The Gay Metropolis (11 page)

“Sex was one of the things of course that made us part of the group. But sex was not the basic reason for it. It was social—they wanted to be together with people [like themselves] so they could relax more.” All the members were white, with lots of Jews, Irishmen, and Italians. And there were plenty of couples. “We also had a ‘Stitch and Bitch gang'—for sewing and gossiping. I was doing beaded fruit. I've been doing it for years. It's expensive, but it's wonderful therapy.

“We had actual business meetings of the veterans association. We discussed general subjects and we had speakers—and a legal adviser. Occasionally someone was having problems in their job and we would discuss
what we could do about it. Of course, the best thing you could do was keep your mouth shut. And try to stay out of problems. That was the easiest way in those days. When we were at our jobs, we had to be careful. I had to be careful. I didn't show any signs of pansyism or anything like that. But other people who do have a little more feminism within themselves did have problems.”

Elphant liked the association's big gatherings because “you would get to meet two or three that you'd become interested in.… That's how I met my lover in 1946. When I first joined, he was one of the young people at a house party. He was seventeen, and he was interested in me and I didn't even know it. I was so shy about things. And somebody had to come over and tell me, ‘Do you know Richard is interested in you?' And so I got friendly with Richard. We were inseparable after that for quite a while. On and off, we were together thirty-four years. But we never lived together.”

IN 1947, AMERICA
was shocked by a contradiction of one of its most strongly held prejudices—the idea that great athletes could never be homosexuals. William “Big Bill” Tilden was a national hero, a larger-than-life tennis player who had been the American champion from 1920 to 1925 and a three-time winner at Wimbledon. Along with Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Johnny Weissmuller, Jack Dempsey and Bobby Jones, he was one of the giants of the golden era of American sports.

But at the age of fifty-three Tilden was sentenced to five years probation in Los Angeles after pleading guilty to a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a fourteen-year-old boy. “You have been the idol of youngsters all over the world,” said the sentencing judge. “It has been a great shock to sports fans to read about your troubles.” Later his probation was revoked when the police found him with a seventeen-year-old boy, and Tilden was forced to serve seven and a half months in jail.

TWO BOOKS PUBLISHED
at the beginning of 1948—a short novel and a giant scientific treatise—sparked a huge debate about sex in America. Both of them were controversial partly because they were so nonjudgmental. Precisely because each volume emphasized the sheer ordinariness of being gay, in the coming decades they would play a crucial role in a very long campaign to convince Americans that homosexuality wasn't really an illness at all.

The longer and more important book did more to promote sexual liberation in general and gay liberation in particular than anything previously published between hard covers. Because it was a dense scientific
study, the publisher ordered an initial printing of only 5,000 copies. But just weeks after it first reached bookstores, there were an amazing 185,000 copies in print

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, by Alfred Charles Kinsey and his associates Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, was an 804-page tome, nine years in the making, which drew its conclusions from detailed interviews with twelve thousand Americans. No one had ever seen anything like it before. It was crammed with tables and graphs, and its statistics startled nearly everyone, including its authors. The accuracy of those numbers has been debated continuously ever since they were first published. But while the book's estimates about the prevalence of different kinds of sexual behavior captured most of the headlines, over the long term those numbers were much less important than the authors' radical approach to their subject.

What made Kinsey's book revolutionary was its insistence that scientists had to divorce their judgments about sexuality from the “religious background” of the culture that had dominated “patterns of sexual behavior” for many centuries. “Ancient religious codes are still the prime source of the attitudes, the idea, the ideals, and the rationalizations by which most individuals pattern their sexual lives,” Kinsey declared.

In his introduction, Dr. Alan Gregg wrote that “no aspect of human biology in our current civilization stands in more need of scientific knowledge and courageous humility than that of sex. … As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.”

Because he adopted a disinterested tone and divorced all of his judgments from the traditional Judeo-Christian influences, Kinsey helped Americans to think about sex in a completely different way. “To each individual, the significance of any particular type of sexual activity depends very largely upon his previous experience,” the fifty-three-year-old zoologist explained.

Ultimately, certain activities may seem to him to be the only things that have value, that are right, that are socially acceptable; and all departures from his own particular pattern may seem to him to be enormous abnormalities. But the scientific data which are accumulating make it appear that if circumstances be propitious, most individuals might have become conditioned in any direction, even into activities which they now consider quite unacceptable.… There is an abundance of evidence
that most human sexual activities would become comprehensible to most individuals, if they could know the background of each other individual's behavior.

The questionnaire about homosexual activity was incredibly detailed, posing more than 120 queries, ranging from “frequency” and “age preferences” (and “reasons for age preferences”) to “positions involved (including 69)” and “blackmail, active and passive.” Kinsey's most surprising conclusion was that “at least 37 percent of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age.” He described himself as “totally unprepared to find such incidence data,” but he added that the data about homosexual activity had been “more or less the same” in big cities and small towns all across the country.

Kinsey had been a professor of zoology since 1920 and director of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University since 1942. He conducted hundreds of the interviews himself, and many of his subjects remembered him as a charismatic figure. Kinsey interviewed Otis Bigelow over several days at the Pennsylvania Hotel in Manhattan.

“You started out shy, but after fifteen minutes you could tell him
anything”
Bigelow remembered. “He was a father—God the father figure. If you told him you had licked someone's toes, he was fascinated to find out about it. And he was nonjudgmental. He wouldn't have been able to get things out of people unless he was the person that he was.” After spending a couple of days with Kinsey, Bigelow decided that if the doctor had asked him to jump out of the window so he could observe his reactions going down, “I probably would have. He was a godfather in a good way. Somebody that you would trust with your life—and you did, of course, in those days.”

Kinsey was fascinated with Bigelow because he had kept a list of all the men he had slept with. “I think it was around five hundred. I would say, ‘That one was in September in the 34th Street-Lexington Avenue John.' That's what one did in those days—you'd have four or five in an hour, if you were attractive and had some nerve.”

Paul Cadmus, who also met Kinsey in the late forties, remembered him as “gentle and quiet—and a little bit formidable because he was so terribly serious. One didn't think of him as laughing or smiling very much. He took homosexuality just as calmly as he did his work with wasps. He interviewed me about my sex life—how many orgasms, how big it was, measure it before and after. He interviewed your friend at the same time. He interviewed Jerry French at more or less the same time to see
what he had to say about our relationship.” Cadmus believed Kinsey was gay, but never suspected that the scientist had acted on that impulse, so the painter arranged for two friends to give the researcher a demonstration of gay lovemaking. “I think he viewed it probably very calmly,” Cadmus said. “We had a date with him and these two friends after the little exhibition, and he came to dinner at our house.” After dinner, Kinsey suddenly felt ill. “We had to put him in a hot bath and give him cognac. But he was all right after that. I don't think he stayed very late after dinner.”

In the report, Kinsey introduced his famous zero-to-six scale (completely heterosexual-to-completely homosexual), which left most people somewhere in between. Thirty-seven percent of the men interviewed for his study had reached orgasm with another man at least once after puberty. Kinsey estimated that twenty-five percent of the male population had “more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55,” and ten percent were “more or less exclusively homosexual.” Four percent were “exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, after the onset of adolescence.”

But the conclusions he drew from these statistics were even more devastating to traditional prejudices than the numbers themselves:

In view of the data which we now have on the incidence and frequency of the homosexual, and in particular on its co-existence with the heterosexual in the lives of a considerable portion of the male population, it is difficult to maintain the view that psychosexual reactions between individuals of the same sex are rare and
therefore abnormal or unnatural, or even that they constitute within themselves evidence of neuroses or even psychoses
[emphasis added]. If homosexual activity persists on as large a scale as it does, in the face of the very considerable public sentiment against it and in spite of the severity of the penalties that our Anglo-American culture has placed upon it through the centuries, there seems some reason for believing that such activity would appear in the histories of a much larger portion of the population if there were no social restraints.

This statement was obviously another attempt to encourage tolerance. However, its unsupported speculation that without discrimination, homosexuals might actually increase in number (rather than simply be less unhappy) contained the seeds of a provocative argument. Many opponents of gay rights still use this idea to promote prejudice against homosexuals—to prevent their numbers from multiplying. However, scientific evidence that homosexuality is primarily hereditary has accumulated steadily during the past decade.

Kinsey urged a reconsideration of the treatment of homosexuals because homosexual activity turned out to be so much more common than anyone had believed before he made his estimates:

The judge who is considering the case of the male who has been arrested for homosexual activity should keep in mind that nearly 40 percent of all the other males in the town could be arrested at some time in their lives for similar activity.… It is not a matter of individual hypocrisy which leads officials with homosexual histories to become prosecutors of the homosexual activity in the community. They themselves are the victims of the mores, and the public demand that they protect those mores. As long as there are such gaps between the traditional custom and the actual behavior of the population such inconsistencies will continue to exist.

“Homosexuality was thought to be a very rare phenomenon,” said Evelyn Hooker, who would do some groundbreaking research of her own a few years later. Before Kinsey, “There was nothing in the literature that concerned well-functioning gay males.… Kinsey gave great hope.” Gay people realized for the first time “that they were not a tiny minority but actually a very sizable proportion of the population.”

ALTHOUGH
the
New York Times
would do quite a lot to impede the cause of gay rights over the next three decades, it greeted the Kinsey Report with respect. The sensitive job of reviewing the book fell to Dr. Howard Rusk. A favorite of the
Times
's publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Rusk wrote a regular column for the Sunday paper (and later founded the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine).

Rusk may have been sympathetic to the book because he wasn't a psychiatrist. Therefore, nothing in it challenged any of the basic tenets of his profession. Rusk wrote that the “end results” of the report “should be healthy. They should bring about a better understanding of some of our emotional problems, and the bases for some of our psychiatric concepts. … It presents facts that indicate the necessity to review some of our legal and moral concepts. It gives new therapeutic tools to the psychiatrist and the practicing physician. It offers a yardstick that will give invaluable aid in the study of our complex social problems” as well as “data that should promote tolerance and understanding.” He also predicted that “after decades of hush-hush,” the new book was certain “to create an explosion.”

Some of the initial criticism of the book was quite mild, but it built steadily through the spring. At a forum of the American Social Hygiene Association in Manhattan in April, Carle Zimmerman, an associate professor
of sociology at Harvard, suggested that “we have the right to ask the backers of the report what they plan for the future, since they indicate throughout the work that they are dissatisfied with the prevailing sex norms.” Helen Judy Bond, head of the department of home economics at Columbia University's Teachers College, advocated “a law against doing research dealing exclusively with sex” because “sex is only part of the sum total of the behavior of each human being.”