The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  He didn’t have time to look for his own place because he “just had to become a dancer,” Gitlin explained. “I was a late starter, and I didn’t have time to waste. I was twenty-two.” His aunt Helen was a “very powerful woman” who was seeing a psychiatrist because she was having terrible abdominal pain that her doctor thought was psychosomatic. One night after dinner, she said, “’You know, Murray, Aaron and I know that among male dancers, there are many who are homosexual.’ She was suspicious of me. ‘And we wonder, since you’re a dancer now, what your relationship is to those men.’

  “I thought she had balls. You know: 1950. And I said, ‘Well, Helen, I am.’ And Aaron was there. She said, ‘Oh.’ I said, ‘Oh yes.’ And I said, ‘I’ve accepted it, and I think I understand it.’ And she said, ‘Well!’

  “She insisted I go to her psychiatrist and have a preliminary consultation with him. And then we’d see.”

  Gitlin went to the psychiatrist, but it had no effect. “I think there was never any choice for me, which is, you know, par for the course. And as far as I know, as far as I can remember, there was never another way for me. I felt confident because I’d thought it through.”

  Soon he found a magnificent cold-water flat at 426 West 56th Street with a bathtub in the kitchen and the bathroom in the hall. The rent was $16 a month. During the next forty-four years, Gitlin would never leave the neighborhood, although he did move once to another apartment six blocks away.

  He was very good-looking, but too chubby to think of himself as really attractive. His first job was in the chorus of The King and I. “I was very happy to be in that show—it was a very glamorous thing to be in. It was just beautiful. I’ve directed it since and played roles in it since, but that was the most important.” In the chorus line, Gitlin replaced Otis Bigelow—the best-looking man in Manhattan in 1940, the one who had chosen a beautiful sailor over a suntanned millionaire.

  A year earlier at Martha Graham’s dancing school in Vermont, Gitlin spotted a “tall beautiful young man, who looked like a swimmer—which he was. I’ll never forget my first impression of him. After class, I asked Martha if she would introduce me to him, and she did. He was very shy. And I said I was living in New York. I said when you come to New York—and I knew he would—look me up if you want to. I’d be very happy to see you.”

  One day Gitlin was leaving the St James Theatre, where The King and I was playing, and he recognized the same young man. “He was sitting out there just waiting for me. And he said, ‘Hi. Remember me?’ In a small voice. I said, ‘Yes, I do remember you.’ And that’s when our friendship really began.”

  The young man was Paul Taylor, who became one of Manhattan’s most famous modern dancers and choreographers, as well as the founder of his own dance company, which is still flourishing. Gitlin found him an apartment in his building, and soon Taylor was bringing over a painter friend named Bob Rauschenberg. “Rauschenberg used to come over and he would go to the bathroom,” Gitlin remembered. “And I would keep painting that bathroom—to cheer it up a little bit. And I painted it red and orange and it would peel almost immediately. And one day, I’ll never forget, Rauschenberg went to the bathroom, and he came in, and said, ‘When I become famous’—not if, but ’when I become famous’—that bathroom is going to be part of the exhibit I have. Because I think it’s so beautiful the way the paint’s peeling off so delicately.’”

  Another frequent visitor was Jerome Robbins, whom Gitlin knew slightly because Robbins had choreographed The King and I. A couple of years later, Robbins would choose a photograph of Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence standing in front of Gitlin’s West Side apartment building to illustrate the cast album of his most spectacular musical.

  “Jerry used to come over and visit and we’d laugh,” said Gitlin. “But he was always weird. We always got along in those days. I don’t know; something happened. He does this to people. He turns people off. Something snaps. Somewhere along the line, something must have happened between him and me. I mean we really liked one another. And in some of my early days on Fire Island, he was out there. He loved the island as much as I did. He loved games and I loved games. And we played with some of the ballet people who were out there. And it was so much fun. He loved to have fun.”

  EVEN FOR THOSE WHO weren’t mingling with the famous or soon-to-be-famous, Manhattan could be full of exhilarating new experiences. For young lesbians and gay men exploring their sexuality for the first time, a certain amount of danger was often quite exciting. For some there was even an occasional epiphany.

  It was the summer of 1955 when Roy Aarons found his very first gay bar. “I was twenty-one, going on twenty-two,” and he was handsome. “I walked down an alley and opened a door. There must have been 160 men in the bar. It was all jammed around the bar, with a piano on a pedestal in the middle of the bar. It felt to me like The Wizard ofOz, when the house lands, and she opens the door, and the black-and-white turns to Technicolor—the whole fucking world has suddenly gone to Technicolor. That was exactly how I felt—the power and the impact. That was my initiation. And from then on you couldn’t stop me: I was crazed.”

  Growing up in the Bronx, Aarons had been “totally unaware of the gay scene in New York. There was nothing to read, nothing in the newspapers, nothing in the magazines. The only gay references I got were snide jokes about fags in my family.”

  He discovered his second gay bar one night just after leaving a Passover seder at his aunt’s house on West 73d Street. “It was this little bar called the Cork Club on the south side of 72d Street which I’d seen a million times before. There was something about it which just drew me there. And I walked down, and sure enough, all guys. I can remember there was a Sam Cooke song playing on the jukebox—’You Send Me.’ Every time I hear Sam Cooke do that it brings it all back. Of course I asked people if they knew anywhere else to go. And they told me a great spot down on 45th Street called Artie’s. That was heaven. Interestingly enough, it was a storefront, brightly lit, right on 45th Street between Sixth and Broadway. In fact it was about five or six doors down from the Peppermint Lounge, which later became famous for the Twist. So you would approach Artie’s, and here was this total picture window and it was jammed in there. There was no attempt to darken it.

  “You could see right through the window from the street—at a time when one wondered how that was allowed. I assume there were big payoffs going on. It was all men but nobody could come in and say there was any lewd behavior going on. Rep sweaters and jackets, it was all kind of dressy. It had not gotten to the era of the funky look. It was totally, blatantly open, and it was jammed from stem to stern with gorgeous young college-age men. It was at once the most exciting and frustrating place—because I wanted to start at the front and work my way through to the rear. That became my hangout.

  “Forty-fifth Street was very lively at that time.… Toward Sixth Avenue was another so-called straight bar where people would go do the Twist, but where I would very frequently run into other gays. I remember once I picked up—oh, God, romance—a soldier, and we had a little fling. It was wonderful. I am still in the navy. At this point, I’m living off the ship in Brooklyn Navy Yard. So I couldn’t bring anybody back. I would have to go to their place. Never with another sailor. I was too scared. I knew it was considered sodomy and I could go to jail.

  “You’re living a totally secret life. You’re showing one face to the world, and. you’ve got this whole other thing happening. There was a risk factor, but there was also a certain excitement about that, an illicit excitement. The next thing I heard about were two dancing bars in the Seventies. One was called the Mais Oui and one was called the Bali. Probably 70th Street for the Mais Oui, between Broadway and Amsterdam. The basement of an apartment house. You had to walk down, and they had this secret lighting system. At the Mais Oui, there was always a bouncer to screen you as you came in. A $1.50 cover charge or something like that. They screened you not just for your ID, but they checked you to see if you looked like an
undercover cop. And in fact a couple of times I was taken for that and the lights went on and I was very proud of that.

  “So whenever it looked like an undercover cop was coming in, the lights would suddenly go on and you had to push your partner away and pretend you were sort of standing around. Rock and roll was just coming in—the Mashed Potato and all of that stuff. So you could meet somebody right away and immediately start grinding away without a lot of ceremony.

  “I found it to be very unsatisfying in the long run. There was a kind of ambivalence because it was exciting. There was the promise of sexuality; there was the physical contact; but there was also a lot of rejection. There was attitude. You’d ask somebody you thought was absolutely dandy to dance, and they’d say, ‘No, thank you very much.’ Or you’d get out on the dance floor and the person’s just not responding, just kind of going through the motions. And I was kind of shy to start with. And you begin to get into a pattern: Should I ask this guy? I don’t want to get rebuffed. So there was all that stuff that still exists today.

  “At that point I wasn’t conscious of coupling being a manifestation of the gay existence. What I was doing then was trying to figure out how I was going to work out a normal life—how to be straight. I knew that I had the capacity.” The year after Aarons entered his first gay bar, he met a girl in Washington and had his first sexual experience with a woman. “So I knew I was capable. My essential flaming passion was not there, but I knew I could accomplish and enjoy it. I was trying to convince myself [to be straight] for the next fifteen years.”

  There was another famous cluster of gay bars near Third Avenue in the East Fifties known as the Bird Circuit: the Blue Parrot on 53d, the Golden Pheasant on 48th, the Swan and the 316—at 316 East 54th Street. The Thalia movie theater on West 95th Street was active because it featured foreign films, which attracted an arty crowd. There was also a great deal of outdoor cruising: on Third Avenue between 50th and 57th streets, in Washington Square in the Village, on Central Park West in the Seventies, and around the skating rink in Rockefeller Center.

  “Gay life was secretive,” Jack Dowling remembered. “It was furtive—furtive is a good word to describe the fifties. There were a lot of parties given by people, particularly on the Upper West Side. This was when I first came to New York, and the Upper West Side was the first place I lived. That’s all I knew. We met people with very elegant apartments. West End Avenue was filled with gay guys sharing apartments. I knew a lot of kids who didn’t live in New York. So we would explore gay New York. I don’t think we thought about being gay as something that would eventually become a lifestyle, you know? There wasn’t any example of it. Occasionally we would meet older men who would say that they had been together for a long time, and it seemed peculiar that two men had set up life together, and were living together and had been for thirty-some years. We had a certain admiration for them. But it seemed very odd.”

  Despite the frequent raids on the bars and the possibility of entrapment, Dowling recalled that the streets still had “an outrageous variety of queens parading down them.” In 1993, he said, “There’s a certain behavior that black queens do today, sort of like ‘Look at me, I demand that you see who I am.’ You don’t see as many white people doing that as you did. At that time, it was all white kids doing that.”

  The Bird Circuit was conveniently connected to the gay bars in the Village by the E train, and Frank O’Hara and his friends used to jump on the subway to visit both neighborhoods in one night. At the San Remo on Bleecker Street, the customers ranged from Leonard Bernstein to James Baldwin. “It was a wonderful bar,” said Jack Dowling. “It was all glass, a big long rectangular room and one whole wall of windows looking out on Bleecker Street. It was not the kind of bar you went into to hide because you were open to the world. It was wonderful in the winter watching the snow come down. Inside, it was a brownish room with octagon-shaped orangey lights. But just an Italian neighborhood bar during the daytime. There were a lot of writers and painters who dropped in at night and it would get cruisy, but not like a gay bar; it was more incidental. The activity was probably more like a heterosexual bar than a gay bar, where people are more direct. In the San Remo it was more conversational. Introductions were made and you could talk to people.”

  In the Village, the more conventional gay bars included Mary’s, Main Street, the Eighth Street Bar, and the Old Colony. O’Hara celebrated the nighttime scene in a poem called “Homosexuality”:

  14th Street is drunken and credulous

  53rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

  love a park and the inept a railway station.

  AFTER HIS ADVENTURES in the American Field Service in Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany, Stephen Reynolds moved to New York with “George” (a pseudonym), a man he had met in Boston during the war. Both of them were extremely wealthy. They remained together for thirty-two years, until George died of cancer in 1976. During most of these years, they lived in a “great big formal house” on East 73d Street where they were constantly entertaining.

  In 1992, Reynolds remembered, “We used to have a man who came in and sort of did butler work when we were giving a party. I went to some hateful charity party a couple of years ago, and he saw me, and said, ‘Mr. Reynolds, I’ve kept a record of all the work I’ve ever done. Do you know how much you entertained? In a month, you did at least two and sometimes three dinners for thirty-five or forty. At least once or twice a week you would have at least twelve or fourteen people.’”

  The house had a huge dining room, and the dinner parties always included plenty of women—except when the English actor John Gielgud was their houseguest. “John used to spend a lot of time at our house, and John [couldn’t] stand women. So we would ask ten or twelve boys and someone would play the piano.”

  At seventy-five, Reynolds still cut an elegant figure in Manhattan. He spoke in a gravelly tobacco voice with a patrician accent and chain-smoked the cigarettes that his doctor insisted would be his downfall. “The doctor has told me it’s just a question of time. When he says that, I blow a huge cloud of smoke in his face. Drives him crazy.”

  The walls of his carefully decorated East Side apartment were covered with autographed photographs of the Broadway stars and British royals who had been his close friends. Reynolds described the general decline of New York society disdainfully: “It seems to me that twenty years ago, there was an entirely different social setup than there is today. I mean, I don’t want to name any names, but I don’t think the Donald Trumps would’ve been awfully big.”

  One thing which hadn’t declined at all was Reynolds’s interest in sex. He bragged about the twenty-seven-year-old he was dating, who also had a girlfriend. Once, he reported, the three of them even had lunch together.

  “I think that the main thing is that there was no militancy in the fifties,” Reynolds recalled. “As a result, I think probably we had more fun.… Every generation thinks that their generation had a better time than the one that comes after it. But I do think, in the sense that if we found a place where we could go and relax, it was more of an adventure. I remember George and I went down to a place in the Village. We had to go upstairs, and there we saw [a famous male decorator] dancing with a man. I nearly fainted; we had never seen such a thing as that. We used to call him the Tainted Woman. He’s a charming old friend of mine, and I love and adore him. I thought, Well, this is living! There are two men dancing together! Whereas, now you go down to the Village and they dress like nuns. But it seems to me that when we found a place in New York where we could go, and there would be chums there, it wasn’t daring exactly, it was just an additional little dessert.”

  After his stint in the war, Reynolds’s family wealth meant that he never had to work again. Neither did his lover. “In our youth, we never heard about job discrimination. I was not aware of it because it was a problem I never encountered. I’m sure it existed. I think that people that I knew were either theatrical people, in which case nobody g
ave a damn, or they moved in a crowd in which that was talked about but nobody cared very much. I was always painfully aware that if George and I went to the beach club in Southampton, I could see a couple of people murmuring. But what are you going to do?

  “I didn’t care by then because I was very happy. It did bother me a little, but not a lot. It was muffled; it was unspoken, but it was felt. I think, if I may say so, that George and I sort of had the intelligence to know there were certain things we must not do. I would not propose myself to the Racquet Club. I know many members, but I do not think that I would get into the Racquet Club. Fortunately, I didn’t want to get into the Racquet Club.”

  In 1989, militants in ACT UP would cause an uproar by invading a Sunday Mass conducted by John Cardinal O’Connor. The demonstrators infuriated many devout Catholics and caused a sharp split within the gay community over their tactics. Predictably, in the fifties, everything was more ambiguous: Gays favored much more subtle infiltration tactics. At the same time, the private life of the cardinal spawned a steady stream of ribald rumors.

  “In those days, St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the greatest cruising ground—especially late Mass on Sunday,” Reynolds recalled. “People would stumble in and start carrying on right under the eyes of Nellie Spellbound [Francis Cardinal Spellman]. She was very upset when the pope ordered the cardinals to shorten their trains from ten yards to two!”

  In 1949 Reynolds visited Cherry Grove, the first postwar gay community on Fire Island. “I’d never seen anything like Cherry Grove. It was very small. There was one bathroom for four of us. Pretty bad: everybody was in drag at cocktail parties. It’s not my dish.

  “I went out with Eddie Villela* once. We stayed at the Pines. And of course he had the build of the century. And he had his wife with him.”