The Gay Metropolis (42 page)

Many journalists still remember 1970 as a “hot” year for
Harper's,
when it was edited by Willie Morris, a Mississippian who was the youngest editor in the magazine's history. Morris showcased the work of some of the era's most acclaimed journalists, including Seymour Hersh and David Halberstam, and he was lionized by the younger liberal establishment.

Naturally not everything Morris published was brilliant; but the ignorance, virulence, and occasional incoherence of Epstein's ten-thousand-word diatribe distinguished it from everything else
Harper's
published during Morris's regime.

The magazine's cover advertised the piece with a picture of a muscular torso clothed in a tight red blouse. Inside, it was illustrated with pictures of a fey young man. Epstein saw evidence everywhere that “homosexuality is spreading” because the Zeitgeist was encouraging “hedonism in all its forms” and homosexuality was suddenly “where the action is.”

He described his fury at being “victimized” by a handsome, masculine army buddy named Richard. Had Epstein been the victim of an unwelcome advance from his colleague? Not at all. His friend Richard's crime was his determination to be
discreet
about his sexual orientation. Epstein conceded that this discretion was “necessary,” but the writer was still furious after he learned the truth. Epstein felt “victimized by [Richard's] duplicity … I never felt quite right about [him] again.” But honesty wouldn't have helped Richard either. A few pages later Epstein wrote, “Men who are defiant about their homosexuality, or claim to have found happiness in it, will … require neither my admiration nor sympathy.”

Elsewhere in the piece, the writer hinted at why it had been so terrifying to discover that he had unwittingly shared an office with a good-looking gay man. “Heterosexuality has not been without its special horrors,” Epstein wrote; his own “once marvelous” marriage had ended in divorce. And on the subject of his fears about the possible homosexuality of one of his four sons, Epstein asked, “Uptight? You're damn right! … My ignorance makes me frightened. … Read enough case histories and you soon begin to wonder how anyone has achieved heterosexuality.”

Picking up larger stones as he rolled along, Epstein described homosexuality as “anathema” and homosexuals as “cursed … quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck.” Consulting a hairdresser who was his personal
expert on the subject, Epstein explained that he did not want to sleep with a man because he didn't feel any desire to do so, and he didn't place “that high a premium on experience for its own sake.” He told the hairdresser that “a whole cluster of interesting emotions go along with murdering a man, but I was not ready to murder to experience them.”

Incoherence began to overtake the writer when he asked, “Who's repressing? Oppressing? No one I know, and certainly not most of the writers I read. … The truth is, when it comes to repression, why bother? Especially when so many voices are shouting to go the other way.” But then, just four sentences later, he cited Dr. David Reuben, the author of
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
…
But Were Afraid to Ask,
then a mammoth best-seller in the how-to category. And how did Dr. Reuben fit into this campaign to encourage a deviant hedonism? According to Epstein, even though Dr. Reuben made it perfectly clear that he hated homosexuality, gay people were just as likely as anyone else to use his book to try to make their sex lives more interesting.
^*

Because “private acceptance of homosexuality” did not exist in Epstein's experience, even among “the most liberal-minded, sophisticated and liberated people,” he had a simple solution for the gay “problem”:

“If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth” because it caused “infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime … and because, wholly selfishly,” he was “completely incapable of coming to terms with it.”

Epstein preceded this statement with the boast that he had “never done anything to harm any single homosexual,” and he hoped he never would. Obviously, wishing for the obliteration of such an unhappy group of people could not possibly harm them.

Finally, Epstein concluded that there were many things that his four sons could do that might cause him “anguish” or “outrage” but “nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives … to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.”

The article caused an uproar in the gay community. Some people defended Epstein because of his “honesty” and considered the piece a fine example of the new journalism pioneered by Tom Wolfe. But the gay activist
Arthur Evans pointed out that what Epstein had done was actually the equivalent of someone writing, “T look into myself and I discover that I really hate blacks—boy, do I hate blacks! I think they're stupid, they're too sensual and they eat watermelon.' That's the level of the Epstein article.” Nevertheless, Morris refused to print any of the rebuttals prepared by GAA members; he maintained that the publication of twenty letters about the Epstein piece was an adequate response.

Pete Fisher was selected to organize GAA's protest, and he understood the importance of striking the right tone. He would stage a sit-in, but it would be “civilized, intelligent, educational, consciousness-raising, hospitable—no demands, no threats, no damages to office or files.” After they had invaded the
Harper's
office, the demonstrators set up a table in the reception area with coffee and doughnuts; then they placed leaflets on every desk. As each
Harper's
employee arrived for work, a protester greeted him: “Good morning, I'm a homosexual. Would you like some coffee?” Downstairs, other demonstrators handed out flyers urging passersby to “join us in our Surprise Visit to
Harper's.
… Bring a sandwich on your lunch hour—have lunch with a homosexual.”

Harper's
executive editor Midge Decter defended Epstein's piece as “serious and honest and misread,” but Arthur Evans was unmoved. “You knew that his article would contribute to the suffering of homosexuals,” he told Decter. “And if you didn't know that, you're inexcusably naïve.” By the end of the afternoon, three local television stations had turned up to cover the demonstration.

“That was a
dreadful
article,” Frank Kameny remembered.

The activist Eric Thorndale concluded that the “chronic affliction of
Harper's
is cultural lag.” Thorndale had discovered that exactly one hundred years earlier the magazine had published an eight-page tirade against female suffrage. “The natural position of woman is clearly … a subservient one,”
Harper's
stated. If women gained the right to vote, they would sell it “any day for a yard of ribbon or a tinsel brooch.” Thorndale concluded that if this cultural lag wasn't “willfully vicious, it was “at least—like the Epstein article of a century later—cheap, canting, pretentious and wrong.”

THE MOST WIDELY
read reply to Epstein's article appeared four months later in an unlikely venue:
The New York Times Magazine.
Abe Rosenthal, who had commissioned the big front-page piece on the “growth” of homosexuality in 1963, had continued to consolidate his power over the daily news department: by now he was managing editor. But in 1971, there were
still two separate
New York Timeses
—the daily paper, which reported to Rosenthal; and the Sunday sections, whose editors reported to Sunday editor Daniel Schwarz. Because of this division, there was real diversity within the news pages, and the Sunday paper often expressed distinctly different points of view from the daily—especially on the subject of homosexuality. (Rosenthal gained control of both the Sunday and the daily news departments in 1977.)

The editorial page remained independent of Abe Rosenthal, and from the mid-sixties onward, under John B. Oakes, Max Frankel, Jack Rosenthal, and Howell Raines, it consistently supported the repeal of sodomy laws and the enactment of basic civil rights protection for gay citizens. As early as November 1967, the Sunday
Magazine
had run a long piece advocating the repeal of sodomy laws and “civil rights for homosexuals,” although it also described homosexuality as “theoretically destructive of the species.”

The lead article in
The New York Times Magazine
on January 17,1971, was entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” This was a landmark event because the author, Merle Miller, was a well-known and well-liked novelist, and
The New York Times
had given its imprimatur to his confession. At this early stage of the movement, Miller was by far the most famous writer ever to “come out” in the pages of the
Times.
The vehemence of the
Harper's
piece made it perfectly clear how much courage that required.

Miller revealed many years later that Epstein's piece had directly inspired his assignment from the
Times.
Soon after the
Harper's
article was published, Miller had had lunch with two “liberal”
Times
editors, both of whom expressed their admiration for Epstein's opinions. For the first time in his life, Miller finally spoke up. “Damn it,” he said, “I'm a homosexual!” The editors responded by commissioning Miller's response.

The implication of Epstein's piece was that homosexuals had no right to exist—and that society certainly had no obligation to temper its prejudices against them. Miller quoted part of what Epstein had written right at the start of his own article: “Nobody says, or at least I have never heard anyone say, ‘Some of my best friends are homosexual,'” Epstein had written. “People do say—I say—‘fag' and ‘queer' without hesitation—and these words, no matter who is uttering them, are put-down words, in intent every bit as vicious as ‘kike' or ‘nigger.'”

“Is it true?” Miller asked.

Is that the way it is? Have my heterosexual friends … been going through an elaborate charade all these years? I would like to think they agree with
George Weinberg,
^*
a therapist … who says, “I would never consider a person healthy unless he had overcome his prejudice against homosexuality.” But even Mr. Weinberg assumes that there is a prejudice, apparently built-in, a natural part of the human psyche. … The late Otto Kahn, I think it was, said, “A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.” Is a fag a homosexual gentleman who has just stepped out? Me?

I can never be sure, of course, will never be sure. I know it shouldn't bother me. That's what everybody says, but it does bother me … every time I enter a room in which there is anyone else. Friend or foe? Is there a difference?

Miller's piece had all of the knowledge, nuance and humanity that Epstein's lacked. The only things the two men agreed about were that “nobody seems to know why homosexuality happens” and “the great fear is that a son will turn out to be homosexual,” as Miller put it. But the gay writer added, “Not all mothers are afraid that their sons will be homosexuals. Everywhere among us are those dominant ladies who welcome homosexuality in their sons. That way the mothers know they won't lose them to another woman.”

Miller described himself as a bookish youth who “read about sensitive boys, odd boys, boys who were lonely and misunderstood, boys who really didn't care all that much for baseball, boys who were teased by their classmates … but for years nobody in any of the books I read was ever tortured by the strange fantasies that tore at me.” As an adult, he was a closeted liberal who belonged to twenty-two organizations devoted to improving the lot of the world's outcasts; homosexuals were the only group he “never spoke up for.” He recalled the silence of the ACLU in the fifties when gay people were being fired from “all kinds of government posts. … And the most silent of all was a closet queen who was a member of the board of directors, myself.”

He displeased some young activists by saying he would have preferred to have been straight. But the piece still represented a tremendous leap forward, simply because it did so much to humanize the homosexual's predicament. During the next ten months Miller received more than two thousand letters, including one from an American army installation in Germany: “I was on leave in Paris and a French boy gave [your article] to me … I read it, after which I burned it. … Thank you, though, just seeing something like that in print has meant more to me than you can rightly imagine.”

Miller said the most common themes from his correspondents were “nothing I have ever read has helped as much to restore my own self-respect” and “so much of what you have to say I have experienced myself and have rarely been able to trust anyone to ‘let go.'”

A “great many” straight readers realized for the first time “that homosexuals were people, too, with feelings, just like anybody else.” Most telling was the reader who suddenly felt all the guilt that Epstein had specifically disavowed: “I've always reacted with horror and indignation at words like ‘Kike, Dago, Spic, Nigger, Pollack,' and yet for every time I've said homosexual, I've said ‘fag' a thousand times. You've made me wonder how I could have believed that I had modeled my life on the dignity of man while being so cruel, so thoughtless to so many.”

To placate the young activists who were upset because he had said that he would have preferred to be straight, Miller explained in his follow-up article: “The assumption seems to have been that I consider straightness more virtuous, somehow superior. That is not what I meant. I meant that in this place and time, indeed in most others since the Hellenic Age … being straight is easier.” But even that sentiment was one that very few of the new young activists agreed with.