One of the first things Rosenthal noticed after he returned to New York after a long absence was how obvious homosexuals had become on the city’s streets. To explain this phenomenon, he assigned the kind of story he would become famous for: a huge attention-getting account that purported to tell the reader everything he needed to know about a particular subject.
In the early 1960s, The New York Times was much more than the newspaper of record. It was the bible of the eastern liberal establishment, the media outlet that set the tone for the coverage of every important story in America. Its news judgment was considered unimpeachable by all other serious newspapers and every network news broadcast. In this period before Watergate and Ben Bradlee made the Washington Post a significant competitor, the Times was the newspaper almost every ambitious print reporter dreamed of working for. Its long page-one stories on sociological subjects were studied by the intelligentsia as if they were the secular equivalent of papal encyclicals.
This was the headline at the bottom of the front page on December 17, 1963:
GROWTH OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN
The story was written by Robert Doty, who had recently returned from a foreign assignment. It began with a routine report about the closings of two more “homosexual haunts,” but quickly declared its main purpose: “The city’s most sensitive open secret—the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness—has become the subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders and the police.”
The article was a breakthrough simply because of the amount of attention it devoted to a sexual subject, since any explicit discussion of sex was generally discouraged in the gray pages of the Times.* It was most startling because of its length: five thousand words on the growing angst of the city’s fathers over this disturbing phenomenon. Homosexual bars, it explained “are only a small part of the homosexual problem in New York. … Sexual inverts have colonized three areas of the city. The city’s homosexual community acts as a lodestar, attracting others from all over the country.” It was the kind of derisive treatment from which Jews, blacks, and Puerto Ricans were protected in the pages of the Times. But none of the reporters in the newsroom challenged its appropriateness for homosexuals. Unlike these other minorities, gay people were a “curable” problem, as the story made clear right from the start:
The old idea, assiduously propagated by homosexuals, that homosexuality is an inborn, incurable disease, has been exploded by modern psychiatry, in the opinion of many experts. It can be both prevented and cured, these experts say.
It is a problem that has grown in the shadows, protected by taboos on open discussion that have only recently begun to be breached.
The overt homosexual—and those who are identifiable probably represent no more than half the total—has become such an obtrusive part of the New York scene that the phenomenon needs public discussion, in the opinion of a number of legal and medical experts.
The story acknowledged that a “minority of militant homosexuals” were “agitating for removal of legal, social and cultural discriminations against sexual inverts” and “fundamental to this aim is the concept that homosexuality is an incurable, congenital disorder.” But it immediately added that this idea was “disputed by the bulk of scientific evidence.” Psychiatrists
have what they consider to be overwhelming evidence that homosexuals are created—generally by ill-adjusted parents—not born.
They assert that homosexuality can be cured by sophisticated analytical and therapeutic techniques.
More significantly, the weight of the most recent findings suggests that public discussion of the nature of those parental misdeeds and attitudes that tend to foster homosexual development of children could improve family environments and reduce the incidence of sexual inversion.
Therefore, the story was nothing more than simple public service because “Leaving the subject exclusively to barroom jesters, policemen concerned with public aspects of the problem and the homosexuals themselves can only perpetuate the mystery and misconceptions that have grown in the dark, according to expert opinion.”
Other choice observations included the following:
The homosexual has a range of gay periodicals that is a kind of distorted mirror image of the straight publishing world. …
The tendency of homosexuals to be promiscuous and seek pick-ups—a tendency recognized even by the gay writer, Donald Webster Cory, in his book, “The Homosexual in America”—makes them particularly vulnerable to police entrapment. …
A homosexual who had achieved good progress toward cure under psychoanalysis recently told his analyst that at certain hours on certain evenings he could identify as homosexual approximately one man out of three along Third Avenue in the fifties and sixties. This was probably an exaggeration. …
Homosexuals are traditionally willing to spend all they have on a gay night They will pay admission fees and outrageous prices for drinks in order to be left alone with their own kind to chatter and dance together without pretense or constraint. …
There is a cliquishness about gay individuals that often leads one who achieves an influential position in the theater—as many of them do—to choose for employment another homosexual candidate over a straight applicant, unless the latter had an indisputable edge of talent that would bear on the artistic success of the venture. …
“The increase in homosexuality is only one aspect of the general atmosphere of moral breakdown that has been going on around us,” says Monsignor Robert Gallagher of the Youth Counseling Service of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. …
[Ten psychoanalysts] reported that 27 percent of the homosexuals under treatment by the group achieved a heterosexual orientation.
Obviously, this meant that 73 percent of their patients remained homosexual. But no one editing the story noticed the contradiction between that fact and the statement immediately following it: “Our findings are optimistic guideposts not only for the homosexuals but for the psychoanalysts who treat them. … We are firmly convinced that psychoanalysts may well orient themselves to a heterosexual objective in treating homosexual patients rather than ‘adjust’ even the more recalcitrant patient to a homosexual destiny.”
The story appeared exactly twenty years after the Journal-American s explanation of this orientation following Wayne Lonergan’s arrest; and though couched in more polite language, it was brimming with exactly the same kind of virulent prejudice published by the Hearst tabloid during World War II. But because it appeared under the imprimatur of the Times, the story had a much more serious and lasting effect. This was the worst kind of Times article, pretending to offer scientific certainty where there was none, and repeatedly citing anonymous “expert opinion” to justify the prejudices of its invisible editors.
Unlike the earlier wartime piece, the Times article at least pretended to give “the other side” of the story, although even these attempts at balance could be quite misleading. For example, the statement that “truly psychotic inverts who prey upon pre-adolescent boys are no more common than molesters of girl juveniles,” might have suggested fairness—except for the fact crime statistics reveal that heterosexual child molestation is much more common than homosexual molestation. In any case, the article was strongly tilted toward the opinion of homophobic psychiatrists like Charles W. Socarides, and the story made it clear that its progenitors believed the only good homosexual was one who was determined to become a heterosexual. Considering the vehemence with which this opinion was expressed in the newspaper of record, the ability of Kameny and Nichols to overturn the traditional positions inside the Mattachine Society barely two years later is all the more impressive.*
* * *
TWO YEARS AFTER the Times article appeared, “CBS Reports” began researching its own documentary about male homosexuals. The principal interviewer on the program was Mike Wallace. The CBS veteran was already well known as a network reporter, b
ut not nearly as famous as he would become after “60 Minutes” began its marathon run in 1968.
It took two years of filming, editing, and fierce internal debate before “The Homosexuals” was finally broadcast on March 7,1967. “No sponsor wanted anything to do with it,” Wallace recalled, and the breaks were filled by public service spots provided by the Peace Corps and the Internal Revenue Service. “This was 1967. People weren’t talking openly about homosexuality,” Wallace said. There were two documentaries from “CBS Reports” during this period that were about “verboten” subjects, the reporter remembered; the other was about the growing popularity of marijuana in America.
The first version of “The Homosexuals” was made by “CBS Reports” producer William Peters under the supervision of Fred Friendly, who was president of CBS News from 1964 to 1966. According to Wallace, after Friendly viewed an early version of the documentary, he praised it, but asked for one addition. “Fred said, ‘We don’t have in what homosexuals do [in bed]. For pure reportage, we have to put that on the air.’ I said. ‘Fred, do you know what it is that homosexuals do?’ He said, ‘No, that’s the point, I don’t.’ I said, ‘Here’s what they do.’ And his face blanched. And he said, ‘Well maybe we don’t have to put it on the air.’ Many people didn’t have a clue!”
But after Friendly had viewed the documentary and before it was broadcast, he resigned as CBS News president because the network refused to provide live coverage of congressional hearings about the Vietnam War. Friendly was replaced by Richard Salant, who found the original version of “The Homosexuals” objectionable. According to a contemporary account in Variety, Salant assigned the producer Harry Morgan to recut the program, partly because he was unhappy with footage dealing “directly with homosexual activities in the U.S. environment,” including “footage from a homosexual tavern and the street pickup scenes.” The show was “gutted and virtually remade,” Variety reported. According to C. A. Tripp, a psychologist whose patient had appeared on the program, the first version was discarded because it might have been interpreted as “for” homosexuality. Wallace told the producer of the original version that Salant thought it smacked of sensationalism.
Although the one-hour broadcast repeated many of the prejudices, quoted several of the same psychiatrists, and even used some of the same words as the article in the Times (“there is a growing concern about homosexuals in society—about their increasing visibility”), the making of the CBS documentary was an extraordinary development for a medium that had generally avoided any discussion of homosexuality. It was also a crucial event for gay people: by reaching forty million prime-time viewers, it probably gave more Americans more information about homosexuals than any journalistic effort (or artistic endeavor) had ever provided before.*
The documentary was heavily weighted toward the traditional view of homosexuality as a debilitating and curable illness; it also repeated the myth that the typical homosexual is “not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship, like that of a heterosexual marriage.” But the specific impact of Kameny and his cohort and the general effects of the sixties were evident throughout. Not only did CBS acknowledge the existence of more than one point of view about homosexuals; it also opened the program with a strikingly handsome, happily adjusted, twenty-eight-year-old blond homosexual. For millions of viewers, this young man was probably the first they ever had heard declare, “I am a homosexual.”
The attractive interviewee was identified as Lars Larson. Watching Larson again thirty years after he interviewed him, Wallace remarked, “He’s nervous.” The correspondent didn’t notice that he himself also looks uncharacteristically anxious, kneading his hands throughout the conversation. Larson acknowledged that when he first realized that he was homosexual, he was “terribly frightened” because he didn’t want to be different. “I wanted to have everything that everybody else had. … And the cost was really quite terrific in human terms.” Then he spoke with the honesty made possible by all the swift changes of this decade: “I could be a nice little robot and go through the motions of life for some sixty, seventy, eighty, years. … But it wouldn’t be right, not for me. And I couldn’t sit back and take that.”
Larson had first seen gay life up close in New Orleans, and after seven days “without experience,” he decided that homosexuality was “furtive” and “ugly,” and he wanted no part of it. But then he met another young man in the service, and they spent the weekend together. For nearly everyone who tuned in to CBS at 10:00 that evening, Larson described his initial encounter with an attitude that must have sounded revolutionary. “It was just a grand, grand experience. It was the first moment in my life where I was open, where I didn’t have to hide, where I could lower all my barriers, where I could be absolutely me—without worrying about it. I had all the freedom in the world to be Lars Larson.”*
Wallace explained that Larson was a member of “the most despised minority in the United States” and “not typical” because of his willingness to appear on television. The reporter gave the results of a newly commissioned CBS poll: “Americans consider homosexuality more harmful to society than adultery, abortion, or prostitution. … Two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with ‘disgust, discomfort, or fear.’ One out often says ‘hatred.’ A vast majority believe that homosexuality is an illness; only ten percent say it is a crime; and yet—here is the paradox—the majority of Americans favor legal punishment, even for homosexual acts performed in private between consenting adults. The homosexual responds by going underground.”
After Larson, the show’s second subject was interviewed on his psychiatrist’s couch, with one hand on his forehead and the other one covering his mouth. When he came out to his parents, “They were sorry for me as if I were some kind of wounded animal they were going to send to the vet,” the patient confided. “I think I always had the feeling that I couldn’t do anything to please my father.” But he was followed by another attractive young man, shown full face, and identified as Warren Adkins of the Washington chapter of the Mattachine Society.
Adkins was really Frank Kameny’s ally Jack Nichols. Adkins was the name of one of Nichols’s former boyfriends. Years later Nichols explained that because he was a “Jr.” he had made a deal with his FBI agent-father not to use his real name in public until after his father had retired from the bureau. “I can’t imagine myself giving this up,” Nichols said on the program. “And I don’t think most other people who are sure of their sexuality, whether they’re homosexuals or heterosexuals, could imagine giving that up either.” Already, the Mattachine militants seemed to understand the political advantages of emphasizing the possibility that homosexuality had a genetic origin. Asked by Wallace what had made him gay, Nichols replied, “It really doesn’t concern me very much. I never would imagine that if I had blond hair that I would worry what genes or what chromosomes caused my blond hair. My homosexuality to me is very much in the same category. I feel no more guilt about my homosexuality … than a person with blond hair or dark skin or with light skin would feel about what they had.”* Nichols said he had told his parents he was gay when he was just fourteen, and “they have accepted me as a person. They don’t think of me as some kind of creature.” He felt “very lucky to have such a warm and understanding family.”
After the camera had been turned off, “Mike said I had answered his questions to his satisfaction,” Nichols recalled. “But,” said Wallace, “I really don’t think you truly believe in your heart what you’re saying to me. I think you know it’s wrong.”
“I think you think it’s wrong,” Nichols replied. “I remember after that being kind of pissed off.” Asked about this exchange thirty years later, Wallace said, “It seems perfectly possible because my eyes were being opened at the time.”
The day after the program was aired, Nichols was fired from his job as a sales manager for a Washington hotel.
Charles Socarides was one of a number of psychiatrists who gained notoriety in the f
ifties and sixties entirely because of his views about homosexuality, and he remained one of the most virulent opponents of the gay liberation movement, right through the 1990s. For CBS, he provided his standard diagnosis: “The fact that someone is homosexual, a true obligatory homosexual, automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long. … The stresses and strains the psychic apparatus is subjected to” will cause him “to have increasing difficulties. I think the whole idea of the happy homosexual is to create a mythology about the nature of homosexuality.” But in another concession to the budding gay movement, Wallace noted that “Dr. Socarides’s views are not universally held. There is a smaller group who do not consider homosexuality an illness at all. Instead they regard it as a deviation within the range of normalcy.”
Almost two decades after the broadcast, Socarides’s son publicly declared his homosexuality. “I don’t think it’s easy for anybody to grow up gay,” Richard Socarides told David Dunlap of The New York Times in 1995. “But given [my father] Charles’s outspokenness on the subject of a so-called cure for homosexuality, it sure wasn’t any easier.” In 1996, Richard Socarides went to work in the White House as Bill Clinton’s liaison to the gay community.
Wallace reported that “homosexual acts are not considered a crime in most of Western Europe,” and he pointed out that the British were about to legalize homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private. In America in 1967, Illinois was the only state where such acts had become legal. Then the program featured this enlightened statement from James Braxton Craven, a federal district court judge in Charlotte, North Carolina:
Is there any public purpose served by a possible sixty-year-maximum or even five-year-minimum imprisonment of the occasional or one-time homosexual without treatment, and if so, what is it? Are homosexuals twice as dangerous to society as second-degree murderers? Is there any good reason why a person convicted on a single homosexual act with another adult may be imprisoned six times as long as an abortionist? Twice as long as an armed bank robber? And seven hundred and thirty times as long as the public drunk?
The Gay Metropolis Page 22
