The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  “General, I would ask him if he had been molested. If not, I would tell him exactly what an Army colonel commanding the R.O.T.C. wartime unit at City College suggested to me when I asked him some uppity question for the campus paper.

  “‘Boy,’ he said, ‘get the hell out of my office.’”

  Three months later, The National Review, the bible of the Republican right for many decades, put the debate on its cover. Although it did not explicitly endorse a change in national policy, the magazine ran an article that included some startling conclusions for a conservative journal. “The truth is that without making a big deal about it most commanders tolerate homosexuals in the ranks,” wrote A. J. Bacevich, a visiting fellow at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Having

  conformed to virtually every expression of cultural orthodoxy, the admirals and generals now argue that the military must preserve itself from contamination by “unmilitary influences.” The argument will not wash. Having embraced the American experiment, the military cannot now on the specific issue of gays opt out of what that experiment has come to signify—with regard to individuals, unfettered equality of opportunity; and with regard to sex, a permissiveness that approaches the absolute. Like it or not, an American military cannot arbitrarily exempt itself from either the first or the second.

  So the generals and the admirals will lose on the issue of gays. Although some will find the adjustment painful, those in the ranks will quickly adapt themselves to the new order of things—which will prove soon enough to be all but indistinguishable from the previous order.

  OUTSIDE OF THE MILITARY, Bill Clinton completed the decades-long process of prohibiting discrimination against gay people in every other federal agency. He also appointed nearly a hundred open lesbians and gay men to his administration, including Roberta Achtenberg, who became an assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Despite Jesse Helms’s attacks on her as a “damn lesbian,” she was easily confirmed by the Senate by a vote of fifty-eight to thirty-one.

  Frank Kameny, who had started the assault on federal discrimination against gays with a lawsuit back in the 1950s, was generally pleased with Clinton’s record at the end of 1995. “I think he’s gotten an enormous amount of criticism on the military issue,” said Kameny. “But I think in the last analysis that’s more a criticism for political ineptitude rather than for intentions.” The veteran activist noted there are now organizations of gay employees in nearly every federal agency, including the FBI and the Agriculture Department. “That kind of thing I find tremendously rewarding and vindicating.” Kameny said. “That sort of thing would be absolutely unthinkable in the sixties.”

  In 1996 the president enraged the gay community by signing the Defense of Marriage Act, which said that neither the federal government nor any other state would recognize a gay marriage performed in Hawaii or anywhere else. The law was probably unconstitutional, but Clinton’s willingness to pander to the right on this issue infuriated his gay supporters, even though he had always publicly opposed gay marriage.

  On the other side of the ledger, after Congress passed a defense appropriations bill in 1996 which would have compelled the armed forces to discharge everyone who was infected with the HIV virus, the Clinton administration managed to put together a new majority in Congress which repealed this heinous provision.

  PROPONENTS OF THE BAN on gays in the military quoted copiously from the Bible. Writing in The New York Times in support of the gay activists’ position, the novelist James A. Michener noted that Sergeant Major S. H. Mellinger had offered “an extreme expression” of the antigay position in the Marine Corps Gazette: “The Bible has a very clear and specific message toward homosexuals—’those that practice such things are worthy of death.’”

  “He is correct,” Michener continued. “In Leviticus 20:13, it says: ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’” But then the eighty-seven-year-old author of forty books offered a wonderfully simple rebuttal to all those who used the Bible to perpetuate this prejudice:

  One must read all of Leviticus to understand the condition of the ancient Hebrews when this harsh judgment was being promulgated. They lived in a rude, brutal, almost uncivilized place where abominations abounded. To read the list of the things the Jews were enjoined to stop doing is to realize that God had to be unusually strict with such an undisciplined mob. Women who had sexual intercourse with animals were to be put to death. “And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they.” A father who had sex with his daughter-in-law “shall be put to death.” On and on goes the litany of common abuses that the Jews must henceforth forgo.

  Two other verses from the same chapter of Leviticus bring into question the relevance of these edicts today. Verse 9 warns: “or every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.” Would we be willing to require the death sentence for boys who in a fit of rage oppose their parents? How many of us would have been guilty of that act at some point in our upbringing?

  Just as perplexing is Verse 10: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife … the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” Can you imagine the holocaust that would ensue if that law were enforced today?

  The Old Testament condemnation of homosexuality must be seen as one law among many intended to bring order to human relationships. Because the Jewish community was in deplorable disarray, harsh measures were required. As order was installed, the extreme penalties advocated in Leviticus were relaxed in the civilized nations that followed. …

  Western society, reacting in its own way, has advanced far beyond the primitive days of Leviticus. We do not kill young people who oppose their parents or execute adulterers.

  So when zealots remind us that the Bible says male homosexuals should be put to death rather than be admitted to the armed forces, it is proper to reply: “You are correct that Leviticus says that. But it also has an enormous number of edicts, which have had to be modified as we became civilized.”

  THE CONFIRMING EVIDENCE of the transformation of American attitudes toward the gay minority came from corporate America.

  Years after many of the Fortune 500 had promised to stop discriminating against gay employees, almost every major American corporation was still worried about any public identification with the gay market—just as every major presidential candidate had avoided courting any gay supporters for years after Stonewall.

  Even as gay people prided themselves on being the secret tastemakers of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, they knew that any overt appeal to gay consumers remained almost unthinkable in what had been a relentlessly closeted society. In the early 1980s, Seagrams and Heublein were among a handful of alcohol manufacturers who had cautiously dipped into this market with print ads in gay publications. But before Bill Clinton’s election, not even a master of homoerotic images like Calvin Klein had ever purchased a single advertisement in a gay magazine—seven years after Klein had surrounded a single naked woman with three naked men to sell the fragrance Obsession.

  In the fall of 1992, all that began to change, largely because of the launching of Out magazine by Michael Goff and Roger Black. Out banned all sex ads to provide a more comforting environment for traditional advertisers, and the results were dramatic and almost immediate.

  Out’s first issue featured ads for Absolut vodka, Benetton clothes and Geffen records. Banana Republic, North American Philips Consumer Electronics, Apple Computer and Calvin Klein (with jeans and underwear modeled by Marky Mark) quickly followed, along with His & His (and Hers & Hers) double-signature traveler’s checks from American Express. AT&T and Continental Airlines were both sponsors of the Gay Games held in New York City during the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall in 1993. A year later the Ikea furniture sto
re became the first general marketer to use identifiably gay characters (two men buying a dining room table) in a television ad broadcast on mainstream media.

  In 1995, even the big guns of macho American commerce had joined the trend, including units of General Motors, Philip Morris and Procter & Gamble. By the following year, the list included Tanqueray, Stolichnaya, Dewar’s, Johnnie Walker (Red and Black), Southern Comfort, Miller beer, Nike, Movado, Bacardi, Benson & Hedges, Carlton, Camel, Swatch, Hush Puppies, RCA Victor, Virgin Atlantic, Glenfiddich, American Airlines, Amtrak, Aramis, Gucci, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Ticketmaster (selling tickets for gay dances), and Baileys Original Irish Cream. “It all comes down to education,” explained Sandra Lot, the publisher of 10 Percent, another gay magazine. “We need to be like the Wizard of Oz and give them the courage to jump into the market.”

  Gay radicals who had taken satisfaction from the separateness of gay culture were understandably perturbed by this digestion of gay market share by the very institutions that had spent so many decades shunning lesbians and gay men. But the sharply dropping shock value of being gay—or appearing in the pages of a gay publication—was an unavoidable side effect of the movement’s steady progress.

  A BOOMLET for gay marriage was another portent of the mainstreaming of gay culture. It was also a very human response to the threat that AIDS continued to pose to the survival of gay culture. Just as marriage had been seen as a boon to the survival of the races by any number of ancient civilizations, some activists in the 1990s began to advocate marriage for exactly the same reason: they believed that anything that would help lesbians and gay men to focus on a single relationship would make it easier for gay culture to prosper in a new century.

  Shortly after Hawaii’s Supreme Court held that a state ban on gay marriage might be a violation of the state’s constitution because it was gender discrimination, Tom Stoddard decided to marry Walter Rieman, his partner of five years.

  Stoddard said the decision to solemnize their vows grew out of “a variety of converging factors,” including the simple realization that both of them would enjoy wearing wedding rings. The ceremony would confirm their status as official domestic partners in New York City, but like gay marriages in every other state that year, it would not be recognized as the equivalent of a marriage between a man and a woman. “I realized my desire to wear a ring was at bottom a desire to show off my relationship,” said Stoddard. “And we both decided that if we were going to wear rings, we wanted to wear them on the traditional wedding finger, and we wanted traditional wedding rings, to declare equivalency to heterosexual marriages.”

  John Boswell, a gay historian at Yale, had recently completed his book about gay marriages in ancient times, and he suggested to Stoddard and Rieman that they could be the first couple in America to use one of the ancient ceremonies he had unearthed. Boswell said he had found eighty different ceremonies, “some written originally in Greek, some written in old Slavonic, and some written in Latin.” But the ceremonies made the prospective couple uncomfortable “because all of them made considerable reference to Jesus Christ and to religious beliefs to which we do not subscribe.” So they decided not to use any of the ceremonies and not to have anyone officiate “because part of the purpose was to create our own ceremony.

  “We’re not looking for approbation from the larger world. We’re making our declaration to the larger world. So we composed a sentence that each of us would declare to the other and would precede the exchange of rings, and that’s what we said to one another.

  “The rings came from Tiffany’s,” said Stoddard. “I decided to go and buy a gift certificate for Walter, amounting to the total price of two rings, for our anniversary, which was in August. That was the very day I moved back from Washington, from the campaign [to permit gays in the military]. I was feeling sad, and sort of confused about things, but because we were having dinner in celebration of our anniversary, I wanted to present this gift certificate from Tiffany’s to Walter that evening. I had only a few minutes to get to the store, and I was laden down with baggage, so I showed up at Tiffany’s at quarter to six.

  “I had trouble getting through the door because I had all this luggage. The salespeople thought I was just totally bizarre, and I made them very nervous. But eventually they escorted me over to the wedding ring counter, and I talked to the person behind the counter who sold me the certificate for $600. As she went away to process the transaction, another salesclerk, who was leaving, passed by. She said,

  “‘Talk about last minute!’ She must have thought we were eloping. It was really funny.”

  When Stoddard returned with Rieman to get the rings fitted, he was delighted by the demeanor of their salesman. “I thought to myself, Gee, this is going to be real trouble, and he’s going to be real uncomfortable in all this. And he couldn’t have been better. He was courteous without being officious, he was not in the least uncomfortable. He just went through the transaction as if such things happened every day. I was pleased because I thought this was a sign of how much the world had changed, and disappointed at the same time because part of this thing was to make a fuss, to cause trouble on behalf of other people.

  “When I went back to pick up the rings I saw the same clerk, and I said, ‘I know this was an untraditional transaction. I really appreciated your businesslike attitude. It was a pleasure to deal with you.’ And he had a big smile on his mouth, and he extended his hand. And I liked that. I thought that was very significant.

  “We wanted to incorporate appropriate traditional elements in this ceremony while maintaining our individuality and our distinctness from a traditional ceremony. We filed for domestic partnership the week afterward. We did not have a cake with two male images; we thought that was absolutely ridiculous. But we did keep some traditional elements. The rings were presented to each of us by our oldest siblings. We had some form of ceremony and we dressed up. But we only wore suits.”

  Stoddard had tried for a formal wedding announcement in the Times, but the paper’s editor said that would be impossible, at least until the state had formally legalized gay marriage. But when another Times reporter learned he was getting married that weekend, he ended up with an announcement in the paper anyway—in the “Chronicle” section. “So I got, in some strange way, the wedding announcement that I wanted.” The New Yorker also made the marriage the lead item in “The Talk of the Town.” Both items also mentioned that Stoddard’s partner had just been elected to a partnership at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. That made Rieman nervous about how his fellow partners would behave at his installation, but Ted Sorensen, who was the master of ceremonies for the event, handled the recent publicity deftly.

  “Now I’d like to bring to the dais Walter Rieman, whose wedding received more attention than anyone else’s, except Donald Trump’s,” said Sorensen.

  “That’s all he said,” Stoddard recalled. “It was just perfect. And then Walter came up, and among other things thanked me for supporting him as he became a partner. And then Sorensen got up after Walter spoke—and this still really affects me—and said, ‘Congratulations, Walter, and welcome, Tom.’ So he was welcoming me to the firm as a spouse—and that was very moving to me. Walter was euphoric.”

  Stoddard and Rieman had decided to conduct their ceremony at Chanterelle, which was their favorite restaurant in Manhattan. Rieman’s brother and two sisters and Tom’s gay brother were among the seventy guests. The ceremony took place in December 1993, which also happened to be the twentieth anniversary of Stoddard’s coming out. “The comment which affected me the most was from Hendrik Uyttendaele.”* said Stoddard. “Hendrik seemed very moved by it and said that he thought that it was one of the most honest events that he’d seen in his life.”

  Each man declared, “I commit to you my life and my love for the rest of our days,” put on their rings, and kissed. Then Stoddard’s brother performed the traditional role of the best man by offering this toast:

  “Tom and Walter
have done something that gay people have dreamed of for thousands of years. Let’s raise our glasses to Tom and Walter. May you continue your life together in a more perfect union, in good health, and always with adventure and purpose and love.”

  JANUARY 1996 BROUGHT inklings of the greatest hope the gay community had felt since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic fifteen years earlier. A new three-drug combination seemed to offer what Lawrence K. Altman described in the Times as “the most powerful AIDS therapy ever tested on infected patients.” He quoted Dr. William Paul, the head of the federal office of AIDS research: “Patients need to know this is promising, all signs are optimistic.”

  For Charles Gibson, for Xax, and for thousands of others, it seemed it might possibly be that “miraculous thing” that would finally allow them to recover.

  Xax, who had resisted all drug therapy for several years after he first learned he was infected, was one of the first patients to start receiving the new treatment: protease inhibitors, in combination with AZT and 3TC.

  “I started in the spring,” said Xax. “Now I do know a lot of people on it. Then I didn’t. Seeing these trials come along—one after another—and everybody’s viral loads are dropping to undetectable levels. It took me about a month to go through the psychological change. And then taking them at the beginning was very hard too, because it has a very strong effect. You would feel it, like, coursing through your body. I would feel it washing through my brain. I would start to go unconscious and all of a sudden I’d snap to, like, where was I? And then in a few seconds I’d be back again, like, whoa, now where was I. And then all of a sudden I’d be knocked out and I’d be asleep. But then over like a few months, that stuff stopped. And I’d just have energy.

  “And I’d just feel good. And that’s a completely new phenomenon in my whole life.