In 1964, Judge Craven had thrown out a state conviction of a man who had been sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in prison for engaging in a homosexual act. “Is it not time to redraft a criminal statute first enacted in 1533?” the judge asked.
The CBS program showed footage of Nichols’s and Kameny’s pickets in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the State Department and the White House in Washington. Kameny appeared using his real name and offered this sound bite about security clearances: “Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal character, as an individual. Certainly some homosexuals are poor risks. This is no possible excuse for penalizing all homosexuals.” In front of the White House, there was also this baffled reaction to twelve gay pickets* from a self-described “country boy” from West Virginia: “I Just don’t understand it. They’re weird! You people are getting much more cosmopolitan than I thought you were!”
Finally, Wallace reported “talk of a homosexual mafia in the arts.” The Times had repeatedly printed pieces on the corrupting influence of homosexual playwrights in the theater. In 1961 Howard Taubman complained, “Writers feel they must state a homosexual theme in heterosexual situations. … Dissembling is unhealthy. … The audience senses rot at the drama’s core.” Five years later, the headline at the top of the “Arts and Leisure” section read “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.” Stanley Kauffmann argued in this famous article that because “three of the most successful playwrights of the last twenty years are (reputed) homosexuals … postwar American drama presents a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage and society.” Knowledgeable theatergoers deduced that Kauffmann was referring to Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and William Inge.
At the heart of Kauffmann’s criticism was the implicit assumption that only a heterosexual man who was having sex with a woman could possibly write a realistic woman character. This argument grew out of a quintessentially fifties attitude: the idea that a woman’s only value to a man was as a sex object, or as the mother of his children. Turning reality on its head, Kauffmann implied that all gay men were misogynistic; therefore, their portraits of women were always malicious. The fact that gay men frequently have much closer friendships with women than heterosexual men do—or that a gay playwright who had learned to appreciate both the masculine and the feminine within him might be adequately equipped to create convincing women characters—never occurred to these critics. They also ignored another fundamental truth: that the similarities between long-term homosexual and heterosexual relationships tend to be much greater than the differences.
The Newsweek theater critic Jack Kroll remembered sitting on a peer review board of the National Endowment for the Arts with Kauffmann. “Stanley had this absolutely gut reaction if a gay group came up—it was just ‘no way,’” said Kroll. “It was amazing to me that a man of that intelligence could not get beyond that reaction. Maybe it was some sort of Jewish morality. What I think was bad about Stanley’s piece was not the fact that he detected signs of a gay sensibility. It was his attitude; it was a prosecutorial thing: ‘You’re under arrest!’”*
The debate about the competence of the homosexual playwright had intensified after the huge success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s scalding portrait of two married couples took Broadway by storm in 1962. In its honesty and its intensity, Albee’s was the first important play to reflect the sensibility of the new decade. But because the playwright was gay, the rumor was rampant that his characters were really male homosexuals in disguise. Twenty-five years later, Albee remembered Kauffmann’s “disgusting article,” and the “absolutely preposterous” notion that
gays were writing about gays, but disguising them as straights, and writing about men, but disguising them as women. … Tennessee Williams knew the difference between men and women as well as I do. If you’re writing about men, you’re writing about men, and if you’re writing about women, you’re writing about women. But then the rumor began that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was really about four men, which led to attempts at all-male productions of the play, which led to me closing them down … because they’re incorrect. But somehow that sniping has never gone away.
“People make the mistake of thinking gay playwrights can’t write women characters,” said Arthur Laurents. “They think the women are really gays in disguise. The truth is that gays write women very well, and they are apt to have trouble writing men. What many write instead are studs and hunks. Look at Williams and Inge. There aren’t men; there are these hustlers in one guise or another—or dream bodies without much mind.”
On the CBS documentary, a year after Kauffmann’s article had appeared, Gore Vidal noted the “theory which one reads all the time about how a certain successful playwright in a very successful play describes married people, heterosexuals, as being wicked and vicious and clawing at each other.” He continued,
This is supposed to be really a story about two homosexual couples. Well … there are wicked homosexuals and there are wicked heterosexuals and this is a playwright who deals in savage and extreme situations. And I don’t see any of it as being translatable particularly as a homosexual situation posing as a heterosexual. And furthermore, if it were, then why is it popular? Obviously it’s popular because what he has to say about married couples speaks to everybody. As a matter of fact, there’s a certain homosexual who has written the only really good women characters in the American theater. So the idea that the homosexual in some way is a seditious person trying to absolutely destroy the family structure of the United States is nonsense.
The “certain homosexual who has written the only really good women characters” was Tennessee Williams. Watching his own program almost three decades later, Mike Wallace was astonished: “He won’t even mention his name! I can’t believe it. Do you believe this? 1967? In the middle of the sexual revolution, the black revolution, Vietnam!”
Vidal wrote later, “It is now widely believed that since Tennessee Williams liked to have sex with men (true), he hated women (untrue). As a result, his women characters are thought to be malicious caricatures, designed to subvert and destroy godly straightness. But there is no actress on earth who will not testify that Williams created the best women characters in the modern theater.” Stephen Sondheim agreed: “It seems to me that Blanche DuBois alone refutes it all.”
“Somebody would become successful, then the word would spread he was a fairy,” said Vidal. “That meant that all the women were really men in disguise and the relationships were all degenerate ones. And this was a plot—by the fifties it was all a ‘homintern plot’—to overthrow heterosexuality.”
Vidal wrote that
faced with the contrary evidence, the anti-fag brigade promptly switch to their fallback position. All right, so [Williams] didn’t hate women (as real guys do—the ball breakers!) but, worse, far worse, he thought he was a woman. Needless to say, a biblical hatred of women intertwines with the good team’s hatred of fags. But Williams never thought of himself as anything but a man who could, as an artist, inhabit any gender; on the other hand, his sympathies were always with those defeated by “the squares”; or by time, once the sweet bird of youth is flown. Or by death, “which has never been much in the way of completion.” Williams had a great deal of creative and sexual energy; and he used both. Why not? And so what?
Arthur Laurents remembered all his friends reacting with “horror at the fact that the Times didn’t fire Kauffmann right then and there” after his article was published. “There is no excuse for it. They let him stay in business for a year, to their discredit.” A few years later, Laurents wrote the screenplay for The Way We Were, the hugely successful Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford vehicle about Hollywood during the witch-hunts of the fifties. It was directed by Sydney Pollack, and Laurents had gotten Pollack the job. One day Pollack told Laurents, “You know, everybody in Hollywood is just so surprised.”
“Why?
” said Laurents.
“This is the best love story anybody has written in years. And you wrote it.”
“Why are they surprised?”
“You’re a homosexual.”
Laurents said nothing. “Because I thought, You’re such an asshole, what can I say?”
The year before the CBS broadcast, Time referred gravely to the “homintern” that Vidal had ridiculed, and offered this pithy observation from the Broadway producer David Merrick about gays in the movie business: “In Hollywood, you have to scrape them off the ceiling.” Laurents had gotten his first job as a stage director when Merrick hired him for I Can Get It for You Wholesale. When Laurents asked Merrick to stop attacking homosexuals, the producer replied, “Oh, I don’t mean it—it’s just for publicity.” Laurents also noticed that nearly everyone who worked for Merrick was gay. “That’s because they don’t have anyone to go home to, so they can work all night,” the producer explained.
The Time essayist opined that “even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the things that normal men take seriously. … [Homosexuality is] essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves ‘he’ and ‘she.’” The essay described pop art as part of a “vengeful, derisive counterattack” by “homosexual ethics and esthetics” on “the ‘straight world.’” Pop “insists on reducing art to the trivial.”* Time’s conclusion: homosexuality “deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but pernicious sickness.” Vidal noted the ‘anti-homintern hysteria was absolutely out of control—and Time was one of the centers.”
The CBS documentary concluded with a debate between Vidal and Albert Goldman, an adjunct assistant professor of English at Columbia, who later gained minor fame as the author of tabloid biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Goldman was among the first to sound the refrain that would become so popular among conservatives three decades later:
It seems to me that there are a lot of features of ordinary life which are enormously exaggerated in homosexual life. I mean the kind of jealousy and rage and promiscuity that is just inherent in the homosexual life. … We’re in the course of gradually rolling back from our former cultural values or cultural identifications to a more narcissistic, more self-indulgent, to a more self centered and essentially adolescent lifestyle. The homosexual thing cannot really be separated from a lot of other parallel phenomena in our society today. I mean we see this on every hand; forty percent of modern marriages end in divorce; we have a very widespread tendency to live lives of nonstop promiscuity. This is played out in a kind of playboy philosophy which is celebrated and sugar-coated and offered to the masses and received with pleasure. We have all sorts of fun-and-games approaches to sex. We have rampant exhibitionism today in every conceivable form. We have a sort of masochistic, sadistic vogue. We have a smut industry that grinds out millions of dollars of pornography a year. We have a sort of masturbatory dance style that’s embraced as if it were something profoundly sexual, whereas actually, all those dances do is just grind away without any consciousness of other people or their partners. And homosexuality is just one of a number of such things all tending toward the subversion, toward the final erosion, of our traditional cultural values. After all, when you’re culturally bankrupt, why you fall into the hands of receivers.
Needless to say, Vidal had a very different point of view: “It is as natural to be a homosexual as it is to be a heterosexual. The difference between a homosexual and a heterosexual is about the difference between somebody who has brown eyes and somebody who has blue eyes.”
“Who says so?” Wallace asked.
“I say so,” Vidal replied.
It is a completely natural act from the beginning of time. … We have a sexual ethic which is the joke of the world. We are laughed at in every country of the world for our attitudes toward sex. The United States is living out some mad Protestant nineteenth-century dream of human behavior. Instead of saying, Aren’t we wicked because we have a high divorce rate, or aren’t we wicked because men like to go to bed with men and women like to go to bed with women, why not begin by saying that our basic values are all wrong? The idea of marriage is obsolete in our society. Everybody knows it. There are natural monogamists, there are people who indeed enjoy one another’s company, but can you imagine a man and a woman who are told that for sixty years they are going to have to live together and have sex only with one another. This is nonsense. Why not begin by accepting the fact of what human beings really are. … We are open, we have something that André Gide referred to as floating sensuality. We can be aroused by this, by that, not necessarily by men and not necessarily by women. … And I think the so-called breaking of the moral fiber of this country is one of the healthiest things that’s begun to happen.*
Wallace ended with a “politically correct” conclusion for an era when nearly everyone considered homosexuals to be sick: an interview with a gay man with a wife and two children, who explained, “I personally don’t believe in a love relationship with another man. I think this is part of the gay folklore, something they try to obtain, but never obtain, primarily because the gay crowd is so narcissistic that they can’t establish a love relationship with another male.” Wallace’s final words on the program were: “The dilemma of the homosexual: told by the medical profession he is sick; by the law that he’s a criminal; shunned by employers, rejected by heterosexual society. Incapable of a fulfilling relationship with a woman, or for that matter with a man. At the center of his life, he remains anonymous. A displaced person. An outsider?”
The program embodied all the prejudices and preconceptions of “respectable” American media outlets in 1967. In determining its point of view, the swirling changes of the sixties were much less important than the “objective authority” of psychiatrists. After watching excerpts of the program in 1995, Wallace exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! That was a good piece back then!” He even endorsed much of what Albert Goldman said about the decline of American society. “Look,” he said, “I cannot believe some of the trash I see on television. And the sexual permissiveness with which we live in this country is frequently—to me—sexual ugliness. Grossness.”
Wallace conceded that he no longer believed that two homosexuals were incapable of a lasting relationship; in fact, he even knew that wasn’t true at the time the program was broadcast.
“It’s not a question now,” said Wallace. “But what I’m doing [at the end of the program] is, I’m synthesizing what we’ve just seen. Look: I had a good friend, by the name of James Amster”—a famous decorator, who created Amster Yard, a group of houses surrounding an L-shaped garden on East 48th Street. “He owned all of those little houses there. And he had a man, a companion. And they were a wonderful old married couple. And this was back in the fifties. Both very attractive people. Both people that I admired.” But to journalists like Mike Wallace, the fact that homosexuality remained part of the American Psychiatric Association’s official catalogue of mental disorders was more important than their own personal experiences.
“Do you think it’s curable?” Wallace was asked in 1995.
“I think probably, if you really want to, I suppose,” the correspondent said.
“You can replace one desire with another?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I had a good friend in Detroit, when I was in my twenties still, and working at WXYZ. And there was a guy there—good-lookin’ fella—he was one of the sound guys. … What he used to do was make the sound of the Lone Ranger’s horse, in a big flower box with pebbles. And I thought to myself, Well, I
could understand the relationship. I found him a very, very attractive man. But to act out in that way …” That was something Wallace could never imagine.
The same year that CBS broadcast “The Homosexuals,” three Los Angeles men tried to counter some of the impressions of gay life conveyed by the mainstream media. In September 1967, Dick Michaels, Bill Rand and Sam Watson secretly printed the first issue of the Los Angeles Advocate in the basement of the Los Angeles headquarters of ABC television. The first five hundred copies of the twelve-page paper were sold for 25 cents each at gay bars throughout the city. Its precursor had been the newsletter of PRIDE, Personal Rights in Defense and Education, a local gay group founded in t966. Gay activists had been energized by an unusually brutal raid of the Black Cat Bar by the Los Angeles Police Department on New Year’s Day in 1967.
Within a year of publishing its first issue, the periodical had a telephone, an IBM electric typewriter, and its first paid employee, and 5,500 copies were in circulation throughout southern California. For many people, the Advocate was “the first exposure we’d had to the idea that what we are is not bad,” said a longtime reader. By the mid-1970s, 40,000 copies of each issue were being distributed nationally, and the Advocate was the most important gay-owned and -operated magazine in America, a status it retains today.
TRUMAN CAPOTE’S FLAMBOYANCE made him one of the few famous writers whom the public could recognize as obviously homosexual in the fifties and the sixties. The novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the movie it inspired had made him a sensation within the literary world, and his charm and his intelligence made him a confidant of many of Manhattan’s richest and most powerful denizens, particularly the women whom he dined with regularly at Manhattan’s most exclusive restaurants.
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