The Gay Metropolis (10 page)

Strickland did look up his new friend when the war was over, and he still remembered him. “Unfortunately, he had no opening. But he sent me with a note to R. H. Macy, to the woman in charge of display there, and she hired me. I just realized that I would be much happier as a gay person, living in New York.”

Jules Elphant used to camp out for the weekend just outside of Lido Beach on Long Island. “In those days you didn't have anybody there. It was just wild. And it was great. It was isolated and people could go sunbathing nude and bathing nude and nobody ever thought about it. It started to get bad when a lot of drag queens started doing shows on weekends on the beaches. They started performing, and some straight people happened to see it and they started bringing their friends. Once that happened, forget it. Before you knew it, there were too many people coming down and that started to ruin Lido Beach.”

Stephen Reynolds remembered going out to Cherry Grove right after the war. “I was aghast,” he said. “I thought it was very amusing. I loved it. But if I had a house out in Fire Island and I looked down on the beach, and two men were fucking I would call the police. Now, of course, if you say such a thing as that, they say, ‘What do you mean? You're prejudiced!' Well I don't go along with that. I mean, if I saw a man and a woman fucking I would call the police, and if I saw two men fucking, I would do the same. But I was brought up a different way.”

Paul Cadmus spent many happy hours gazing at the sailors who flooded Riverside Park: “A lot of my ‘gay life' was visual mostly. Not all of it, but more than I wanted. I was rather timid, I guess. I kept most of my dreams about sailors to myself. I used to like watching them, thinking what a good time they were having.”

ALTHOUGH THE ARMY
trained its officers to be on the lookout for men who had “feminine bodily characteristics,” or who demonstrated “effeminacy in dress and manner,” there were no instructions to exclude masculine women from the armed forces. Johnnie Phelps, a woman sergeant in the army, thought, “There was a tolerance for lesbianism if they needed
you. The battalion that I was in was probably about ninety-seven percent lesbian.”

Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I'm giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.' We're going to get rid of them.”

“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary, who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I'll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.'

“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps's name may be second, but mine will be first.'

“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you're right. They're lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I'll be happy to make that list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we've been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.'

“And he said, ‘Forget the order.'

“It was a good battalion to be in.”

Allan Bérubé notes that “an extraordinary aspect of WAC policy” was to encourage officers to try to “mold the lesbian desires of WACs into qualities that made better soldiers. Such advice grew out of psychiatrists' attempts to apply their concepts of transference and sublimation to the interpersonal dynamics of military life. Trainees who had ‘potential homosexual tendencies'” could be deterred from sex “by encouraging them to sublimate their desires into a ‘hero-worship type of reaction. … By the strength of her influence [an officer] could bring out in the woman who had previously exhibited homosexual tendencies a definite type of leadership which can then be guided into normal fields of expression, making her a valued member of the corps.'”

A lecture prepared by the Surgeon General's Office and delivered to WAC officers included the statement that “every person is born with a
bisexual nature.” Any WAC might gravitate “toward homosexual practices because of her new close association and the lack of male companionship which she had known in civilian life.”

As the nation's manpower needs mushroomed, the armed forces were continually adjusting their regulations governing the treatment of homosexuals. The balance of power in determining how they should be handled shifted back and forth between psychiatric consultants and hard-line military bureaucrats. Part of the time psychiatrists encouraged reform by opposing routine court-martials and imprisonment for homosexual soldiers; at other points in the debate they supported “the stigmatization of homosexuals with punitive rather than medical discharges,” according to Bérubé, because they worried that heterosexual soldiers would pretend to be gay if they knew that could get out with an honorable discharge.

A1943 policy published by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson provided an exception for a soldier who had a homosexual experience but was not a “confirmed pervert.”
^*
After psychiatric examination and if “he otherwise possesses a salvage value,” this type of offender was to be reclaimed and returned to duty after “appropriate disciplinary action.” But periodic witch-hunts continued, and gay soldiers were routinely interrogated to obtain the names of anyone else they believed was gay.

In 1944 a new directive required hospitalization for suspected homosexuals. And it was no longer necessary to commit sodomy to be targeted as an undesirable. As Bérubé noted, “Now merely being homosexual or having such ‘tendencies' could entrap both men and women, label them as sick, and remove them from the service.” A psychiatrist interviewed each suspect, and a Red Cross worker wrote up his life history and contacted his family. If he refused a dishonourable discharge, he could be court-martialed and imprisoned.

Stanley Posthorn met a man who had been hospitalized for six months because he had “gone down” on a private—“and it was very important to him to get the boy off. The boy was straight, very beautiful, and very amenable to being seduced. I don't think he felt remorse about what he had done. They decided not to court-martial” the man who had seduced the private. “But he got a dishonorable discharge.”

All those who received a dishonorable discharge paid a huge price when the war was over, because they were automatically denied the lavish benefits of the GI Bill, which financed the education and subsidized the mortgages
of millions of other veterans. However, at least in the case of Posthorn's friend in the hospital, his dishonorable discharge had no effect at all on his employment prospects.

“Nobody asked to see it,” said Posthorn, who received an honorable discharge. “Nobody asked him and nobody ever asked me. But it was an ugly thing to have done to you.”

When the army moved toward a policy of hospitalization for suspected homosexuals, it created an unprecedented opportunity for psychiatrists to study large numbers of gay men in one place. Many military psychiatrists were very surprised to discover that many gay men saw themselves as part of a superior elite—just as Otis Bigelow did—and rejected the idea that they were degenerates.

One of the oddest projects was aimed at developing a new method to detect homosexuals. It involved inserting tongue depressors into the throats of 1,404 psychiatric patients. Researchers found that 89 percent of those who were diagnosed as sexual psychopaths “and who had ‘admitted fellatio' did not show a ‘gag reflex' due to ‘the repeated control of the reflex during the act of fellatio.'” The study couldn't explain why one-third of the drug addicts in the study also showed no gag reflex.

Although psychiatrists believed they were improving the plight of gay soldiers by lobbying for hospitalization rather than imprisonment, their efforts would have a decidedly negative effect on gay life in America over the next three decades. Practically everything psychiatrists urged the army to do—“forced hospitalization, mandatory psychiatric diagnoses, discharge as sexual psychopaths, and the protective sympathy of psychiatrists”—reinforced the notion that homosexuals were sick.

A handful of psychiatrists who studied the gay experience in the armed forces reached remarkably enlightened conclusions. But this minority view received very little publicity, and negligible support from colleagues.

Immediately after the war, Clements Fry and Edna Rostow examined the records of 183 servicemen. These Yale researchers concluded that the military had rarely enforced its official discharge policy and permitted most gay personnel to remain in the army and navy.

Inside, most soldiers kept their sexual behavior secret. They had performed just as well as heterosexuals “in various military jobs,” including combat. The researchers also found no reason to believe that homosexuality alone “would make a man a poor military risk.… Homosexuals should be judged first as individuals, and not as a class.” Their report even suggested that military officials should “examine the question as to whether the military service should be interested in homosexuality as
such, or only in the individual's ability to perform his duties and adjust to military life.”

This study was the first in a Pentagon series that contradicted the military's official prejudice. A Defense Department committee in 1952 and the Navy's Crittenden Board in 1957 both rejected the idea that gays represented exceptional security risks. But like the report of Fry and Rostow, these studies and nearly all the others devoted to homosexuals in the military were either suppressed or destroyed. In 1977, the army announced that its files revealed “no evidence of special studies pertaining to homosexuals,” and the navy couldn't locate any either.

In an unusual article,
Newsweek
reported in 1947 that the typical gay serviceman “topped the average soldier in intelligence, educaticin and rating.… As a whole, these men were law-abiding and hard-working. In spite of nervous, unstable and often hysterical temperaments, they performed admirably as office workers. Many tried to be good soldiers.” The Yale report might have been the source of this information, but it wasn't credited in the piece.

A study conducted in 1989 by the Defense Department's Personnel Security Research and Education Center concluded that sexuality “is unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left- or right-handed.” It too was suppressed until 1989, when Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, the first openly gay man in Congress, made it public. An additional PERSEREC report concluded that personnel discharged because they were gay were better qualified and had fewer personal problems than the typical heterosexual in the military.

WHEN THE WAR
finally ended in Europe in the spring of 1945, Stephen Reynolds was stationed in Germany. “It was the most depressing day on earth,” he remembered. “I don't know why. I was on a run. I was with someone in the ambulance. We were in Bavaria, and we stopped by the road for tea. And an American truck came roaring around the corner, and he said, ‘The war is over.' We said, ‘What?' He said, ‘The war is over.'

“So we got in the car. My brother had been killed in the war. And there was no excitement. If we'd been in a city, there would have been an orgy. But we were out in the field in some ghastly place. And it just didn't mean anything. Nobody celebrated. There was no way to celebrate.”

But a few months later, when Japan surrendered after the United States dropped the second atomic bomb in August, Reynolds was back in Manhattan. And there he witnessed pandemonium: “That was a
huge
celebration. I was very young then. I was invited to the Colony for supper. It was
the first time I'd ever been there. After that I went there a lot—it was the most marvelous restaurant in New York City. And the Windsors were there—they had a lot to celebrate.
That
was a wild night. There was great jubilation.”

IN THE LATE
1940S, thousands of lesbian and gay soldiers who had streamed through New York City on their way to Europe settled in Manhattan, bolstering what was already the largest gay community in America. In 1945, they founded the Veterans Benevolent Association, one of the first gay organizations ever incorporated in New York State.

The group met monthly and then twice a month on the fourth floor of a building on Houston Street near Second Avenue. Jules Elphant attended its meetings right from the start, when he was twenty-two. “A lot of it was uncomfortable because in those days we just didn't talk about being gay,” Elphant remembered. “Of course in those days we weren't ‘gay.' I think we were just ‘queer.' Or ‘sissies.'
Sissy
was the word that took care of everything, but so many of us were so far from being sissies. I always found myself in a macho-type way.”

The association's dances attracted nearly two hundred men. The dances also attracted a couple of the veterans' wives, including the woman married to James Lang, who founded the association and did most of the work that kept it together until 1954. “The women were all straight, but they knew their husbands were gay and they just went along with the husbands,” said Elphant.

“Once we dressed in bathing suits,” he continued. “Everyone was introduced as Miss So-and-So. I was very uncomfortable with that. But I whipped up my own red, white, and blue costume—I was Miss Patriot. And I met a lot of interesting people because of that—‘Oh, you've got such powerful legs.' This was one of the first socials I went to, and it brought me out. Suddenly I made more friends that way.