The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  Stoddard was also smart, political, and very good-looking, although he considered himself “very shy and very fearful,” shortcomings he overcame by thrusting himself into hostile environments.

  In the winter of 1970, he moved to New York, at the age of twenty-two. He had worried that he might be gay since he had been a high school student outside Chicago in 1965, and he had gone to the biggest bookstore he could find to look for an appropriate volume in the psychology section. The two books he found were by Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber, two of the most homophobic psychiatrists in America. “Both of them took the position that not only was homosexuality wrong, but that ‘single status’ was wrong. Bieber’s belief was that bachelors were inherently disturbed people, regardless of their sexual orientation. I read these books, they sounded plausible to me, I believed them, and then I hid them in the house.” And during college, he never had sex with a man.

  When he moved to New York, he lived in an apartment a half a block from one of the main gay cruising areas of that era—Central Park West and 72d Street. “It was dangerously close.” So the first time Stoddard’s roommate went away for the weekend, he picked someone up and brought him back to his apartment. “That was my first sexual experience. And it was extremely unpleasant and painful, as most of these stories run. He fucked me. I had never imagined that people did such things, yet was too young and too fearful to say no. I just found it painful as well as bizarre. I decided that if that was what gay men did, then I wasn’t gay. I remember how old he was because he seemed so old to me. In 1970 I was twenty-two and he was thirty.”

  Stoddard waited a year before he repeated the experience, and the second time was a little better. But then he decided to retreat from Manhattan temporarily, and he moved to Minneapolis, where he worked for the American Field Service, a student exchange program.

  “Minneapolis is much colder than anyone can possibly imagine. I would occasionally give myself frostbite because I didn’t know how to behave in that cold weather. But one of the consequences of that cold weather was to accentuate my sense of loneliness. I would sit in my apartment by myself, feeling very cold. I was quirky then in some ways similar to the way I’m quirky now: I didn’t turn the radiators on enough in the apartment. I believed it was a waste of energy and the building was overheated anyway. I thought I would just receive the heat from the other apartments. I did this the entire winter. What I was doing was driving myself into a gay bar. I’m quite serious. At some point I wanted to make myself so uncomfortable that I had to make a change and do something that was otherwise frightening.”

  He had noticed a lot of men going into a downtown bar called Sutton Place, so he drove there and sat in his car for an hour until he got up the courage to go in. “It was probably the most important event of my life. I got out of the car, I locked it, and I walked into the bar. I’m sure that I had my head down because that’s what I do when I’m really frightened. I walked in and I heard this extraordinary music. That was the first thing I remember. It was the beginning of disco. I remember hearing Barry White’s “Love Unlimited.” That is my coming-out song. I opened the door, and all of a sudden here was all this activity, this bizarre music that I would not have heard on the radio or anywhere else, and I thought that I had entered another universe. I sidled up to the bar, ordered a beer, with my head down, drank the beer, and the bartender would occasionally say things to me, which frightened me, and went back home. The next night, I went back and met a man who became my first boyfriend. I also met, through him, his roommate and a whole host of people who became my first community of gay friends. Within about a week, I had joined the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights. It was easy for me at that point because I was more of a human being, apart from my sexuality, than most other people at that level because I had done a lot and knew who I was. So it was fairly easy once I figured out my sexuality.”

  In Minneapolis, he met his second role model, a man named Howard Brown, who had served in New York City as Mayor John Lindsay’s first health services administrator. In 1973, he caused a sensation when he announced that he was gay, and that he intended to become a “militant homosexual” who would march and lobby for the gay civil rights bill, which remained bottled up in the New York City Council.*

  Just after Brown’s disclosure had made the front page of The New York Times, he came to Minneapolis to address the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights, and Stoddard was immediately “enthralled” by him: “He was a wonderful speaker. A stirring speaker. Funny, expansive, inspirational, and he was from ‘my city’ because I knew at this point I was going back to New York. He was a learned, successful person, and a political person. It’s clear to me why he was so attractive to me. Here was someone from my world, from the east, who could be a role model for me, and who was gay. Openly gay! Such a thing never occurred to me, and I was in a trance that entire day. I ended up going to a party held for him, given at the home of Allan Spear, a state senator who was also openly gay. I believe he was the first openly gay legislator in the United States. He’s still in the state legislature. He teaches history. He’s a wonderful man. At any rate, I went to this party that night and met a whole additional group of people and got to hear Howard Brown tell personal stories of life in New York. It was my first hearing of the term fist-fucking, which they all talked about with great energy. At the time, I couldn’t understand what was so novel about it because I thought it was simply another word for masturbation. Only later when I moved back to New York did I understand why all the commotion. That party was a very important event for me. In some degree I patterned my own speeches after Brown’s.”

  In 1974, Stoddard moved back to Manhattan to attend New York University Law School. And he did not find gay culture to be merely hedonistic:

  “It was in the largest sense exploratory. That’s really the key to understanding it. For me it was an exploration of sex, but it was also an exploration of relationships: casual relationships, friendships, and deeply felt romantic relationships. I could only begin to piece together my emotional life through that exploration. Gay men, at that time in particular, had no avenue of self-discovery apart from trial and error. And I made a lot of tries, and a lot of errors.”

  He rarely went to the baths, partly because he thought men clothed in towels offered too little information about who they were. “Part of the interesting thing about sexual relationships is figuring out who somebody is in the larger sense: what they think, what they do, how they react to the world. Part of that has to do with the clothes that they wear, the class in which they grew up. And those are things that are hard to figure out at the baths. There aren’t as many games and there isn’t as much complexity to a bathhouse.”

  At the same time Stoddard was beginning to develop his voice as an activist. When Herbert Hendin wrote about “homosexuality and the family” in The New York Times in the summer of 1975, Stoddard fired off a letter to the editor. “A piece as sloppy, ill-reasoned and inhumane as Herbert Hendin’s demands rebuttal,” Stoddard wrote. “For Hendin, homosexuals are like alcoholics. They deserve pity and help, but their way of life demands censure. In order to preserve Hendin’s notions of what is healthy behavior and what is not, they must continue to live as social misfits.”

  The following year Stoddard was infuriated when the United States Supreme Court summarily affirmed a lower court ruling that upheld Virginia’s sodomy statute. The court acted without hearing arguments or issuing an opinion. Justices William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and John Paul Stevens dissented from the six-to-three ruling.

  Chief Justice Warren Burger was scheduled to visit the NYU Law School right after the decision was announced, and Stoddard joined forces with his friend Peter Kazaras to convince eight professors and seven other students to write Burger a letter of protest about the sodomy case.

  The letter was firm but polite. It argued that the Court’s latest action was an unwarranted departure from other recent decisions that affirmed privacy rights, in
cluding Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case of 1974, in which the Court “recognized the importance of personal privacy and autonomy with regard to sexual matters. We appreciate that a summary affirmance probably does not reflect the Court’s considered judgment on this issue; nevertheless, the disposition of [the sodomy case] can be read to indicate that the right of sexual privacy does not extend to homosexuals.”

  “The case made me really angry,” said Stoddard. “By that time, I was quite political, I was very interested in constitutional law. I was very proud of that. It was professional, it was lawyerly, and it was quite stirring. It was a dramatic thing to do, particularly for law students. We had convinced our teachers that they should go along with us.”

  Stoddard did everything “with the quiet conviction that all he was seeking was what was just and fair,” said his close friend Rich Meislin. “When he went into his ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ mode, people listened. Change happened.” He was also, in his own way, a subversive “because he looked like what every mother wanted her son to be—and he was unabashedly gay.”

  The other important event during his law school career was Stoddard’s application for a Civil Liberties fellowship at NYU as an openly gay person. He believed he was the first person who had ever done that. And he was accepted. It was a scholarship and an internship, and he ended up at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he eventually worked for eight years. “I guess I’m still connected because I’m on the Board of ACLU.

  “That experience made clear to me that I wanted to be a public interest lawyer. I feel great passion about this program at NYU because of what it did to me.” In 1995, the program established a fellowship in Stoddard’s name to farm out law students to work for gay organizations.

  “Sometimes the things that are best for us are the things that we most avoid. It took me a long time to figure things out, but once I did it was absolutely clear to me. There were certain steps along the way, including activism and law school that moved me in this direction.

  “But I’m very grateful for being gay. It’s my salvation: it’s my escape from an ordinary life that would have made me unhappy. Otherwise I would be living in the suburbs because I am by nature a strange combination of rebel and conservative.”

  THE FIRST PLACE that hip Manhattan patronized to pay public homage to the glitzy part of the gay world of the seventies was an abandoned television studio that had been built as an opera house a half century earlier. When it opened in 1977, its location was the least fashionable one could imagine: 254 West 54th Street, near Eighth Avenue, on the fringes of the theater district, twelve blocks north of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  Technically, only Thursdays and Sundays were “gay nights,” but the crowd was always very mixed—and progressively gayer every night after 2:00 A.M. The bar stopped serving booze at 4:00, and the club closed at 6:00.

  Studio 54 was the brainchild of Steve Rubell, the thirty-three-year-old gay owner of a string of suburban steak houses who survived the demise of his first discotheque in Queens to become the most famous nightspot impresario of his generation.

  Rubell had a straight partner, Ian Schrager, but it was the five-foot, six-inch Rubell who was out front every night, deciding who was cool enough to get in, carefully excluding all the men in “double-knit three-piece suits” and favoring “dancers and Broadway actors” because “they’re loose and fluid.”

  “I look at it like casting for a play,” Rubell explained. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have let myself in,” an ironic reference to his own “bridge and tunnel” origins. His goal was to make it not too straight and not too gay: “we want it to be bisexual.”

  Frank Rich wondered in Esquire if the nightclub owner’s behavior was “the revenge of the nerd.” Watching Rubell in action, “one could imagine that he was getting back at the cool crowd of his own suburban high school—the handholding jocks and cheerleaders who might have tyrannically ruled his senior prom. … Whatever their actual sexuality, the stars who passed through Studio 54 achieved the ultimate status: they could emulate the gay night life. … Rubell hooked his civilian heterosexual admittees by allowing them to become, for a night, vicarious members of a club that did not want them.”

  Rubell and Schrager had very similar backgrounds. Both of them grew up in East Flatbush, a working-class section of Brooklyn; both of them attended Syracuse University and both of them were fraternity brothers at Sigma Alpha Mu. The first model for their future extravaganza was Le Jardin, a gay disco in the basement of the run-down Diplomat Hotel, which Schrager remembered as “overwhelming … like a Sodom and Gomorrah.” Schrager saw Bianca Jagger there, and he knew that was the kind of person he wanted at his own club. Later, Rubell dated Studio’s takeoff to the night that Bianca rented it for Mick’s thirty-fourth birthday.

  Depending on which story you read, Rubell and his partners had invested $1.1 million (New York Times), $800,000 (People), or $400,000 (Money) to install four hundred separate light programs, long leather couches, a man in the moon with a (coke) spoon who descended from the ceiling, and a continually changing decor, ranging from a re-creation of Peking for restaurateur Michael Chow’s birthday party to a farm with pigs, goats and sheep for Dolly Parton—all of which produced an atmosphere that Rubell boasted was “something out of Fellini.” The club could handle two thousand revelers at a time.

  Howard Rosenman was there the first night the club opened. He thought Rubell “had an impeccable eye about guys and about fame and celebrity and power. And he was able to arbitrate and calibrate levels of power, taste, charisma, glamour, chic, looks, talent, and sexual desirability—in an instant.”

  Rubell himself attributed his success to two factors: a “need to be liked and accepted,” and a lifelong competition with an older brother who had “a higher IQ,” had become “a successful gynecologist,” and was “even nine inches taller than I am.”

  Inside the club were Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Halston, Liza Minnelli, Margaux Hemingway, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Warren Beatty, O. J. Simpson, Moshe Dayan, Gina Lollabrigida, and Baryshnikov—and anyone close to Roy Cohn, because Cohn was the lawyer for Rubell and Schrager, a fact that fueled never-confirmed rumors that the club was close to the Mob. Titled Europeans did not impress Rubell: “Turn some of these princes and princesses upside down and you’d be lucky if 25 cents dropped out,” he said. “They’re sort of like loss leaders.”

  In 1978, Cohn’s connection to the discotheque—the “hot spot of the universe” as Ethan Geto remembered it, or “the greatest club of all time,” in rock impresario Ahmet Ertegun’s estimation—was a crucial element in the lawyer’s influence peddling in Manhattan. It was also tremendously ironic: the easiest way to get into the most fashionable gay-run nightspot on the planet was to befriend one of the most self-hating gay men in America. To show their disdain, most of Cohn’s legions of enemies never entered Studio 54 at all. A feeling of moral superiority amply compensated them for their absence.

  Cohn’s law partner, Stanley M. Friedman, remembered the scene this way: “Roy would have an entourage of boys and, quote, legitimate people: clients, friends, political figures. It was Hollywood. Here are people from normal walks of life, going out at midnight. The music was blaring, the lights were blitzing, dozens of beautiful people dancing. Men and women, men and men. Crazy clothes some of them: the tight clothes, the cutoff clothes. The bar: six deep, people getting drinks. I didn’t see the coke snorting in the bathrooms. Roy was treated like royalty—Steve and Ian and Andy Warhol and whatever other beautiful people or jet-setters he would be with.

  “You know how many phone calls we would get in a week? ‘I’m coming into New York, can you get me into Studio 54?’ They don’t want to go in the front door, so they go in the back door on 53d. Go in there and your name will be on the list. That was a premium. There wasn’t a day that went by that we didn’t get a call. I mean, if you gave somebody a couple of bars of gold bullion, it wouldn’t be as good.


  “When they started off, the place was empty, and they had a line two blocks long outside, creating the impression they were full. They wouldn’t let anybody in. And then they’d say, ‘You, all right you, in the back, you can go in.’ They knew how to market,” said Friedman. Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., who covered Studio 54’s opening, remembered that this tactic of keeping the lines long regardless of how crowded it was inside began on the very first night.

  Like many others, Ethan Geto resisted going to Studio 54 because he didn’t want to risk being rejected at the front door. And he certainly wasn’t going to drop the name of Roy Cohn, the embodiment of evil to anyone with Geto’s convictions. But an out-of-town friend finally convinced him to test his luck:

  “There’s these mobs of people trying to get in, including a lot of the beautiful people: people that are so chic and stylish and gorgeous and models and show business people. And I’m way in the back of the crowd. And I’m saying to the people I’m with, ‘Let’s get outta here. Let’s go somewhere else.’ And all of the sudden, from the door, comes a voice that yells out, ‘Let that tall guy in back there! Get the tall guy!’ And these monstrous bouncers come, like Paul Bunyan.

  “I get up to the door. And there’s this guy who was the head doorman named Marc Benecke. And Marc says, ‘Are you Ethan Geto?’

  “I said, ‘Yeah, I am.’

  “He says, ‘Don’t you remember me?’”

  Geto did not, but Marc remembered the pol very well because Marc was a political junkie who had known Geto in several Democratic campaigns, including Bela Abzug’s run for the Senate in 1976. “Marc had been a political groupie as a kid,” said Geto. “And all he ever cared about, before he got to this great elevated stage in life, was politics. Bob Abrams and Bela Abzug were the big people in his life.”