The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  Stormé DeLarverie, a cross-dressing lesbian who witnessed the Stonewall riot — and may have helped to precipitate it. “The cop hit me and I hit him back,” She remembered. Courtesy of Stormé DeLarverie. Below: Jack Nicholas (right) and his lover Lige Clarke were the first gay authors to write about Stonewall. Their article appeared in Screw magazine. Courtesy of Eric Stephen Jacobs.

  Howard Rosenman had an affair with Leonard Bernstein in Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. Courtesy of Kitty Hawks. Right: Walter Clemons was denied the Job of daily book critic at the New York Times after the managing editor learned that clemons was gay. Courtesy of Frank Distefano.

  Michael York and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret in 1972. “Screw Maximillian !” York shouted at her. “I do,” Minnelli replied. “So do I!” Courtesy of Springer/Corbis-Bettmann.

  Thousands gathered outside San Fransico’s City hall for a candlelight vigil after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in November 1978. Courtesy of Springer/Corbis-Bettmann.

  Jack Fitzsmmons at Fire Island Pines in 1981. That year the Reagan administration asked him to become an assistant White House counsel, but the offer was rescinded after Fitzsmmons told his boss that he was gay. Courtesy of Philip Gefter.

  Philip Gefter was Fitzsmmons’s lover. Gefter was one of the earliest a ti-AIDS activists in Manhattan. Courtesy of Jonathan Tamarkin.

  This debate within the movement still continues today between those who argue that lesbians and gay men should strive to look and act as much as possible like their heterosexual counterparts, to hasten their acceptance by the larger community, and those like myself who believe that any movement whose essential purpose is to celebrate diversity must be as flexible and inclusive as possible.

  The publication of The Homosexual in America, the founding of the Mattachine Society, the pioneering work of Evelyn Hooker and the first tentative moves toward public lives by a handful of lesbian and gay artists all moved the gay cause cautiously forward. Although Sagarin would gradually be left behind by his more militant followers, he had been among the very first to identify the potential for a movement that would finally burst into the streets in the coming decade.

  “Millions cannot be excluded from government and private employment,” he wrote. “In the millions who are silent and submerged,” he saw “a reservoir of protest, a hope for a portion of mankind. And in my knowledge that our number is legion, I raise my head high and proclaim that we, the voiceless millions, are human beings, entitled to breathe the fresh air and enjoy with all humanity, the pleasures of life and love on God’s green earth.” If an appeal were made “to the American traditions of fair play and equality of opportunity, I am personally convinced that American attitudes will change.” In this “anti-sexual culture it is entirely possible that there is no such thing as a persecution of homosexuality; there may be only a persecution of sexuality.” And in an echo of the sentiments Isherwood had expressed to Vidal, Sagarin concluded, “In arousing the population to the need for such a change, there is a revival of a spirit of humanitarian sympathies” that “will be beneficial to all men and women.”

  III

  The Sixties

  “It was a marvelous time. In the sixties you were knocked in the eyeballs.”

  —DIANA VREELAND

  “The thing that most people don’t realize is that it’s warmer to have long hair. … People with short hair freeze easily. They try to hide their coldness and they get jealous of everybody that’s warm. Then they become either barbers or congressmen.”

  —BOB DYLAN, 1966

  “You do what’s appropriate for the time. That’s it.”

  —STORMÉ DELARVERIE

  “Queen power exploded with all the fury of a gay atomic bomb. Queens, princesses and ladies-in-waiting began hurling anything they could lay their polished, manicured finger nails on. … The lilies of the valley had become carnivorous jungle plants.”

  —New York Daily News, July 6, 1969

  “Do you think homosexuals are revolting?”

  “You bet your sweet ass we are.”

  —Headline on the first leaflet distributed by the Gay Liberation Front, July 1969

  ALL THE CROSSCURRENTS flowing beneath the prevailing calm of the fifties—the black civil rights movement in the south; the books and poems of the Beats; the satire of Tom Lehrer, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce; the subversive rhythms of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly; the explicit sexuality of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Elvis Presley; even the outrageous looks of Liberace and Little Richard—all these converged to create the necessary prologue for the sixties, a ten-year-long convulsion that would electrify the connections between culture and politics in America. For a fleeting moment, millions of members of a new generation would sense synergy between artists and politicians—between Bob Dylan and John Kennedy, rock and roll and the antiwar movement, Aretha Franklin and Martin Luther King, even Janis Joplin and the women’s movement.

  As the new decade began, John Kennedy was the first person to shatter a significant American taboo when he became the only Catholic ever to capture the presidency. Although he won with a tiny plurality of the vote, his victory signaled that the levers of authority might some day become accessible to all kinds of Americans who had been excluded for centuries from real positions of power.

  The triumphs of the black civil rights movement in the first half of the decade—especially the March on Washington in 1963 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964—provided the blueprints for a much broader national liberation, first for women, then for gays and eventually for practically every other oppressed group in America. As Audre Lorde has pointed out, the civil rights movement was “the prototype of every single liberation movement in this country that we are still dealing with.” (As early as 1966, a popular black-and-white civil rights lapel button bearing an equals sign had been reproduced by gay activists with a lavender background.)

  “I think the connections between black liberation and women’s liberation and gay liberation are very deep,” said Grant Gallup, a priest who was active in the civil rights movement. “Many of us who went south to work with Dr. King in the sixties were gay. I remember a plane going down from Chicago. There were six priests, and three of us were gay. A lot of gay people who could not come out for their own liberation could invest the same energies in the liberation of black people.”

  “America changed because of working black southerners who decided they were going to take on America’s apartheid,” said the historian Joan Nestle. “I did voter registration work in Alabama and I saw a working-class black family take on history. But at night, when we would gather and everybody told stories, I couldn’t tell my story. And at that moment, keeping the secret of my queerness did not seem the biggest thing to me. … In fact, I came home with a man, a wonderful man, who … said to me, ‘The one group of people I hate are homosexuals.’”

  The civil rights movement also provided the impetus for the radical student movement, which first got national attention in Berkeley in 1964, exploded at Columbia in 1968, and transformed hundreds of other once somnolent campuses in between and thereafter. Thomas Powers, a fine historian of the period, identified two styles that began to appear among northern white students in the early 1960s: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee vogue “of Levis, denim jackets, dark glasses, and work boots;* and the beat style of army fatigue jackets, long hair, beards, mattresses on the floor and marijuana. The cultural alienation of the beats complemented the inevitable political alienation of the civil rights groups.” Both styles “had a vitality lacking in the conservative political groups.” Student communities in Greenwich Village, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco “provided a concrete image of a way of life which touched the imagination of students throughout the country.” In Cambridge, a Harvard undergraduate who was a freshman in 1965 remembered a floor mate who was openly gay, “and no one ever bothered him a bit.” To his heterosexual classmates, the young man
was just another zany sixties character.

  A broadly based prosperity gave many members of this new generation the luxury of not worrying too much about what they were going to do after college. Instead they spent long periods thinking about how they might reinvent themselves—politically and spiritually.

  Vietnam was the corrosive that dissolved America’s confidence in every kind of conventional wisdom. The student movement was galvanized by the growth of the antiwar movement in 1967 and 1968. The fight to end the war in Vietnam introduced millions of Americans of all ages to the concept of mass political action—and the kind of power that could be wielded in the streets, especially when the national press became mesmerized by such actions. In New York City, political activity of every kind had exploded. By 1968 you could literally “Dial-a-Demonstration.” After the Tet Offensive at the beginning of that year, when the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong simultaneously attacked all the major population centers in South Vietnam, the antiwar movement convinced even the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal that the national establishment could be disastrously mistaken about a crucial matter of public policy.

  THE PACE of social change during this decade was unprecedented in modern American life, and nearly all the social, political and spiritual movements of the sixties contributed to the gestation of gay liberation. In the fifties, the silent generation had venerated conformity; in the sixties, the Vietnam generation celebrated diversity: every type of experimentation, every kind of adventure.

  That was the crucial difference. Because everything was being questioned, for a moment anything could be imagined—even a world in which homosexuals would finally win a measure of equality.

  The two men most responsible for infusing the gay movement with the spirit of the sixties were Franklin Kameny and Jack Nichols, two activists from different generations, with little in common apart from a determination to ignore convention.

  Kameny was a man of absolute convictions and unrelenting intensity. Born to Jewish parents in New York City in 1925, he entered Queens College when he was sixteen. Kameny joined the army in 1943 and saw combat in Holland and Germany. “I fought my way virtually slit trench by slit trench through the Rhineland in the Ninth Army under Simpson, halfway across Germany,” Kameny remembered. “I was in the army of liberation for three months in Czechoslovakia. We knew with absolute certainty we were all going over to the Pacific. And then they dropped the atom bomb and we got ready to go home.” Kameny was convinced that President Truman had done the right thing: “I’ve had no qualms about that at all.”

  He was not sexually active during his army service, so he “missed out on all sorts of endless opportunities.” Kameny said, “I think my army career would have been utterly different if I had just picked up on the right vibrations at the right time. All kinds of passes were made at me, and I was too naive to know anything.” He finally had sex with another man on his twenty-ninth birthday. “Psychologically and emotionally I was quite prepared fifteen years earlier, if only somebody had seduced me.” He laughed at the memory. “I just wish somebody had!”

  Kameny earned his PhD. in astronomy from Harvard in 1956 and went to work for the U.S. Army Map Service in July 1957. He was fired five months later when the government learned of a previous arrest for “lewd conduct.” He filed one of the first lawsuits challenging the exclusion of gay people from federal employment, but all of his efforts ended in failure when the United States Supreme Court refused to hear his case four years later. During this period he was unemployed, and nearly destitute: “For about eight months in 1959 I was living on twenty cents’ worth of food a day. Which even by 1959 prices was not that much. A big day was when I could afford twenty-five cents and put a pat of margarine on my frankfurters and potatoes. I lost so much weight that I couldn’t sleep soundly lying on my side because my knees were too bony to rest comfortably on each other. It was difficult. After that I got a series of jobs as a physicist.” However, without a security clearance, the only companies he could work for were those without any government contracts, so they were “not financially stable,” and they often folded while Kameny was working for them.

  In 1960, the same year that John Kennedy was elected president, Kameny met Jack Nichols, a Washington native who had come out to himself and his FBI-agent father when he was still in high school. Nichols had been radicalized by reading The Homosexual in America when he was fifteen. Four decades later, he still remembered which lines affected him the most. Sagarin had borrowed them from W. E. B. Du Bois: “The worst effect of slavery was to make the Negroes doubt themselves and share in the general contempt for black folk.” Sagarin suggested that the same was true of lesbians and gay men. In November 1961, Nichols and Kameny founded an independent chapter of the Mattachine Society in Washington.* The two men had a completely different attitude from the quiet dissidents who had preceded them.

  “As we got into things it became very very clear that one of the major stumbling blocks to any progress was going to be this attribution of sickness,” Kameny remembered. “An attribution of mental illness in our culture is devastating, and it’s something which is virtually impossible to get beyond. So the first thing was to find out if this was factually based or not. I had no idea what I was going to find. So I looked and I was absolutely appalled.” Everything Kameny encountered was “sloppy, slovenly, slipshod, sleazy science—social and cultural and theological value judgments, cloaked and camouflaged in the language of science, without any of the substance of science. There was just nothing there. … All psychiatry assumed that homosexuality is psychopathological. It was garbage in, garbage out.”

  In New York in 1964, Kameny declared, “Our opponents will do a fully adequate job of presenting their views, and will not return us the favor of presenting ours; we gain nothing in virtue by presenting theirs, and only provide the enemy … with ammunition to be used against us.” Kameny was speaking in a period when gay publications like Mattachine Review and One still routinely printed psychiatric opinions describing homosexuality as an illness—and that particular practice became the focus of Kameny’s most important philosophical campaign. “I do not see the NAACP … worrying about which chromosome and gene produced a black skin, or about the possibility of bleaching the Negro,” Kameny explained. “I do not see any great interest on the part of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League in the possibility of solving problems of anti-Semitism by converting Jews to Christians. … We are interested in obtaining rights for our respective minorities as Negroes, as Jews, and as Homosexuals.” Then he added words that echoed those of Christopher Isherwood, who had argued in his letter to Gore Vidal in 1948 that successful, committed relationships between two members of the same sex were actually beneficial to society as a whole.

  “I take the stand that not only is homosexuality … not immoral,” said Kameny, “but that homosexual acts engaged in by consenting adults are moral, in a positive and real sense, and are right, good and desirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which they live.”

  Kameny and his Washington cohort forced federal officials to meet with them to discuss their exclusionary policies as early as October 1962, the same month as the Cuban missile crisis. They didn’t change any minds, but they made the bureaucrats aware of their existence. In the summer of 1963, Kameny, Nichols and five others formed their own (unidentified) gay contingent in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, March on Washington. A few months later, Kameny recruited his first significant ally from the liberal heterosexual community. In March 1964, he persuaded the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the Civil Service Commission’s regulations excluding gays from federal employment. Five months later, the D.C. ACLU condemned the government’s exclusion of homosexuals as “discriminatory” and urged an end to the policy of “rejection of homosexuals.” Then the ACLU took the case of Bruce Scott, who had been rejected for a federal job because of “convincing evidence” of gay conduct. At its co
nvention in 1964, the national ACLU adopted the position of its Washington chapter, a major victory for the gay movement. (Since 1957, the ACLU had explicitly supported the constitutionality of sodomy laws and federal regulations denying employment to gay men and lesbians.) In July 1965, the United States Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that the charges against Bruce Scott were too vague to disqualify him for federal employment.

  The previous fall, Washington had been rocked by a “homosexual scandal” when Walter Jenkins, a top aide in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, was arrested for lewd conduct in the basement men’s room of a YMCA—just weeks before a presidential election. Johnson immediately demanded Jenkins’s resignation, and the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, decided not to make the incident a major issue in the campaign. However, in a speech for Goldwater, Richard Nixon asserted that Americans would “not stand for immorality in the White House” and called on Johnson to tell the nation everything he knew about this “sick man.” The New York Times declared that “the public can easily understand that men at the summit of government are subject to human frailty,” but added, “there can be no place on the White House staff … for a person of markedly deviant behavior.”

  In the scandal’s most surprising episode, J. Edgar Hoover inadvertently redirected attacks on the White House to himself when the press reported that he had sent flowers to Jenkins with a card inscribed “J. Edgar Hoover and Associates.” The Times wrote that right-wing critics had reacted to the gesture with “shock, disbelief, and even outrage.” Former Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota demanded to know whether the FBI or its director “was involved in such a way that it fears being hurt by some revelation Jenkins could make.” The congressman said the FBI had been “compromised” by Hoover’s bouquet. A bureau spokesman confirmed that Jenkins and Hoover were good friends, but declined further comment. As usual, Washington’s underlying fear of Hoover made him immune to all criticism.