The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  The psychologist presented her findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1956 and published them the following year in “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” in The Journal of Projective Techniques. The conservative psychoanalytic establishment immediately attacked her and tried to prove that she was “crazy.” But her gay friends were thrilled: “This is great,” they said. “We knew it all the time!” Using widely accepted standardized tests, she had proved for the first time that “gay men can be as well adjusted as straight men and some are even better adjusted than some straight men.”

  Although it would be years before she convinced many of her colleagues of the accuracy of her findings, Dr. Hooker’s work provided the framework that made it possible for the American Psychiatric Association to rethink its position on this subject seventeen years later. It also gave gay men hope, when they needed it most, that the psychiatric establishment might some day change its attitude toward their orientation. Dr. Hooker’s work made her one of the earliest and most important heterosexual allies of lesbians and gay men in America. In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, she would be the star of many gay-pride events. She died at her home in Santa Monica in 1996, at the age of eighty-nine.

  THE THIRD CRITICAL intellectual event for homosexuals in the 1950s was the publication of a book that would become the bible of the early gay movement. William Wynkoop was a college English professor when he walked into a Doubleday bookstore in Detroit in 1951 and learned about it. He was talking to the store’s gay manager about “how terrible” conditions were for gay people at the time.

  “We were old enough then to really see the horror that was being perpetrated on us,” Wynkoop recalled four decades later. “And the manager said, ‘Well, something is happening! It’s the beginning of a change! We’ve got to organize.’” He had just received a review copy of this new book: “‘It lays it on the line! And it’s a very fearless book.’”

  The book was called The Homosexual in America, and it was the first essential document of gay liberation in the United States. It was published under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory. The author was a man with a wife and son, whose family knew nothing about his secret life as a gay oracle. His real name was Edward Sagarin, and he lived in Brooklyn. Sagarin was the friend of a printer who did work for Greenberg, which had published a few gay novels. The printer introduced Sagarin to a Greenberg editor named Brandt Aymar. After the war, Aymar and Jae Greenberg had been indicted on a federal charge of sending obscene materials through the mail.

  The offending books were three volumes of gay fiction—Quatrefoil, a fine wartime novel by James Fugate; The Divided Path; and The Invisible Glass. Vociferous complaints from the mother of one of their mail-order customers resulted in the indictment. After the charges had dragged on for five years, they were settled for a fine of $3,500—and a promise to keep the three novels out of print.

  But no official ever challenged the right to publish The Homosexual in America. “It was well accepted all over the country,” Aymar remembered forty-four years after he published it. There were seven printings of the book between 1951 and 1957. For the thousands of gay readers who discovered it at stores across the country, it was a revelation. Sagarin had participated in “American life as a homosexual” since the 1920s, and he provided the most comprehensive description of gay male life in America ever written. He also sketched a broad plan to revolutionize American attitudes on the subject. Two appendixes referred the reader to 59 nonfiction works and 213 novels and dramas with a gay theme or character.

  William Wynkoop was overwhelmed when he read it. “I said, ’This is amazing! This is a breakthrough that has never occurred in history before!’” His lover Roy Strickland agreed: “This was a revolutionary book.”

  Sagarin’s preface recorded the author’s typical, tortured journey, which made it clear that like nearly all lesbians and gay men, he did not feel that he was a victim of recruitment. He recounted his first attraction to another man, his complete ignorance of “any facts about homosexuality,” and his “deep shock” when a teacher in high school took him aside and explained to him that there were people “called inverts.” After that Sagarin read every book he could find on the subject, and “sought to understand why I could not be like others.”

  He felt “deeply ashamed of being abnormal and was aware of the heavy price that must be paid if anyone were to discover my secret.… I struggled against my homosexuality, sought to discipline myself to overcome it, punished myself for failures to resist sinful temptations. But the struggles did nothing to diminish the needs within me.” And like many of the men studied by the army during World War II, he alternately felt “trapped by a human tragedy to which I could never adjust, or blessed as one of the elite of the world.”

  But Sagarin’s experiences with men discouraged him from believing in the possibility of a long-term homosexual relationship: “Passionate infatuations that seemed permanent were torn asunder after only a short period of time.… It appeared to me that I faced a life of dissipation, a hopeless dead-end.” So when he discovered at twenty-five that he was “capable of consummating a marriage,” he married his childhood sweetheart. His final solution was typical of his generation—a marriage that lasted until the end of his life, and a simultaneous love affair with a black boyfriend.

  The Homosexual in America was a call to arms, an attack on every anti-homosexual prejudice. As the historian John D’Emilio pointed out, it “not only provided gay men and women with a tool for reinterpreting their lives; it also implied that the conditions of life had changed sufficiently so that the book’s message might find a receptive audience.”

  Sagarin declared that being homosexual “is as involuntary as if it were inborn,” and he decried the fact that homosexuals were the only significant minority without “a spokesman, a leader, a publication, an organization, a philosophy of life,” or even “an accepted justification” for their own existence. “There is surely no group of such size, and yet with so few who acknowledge that they belong.”

  To make money and to educate the faithful, Sagarin joined forces with his editor, Brandt Aymar, and opened a gay bookstore called the Book Seller, on Second Avenue near 49th Street. Gore Vidal was among the many gay authors who did signings there. Sagarin and Aymar also started a gay book club called the Cory Book Service (after Sagarin’s pseudonym). The club flourished for about a year, until it ran out of new titles to offer.

  Sagarin said his “friends” attacked the homosexual for lying to everyone, including himself. Then he identified the dilemma confronting almost every gay person in the fifties: If he was honest about who he was, he faced “discrimination and social ostracism.” But if he disguised his true nature to protect himself, he was denounced for “living a life that is a lie.” And he wrote, “In this situation, the dominant heterosexual group is without an answer.”

  Dozens of his declarations foreshadowed themes that would dominate gay political debates for the rest of the twentieth century. For example, he attributed the promiscuity of many gay men to the lack of any “social, legal or ecclesiastical pressure to bind together the homosexual union,” a precursor of subsequent arguments in favor of gay marriages. He also believed that heterosexual men would be just as promiscuous as homosexuals if they had the chance: “The fact is that every male who is not woefully undersexed is essentially an undiscriminating satyr. Most men want women. They want many females, and any females. They will whistle after every girl on the street, unless restrained by social convention; they will visit the prostitute without knowing in advance what that partner will look like. … The woman on the other hand is restrained.… The key to the puzzle … of homosexual promiscuity is … quite simple: the promiscuous (heterosexual) male meets the discriminating (heterosexual) female” who acts as a restraint, while “the promiscuous (homosexual) male meets the promiscuous (homosexual) male, and the restraints are entirely removed.”

  Other students of thi
s question argue that the absence of a normal adolescence leads many gay men to be promiscuous young adults. “One of the reasons gay men deal badly with dating and relationships is that they’re not trained in the same way as heterosexuals,” said Tom Stoddard, one of the most effective gay activists of the eighties and nineties. “They lose that experience in adolescence and have to make up for it in some fashion. I think of all the experiences I missed when I was in high school and college because I was not a sexual person, when all of my peers, except for the gay ones, were experimenting and learning and having a good time. It’s one of the reasons that many gay men in their twenties and thirties, perhaps even later, act like adolescents. First of all, it’s a lot of fun, at least for a while. And, secondly, they never had an opportunity to progress or to learn. You had no examples—nothing even to read about the subject, other than hostile stuff. In the good world of the future, I think that won’t happen. They will be adolescents at an appropriate time in their lives.”

  Sagarin’s original radicalism was suggested by his attack on those who advocated “tolerance” for homosexuals. “Tolerance is the ugliest word in our language,” he wrote. “We appeal to people to be tolerant of others—in other words to be willing to stand them … I can’t see why anyone should be struggling to be tolerated. If people are not good, they should not be tolerated, and if they are good, they should be accepted,” This attitude would also become a leitmotif of the gay movement three decades later.

  Sagarin was also one of the first to describe what would later be widely labeled as internalized homophobia:

  The prejudice of the dominant group, seen everywhere … is most demoralizing when we homosexuals realize to what extent we have accepted hostile attitudes as representing an approximation of the truth. … A person cannot live in an atmosphere of universal rejection … without a fundamental influence on his personality.… There is no Negro problem except that created by whites; no Jewish problem except that created by gentiles … and no homosexual problem except that created by the heterosexual society. … The very impact of the words I am a homosexual… forced me at… all moments of the day to convince myself that I was as good as the next person; in fact better.

  Sagarin believed the main problem for the homosexual was the hypocrisy of the antisexual society he lived in. He wrote that “Sexual freedom is actually being practiced on a very wide scale in modern life,” despite its condemnation “by school, church, newspapers and government. … In modern anti-sexual society, [even] the heterosexual is tolerated only because he is necessary for the propagation of the species,” while “the virgin and the chaste are glorified as pristine purity.”

  He called for the abolition of all laws regulating sex.* “All sexual activity [should be] accepted as equally correct,” Sagarin wrote, “so long as it is entered into voluntarily by the parties involved, they are perfectly sane and above a reasonable age of consent, free of communicable disease, and no duress or misrepresentation is employed.”

  And he identified the essential fact about all lesbians and gay men, the element that paradoxically undermined their confidence and simultaneously imbued them with a sense of superiority: “the dominant factor in my life, towering in importance above all others, is a consciousness that I am different. In one all-important respect, I am unlike the great mass of people always around me, and the knowledge of this fact is with me at all times, influencing profoundly my every thought. … To my heterosexual friends and readers” who are baffled by “the desire that I always carry within me, I can only state that I find their own sexual personality just as much an enigma.”

  Most importantly, he framed what would become a four-decade-long debate about the tyranny of the closet—and accurately predicted the impact of its destruction. “Many homosexuals consider that their greatest fortune, their one saving grace, has been the invisibility of the cross which they have had to bear,” Sagarin wrote toward the end of his book. “Actually, the inherent tragedy—not the saving grace—of homosexuality is found in the ease of concealment. If the homosexual were as readily recognizable as … members of… other minority groups, the social condemnation could not possibly exist. Stereotype thinking on the part of the majority would … collapse of its own absurdity if all of us who are gay were known for what we are.… If only all of the inverts, the millions in all lands, could simultaneously rise up in our full strength!”

  Sadly, Sagarin never took his own advice on this subject, a failure that contributed to his eventual estrangement from the vanguard of the movement he did so much to create.

  WILLIAM WYNKOOP was thirty-three in 1949 when he met the thirty-one-year-old Roy Strickland on a park bench in Washington Square in Greenwich Village. It was an unusually mild evening in December. Strickland was the young man from Long Island who had suffered through unsuccessful male hormone treatments paid for by his sister. Now he was working in window display at a department store. Wynkoop was a Dartmouth graduate who had become a college English professor. As a gay man in 1949, his thinking was decades ahead of its time.

  Until he met Strickland, Wynkoop remembered, “There wasn’t one homosexual that I had talked to—or gone to bed with—who shared my view that we were not abnormal and sick.” His contemporaries told him they had never heard anything like his philosophy before. “I said, we are not inferior in any sense,” Wynkoop recalled. “We don’t produce babies, thank heavens, because there are too many being born as it is. But so far as our own pleasure in sex is concerned, I’m convinced the pleasure of most homosexuals in sexual activities is equal in passion and enjoyment to that which the majority of heterosexuals experience. The choice we made was to be true to ourselves.

  “The world regarded us as flibbertigibbets. That was the general view of homosexual men, that they were childish, depraved, and degenerate. That was the favorite word of heterosexual society in referring to us. Degenerate people who are incapable of any lasting relationship—they are too unstable, too childish, and too vicious.” This aspect of the psychiatric profession’s formal judgment was its most damaging: the notion that all homosexuals were the victims of some kind of arrested development, coupled with the idea that nearly all of them could change, if only they exerted the will to do so. “I knew from the depths of my soul that this was not true. And yet I would get no support from fellow male homosexuals.” When Wynkoop made his speech about the health of the average gay man in front of Strickland’s roommate on West 9th Street, the roommate told Strickland, “This one’s crazy. You’ve got to turn him in for another one.” Strickland ignored the advice. In 1996, he and Wynkoop celebrated their forty-seventh anniversary together.

  Two years after Wynkoop met Strickland, The Homosexual in America was published. “Before this came out the majority of people that I remember hearing talk about gays—‘faggots,’ as they would call us—were convinced that we choose this lifestyle,” said Wynkoop. The book attracted a devoted following, even though, as Strickland remembered, “You would never see anybody reading it on the subway or a bus because of the title.” And although it was stocked by many stores, “People were afraid to go in and ask.”

  Wynkoop and Strickland wrote to the author in care of his publisher, and Sagarin soon wrote back to invite Wynkoop to meet him for a drink at a hotel on Madison Avenue, right next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When Wynkoop arrived at the appointed hour, he saw a single man at the bar—very short and hunched. “I do remember the shock that I got when he moved off that stool at the bar,” said Wynkoop, who remembered Sagarin being severely crippled and stooped.

  Later Sagarin invited Wynkoop and Strickland out to Brooklyn to meet his family. “My wife and child don’t know anything about this,” Sagarin told Wynkoop a few weeks after their first meeting. “He said, ‘I would like very much for you to come out there, to meet them, and for them to meet you. But if you do, don’t say anything that would reveal what I am,’” Wynkoop declined the offer. “That sort of turned me off. I greatly admired his ability, bu
t I didn’t feel much rapport with him. He was such an entirely different type of man than I was.”

  However, in 1952, Wynkoop and Strickland did accompany Sagarin to a meeting of the Veterans Benevolent Association, one of the first gay groups in New York City, founded in 1945. Under discussion that evening was a motion to admit a new member. “Two or three of the members got up and in pretty strong terms opposed his being taken in,” William Wynkoop recalled. “And I remember wondering, What in the world are they opposing him for? The guy is gay, he’s apparently a veteran, and he wants to be a member. And he’s a man. Then it came out after some discussion. He was an effeminate man, and they didn’t want to have anything to do with effeminate male homosexuals. This made me boil.” Wynkoop put his hand up during the meeting, but he was never allowed to speak. “When we went out, I said I thought that was absolutely infuriating. This is not what we’re fighting for”—yet another form of discrimination. And Sagarin said, “Well, they were in the army and so they’re very macho, and they don’t want to be identified. They felt that it was just too risky to accept a member who was effeminate.”

  A month after the 7960 presidential election, Gore Vidal greeted John F. Kennedy as Kennedy arrived at the Morosco Theatre to see The Best Man, Vidal’s Broadway hit (and future movie), which had a gay subplot. Courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettmann.

  Jack Nichols headed the first gay picket line in front of the White House in 1965. Frank Kameny was right behind him. These two men did more than anyone else to infuse the gay movement with the spirit of the isixties. Courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettmann.

  The Beatles and their gay manager, Brian Epstein, in London, July 1966. When Epstein first saw them perform, it was literally love at first sight. Courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettmann.