was one of the great gay-straight Greenwich Village meeting grounds of the fifties. “Then Jack got so stoned, Burroughs was disgusted with Jack, and he left,” Vidal continued. “Then Jack and I end up in the Chelsea Hotel. His idea, may I say. Though he was quite attractive that night. Relatively. He describes it all in a book called The Subterraneans, in which I am Arial Lavalina, the author of Recognition in Rome.”
Here is Kerouac’s version of the evening in The Subterraneans:
repairing the three of us to 13 Pater a lesbian joint down Columbus, Carmody, high, leaving us to go enjoy it, and we sitting in there, further beers, the horror the unspeakable horror of myself suddenly finding in myself a kind of perhaps William Blake or Crazy Jane or really Christopher Smart alcoholic humility grabbing and kissing Arial’s hand and exclaiming “Oh Arial you dear—you are going to be—you are so famous—you wrote so well—I remember you—what—” whatever and now unrememberable and drunkenness, and there he is a well-known and perfectly obvious homosexual of the first water, my roaring brain—we go to his suite in some hotel—I wake up in the morning on the couch, filled with the first horrible recognition, “I didn’t go back to Mardou’s at all…”
Vidal believes the handful of artists whose “deviant” orientation was known to the critics all paid a significant price for their openness. “It is hard now to realize what a bad time of it Tennessee used to have from the American press,” Vidal wrote.
During the forties and fifties the anti-fag battalions were everywhere on the march. From the high lands of Partisan Review to the middle ground of Time magazine, envenomed attacks on real or suspected fags never let up. A Time cover story on Auden was killed when the managing editor of the day was told that Auden was a fag. From 1945 to 1961 Time attacked with unusual ferocity everything produced or published by Tennessee Williams. “Fetid swamp” was the phrase most used to describe his work. But, in Time, as well as in time, all things come to pass. The Bird is now a beloved institution.
“So why all the fuss?” Vidal asked.
In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock up someone or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed, and one seldom used in civilized societies. But although the United States is the best and most perfect of earth’s societies and our huddled masses earth’s envy, we have yet to create a civilization, as opposed to a way of life.
Jack Kerouac was the first person Allen Ginsberg came out to at Columbia in 1946—“’Cause I was in love with him,” Ginsberg remembered. “He was staying in my room up in the bed, and I was sleeping on a pallet on the floor. I said, ‘Jack, you know, I love you, and I want to sleep with you, and I really like men.’ And he said, ‘Oooooh, no …’ We’d known each other maybe a year, and I hadn’t said anything.”
Within a year, Ginsberg said he had slept with Kerouac “a couple of times.”
Neal [Cassady], his hero, and I were lovers, also, for many years.… At the time Kerouac was very handsome, very beautiful and very mellow.… As a slightly older person and someone who I felt had more authority, his tolerance gave me permission to open up and talk.… He wasn’t going to hit me. He wasn’t going to reject me.… He was going to accept my soul with all its throbbings and sweetness and worries and dark woes and sorrows and heartaches and joys and glees and mad understandings of mortality, ‘cause that was the same thing he had.… The basic thing about him was Character, with a capital C… an enormous mellow, trustful tolerance and sensitivity. And that’s why he’s such a great writer and observer. He held everything ever, as sensitive young fellow, even my fairy woes.
But Ginsberg did not consider Kerouac to be primarily gay.
He had mixed feelings at different times, but I think it would have been abusive of his character to point an accusing finger and say, “You’re a fairy!” There is a certain tendency among gay people … to plaster labels over everybody, including themselves, instead of seeing the nameless love that everybody is. Just as there was a tendency among macho heterosexuals to plaster labels, so there was a counter-balancing tendency among homosexuals to overreact to that and camp too heavily, so that he was sensitive about being put down as a fairy, which he wasn’t.
In his classic, On the Road, Kerouac originally included a scene in which Dean Moriarty had sex with a traveling salesman who is taking him to Chicago in a Cadillac. According to Ginsberg, “That was eliminated from the book by Malcolm Cowley… and Jack consented to that. So Jack actually did talk about it a little in his writing.”
But Kerouac, Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats, as they called themselves, were far more important for what they stood for than for whom they slept with. Their celebration of nonconformity planted the roots of the rebellion against a monochrome society that would flower into the counterculture in the coming decade. And in this postwar period, they were the first group of American writers ever to portray homosexuality as hip—a huge step forward for all those who continued to accept society’s definition of this orientation as an illness, a crime, or both. “It took an enormous amount of courage to openly declare yourself to be a lesbian or a gay male,” the historian Martin Duberman remembered. But the fifties were not a time of “total desperation—it depended on who you are or where you are.”
To Ginsberg, the events of the forties were all reasons to rebel against the establishment in the fifties. “In the forties, the bomb dropped,” Ginsberg said. “In the forties, the entire planet was threatened biologically. … There was a … total breakdown of all morality in the concentration camps. For homosexuals there was a sudden realization: ‘why are we being intimidated by a bunch of jerks who don’t know anything about life? Who are they to tell us what we feel and how we’re supposed to behave? And why take all that bullshit?’ Why not ‘sort of dish it back and start talking openly?’”
During the fifties, “We thought that we were in a decade of such towering dullness and stupidity,” said Jay Presson Allen.
“There was a series of trials that liberated the word,” Ginsberg recalled, including an unsuccessful attempt to suppress his epic poem Howl. “So they lost. So we got a lot of publicity. So the book sold like hotcakes and the censors acted as publicists for a new sensibility.” Howl became a best-selling book of poetry. And in 1958, One, the magazine published by the Mattachine Society, won a case against the United States Post Office, which guaranteed other gay publications access to the mail.
NEW YORK UNDERWENT great physical changes in the fifties. Except for a couple of brief stretches of the Broadway line in Harlem, all the remaining elevated trains were torn down in Manhattan; most of the north-south avenues became broad, one-way thoroughfares below Central Park; and the manufacturers that had made New York City the industrial capital of the East Coast ever since the opening of the Erie Canal were beginning their decades-long exodus.
Heavy industry began to leave in search of lower taxes and wide-open spaces. Following these factories as they moved into the suburbs and beyond were the returning veterans who formed the nucleus of the quickly growing Jewish, Irish and Italian middle classes. Eager to raise their young families far from the soot of the city, they snatched up seventeen thousand houses (reserved for whites only) in Levittown on Long Island and filled new communities in the nearby counties of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, creating a vast suburban belt. The new immigrants who the public noticed replacing them in the city were Puerto Ricans, and poor blacks fleeing the rigid segregation that remained intact almost everywhere—above and below the Mason-Dixon Line.
New York at night looked much more forbidding than it does today. Before high-intensity streetlights were installed as an anticri
me measure during John Lindsay’s administration at the end of the sixties, side streets were often steeped in shadows. The air was dirtier too, in an era when cars lacked catalytic converters and most apartment houses still belched heavy black smoke from their incinerators. To many New Yorkers in the fifties, the city seemed more ominous—and its future more uncertain—than it ever had before.
But nothing would deter a new wave of mostly invisible immigrants, whose arrival was almost never mentioned in the pages of the daily papers. These were the lesbian and gay veterans and recent college graduates who had tasted a different life in Manhattan during the war. Here, many of them had discovered for the first time that they were not alone; and they came back by the thousands to fill up the apartments in Greenwich Village, the East Fifties, and the Upper West Side. The revitalizing effect of these invisible immigrants—invisible in the same sense as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—would go unreported for twenty-five years. But they played a vital role in New York’s postwar renaissance.
And unlike many of the city’s more established white residents, many of these lesbians and gay men welcomed the influx of poorer immigrants. “I loved the Puerto Ricans coming to New York,” said Franklin Macfie. “It really gave energy to a dying city. My oldest sister married a Puerto Rican, a sensationally wonderful guy.”
MURRAY GITLIN was the West Hartford boy who got posted to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and found his first pickup in the orchestra seats of Radio City Music Hall. He had black hair and a long, attractive Semitic face. His low, warm, carefully modulated voice and precise diction made him sound almost British. His close friend Stanley Posthorn remarked that Gitlin was so charming that he could convert anyone he met into a friend.
In 1949 Gitlin moved back to New York. His first temporary residence was the elegant apartment belonging to his uncle Aaron and aunt Helen on the Grand Concourse, still a magnificent Bronx boulevard right after the war.
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