The Gay Metropolis (2 page)

At the dawn of this new age, at the same time that Freud was researching
The Interpretation of Dreams,
his contemporary Magnus Hirschfeld was launching the first gay liberation movement of the modern era in Germany. In 1897 Hirschfeld distributed more than six thousand questionnaires to Berlin factory workers and university students. He concluded that 2.2 percent of all German men were homosexuals and published his findings
in one of the twenty-three volumes of
Jahrbuch,
the first avowedly gay publication of the twentieth century. A few years later, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Research, which collected twenty thousand books and thirty-five thousand photographs. He also organized the World League for Sexual Reform, which held annual conferences in Copenhagen, London and Vienna, between 1928 and 1932. He campaigned continuously for the repeal of paragraph 175, the law banning sodomy in Germany. A petition asking the Reichstag to annul that law attracted the signatures of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein.

Hirschfeld conducted his research at a time when Weimar Germany nurtured a rich gay culture, which included costume balls and luxurious bars and nightclubs for gay men and lesbians. But after barely three decades, the Nazis would put an end to all of Hirschfeld's activities. Nazi toughs attacked him during public appearances. Four months after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, while Hirschfeld was out of the country, the Institute for Sexual Research was ransacked and its contents were burned in a public ceremony.

The fact that the Nazis seized power from a regime that had tolerated homosexuality would color American attitudes toward sexual permissiveness for thirty years afterward. American writers would regularly compare the Weimar period to the debauchery of ancient Rome—and then conclude that any culture that permitted gay life to flourish was obviously doomed to catastrophe.

The subject was further complicated by the fact that the Nazis themselves had tolerated openly gay men among their own leaders, even though “the official party apparatus had” assailed “all immorality, especially love between men” as early as 1928. This uneven tolerance ended in 1934, when Ernst Roehm, the gay commander of the Nazi S.A., and dozens of his allies were massacred during the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler said afterwards that these men deserved to die for their “corrupt morals alone,” but the historian William L. Shirer wrote that the Führer “had known all along … that a large number of his closest … followers were sexual perverts and convicted murderers.”

What American journalists and historians neglected altogether was the vicious persecution that gay people suffered at the hands of the Nazis once Roehm and his friends had been eliminated. Historians of the Holocaust estimate that during the Third Reich at least ninety thousand homosexuals were arrested, more than fifty thousand were sent to prison and between ten and fifteen thousand ended up in concentration camps, where they were identified by pink triangles.

Most Americans considered Hitler's obliteration of the German Jewish population so horrifying that it did more to discredit anti-Semitism than any other single event. But Nazi oppression of homosexuals failed to increase sympathy for them in the United States or anywhere else.

ALTHOUGH
World War II did nothing to improve the way most Americans viewed homosexuality, it would have a dramatic effect on the way thousands of lesbians and gay men viewed themselves. The United States Army acted as a great, secret unwitting agent of gay liberation by creating the largest concentration of homosexuals inside a single institution in American history. That is why this volume begins with World War II.

People from all over the country who had assumed that they were unique learned that they were not alone. Soldiers and sailors also got a chance to sample gay culture all over the world—and discovered that large gay communities already existed in American ports of entry like San Francisco and New York City.

It was also during this war that the word
gay
became “a magic by-word in practically every corner of the United States where homosexuals might gather.” (Some historians have traced the use of the word
gaie
as a synonym for homosexual all the way back to sixteenth-century France.)

In the postwar period, New York City became the literal gay metropolis for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from within and without the United States: the place they chose to learn how to live openly, honestly and without shame.

But the figurative gay metropolis is much larger: it encompasses every place on every continent where gay people have found the courage and the dignity to be free.

Some of the ordinary and extraordinary citizens who nurtured the spectacular growth of that larger metropolis are the main subjects of this book. While the women I have written about are among the most compelling characters in this saga, men gradually became my principal focus—because their story is also mine.

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

—
E. B. WHITE

“I think the trick is to say yes to life.”

—
JAMES BALDWIN

S
ANDY KERN
grew up on Amboy Street, the Brooklyn block where the boys from Murder, Incorporated, used to shoot craps in front of Olesh's Candy Store. These were the Jewish mobsters of Brownsville before the war began. “We kids would stand and watch for the cops,” Kern remembered, “and we would signal them. And when we didn't do it in time and the cops did raid them—they did it right in the street, of course—the cops would come, they would run away, these guys. And when the cops got to the site where they were playing craps, they would take all the coins that were on the floor and toss them up in the air, and the kids would scramble for the money.”

Kern laughed at the vivid memory, a faraway moment when she already knew she was unlike everyone else, but didn't yet know how. “Of course the war stopped all that, and a lot of the guys never came back.” She was twelve in 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “I always thought I was very, very
special
, because I was very different from everybody in the neighborhood. And I always imagined that there was a ray of light beaming down from the sky onto me. Following me all over because I was very special. And I didn't know why until we were in the midst of an air-raid drill.

“We used to have these regularly. It was in the evening. And the air-raid drill meant that all the lights had to be put out. Everything. As if there were actual enemy planes flying overhead. And all the lights would be doused, and the black curtains over the windows we had, and every light was either hidden, or covered, or turned off.

“So it was completely black. And I was sitting with my little girlfriend, whom I loved until it hurt me. I was so crazy about Minnie. We were the same age. She was about five foot eight, and she was beautiful in my eyes. My father was a pushcart peddler and made a few pennies a day. Her father was in construction, so he earned more money. All the lights went out and we were sitting in front of the stoop.” She laughed again: “I'm remembering it all!”

“Anyway, it was black and dark, so I felt that I could put my arms around her. And oh! I was
so
happy. I was holding her in my arms. I never did that before. And I put my face in her hair, and I could smell her, and it was fantastic. I was never so open during the day when the light and everybody could see. I don't know why, but I sensed that I shouldn't display my affection for her. But in the dark, of course, I could do all that I wanted to do, and that's what I wanted to do: just hold her and smell her.

“I don't even know if I was kissing her. It was just fondling—holding her in my arms—when all of a sudden the sirens came on, which was the end of the make-believe air raid. And all the lights went on, and there I was still holding her in my arms—when a neighbor turned around and looked at us.

“And she said
that word
that I heard for the very first time in my life. She said, ‘Are you a lesbian?'

“So! I remembered the word. We didn't have any dictionary at home—would you believe it? So the next day I ran to the library and I looked up the word
lesbian
. Oh boy. That's when I
really
felt special. Because I remember reading about the Isle of Lesbos. So I said, ‘Well, I deserve!' I confirmed my feelings of being special. So, unlike many other lesbians, I was always very proud—and I always felt very special. But at the same time I knew somehow that I shouldn't tell everybody how I feel.

“That's when I started to read the literature about it. And I remember having read
The Well of Loneliness
. They didn't have it in the bookstore. I had to send away for it. I don't know how I found out about it. Maybe I read about it in the library when I was looking up the word
lesbian
. I wrote away to the publisher just for
The Well of Loneliness
and
The Unlit Lamp
. I got them both at the same time. And I didn't have to worry about receiving them at home because neither one of my parents could read English.
They came from Russia—Russian-Jewish—and they never learned how to read English. Before I went to school, I only spoke Yiddish.

“Minnie and I would walk together in the wintertime. I would have her hand in my pocket—we would hold hands in my pocket—and she loved it. And when we went to the movies, she always let me hold her hand.” Then Minnie went away to camp for the summer. “My heart was broken! I used to write her letters, and in my letters I would cut my finger and bleed on the letter.I would be falling in love all the time. And each one was a bone-crushing kind of love!”

Kern laughed some more. “When I was very young, there was something strange going on with me. On the outside I was very tough. I was known as ‘The Terror.' That was my nickname. I was the leader of the gang and I would beat up the tough guys and my territory was Amboy Street, and nobody could come onto Amboy if they lived someplace else. But inside I was afraid of people. And I was in love with all these women. And I would be composing all this music. My mother had this tall radio that stood on the floor. I would sit down on the floor and press my ear against the loudspeaker so I could feel
inside
the music. Inside it! Oh! And I would keep it very loud, and my mother would yell at me. But I was wild about the music.

“There was such a difference between how I was on the outside, compared to the way I was on the inside. I was in my secret world, which ran along with my real life. In my secret life I was a pianist-conductor-composer, and I wrote all this beautiful music and played all this wonderful music, and the women would just
swoon
over me. All this romantic music that came pouring out of my head and heart!”

ACROSS THE RIVER
from Kern, Otis Bigelow lived in Manhattan. He, too, would never think of himself the same way again after the summer of 1942. Bigelow turned twenty-two that June. A striking native of Exeter, New Hampshire, where his father had been a master at Phillips Exeter Academy, Bigelow was an only child.

After his father died, his mother sent him away to Rumsey Hall, a British-style school in Washington, Connecticut, where “Sir, yes, sir” was the required form and the students wore black ties to dinner.

At twelve Bigelow was already having sex with his classmates, but they didn't think their pastime had anything to do with being “gay” or “homosexual,” words that they had never heard spoken. “In my world, in the thirties, it simply did not exist,” Bigelow recalled.

Like millions before him, and millions after him, Bigelow believed he
was simply going through “a stage. … It was just friends, you know, doing something for a friend. There was no masculinity or femininity involved. I thought for many years that it was fine, and that it was a substitute for girls. I always thought I would get married. I went out with girls and loved girls; they were interested in me and I in them and we got along beautifully.”

His roommate at Rumsey, an admirer of Tarzan, taught Bigelow how to masturbate. “He loved to go off into the woods and tie me to a tree. Then I would say, ‘Oh, Tarzan, Tarzan, where are you?' And he would come swinging through the trees and carry me away.”

In 1934, Bigelow transferred to Exeter; two years later, his mother died, and he was devastated.

At Exeter, “There were a couple of guys who could actually see through me, both of whom I think turned out to be totally straight. They would say, ‘Want to come down to my room?' And I would sneak down after lights out, we would fuck each other between the legs. That's what friends are for! It was just a friendly but mechanical act. More fun than doing it by yourself or doing it with a pillow—or a milk bottle. We tried everything.” Later, in New York, he learned the forties slang for this kind of primitive sex: “first-year Princeton.”

Once, at a bus station away from school, he was a little more adventurous. “I had gone to the movies and had taken the bus back and went into the john. There was a nice-looking fellow standing there and he took one look at me and took me into one of the booths and stood me on the john. I thought it was wonderful, but I had a terrible attack of conscience afterwards. I went home and scrubbed myself. I had never heard of such a thing.”

Bigelow loved the theater, and he played all the leading ladies at Exeter until his voice began to change. In
Androcles and the Lion
, he was Lavinia and he had to kiss the handsome captain on the cheek. He told the director he didn't want to do it, but the director insisted that he follow the script. “So I did. It was a strange feeling.”

When he graduated from Exeter in 1938, he ignored his uncle's admonition to go to college. Instead, he moved to New York, where he hoped to become an actor. While performing summer stock in Rye Beach, New Hampshire, Bigelow had met Gordon Merrick, an actor who had just graduated from Princeton. Bigelow and Merrick used to kiss, but nothing more. Although they shared an apartment when they reached New York, Bigelow was still planning to marry a woman. And quite quickly Gordon decided that he was “very into
not
being gay,” Bigelow recalled.