While the sexual revolution encouraged all kinds of experimentation, Stonewall produced a different imperative for an emerging generation of gay people—the pressure to become politically involved, and to declare themselves as exclusively gay. Self-identified bisexuals were dismissed by radical activists as being too cowardly to call themselves gay. In some cases, this political imperative merely prevented honest self-description.
Although millions of lesbians and gay men were relishing the fruits of an unprecedented sexual freedom, most of them remained firmly inside the closet—and only a tiny proportion were becoming politically active. During most of the seventies, there wasn’t a single gay reporter out of the closet at any daily newspaper in Manhattan. The Washington Post reporter Roy Aarons remembered recoiling when he ran into a Post colleague, Herb Denton, at a gay bar. “We both turned around and barely acknowledged each other,” said Aarons. Even at an “alternative” weekly like the Village Voice, a demonstration had been necessary shortly after Stonewall to force the newspaper to permit the use of the word gay in an advertisement.
When Calvin Tomkins profiled Philip Johnson in The New Yorker in 1977, the architect pleaded with the author not to identify him as a gay man. Johnson was negotiating with AT&T executives for the commission to design the company’s new headquarters on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and he thought the disclosure might jeopardize his employment. “This was in the early stages, when I wasn’t sure I had the job,” Johnson said. Tomkins was “furious, but he complied with Johnson’s request. The architect’s lover, David Whitney, was discreetly identified in the article as “his friend.”
Johnson was of a class and a generation who were routinely invited to the fanciest dinner parties, but who almost never brought along a male companion. On the other hand, single gay men were most welcome: “Mrs. [Vincent] Astor said she always had a homosexual to dinner” because they were “the only people who could talk,” the architect remembered.
After Johnson had been living with David Whitney for more than fifteen years (they first met in i960), Barbara Walters interrogated Johnson during a dinner party at the home of Kitty Carlisle Hart. “Why don’t you ever bring your boyfriend to these events?” Walters demanded.
“I said, ‘By God, you’re right, Barbara.’ Got up from the table and went home,” Johnson recalled. “She was a very great help. I was so mean and selfish: Til be home late tonight,’ that kind of thing.”
Leonard Bernstein had been conflicted about his sexuality all his life. In 1976 he shocked his friends when he separated from his wife, Felicia, to live with a male lover, Tom Cothran. It was actually Mrs. Bernstein who had precipitated the split by telling her husband that if he continued to spend time alone with Cothran, she did not want him back. The press reported the breakup in October, and in December Bernstein hinted at his reasons in public. Before conducting the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, he startled the audience with a fifteen-minute confession.
He said that after studying Shostakovich’s life and work, “I came to realize that as death approaches, an artist must cast off everything that may be restraining him and create in complete freedom. I decided that I had to do this for myself, to live the rest of my life as I want.” But by the following summer Bernstein was back with his wife.
THE SEVENTIES WERE A CHALLENGING decade for New York City. The flight of the middle class which had started after World War II was continuing, reducing its tax base and straining its finances. John Lindsay had brought glamour, style and excitement to city hall after he was elected mayor in 1965. He had reclaimed the verdant center of Manhattan for all kinds of recreation with a single, uncomplicated act: the exclusion of the automobile from Central Park on weekends. The park came alive, and the mayor rechristened New York, with tongue in cheek, as “Fun City.” But Lindsay had also spent much more money than the city was actually taking in, and a year after he left office in 1973, New York was slouching toward bankruptcy. By 1975 new construction of all kinds was at a standstill, all sorts of buildings were defaulting on their mortgages, and the assessed value of the city’s real estate was suddenly declining.
Much of the rest of the nation considered Manhattan’s misfortune wholly appropriate for what they thought of as America’s version of Sodom on the Hudson. This anti-New York sentiment was embraced by President Gerald Ford, whose resistance to federal loan guarantees to rescue the city from default was summarized in another pithy Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The vibrancy of the growing gay movement was in vivid contrast to the dreary predictions of obsolescence for the city that was nurturing it. At the very moment gay people were exulting in their newfound urban freedom, pundits were prophesying the imminent death of the greatest of all American metropolises.
The bold new activists in the streets of Manhattan were dramatically increasing the public profile of gay people in America. “When we first started out, we were all focused on taking the spirit of Stonewall into the streets,” said Michela Griffo. “Just making ourselves more visible as a political organization. Trying to get more and more men and women to join us,”
The young militants set an intoxicating pace.
Nine months after Stonewall, another police raid led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine brought instant notoriety to the Snake Pit, an after-hours club in Greenwich Village. The raid became controversial after the police arrested 167 patrons, one of whom was a twenty-three-year-old Argentinean named Diego Vinales who jumped from the second-floor window of the Sixth Precinct house and impaled himself on the spike of a steel fence. After several major operations, Vinales survived.
John Koch, the manager of the Ninth Circle Steakhouse, remembered when two of the policemen who had participated in the raid came in for dinner the following evening. “This cop is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet,” said Koch, “and he was there with his partner, and he was so distraught. He was a young kid then, and he said, I can’t believe they won’t leave these people alone.’ He was really upset that this had happened.”
After the raid, a freshman congressman named Edward I. Koch became one of the first elected officials to publicly lobby on behalf of the homosexuals of Greenwich Village. Koch wrote to Police Commissioner Howard Leary to point out that the raid violated a previous promise from the commissioner to end entrapment and harassment of homosexuals. “I would like to know, Commissioner, whether there has been a change in policy. I cannot understand arresting 167 people in a bar for disorderly conduct. … It is not a violation of the law to be homosexual or heterosexual, and the law should never be used to harass either.” In their column in Gay, Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke expressed their delight: “It takes real balls for a politician to stand up for the civil rights and liberties of homosexual citizens,” they wrote. “Congressman Koch has earned the distinction of being the first to do so.”
Up on First Avenue in the Nineties at the Charade, black and white men celebrated two civil rights revolutions at once. Mingling happily around a small horseshoe bar in the front, and dancing to the Supremes and Aretha Franklin in the back, no one ever felt the slightest racial animosity. “Everybody was very interested in everybody else,” remembered “Edward Stone” (a pseudonym), a thirty-two-year-old white freelance writer who dated only black men at the time. “There were students and hairdressers and accountants,” said Stone, and there was “no element of danger even implicit in all of this.” Stone remembered boisterous parties in Harlem and the Village, where almost every guest was part of an interracial couple. “People were interested in music and pot; they were not political at all. They seemed very much at ease. I had very good relations with blacks back then.” (Twenty-five years later, Stone said he hardly had any black friends at all.)
In 1970, Arthur Goldberg was the Democratic candidate for governor. As a former secretary of labor, United States Supreme Court justice, and ambassador to the United Nations, Goldberg was one of the most famous liberals of his era. D
uring a campaign swing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June, Goldberg was accosted by three dozen members of the Gay Activists Alliance. First they asked him politely whether he favored fair employment laws for homosexuals and the repeal of the sodomy law. Goldberg replied, “I think there are more important things to think about.” That provoked cries of “Answer homosexuals!” and “Gay power!” and finally—after he retreated into his white limousine—shouts of “Crime of silence!”
That same month, during Gay Pride Week—newly invented to mark the first anniversary of Stonewall—GAA staged a sit-in at the Manhattan office of the Republican State Committee, demanding to learn Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s views on homosexuality. A small group of demonstrators were arrested and immediately dubbed the “Rockefeller Five.”*
On June 28, between five thousand and fifteen thousand newly minted gay activists marched up Sixth Avenue from Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park for a “Gay-In” to celebrate the Stonewall anniversary. This gathering was by far the largest public display of homosexuality Manhattan had ever seen, and it made the front page of the Times. Even notoriously blasé New Yorkers reacted with silent astonishment. The marchers carried bright red, green, purple, and yellow silk banners, and shouted “Say it loud, gay is proud!” and “Join us!” at the curious; occasionally a passerby filed into the parade. A tall attractive girl carried a sign reading “I am a lesbian” to the applause of some of the bystanders. “Not long ago the scene would have been unthinkable,” Lacey Fosburgh wrote in the Times, “but the spirit of militancy and determination is growing so rapidly among the legions of young homosexuals that last weekend thousands of them came from all over the Northeast.”
“The main thing we have to understand,” said Michael Kotis, the president of the Mattachine Society, “is that we’re different, but we’re not inferior.”
Similar festivities were held in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Less than four months later, Goldberg and both of the major party candidates for United States senator—the Republican incumbent, Charles Goodell; and the Democratic challenger, Richard Ottinger—became three of the first statewide candidates in New York to endorse GAA’s civil rights platform. “Today we know not only that gay is good, gay is angry,” the activist Arthur Evans later told the Times. “We are telling all the politicians … that they are going to become responsible to the people. We will make them responsible to us, or we will stop the conduct of the business of government.” The following year, Mayor John Lindsay quietly endorsed the gay civil rights law, which was stalled in the city council. “The idea of a ‘homosexual vote’ is slowly gaining ground,” Times reporter (and future executive editor) Joseph Lelyveld wrote in the summer of 1971, in one of the paper’s first serious assessments of the budding gay movement.
ETHAN GETO was twenty-six in 1970, a Bronx native who had grown up on the Grand Concourse near 163d Street, listening at night to the roar of the crowd floating through his window from nearby Yankee Stadium. In the seventies, he would discover that he was completely bisexual—“right in the middle” of the Kinsey scale.
It had not been an easy childhood: “I was an only child doted on by an obsessive mother and a hyper borscht-belt comedian father and this is what produced me.” His father started out with the Mercury Theatre, where Orson Welles also starred. “My father was a very talented guy in the theater but, unlike many of his friends and contemporaries, he never achieved significant commercial success.”
In 1949, the family had moved to Paris so that Geto’s father could study literature at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. At the end of the year, his parents split up, and the six-year-old Geto returned home alone with his mother. “When I was a little kid, I was emotionally disturbed, in no small part because of my mother’s near clinical hysteria. And I was put away for four years from age ten through thirteen in an institution for emotionally disturbed children. I first went to Bellevue, and I was locked up for four months in the psychiatric ward instead of the standard two-week observation period because they couldn’t figure out what to do with me. So I spent four months with every psychopathic kid in New York, mostly from tough neighborhoods. I was this scared, Jewish, middle-class kid in the violent psycho ward. My mother called the police department, and said, ‘My son is poisoning me.’ I was not. The truth is that I was an extremely fragile and withdrawn kid who stayed in my room all day long and played alone with my collection of one thousand toy soldiers.
“In Bellevue they tested me and said I had a genius IQ.” Geto was eventually sent to the Pleasantville Cottage School in Westchester, which was run by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Most of the counselors and teachers were highly educated Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany.
“It was a nice place. I was very sexually active there. We lived in cottages with twenty other boys. There was a house mother and a house father who lived downstairs. And we boys upstairs. The boys in my cottage were ten, eleven, twelve. And we had sex every night. It was heaven. We used to say to each other, ‘Pretend you’re the girl!’ And the other one would say, ‘No, pretend you re the girl!’ And the ‘girl’ would lie down on her tummy and the other boy would get on top of ’her,’ insert his penis between her thighs or against her buttocks and have an orgasm. We were too young to ejaculate, but we had intense orgasms. I had crushes on a couple of boys. And I was really hot to get them in bed and sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t.”
After four years Geto moved back into his mother’s house in the Bronx. “When I was thirteen years old and I went home, all of a sudden I realized that there’s something called a homosexual. When I entered puberty, I keyed into the fact that there were queers, fags, homosexuals. This is 1956. And my mother’s attitude and my whole family, who were intellectual, liberal Jews, was that gay people were, at best, marginal characters in society. Not respectable people. And so I panicked. My experience all along, after that, was that the liberal Jews were always the most terrified and the most disdainful. Surprisingly, a lot of the working-class Italians and Irish were more accepting of gay people in New York.
“I remember my grandmother walking down the street with me when I was five or six years old, and saying, ‘Look! Look, sweetheart! There’s one of those powder puffs!’ And I said, ‘What is that, Grandma?’ ‘Oh, you know, a cream puff—those men who think they’re ladies.’ So for six years, from the ages of thirteen to nineteen years old, which is 1956 to 1962,1 am totally in the closet. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t seek it out.
“My mother was a Freudian. And if you were homosexual, you were sick! Freud was God to Jewish intellectuals of my mother’s generation. For my family, it was Stalin and Freud. Those were the Gods. They could do no wrong. My father was a passionate idealist, dedicated to improving the lot of workers, fighting for civil rights, and he believed that American capitalism was the root of all evil. Like many young idealists of his generation, when he was in his twenties—during the 1930s—he joined the Communist party.
“This is my family background.”
When Geto turned twenty in 1963, he was a junior at Columbia College, living near the campus on 113th Street and hanging out at the West End, then the principal Columbia saloon. There, he spotted a “total, flitting queen—that’s how I noticed him because I wouldn’t know how to figure out another gay person. And I kept staring at him.” After gazing at his intended every night for three weeks, Geto finally got up the nerve to speak to him. “They’re closing the bar, and I say, ‘Hey, how would you like to come up to my apartment for a drink?’ So he says, ‘Oh, okay, but what else do you have in mind?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. You seem like a nice person. I want to get to know you.’ He says, ‘Oh, really. Oh, all right. Let’s go!’
“So, I take this guy up. We have sex. I have a big crush on him. For three months, I didn’t do any work. I almost dropped out of Columbia. I just hung out with him. He lived in a
penthouse on 72d Street and West End Ave. And he was not rich. He was a librarian who worked for the federal government. He was very proper: he wore very conservative Brooks Brothers clothes to work. And I waited for him to come home every night. He gave me the keys to his apartment. He used to call up all his friends, and say, ‘Darling, guess what’s doing me now! Cora, girl of twenty!’ That was me. And I’d say, ‘Don’t call me girls’ names! What do you mean, Cora?! What does that mean?!’ The first time I had sex with this guy, he said to me, ‘You might not want to do that tonight because I was just with someone else a couple of days ago and he called me up, and he says, ‘Sarah, I have the clap.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what that is.’
“And I had sex with him and I got the clap for the first time. I’m twenty years old. I was terrified. He took me to a gay dermatologist doctor who was his buddy. And Gerald took care of all the boys when they got the clap or anything else. Everyone would go to Gerald. He was the ‘in’ doctor for the gay set. So I’m twenty years old. I’m quaking in fear. My penis pouring this horrible, burning discharge. He shot me up with something, and then he gave me pills, and then he did a smear on a slide, and he says, ‘Oh, you got it, darling!’ He says, ‘Mary, you’ve got it! What were you doing with Rodney?!’ I was with him every day. Every day! He couldn’t get rid of me. I slept there. I ate there. Every day, we had sex all day. He was great. And he was in heaven. He was a riot. Anyway, he was in big trouble because he owed Macy’s $600 that he couldn’t pay on his Macy’s credit card because he’d bought so much yarn to knit with. All he did was knit.”
The Gay Metropolis Page 29
