The Gay Metropolis (40 page)

THE SEXUAL FREEDOM OF THE SEVENTIES
and the political awareness that flowed from Stonewall exerted two different influences on gay people coming of age in this era. The essential messages of the sexual revolution were about freedom and experimentation, and they encouraged men and women to sample every kind of erotic experience. Stonewall's lessons were less about sex and more about politics.

Among many lesbians, the sexual revolution diminished the impulse toward role-playing that had been so strong in previous decades. The singer Judy Barnett, who was nineteen in 1970, felt that “through the sixties, before the love revolution, the role-playing thing was much stronger. In the forties and fifties, the butch and femme thing was very distinct. By the time it got to our generation, we had the ‘love is all you need' thing, where it didn't matter who it was or how androgynous or what it was, and that helped break down some of the role-playing—at least the stereotypic manifestation of the role-playing.”

The opposite trend was apparent within part of the gay male population in the seventies. Perhaps because of a new impulse to define themselves as “masculine” in traditional heterosexual terms, there was a new vogue for male role-playing, with more men insisting on defining themselves as “tops” who assumed the (theoretically) dominant position over “bottoms.”
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“In the fifties I never knew what a top or bottom was,” said Dan Stewart, a landscape architect who came out at the end of that mellower decade. “People were versatile. If you were attracted to somebody, you just did whatever. There was no left earring, or red handkerchief.
You just made love to men, usually playing both roles. So when that happened during the seventies, that was very extraordinary to me—the fact that somebody's going to play a role, and you're going to play another role.”

While the sexual revolution encouraged all kinds of experimentation, Stonewall produced a different imperative for an emerging generation of gay people—the pressure to become politically involved, and to declare themselves as exclusively gay. Self-identified bisexuals were dismissed by radical activists as being too cowardly to call themselves gay. In some cases, this political imperative merely prevented honest self-description.

Although millions of lesbians and gay men were relishing the fruits of an unprecedented sexual freedom, most of them remained firmly inside the closet—and only a tiny proportion were becoming politically active. During most of the seventies, there wasn't a single gay reporter out of the closet at any daily newspaper in Manhattan. The
Washington Post
reporter Roy Aarons remembered recoiling when he ran into a
Post
colleague, Herb Denton, at a gay bar. “We both turned around and barely acknowledged each other,” said Aarons. Even at an “alternative” weekly like the
Village Voice,
a demonstration had been necessary shortly after Stonewall to force the newspaper to permit the use of the word
gay
in an advertisement.

When Calvin Tomkins profiled Philip Johnson in
The New Yorker
in 1977, the architect pleaded with the author not to identify him as a gay man. Johnson was negotiating with AT&T executives for the commission to design the company's new headquarters on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and he thought the disclosure might jeopardize his employment. “This was in the early stages, when I wasn't sure I had the job,” Johnson said. Tomkins was “furious, but he complied with Johnson's request. The architect's lover, David Whitney, was discreetly identified in the article as “his friend.”

Johnson was of a class and a generation who were routinely invited to the fanciest dinner parties, but who almost never brought along a male companion. On the other hand, single gay men were most welcome: “Mrs. [Vincent] Astor said she always had a homosexual to dinner” because they were “the only people who could talk,” the architect remembered.

After Johnson had been living with David Whitney for more than fifteen years (they first met in i960), Barbara Walters interrogated Johnson during a dinner party at the home of Kitty Carlisle Hart. “Why don't you ever bring your boyfriend to these events?” Walters demanded.

“I said, ‘By God, you're right, Barbara.' Got up from the table and went
home,” Johnson recalled. “She was a very great help. I was so mean and selfish: Til be home late tonight,' that kind of thing.”

Leonard Bernstein had been conflicted about his sexuality all his life. In 1976 he shocked his friends when he separated from his wife, Felicia, to live with a male lover, Tom Cothran. It was actually Mrs. Bernstein who had precipitated the split by telling her husband that if he continued to spend time alone with Cothran, she did not want him back. The press reported the breakup in October, and in December Bernstein hinted at his reasons in public. Before conducting the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony, he startled the audience with a fifteen-minute confession.

He said that after studying Shostakovich's life and work, “I came to realize that as death approaches, an artist must cast off everything that may be restraining him and create in complete freedom. I decided that I had to do this for myself, to live the rest of my life as I want.” But by the following summer Bernstein was back with his wife.

THE SEVENTIES WERE A CHALLENGING
decade for New York City. The flight of the middle class which had started after World War II was continuing, reducing its tax base and straining its finances. John Lindsay had brought glamour, style and excitement to city hall after he was elected mayor in 1965. He had reclaimed the verdant center of Manhattan for all kinds of recreation with a single, uncomplicated act: the exclusion of the automobile from Central Park on weekends. The park came alive, and the mayor rechristened New York, with tongue in cheek, as “Fun City.” But Lindsay had also spent much more money than the city was actually taking in, and a year after he left office in 1973, New York was slouching toward bankruptcy. By 1975 new construction of all kinds was at a standstill, all sorts of buildings were defaulting on their mortgages, and the assessed value of the city's real estate was suddenly declining.

Much of the rest of the nation considered Manhattan's misfortune wholly appropriate for what they thought of as America's version of Sodom on the Hudson. This anti-New York sentiment was embraced by President Gerald Ford, whose resistance to federal loan guarantees to rescue the city from default was summarized in another pithy
Daily News
headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The vibrancy of the growing gay movement was in vivid contrast to the dreary predictions of obsolescence for the city that was nurturing it. At the very moment gay people were exulting in their newfound urban freedom, pundits were prophesying the imminent death of the greatest of all American metropolises.

The bold new activists in the streets of Manhattan were dramatically increasing the public profile of gay people in America. “When we first started out, we were all focused on taking the spirit of Stonewall into the streets,” said Michela Griffo. “Just making ourselves more visible as a political organization. Trying to get more and more men and women to join us,”

The young militants set an intoxicating pace.

Nine months after Stonewall, another police raid led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine brought instant notoriety to the Snake Pit, an after-hours club in Greenwich Village. The raid became controversial after the police arrested 167 patrons, one of whom was a twenty-three-year-old Argentinean named Diego Vinales who jumped from the second-floor window of the Sixth Precinct house and impaled himself on the spike of a steel fence. After several major operations, Vinales survived.

John Koch, the manager of the Ninth Circle Steakhouse, remembered when two of the policemen who had participated in the raid came in for dinner the following evening. “This cop is the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet,” said Koch, “and he was there with his partner, and he was so distraught. He was a young kid then, and he said, I can't believe they won't leave these people alone.' He was really upset that this had happened.”

After the raid, a freshman congressman named Edward I. Koch became one of the first elected officials to publicly lobby on behalf of the homosexuals of Greenwich Village. Koch wrote to Police Commissioner Howard Leary to point out that the raid violated a previous promise from the commissioner to end entrapment and harassment of homosexuals. “I would like to know, Commissioner, whether there has been a change in policy. I cannot understand arresting 167 people in a bar for disorderly conduct. … It is not a violation of the law to be homosexual or heterosexual, and the law should never be used to harass either.” In their column in
Gay,
Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke expressed their delight: “It takes real balls for a politician to stand up for the civil rights and liberties of homosexual citizens,” they wrote. “Congressman Koch has earned the distinction of being the first to do so.”

Up on First Avenue in the Nineties at the Charade, black and white men celebrated two civil rights revolutions at once. Mingling happily around a small horseshoe bar in the front, and dancing to the Supremes and Aretha Franklin in the back, no one ever felt the slightest racial animosity. “Everybody was very interested in everybody else,” remembered “Edward Stone” (a pseudonym), a thirty-two-year-old white freelance writer who dated only black men at the time. “There were students and hairdressers and
accountants,” said Stone, and there was “no element of danger even implicit in all of this.” Stone remembered boisterous parties in Harlem and the Village, where almost every guest was part of an interracial couple. “People were interested in music and pot; they were not political at all. They seemed very much at ease. I had very good relations with blacks back then.” (Twenty-five years later, Stone said he hardly had any black friends at all.)

In 1970, Arthur Goldberg was the Democratic candidate for governor. As a former secretary of labor, United States Supreme Court justice, and ambassador to the United Nations, Goldberg was one of the most famous liberals of his era. During a campaign swing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June, Goldberg was accosted by three dozen members of the Gay Activists Alliance. First they asked him politely whether he favored fair employment laws for homosexuals and the repeal of the sodomy law. Goldberg replied, “I think there are more important things to think about.” That provoked cries of “Answer homosexuals!” and “Gay power!” and finally—after he retreated into his white limousine—shouts of “Crime of silence!”

That same month, during Gay Pride Week—newly invented to mark the first anniversary of Stonewall—GAA staged a sit-in at the Manhattan office of the Republican State Committee, demanding to learn Governor Nelson Rockefeller's views on homosexuality. A small group of demonstrators were arrested and immediately dubbed the “Rockefeller Five.”
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On June 28, between five thousand and fifteen thousand newly minted gay activists marched up Sixth Avenue from Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park for a “Gay-In” to celebrate the Stonewall anniversary. This gathering was by far the largest public display of homosexuality Manhattan had ever seen, and it made the front page of the
Times.
Even notoriously blasé New Yorkers reacted with silent astonishment. The marchers carried bright red, green, purple, and yellow silk banners, and shouted “Say it loud, gay is proud!” and “Join us!” at the curious; occasionally a passerby filed into the parade. A tall attractive girl carried a sign reading “I am a lesbian” to the applause of some of the bystanders. “Not long ago the scene would have been unthinkable,” Lacey Fosburgh wrote in the
Times,
“but the spirit of militancy and determination is growing so rapidly among the legions of young homosexuals that last weekend thousands of them came from all over the Northeast.”

“The main thing we have to understand,” said Michael Kotis, the president of the Mattachine Society, “is that we're different, but we're not inferior.”

Similar festivities were held in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Less than four months later, Goldberg and both of the major party candidates for United States senator—the Republican incumbent, Charles Goodell; and the Democratic challenger, Richard Ottinger—became three of the first statewide candidates in New York to endorse GAA's civil rights platform. “Today we know not only that gay is good, gay is angry,” the activist Arthur Evans later told the
Times.
“We are telling all the politicians … that they are going to become responsible to the people. We will make them responsible to us, or we will stop the conduct of the business of government.” The following year, Mayor John Lindsay quietly endorsed the gay civil rights law, which was stalled in the city council. “The idea of a ‘homosexual vote' is slowly gaining ground,”
Times
reporter (and future executive editor) Joseph Lelyveld wrote in the summer of 1971, in one of the paper's first serious assessments of the budding gay movement.

ETHAN GETO
was twenty-six in 1970, a Bronx native who had grown up on the Grand Concourse near 163d Street, listening at night to the roar of the crowd floating through his window from nearby Yankee Stadium. In the seventies, he would discover that he was completely bisexual—“right in the middle” of the Kinsey scale.

It had not been an easy childhood: “I was an only child doted on by an obsessive mother and a hyper borscht-belt comedian father and this is what produced me.” His father started out with the Mercury Theatre, where Orson Welles also starred. “My father was a very talented guy in the theater but, unlike many of his friends and contemporaries, he never achieved significant commercial success.”