The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  “I remember when I first got laid [with a girl], at sixteen, and somehow the word got around. I remember a football player friend of mine with whom I worked as a lifeguard said something to the effect of, ‘Gee, I’ve always been kind of shy around you because I never knew you would do anything like that. I feel a lot more comfortable with you now.’ And I was crazy about him. I just thought, Well, how sweet. I’ve made the grade! I’m in with the guys now.”

  Clemons got his first short story published in Scholastic magazine while he was still in high school. He chose to go on to Princeton “because of Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson and wanting to write songs for the Triangle Show.” His dream came true: “I was the musical director of the Triangle Show.” He was a tall, blond, good-looking Texan, but he went through college without ever having sex with a man. Then he won a Rhodes Scholarship, and he didn’t have sex at Magdalen College in Oxford, either. “There was all sorts of activity at Magdalen. Sort of everywhere but nowhere. I don’t know if anybody was actually doing anything, but there was a lot of affection and flirting and all that. I was in no position to know if anybody was getting it on. But surely they were. I would have been so racked with guilt if I’d done anything, and I’m sure they were doing it all without worrying about it. I’m sure many of those people went through what I had read about: they did it and then it was a passing phase. They went on and got married. I have often thought that if I had had a passage of homosexual activity in my teens I might have been much more comfortable. Who knows?”

  The Korean War was on and, after Oxford, Clemons would have been vulnerable to the draft. But during his final six months abroad he was diagnosed with diabetes. He took a job as an ordinary seaman on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico which was surveying the gulf’s bottom for oil-well drilling.

  “I had some very close friends among those men, and a particular friendship with one of the most wonderful guys I ever knew, perfectly straight, very affectionate and physical. His name was L. D. Harris.

  “L.D. was my age. He was draped around me at all times, and, to my horror, one of the older guys said, ‘There are two guys that ought to just fuck each other and get it over with!’

  “I just froze. And my friend hugged me, and said to this guy, ‘Oh, toilet-mouth, you’d say anything!’ He didn’t have the slightest worry about it. That was really one of the happiest moments of my life.”

  L.D. was a particular kind of male heterosexual cherished by gay men everywhere: someone so confident of his orientation that he never feels threatened by the homosexuality of anyone else. “He was, therefore, very affectionate with me,” said Clemons. “He was a terrific fellow. He was tirelessly heterosexual and a very cute country boy.”

  Arthur Laurents recalled many similar experiences. “I have noticed that straight men who are secure in their sexuality are very affectionate, very often physically,” said Laurents. “They feel no threat. They are the ones who really hug you. They kiss you. And there’s not a slight whiff of sexuality about it. They’re not afraid of themselves, is what it is.”

  Most of the crew on Clemons’s boat came from one little Texas town north of Dallas called Quenlin. The total population was six hundred. “They would fix me up with girls, and I would fuck one of the local girls and I was one of the gang,” he said.

  Finally, on a trip home to Houston, Clemons had his first gay sexual experience. “I was doing some work in the public library, and there was a men’s room at the bottom of the public library where I discovered that guys were exhibiting themselves and tempting the passersby, and I simply went down there and picked somebody up and went back with him to his room at the Y, where I fucked him and he fucked me. And I said that I had never done this before, and he didn’t believe me. I said, ‘No, I’m telling the truth. I’ve just imagined it.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’ve got some imagination!’ He was a very nice man and I never saw him again, although I often think of him as some sort of lucky first encounter.

  “After this first experience, I went over to my girlfriend’s house, just dazed. But my thought was, I’ve done this once and if you don’t do it again it will just be an experiment”—another typical reaction to an initial encounter. “I abstained for a solid year after that. I continued with this girl, with whom I became impotent with guilt. I think I was so full of conflict that the relationship began to fall to pieces. And then I didn’t want to fuck her anymore.

  “It was no longer possible for me to continue the fantasy that I would outgrow this. It didn’t seem possible for me to continue a relationship with a woman with whom I would probably be unfaithful. And so I gradually just withdrew from it.”

  After a year at sea, Clemons had accumulated enough money to go to Europe, so he lived in London and Paris for a couple of years before moving to New York in 1958. In London, he was cruised on the streets of Chelsea. He began to think “that queers had funny eyes. I was afraid that I would get to look like that. And I only gradually worked out what it was. It’s the cautious homosexuals that looked at you without moving their face. In order not to be caught looking, you’re suddenly aware that you’re being looked at by a face that’s frankly not looking at you at all. So the eyes look very peculiar. It’s a kind of snake-eyed look.”

  His short stories were published in Harper’s Bazaar and Ladies’ Home Journal, among other periodicals. There was nothing gay about any of Clemons’s fiction, and many of his straight friends were unaware of his orientation. He was an elegant man, with the understated air of a patrician from Texas. He had great confidence in his own intelligence, but he was never boastful. After he moved to New York in the sixties, he escorted many of the city’s most elegant women. He did have one long-term relationship with a man he adored, but many of his closest friends never met his companion: like so many members of his generation, Clemons would always lead a compartmentalized life. But while he remained very discreet, by the time he was thirty, all of his inhibitions about having sex with men had disappeared.

  FOR MORE THAN thirty years after World War II, beginning with the widespread availability of penicillin and other antibiotics, sexually active Americans enjoyed a kind of liberty that was without precedent in modern times: an almost total freedom from fear of sexually transmitted diseases. For the first time in many centuries, syphilis and gonorrhea became inconveniences instead of catastrophes. Eventually, medical advances would contribute to a dramatic change in the way Americans of all persuasions thought about sex. But because of the sexual taboos of the fifties, many heterosexual New Yorkers had to wait for the arrival of the Pill—and a whole new set of sixties attitudes—before their sexual revolution began.

  Gay New Yorkers did not have to wait. “It was vividly exciting to sneak around and be in a black tie at a party and make connection with somebody’s eye across the room and meet later after we dumped our dates,” said Clemons. And although the scene was much more furtive than it would be two decades later, on any given night in the fifties it could be just as wild as it would be seven nights a week in the seventies.

  Clemons was never concerned about catching anything. “Nobody worried about it a bit. You never had a tremor: if you saw somebody you wanted, you went for it. I went to the baths. I went to the Everhard. It cost something like six dollars. I always went at night, and I often stayed all night.*

  “If you got a locker, you put your clothes in the locker. If you took a cubicle, you hung your clothes up in your cubicle. Then you had a little knee-length white gown to wrap yourself in, which you usually wore loose with your cock hanging out. The stomach-downs wanted to be fucked. I guess you could have sex with as many as a dozen people. There were group scenes. There was a very impressive steam-bath room down in the lower level, as well as a swimming pool and a big sort of cathedral-like sauna room. It was very steamy and you could hardly see. You could stumble into multiple combinations.”

  Once he picked up a man at the baths who was “just hot as a firecracker but clearly under pressure. I went off to
the bathroom and came back to the cubicle and he had dressed and vanished. I was quite hurt. Then I saw his picture in the paper the next day.” He had been arrested for hit-and-run driving.

  Clemons also went to a bathhouse on West 58th Street near Columbus Circle. “Once in the afternoon, Truman Capote entered and I quickly left. I didn’t know Truman Capote, but I didn’t want to be in the same baths with him. Nureyev used to hang out there, and so did Lincoln Kirstein, but I never saw either of them. But the word was around. There was a rather friendly guy at the front desk who I was sort of chatty with, and he would say, ‘You don’t have any luck. Nureyev was here last night and you missed him again. The best legs I’ve ever seen!’”

  The Penn Post baths across the street from Penn Station were popular at lunchtime and with the commuter crowd in the late afternoon. Murray Gitlin remembered “a room with a lot of double bunks and a steam room slippery with slime. I was lying on the upper bunk at the end of Penn Post, and I heard this very erudite conversation, and I looked down and it was Lincoln Kirstein.”

  After Clemons’s collection of short stories was published in 1959, he made extra money playing the piano in Manhattan nightclubs like the RSVP, where Mabel Mercer was a regular performer. Downtown on West 9th Street, Clemons frequented a popular gay restaurant called the Lion, where he first heard an unseasoned woman singer from Brooklyn.

  “It was before I went off to Rome. When her first record came out and we began to hear about her in Rome, somebody brought me the record and I looked at that face and realized it was a much-glamorized photo of this awful girl that I had heard in the Lion [in 1960]. She was hostile and terribly nervous. She had no contact with the audience and was hunched over the microphone and made something that was supposed to be patter, but was so convoluted and interior that all you felt was this hostility and terrible resentment from this ugly girl. I remember her singing ‘Cry Me a River.’ It was a very muffled act. It must have been one of her very first appearances because she was so tense. It was memorable not because we saw a great star, but because we saw this awful girl.” Despite the way Clemons remembered her, Barbra Streisand won the amateur talent competition at the Lion four weekends in a row.

  Streisand was “discovered” three years later by Arthur Laurents, when he directed her in Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway in 1962. “One day this girl came in [wearing] these bizarre thrift-shop clothes,” Laurents recalled. “She was nineteen. She started to sing, and I thought, My God, Yve never heard anything like this.” But the show’s producer, David Merrick, agreed with Walter Clemons. Merrick kept saying, “She’s so unattractive,” and he tried to get Laurents to fire her “every night of rehearsal and out of town.” But Streisand “knew she was going to be a star right then and there,” said Laurents. “And she made sure you knew.”

  JACK DOWLING first reached Manhattan by bicycle when he was thirteen, in 1945, right after the war ended. He pedaled there from Sewaren, thirty miles away, near the Jersey Shore. “It took me all day to get here and then all day to get home, which left about a half an hour to explore the city. I remember leaving in the morning on a Sunday and getting here late afternoon, passing through Staten Island and taking the ferry.

  “When I started to come by bus I was fourteen or fifteen. I wasn’t quite sure of what I was looking for. It would have been something that wasn’t happening where I was living, something that wasn’t happening at home. The beat of the city fascinated me. I needed to see whatever city life might eventually hold.”

  By the mid-fifties he had a pretty good idea of gay life’s parameters. He recalled one night in Manhattan in 1951: “You go to a bar like New Verdi on Verdi Square on the east side of Amsterdam. There’s not even a bar there now. Hang out drinking beer with a lot of other people that you know. Then you all get in a cab and race down the West Side Highway and go to Mary’s on 8th Street. Go down the street to Main Street and the Old Colony, and then decide the Village is dead—mostly because nobody has cruised you. So you get back in another cab, with another group, and go back to the West Side. There was another bar on 72d Street, the Cork Club, and we would hit that. By now it’s getting close to closing and somebody suggests an after-hours party. There was a church a few blocks from the bar, and somebody knows the guy who is the rector. The rector is gay. So this whole gang pours into the rectory—this is after four in the morning—and then somebody discovers the unlocked door from the rectory into the church, so then everybody pours into the church. There wasn’t sexual carrying on, but there was a lot of camping. Music was being played on the organ. By now it’s past five o’clock in the morning. People are drunk, taking down drapes and wearing them. And then it suddenly dawned on everybody that the church was going to be used pretty soon. We were smoking in there, and people had beer. The place was a mess. So we rushed around and tried to make it all right. It was not exactly a wild night as far as sex goes, but there was always that edge, much more so than now—running on danger—since it was dangerous everywhere. You were always playing and teasing with that aspect of life in the city.

  “We also used to go to Lucky’s in Harlem. It was a big bar where the waiters and waitresses would sing, and the patrons would sing, and people would come and listen to jazz. It was a straight bar, but there were a lot of gay people from downtown, and there were a lot of gay black guys there.

  “Nights went on forever in New York. It was hot. You could take the subways and in minutes be in other gay places. It was dark and shadowy because the streetlights were not as bright as they are now.

  “It was a very casual time. I used to leave the San Remo when it closed in my Packard convertible. With a friend, I would take the car off the road in Central Park and drive across the meadow. We would cruise the park, then pick cherry blossoms from behind the Metropolitan Museum, filling up the rumble seat. On the way home, we would drop the boughs off at sleeping friends’ apartments before going home to bed ourselves. Although there was police repression against gays, the police were really quite naive. You could go cruising across the lawns of Central Park in an old car, and if they saw you, they probably wouldn’t believe it.”

  FOR LESBIANS AND GAY MEN coming of age in this period, the Kinsey Report made an enormous difference. Despite all the emphasis on conformity, for the first time in the country’s history, there was at least a muted minority point of view about what it meant to be a homosexual.

  Three other events of the fifties were crucial to the birth of the gay liberation movement at the end of the following decade, and two of them occurred in 1951. The first was the founding of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles by Harry Hay, whose political awakening had started when he joined the Communist party and participated in a general strike in San Francisco in 1934. Mattachine took its name from the court jesters of the Middle Ages who were permitted to speak brutal social truths from behind their masks. In the summer of 1950, Hay tried to accumulate names for a gay rights organization by circulating a petition against the Korean War on gay beaches in Los Angeles. But when he raised the subject of growing federal harassment of homosexuals, the petition signers were far too fearful to join an avowedly gay organization. “We didn’t know at that point that there had ever been a gay organization of any sort, anywhere in the world before,” said Hay. “Absolutely no knowledge of that. So we thought that we had to be very, very careful” because “if we made a mistake, and got into the papers the wrong way, we could hurt the idea of a movement for years to come. And we were terrified of doing that.”

  After months of discussion with four cofounders, in the winter of 1951 Hay decided to model the society’s organization on the structure of the Communist party, with strict secrecy and a carefully defined hierarchy. The first goal would be to change the self-image of gay people to produce a “new pride—a pride in belonging, a pride in participating in the cultural growth and the social achievements of… the homosexual minority.” A New York chapter soon followed, but it would take another twenty years befo
re that pride became the common goal of thousands of gay Americans.

  After the founding of the Mattachine Society, for the first time sophisticated heterosexuals had somewhere to go when they wanted to find gay American men who considered themselves well-adjusted. The first person to take significant advantage of this opportunity was Dr. Evelyn Hooker, an iconoclastic psychologist at the University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Hooker had plenty of gay friends, including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and his lover, Don Bachardy. Isherwood described her in the same way that many people had described Kinsey, which may explain why she and Kinsey reached such dramatically different conclusions from other scientists of this period. “She never treated us like some strange tribe,” said Isherwood, “so we told her things we never told anyone before.”

  Hooker had been invited to attend some of the first public meetings of the Mattachine Society, and some of her gay friends urged her to analyze their behavior. She decided to apply for a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study homosexual men. To her astonishment, despite the wave of McCarthyite attacks coming out of Washington, her grant application was accepted. But she always denied that her action had required any courage: “Curiosity and empathy were what compelled me to do my study,” she said.

  The Mattachine Society helped her to recruit thirty gay men; then she found another thirty heterosexual men to act as her control group, including policemen and firemen. The two groups were matched in IQ, age, and education levels. All of the men were given three standard personality tests, including the Rorschach inkblot test. Because nearly all psychologists and psychiatrists in this period believed that homosexuality was a symptom of mental illness, “Every clinical psychologist… would tell you that if he gave those projective tests he could tell whether a person was gay or not,” Dr. Hooker said. “I showed that they couldn’t do it. I was very pleased with that.”