The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  All their dreams were about to come true.

  IV

  The Seventies

  “The ‘homosexual problem’… is the problem of condemning variety in human existence,”

  —DR. GEORGE W. WEINBERG, 1971

  “It is one thing to confess to political unorthodoxy but quite another to admit to sexual unorthodoxy.”

  —MERLE MILLER, 1971

  “This was a very idealistic era, when young people felt they could change the world. We truly felt we were part of history. We were doing something new. We were doing something righteous. We were part of the generation of committed youths.”

  —MORTY MANFORD, gay activist

  “To Victory!”

  —CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, 1974

  NO OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS movement in America ever had such an improbable unveiling: an urban riot sparked by drag queens. But while many gay people remained ignorant of Stonewall and others reacted to it with discomfort, this 1960s version of the Boston Tea Party would do more than any other event to transform gay life in America. The thick bottle that had contained an entire culture was uncorked in 1969; within a few years it would be shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Stonewall’s impact on gay men and lesbians would eventually be comparable to the effect of the Six Day War on Jews around the world: for the first time, thousands of members of each tribe finally thought of themselves as warriors. But because gay people started with so much less self-esteem in 1969 than most Jews had before 1967, the consequences of Stonewall were much more dramatic. Although millions would remain in the closet, within a year after Stonewall, thousands of men and women would find the courage to declare themselves for the first time: to march and lobby and “zap”*—and even to be identified as gay in their local newspapers.

  Never again would American children baffled by this mystery within themselves grow up without seeing any manifestation of it in the world around them. The ancient conspiracy of cultural invisibility was finally over.

  In 1969, the only gay organizations with any significant public identity were the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. Just four years later, one could join a radical Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, a more mainstream Gay Activists Alliance, the National Gay Task Force,† the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and hundreds of other groups in New York, across the country, and around the world. “It was like fire, you know,” said Jim Fouratt, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front in New York. “Like a prairie fire: let it roar.… People were ready.” Fouratt joined a group that traveled around the country to create other GLFs. “I think we set up about forty chapters, most of them on university campuses,” he recalled. Even at Catholic Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, gay students decided in 1971 to start their own organization. “I am a great believer in nonviolence,” one of them wrote, “but if any of the football jocks or whoever starts to give me a hard time … well, I don’t like to brag about my karate, but …”

  “It’s amazing when you suddenly find pride, said Arthur Laurents. “When you suddenly stand up.”

  By 1973, the Gay Activists Alliance’s National Gay Movement Committee in Manhattan carried the names of 1,100 gay groups all over America in its records. According to the historian Toby Marotta, “Gay and lesbian liberationists in New York City elaborated and publicized the ideologies, set the examples and offered the help that encouraged” gay people everywhere to organize.

  THE PERSON WHO played the largest role in ending the invisibility of gay life in America was an Irish-Catholic heterosexual, a television interviewer who never hesitated to take positions that enraged his church. His name was Phil Donahue, and on scores of shows during his marathon run on network television, he explored every facet of the gay experience. For millions of Americans, he provided their first window into this mysterious world. By the end of his twenty-nine years on the tube, he had done more than anyone else to turn the exotic into the commonplace.

  In 1996, Donahue vividly recalled his first show with a gay man, Clark Polak, a prominent gay leader from Philadelphia and a close ally of Frank Kameny. “I do remember featuring the first out of the closet: ‘right here, right now, yes, here he is, folks—Clark Polak.’” It was the year before Stonewall: “the first gay Donahue show out of Dayton.

  “There was the phone number and here was this gay guy—you could actually call up a gay guy! It really was a sensation.” Donahue readily admitted his original motivation for exploring this subject: “People didn’t leave the barber shop—even when their haircut was over!” Although he felt uncomfortable the first time he interviewed a gay man, he was also extremely curious. “And I know they’re going to watch this program. And, remember, that’s what I’m paid to do: I’m paid to draw a crowd.”

  Gradually, Donahue began to understand “that gayness was not a moral issue.” Over the next three decades, he made an enormous contribution to America’s enlightenment by regularly sharing that commonsense idea with a gigantic audience.

  “This was a very big nirvana, he said. “This was truly a big, big moment of awareness for me: that there were homosexual jerks, but that had to do not with their gayness, but with their humanness. And that jerks do not abound in any greater numbers in the gay community than in the so-called straight community.”

  His Catholic upbringing never prevented him from having an open mind. “I looked up after sixteen years of Catholic education to realize Catholics were supporting the Vietnam War, voting for Nixon. I was starting to realize first of all that the church is not divinely inspired in all matters. It is as corrupt as any large institution, including General Motors and the United States government.

  “I was never going to let an institution or another person tell me what was a mortal or a venial sin. … And then as the years went on, I began to realize that one of the biggest closets of all was the one that was occupied by so many thousands of priests of the Roman Catholic Church.

  “Then we did programs that showed that most children are abused by straight people—and that gay people are not in the bushes waiting to grab your child. I began to see the tremendous mountain that had to be climbed on the matter of gay rights. I began to explore the fascinating legal issues that obtained to gayness: guys getting thrown out of their apartment; guys not getting promoted; guys losing their jobs; usually guys, not always. We did shows with guys who took their lover to the senior prom in high school. And the sheriff who wouldn’t let them on the dance floor. We had some fabulous shows—I mean truly riveting personal accounts of bizarre behavior.

  “We did many shows on gay bashing. I think that homophobia is most virulently expressed in male adolescence and also in the twenties. I’m not prepared to say that all gay bashers are gay. But I am prepared to say that a significant percentage of gay bashers probably are, and they’re in deep, deep denial.

  “When you see what organized religion does to legitimize homophobia, you begin to appreciate the enormously complicated issue of attacking this fear. If the church says gay bashing is all right, then people can say, ‘Why the hell isn’t it?’

  “That is to me the biggest sin of all.”

  IN 1972, Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen starred in the first made-for-TV gay movie. The following year, public television provided America with its most prolonged prime-time exposure to a gay character to date in its twelve-hour multipart documentary, An American Family. The parents, Bill and Pat Loud, actually decided to divorce during this cinéma vérité exercise, but the character who captured most people’s attention was their gay son, Lance—“the California suburban kid who really had become what Bette Midler called everything you were afraid your little boy would grow up to be,” as Frank Rich put it in a landmark piece about gay culture in Esquire. Lance was an “Andy Warhol camp follower who had dyed his hair silver at age fourteen, later painted his lips David Bowie blue, and now lived in New York’s Chelsea hotel,” Rich wrote. “Yet Lance was too witty and attractive to be repellent: he epitomized the youn
g homosexuals now beginning to come out of the closet—the wisecracking, benign, artistic types that men and women of my generation sought out, especially for party invitation lists. … Lance was not a fake like David Bowie but an accessible, ingratiating prime-time boy next door—Billy Gray or Jerry Mathers or David Cassidy.” But to someone a little older like the novelist Anne Roiphe, Lance was “the evil flower of the Loud family” with a “campy wit and all the warmth of an iguana.” Getting a little carried away, Margaret Mead called the series “as important a moment in the history of human thought as the invention of the novel.” Time called it “the ultimate soap opera.” What it really amounted to was a model for the incessant confessional television of Sally Jessy Raphael and countless rivals—and later, MTV’s “The Real World.”

  THE SPIRIT of the sixties was born in the big cities on both coasts, and peaked on the East Coast in 1969—just two months after Stonewall—when three hundred thousand kids gathered to celebrate the magic of peace, love, music, marijuana and mud at Woodstock in Bethel, New York. In the following decade, the ethos of the sixties gradually spread through the American heartland. Members of the Vietnam generation consumed vast amounts of grass, cocaine, mescaline, LSD, and other stimulants that fueled the most unbridled sexual freedom ever seen in a modern Western society. Writing in Esquire at the end of 1969, Tom Burke described the new homosexual as “an unfettered, guiltless male child of the new morality in a Zapata moustache and an outlaw hat, who couldn’t care less for Establishment approval, would as soon sleep with boys as girls, and thinks that ‘Over the Rainbow’ is a place to fly on 200 micrograms of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.” Without the constraints of religion, the fear of contagion, or (in most cases) the slightest desire to seek the counsel of psychiatrists, promiscuity replaced puritanism with a vengeance. And no one was more promiscuous than the gay men of New York City.

  Bisexuality was suddenly fashionable within the cosmopolitan vanguard of a new generation, and it was depicted in two fine movies that violated all the rules of the now defunct censorship office. Sunday, Bloody Sunday was written by Penelope Gilliatt and directed by John Schlesinger, a gay man who was still in the closet in 1971. In it, a young Glenda Jackson and a middle-aged Peter Finch compete for the affections of Murray Head, a pretty boy who enjoys a guiltless pleasure playing the two of them off each other. Most of the film was marvelously understated, but one shot made cinematic history, producing gasps from part of the audience—and silent smiles from the rest: a full-on-the-lips kiss between Peter Finch and Murray Head. For millions of gay moviegoers who had long been accustomed to gruesome fates for any gay characters who managed a brief on-screen appearance, a close-up of the first really sexy kiss between two attractive men was a moment of rare fulfillment.*

  The following year, Bob Fosse directed Cabaret, the best film musicaldrama ever made. Inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabarethad been produced on Broadway in 1966, but even at that late date all of the gay elements had been expunged.* The screenwriter Jay Presson Allen restored them, and the result was a film set in Weimar Berlin in the thirties which also captured the sexual milieu of hip young America in the seventies. Cabaret reminded the gay novelist Armistead Maupin of his own life in San Francisco, and he remembered it as the first movie that “really celebrated homosexuality.” The seventies were an era when activists like Jack Nichols were hoping for the “final crumbling of gay/straight divisions and the creation of a sexually integrated society in which everybody would be free to love and make love”—without labeling himself.

  Cabaret depicted all of the permissiveness that drew gay Americans like Philip Johnson and Paul Cadmus and Englishmen like Isherwood and Auden to Berlin in the twenties and thirties. Sixty years later, Johnson still remembered buses adorned by with advertisements for bars reading “Come to Us Because We Do Gay Things” and an atmosphere that was “much more decadent” than France under Louis XVI. Every summer, for several years, Johnson would travel to Berlin to select a new boy from the streets to live with him for a month or two. “It was a very open town because they’d lost the war,” Johnson remembered. “And that still rankled, of course. The defeated parties have to be sort of, ‘Well, I’m being fucked. I’m fucked. So I better make money doing it.’ And I enjoyed the payment part of it. They were Germans. They were boys. Very nice. Every summer I had a different friend. I stayed with a family, who were obviously tolerant.” When Paul Cadmus visited Germany in 1932, he purchased his first male photographs, which he spotted in shop windows.

  In Cabaret, Liza Minnelli seized her mother’s mantle as a gay icon and gave the greatest performance of her career, winning one of the eight Oscars awarded to the film. Borrowing from her mother’s life for her own art, Minnelli’s character seduced the gay English (Isherwood) character played by Michael York.† Then Minnelli and York shared the affections of a wealthy German count, who introduced himself to Minnelli this way: “You are like me adrift in Berlin. I think it’s my duty to corrupt you.”

  Fosse encouraged improvisation on the set, which made everyone feel as if he was part of the “creative process,” Michael York remembered. The director badly needed a hit after Sweet Charity, and he worked feverishly on his new project. Musical collaborators John Kander and Fred Ebb added several showstopping songs, including “Maybe This Time” and “Money, Money.” Because nearly all the songs were performed inside a club, this movie musical was unusually seamless. York thought it was “one of the best-edited films” he had ever seen. Fosse’s “angular sexy choreography matched the Brechtian mood of the cabaret, a perfect expression of a disjointed time,” York wrote. “Fosse’s achievement was to make the sleaziness of the cabaret believable while at the same time showcasing the improbable brilliance of the performers in it.”

  During a “long, extraordinary day” of shooting and improvisation inside a German castle in Schleswig-Holstein, York marveled when a whole sequence was invented that “culminated in the three principals’ faces interlocking in a revolving triangle, with looks speaking more poignantly than any improvised words.”

  Soon after their romp in the castle, Minnelli and York confronted each other over their mutual involvement with the count.

  “Screw Maximilian!” York shouted at her.*

  “I do,” Minnelli replied.

  “So do I!” said York. Minnelli cringed, York grinned, and gay audience members around the world reacted with a roar.

  “You two bastards!” said Minnelli.

  “Two?” said York “Two? Shouldn’t that be three?”

  The film was brimming with menace, with the sexual antics of Minnelli and York set against the steady penetration of German society by the Nazis. This juxtaposition reinforced the old American notion that loose German morals between the wars contributed to the rise of Hitler. Isherwood was disgusted by this point of view. “People take this attitude that Germany went to pieces between the wars because of its ‘decadence,’” he said in 1975. “By which they always mean homosexuality. … It’s such rubbish, sheer Nazi propaganda. Germany went to pieces because of a war started by greedy old men who sent out all the best young people of a generation to die.”

  THE BIG NEWS in the British literary world at the beginning of the seventies was the imminent publication of Maurice, the gay novel that E. M. Forster had completed sixty years earlier. Forster had read Maurice aloud to some of his gay friends, including Paul Cadmus, but he chose not to publish it during his own lifetime, partly because he was worried about the impact it might have had on his (married) policeman-lover. In the fall of 1970 New York Times London bureau chief Anthony Lewis wrote that the novel would surprise many of Forster’s readers because “his sensitively drawn women are widely regarded as his outstanding fictional creations and the sorrow and the joy of marriage are portrayed with convincing emotion.” Despite the persistence of these Stanley Kauffmannesque prejudices, the changing climate had finally made it possible to acknowledge Forster’s sexuality in public. Lor
d Annan, an intellectual historian, told the BBC in 1970, “Of course Forster was a homosexual, there’s no question about this. He wouldn’t want to have denied it.” Forster had watched “public opinion change very gradually from the hysterical outburst of the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 to the recent repeal of laws against adult homosexual relations.”

  THE SEXUAL FREEDOM OF THE SEVENTIES and the political awareness that flowed from Stonewall exerted two different influences on gay people coming of age in this era. The essential messages of the sexual revolution were about freedom and experimentation, and they encouraged men and women to sample every kind of erotic experience. Stonewall’s lessons were less about sex and more about politics.

  Among many lesbians, the sexual revolution diminished the impulse toward role-playing that had been so strong in previous decades. The singer Judy Barnett, who was nineteen in 1970, felt that “through the sixties, before the love revolution, the role-playing thing was much stronger. In the forties and fifties, the butch and femme thing was very distinct. By the time it got to our generation, we had the ‘love is all you need’ thing, where it didn’t matter who it was or how androgynous or what it was, and that helped break down some of the role-playing—at least the stereotypic manifestation of the role-playing.”

  The opposite trend was apparent within part of the gay male population in the seventies. Perhaps because of a new impulse to define themselves as “masculine” in traditional heterosexual terms, there was a new vogue for male role-playing, with more men insisting on defining themselves as “tops” who assumed the (theoretically) dominant position over “bottoms.”* “In the fifties I never knew what a top or bottom was,” said Dan Stewart, a landscape architect who came out at the end of that mellower decade. “People were versatile. If you were attracted to somebody, you just did whatever. There was no left earring, or red handkerchief. You just made love to men, usually playing both roles. So when that happened during the seventies, that was very extraordinary to me—the fact that somebody’s going to play a role, and you’re going to play another role.”