The Gay Metropolis (32 page)

After the camera had been turned off, “Mike said I had answered his questions to his satisfaction,” Nichols recalled. “But,” said Wallace, “I really don't think you truly believe in your heart what you're saying to me. I think you know it's wrong.”

“I think
you
think it's wrong,” Nichols replied. “I remember after that being kind of pissed off.” Asked about this exchange thirty years later, Wallace said, “It seems perfectly possible because my eyes were being opened at the time.”

The day after the program was aired, Nichols was fired from his job as a sales manager for a Washington hotel.

Charles Socarides was one of a number of psychiatrists who gained notoriety in the fifties and sixties entirely because of his views about homosexuality, and he remained one of the most virulent opponents of the gay liberation movement, right through the 1990s. For CBS, he provided his standard diagnosis: “The fact that someone is homosexual, a true obligatory homosexual, automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long. … The stresses and strains the psychic apparatus is subjected to” will cause him “to have increasing difficulties. I think the whole idea of the happy homosexual is to create a mythology about the nature of homosexuality.” But in another concession to the budding gay movement, Wallace noted that “Dr. Socarides's views are not universally held. There is a smaller group who do not consider homosexuality an illness at all. Instead they regard it as a deviation within the range of normalcy.”

Almost two decades after the broadcast, Socarides's son publicly declared his homosexuality. “I don't think it's easy for anybody to grow up gay,” Richard Socarides told David Dunlap of
The New York Times
in 1995. “But given [my father] Charles's outspokenness on the subject of a so-called cure for homosexuality, it sure wasn't any easier.” In 1996, Richard Socarides went to work in the White House as Bill Clinton's liaison to the gay community.

Wallace reported that “homosexual acts are not considered a crime in most of Western Europe,” and he pointed out that the British were about to legalize homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private. In America in 1967, Illinois was the only state where such acts had become legal. Then the program featured this enlightened statement from James Braxton Craven, a federal district court judge in Charlotte, North Carolina:

Is there any public purpose served by a possible sixty-year-maximum or even five-year-minimum imprisonment of the occasional or one-time homosexual without treatment, and if so, what is it? Are homosexuals twice as dangerous to society as second-degree murderers? Is there any good reason why a person convicted on a single homosexual act with another adult may be imprisoned six times as long as an abortionist? Twice as long as an armed bank robber? And seven hundred and thirty times as long as the public drunk?

In 1964, Judge Craven had thrown out a state conviction of a man who had been sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in prison for engaging in a homosexual act. “Is it not time to redraft a criminal statute first enacted in 1533?” the judge asked.

The CBS program showed footage of Nichols's and Kameny's pickets in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the State Department and the White House in Washington. Kameny appeared using his real name and offered this sound bite about security clearances: “Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal character, as an individual. Certainly some homosexuals are poor risks. This is no possible excuse for penalizing all homosexuals.” In front of the White House, there was also this baffled reaction to twelve gay pickets
^*
from a self-described “country boy” from West Virginia: “I Just
don't understand it. They're weird! You people are getting much more cosmopolitan than I thought you were!”

Finally, Wallace reported “talk of a homosexual mafia in the arts.” The
Times
had repeatedly printed pieces on the corrupting influence of homosexual playwrights in the theater. In 1961 Howard Taubman complained, “Writers feel they must state a homosexual theme in heterosexual situations. … Dissembling is unhealthy. … The audience senses rot at the drama's core.” Five years later, the headline at the top of the “Arts and Leisure” section read “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.” Stanley Kauffmann argued in this famous article that because “three of the most successful playwrights of the last twenty years are (reputed) homosexuals … postwar American drama presents a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage and society.” Knowledgeable theatergoers deduced that Kauffmann was referring to Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and William Inge.

At the heart of Kauffmann's criticism was the implicit assumption that only a heterosexual man who was
having sex
with a woman could possibly write a realistic woman character. This argument grew out of a quintessentially fifties attitude: the idea that a woman's only value to a man was as a sex object, or as the mother of his children. Turning reality on its head, Kauffmann implied that all gay men were misogynistic; therefore, their portraits of women were always malicious. The fact that gay men frequently have much closer friendships with women than heterosexual men do—or that a gay playwright who had learned to appreciate both the masculine
and
the feminine within him might be adequately equipped to create convincing women characters—never occurred to these critics. They also ignored another fundamental truth: that the similarities between long-term homosexual and heterosexual relationships tend to be much greater than the differences.

The
Newsweek
theater critic Jack Kroll remembered sitting on a peer review board of the National Endowment for the Arts with Kauffmann. “Stanley had this absolutely gut reaction if a gay group came up—it was just ‘no way,'” said Kroll. “It was amazing to me that a man of that intelligence could not get beyond that reaction. Maybe it was some sort of Jewish morality. What I think was bad about Stanley's piece was not the
fact that he detected signs of a gay sensibility. It was his attitude; it was a prosecutorial thing: ‘You're under arrest!'”
^*

The debate about the competence of the homosexual playwright had intensified after the huge success of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee's scalding portrait of two married couples took Broadway by storm in 1962. In its honesty and its intensity, Albee's was the first important play to reflect the sensibility of the new decade. But because the playwright was gay, the rumor was rampant that his characters were really male homosexuals in disguise. Twenty-five years later, Albee remembered Kauffmann's “disgusting article,” and the “absolutely preposterous” notion that

gays were writing about gays, but disguising them as straights, and writing about men, but disguising them as women. … Tennessee Williams knew the difference between men and women as well as I do. If you're writing about men, you're writing about men, and if you're writing about women, you're writing about women. But then the rumor began that
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was really about four men, which led to attempts at all-male productions of the play, which led to me closing them down … because they're incorrect. But somehow that sniping has never gone away.

“People make the mistake of thinking gay playwrights can't write women characters,” said Arthur Laurents. “They think the women are really gays in disguise. The truth is that gays write women very well, and they are apt to have trouble writing men. What many write instead are studs and hunks. Look at Williams and Inge. There aren't men; there are these hustlers in one guise or another—or dream bodies without much mind.”

On the CBS documentary, a year after Kauffmann's article had appeared, Gore Vidal noted the “theory which one reads all the time about how a certain successful playwright in a very successful play describes married people, heterosexuals, as being wicked and vicious and clawing at each other.” He continued,

This is supposed to be really a story about two homosexual couples. Well … there are wicked homosexuals and there are wicked heterosexuals and this is a playwright who deals in savage and extreme situations. And
I don't see any of it as being translatable particularly as a homosexual situation posing as a heterosexual. And furthermore, if it were, then why is it popular? Obviously it's popular because what he has to say about married couples speaks to everybody. As a matter of fact, there's a certain homosexual who has written the only really good women characters in the American theater. So the idea that the homosexual in some way is a seditious person trying to absolutely destroy the family structure of the United States is
nonsense.

The “certain homosexual who has written the only really good women characters” was Tennessee Williams. Watching his own program almost three decades later, Mike Wallace was astonished: “He won't even mention his name! I can't believe it. Do you believe this? 1967? In the middle of the sexual revolution, the black revolution, Vietnam!”

Vidal wrote later, “It is now widely believed that since Tennessee Williams liked to have sex with men (true), he hated women (untrue). As a result, his women characters are thought to be malicious caricatures, designed to subvert and destroy godly straightness. But there is no actress on earth who will not testify that Williams created the best women characters in the modern theater.” Stephen Sondheim agreed: “It seems to me that Blanche DuBois alone refutes it all.”

“Somebody would become successful, then the word would spread he was a fairy,” said Vidal. “That meant that all the women were really men in disguise and the relationships were all degenerate ones. And this was a plot—by the fifties it was all a ‘homintern plot'—to overthrow heterosexuality.”

Vidal wrote that

faced with the contrary evidence, the anti-fag brigade promptly switch to their fallback position. All right, so [Williams] didn't hate women (as real guys do—the ball breakers!) but, worse, far worse,
he thought he was a woman.
Needless to say, a biblical hatred of women intertwines with the good team's hatred of fags. But Williams never thought of himself as anything but a man who could, as an artist, inhabit any gender; on the other hand, his sympathies were always with those defeated by “the squares”; or by time, once the sweet bird of youth is flown. Or by death, “which has never been much in the way of completion.” Williams had a great deal of creative and sexual energy; and he used both. Why not? And so what?

Arthur Laurents remembered all his friends reacting with “horror at the fact that the
Times
didn't fire Kauffmann right then and there” after his
article was published. “There is no excuse for it. They let him stay in business for a year, to their discredit.” A few years later, Laurents wrote the screenplay for
The Way We Were,
the hugely successful Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford vehicle about Hollywood during the witch-hunts of the fifties. It was directed by Sydney Pollack, and Laurents had gotten Pollack the job. One day Pollack told Laurents, “You know, everybody in Hollywood is just so surprised.”

“Why?” said Laurents.

“This is the best love story anybody has written in years. And you wrote it.”

“Why are they surprised?”

“You're a homosexual.”

Laurents said nothing. “Because I thought,
You're such an asshole, what can I say?”

The year before the CBS broadcast,
Time
referred gravely to the “homintern” that Vidal had ridiculed, and offered this pithy observation from the Broadway producer David Merrick about gays in the movie business: “In Hollywood, you have to scrape them off the ceiling.” Laurents had gotten his first job as a stage director when Merrick hired him for
I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
When Laurents asked Merrick to stop attacking homosexuals, the producer replied, “Oh, I don't mean it—it's just for publicity.” Laurents also noticed that nearly everyone who worked for Merrick was gay. “That's because they don't have anyone to go home to, so they can work all night,” the producer explained.

The
Time
essayist opined that “even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the things that normal men take seriously. … [Homosexuality is] essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves ‘he' and ‘she.'” The essay described pop art as part of a “vengeful, derisive counterattack” by “homosexual ethics and esthetics” on “the ‘straight world.'” Pop “insists on reducing art to the trivial.”
^*
Time's conclusion: homosexuality “deserves fairness, compassion,
understanding and when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but pernicious sickness.” Vidal noted the ‘anti-homintern hysteria was absolutely out of control—and
Time was
one of the centers.”

The CBS documentary concluded with a debate between Vidal and Albert Goldman, an adjunct assistant professor of English at Columbia, who later gained minor fame as the author of tabloid biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Goldman was among the first to sound the refrain that would become so popular among conservatives three decades later:

It seems to me that there are a lot of features of ordinary life which are enormously exaggerated in homosexual life. I mean the kind of jealousy and rage and promiscuity that is just inherent in the homosexual life. … We're in the course of gradually rolling back from our former cultural values or cultural identifications to a more narcissistic, more self-indulgent, to a more self centered and essentially adolescent lifestyle. The homosexual thing cannot really be separated from a lot of other parallel phenomena in our society today. I mean we see this on every hand; forty percent of modern marriages end in divorce; we have a very widespread tendency to live lives of nonstop promiscuity. This is played out in a kind of playboy philosophy which is celebrated and sugar-coated and offered to the masses and received with pleasure. We have all sorts of fun-and-games approaches to sex. We have rampant exhibitionism today in every conceivable form. We have a sort of masochistic, sadistic vogue. We have a smut industry that grinds out millions of dollars of pornography a year. We have a sort of masturbatory dance style that's embraced as if it were something profoundly sexual, whereas actually, all those dances do is just grind away without any consciousness of other people or their partners. And homosexuality is just one of a number of such things all tending toward the subversion, toward the final erosion, of our traditional cultural values. After all, when you're culturally bankrupt, why you fall into the hands of receivers.