The Gay Metropolis (19 page)

Vidal believes the handful of artists whose “deviant” orientation was known to the critics all paid a significant price for their openness. “It is hard now to realize what a bad time of it Tennessee used to have from the American press,” Vidal wrote.

During the forties and fifties the anti-fag battalions were everywhere on the march. From the high lands of
Partisan Review
to the middle ground
of
Time
magazine, envenomed attacks on real or suspected fags never let up. A
Time
cover story on Auden was killed when the managing editor of the day was told that Auden was a fag. From 1945 to 1961
Time
attacked with unusual ferocity everything produced or published by Tennessee Williams. “Fetid swamp” was the phrase most used to describe his work. But, in
Time
, as well as in time, all things come to pass. The Bird is now a beloved institution.

“So why all the fuss?” Vidal asked.

In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock up someone or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed, and one seldom used in civilized societies. But although the United States is the best and most perfect of earth's societies and our huddled masses earth's envy, we have yet to create a civilization, as opposed to a way of life.

Jack Kerouac was the first person Allen Ginsberg came out to at Columbia in 1946—“'Cause I was in love with him,” Ginsberg remembered. “He was staying in my room up in the bed, and I was sleeping on a pallet on the floor. I said, ‘Jack, you know, I love you, and I want to sleep with you, and I really like men.' And he said, ‘Oooooh, no …' We'd known each other maybe a year, and I hadn't said anything.”

Within a year, Ginsberg said he had slept with Kerouac “a couple of times.”

Neal [Cassady], his hero, and I were lovers, also, for many years.… At the time Kerouac was very handsome, very beautiful and very mellow.… As a slightly older person and someone who I felt had more authority, his tolerance gave me
permission
to open up and talk.… He wasn't going to hit me. He wasn't going to reject me.… He was going to accept my soul with all its throbbings and sweetness and worries and dark woes and sorrows and heartaches and joys and glees and mad understandings of mortality, ‘cause that was the same thing he had.… The basic thing about him was Character, with a capital C… an enormous mellow, trustful tolerance and sensitivity. And that's why he's such a great writer and observer. He held everything ever, as sensitive young fellow, even my fairy woes.

But Ginsberg did not consider Kerouac to be primarily gay.

He had mixed feelings at different times, but I think it would have been abusive of his character to point an accusing finger and say, “You're a
fairy!” There is a certain tendency among gay people … to plaster labels over everybody, including themselves, instead
of
seeing the nameless love that everybody is. Just as there was a tendency among macho heterosexuals to plaster labels, so there was a counter-balancing tendency among homosexuals to overreact to that and camp too heavily, so that he was sensitive about being put down as a fairy, which he wasn't.

In his classic,
On the Road
, Kerouac originally included a scene in which Dean Moriarty had sex with a traveling salesman who is taking him to Chicago in a Cadillac. According to Ginsberg, “That was eliminated from the book by Malcolm Cowley… and Jack consented to that. So Jack actually did talk about it a little in his writing.”

But Kerouac, Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats, as they called themselves, were far more important for what they stood for than for whom they slept with. Their celebration of nonconformity planted the roots of the rebellion against a monochrome society that would flower into the counterculture in the coming decade. And in this postwar period, they were the first group of American writers ever to portray homosexuality as hip—a huge step forward for all those who continued to accept society's definition of this orientation as an illness, a crime, or both. “It took an enormous amount of courage to openly declare yourself to be a lesbian or a gay male,” the historian Martin Duberman remembered. But the fifties were not a time of “total desperation—it depended on who you are or where you are.”

To Ginsberg, the events of the forties were all reasons to rebel against the establishment in the fifties. “In the forties, the bomb dropped,” Ginsberg said. “In the forties, the entire planet was threatened biologically. … There was a … total breakdown of all morality in the concentration camps. For homosexuals there was a sudden realization: ‘why are we being intimidated by a bunch of jerks who don't know anything about life? Who are they to tell us what we feel and how we're supposed to behave? And why take all that bullshit?' Why not ‘sort of dish it back and start talking openly?'”

During the fifties, “We thought that we were in a decade of such towering dullness and stupidity,” said Jay Presson Allen.

“There was a series of trials that liberated the word,” Ginsberg recalled, including an unsuccessful attempt to suppress his epic poem
Howl
. “So they lost. So we got a lot of publicity. So the book sold like hotcakes and the censors acted as publicists for a new sensibility.”
Howl
became a best-selling book of poetry. And in 1958,
One
, the magazine published by
the Mattachine Society, won a case against the United States Post Office, which guaranteed other gay publications access to the mail.

NEW YORK UNDERWENT
great physical changes in the fifties. Except for a couple of brief stretches of the Broadway line in Harlem, all the remaining elevated trains were torn down in Manhattan; most of the north-south avenues became broad, one-way thoroughfares below Central Park; and the manufacturers that had made New York City the industrial capital of the East Coast ever since the opening of the Erie Canal were beginning their decades-long exodus.

Heavy industry began to leave in search of lower taxes and wide-open spaces. Following these factories as they moved into the suburbs and beyond were the returning veterans who formed the nucleus of the quickly growing Jewish, Irish and Italian middle classes. Eager to raise their young families far from the soot of the city, they snatched up seventeen thousand houses (reserved for whites only) in Levittown on Long Island and filled new communities in the nearby counties of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, creating a vast suburban belt. The new immigrants who the public noticed replacing them in the city were Puerto Ricans, and poor blacks fleeing the rigid segregation that remained intact almost everywhere—above and below the Mason-Dixon Line.

New York at night looked much more forbidding than it does today. Before high-intensity streetlights were installed as an anticrime measure during John Lindsay's administration at the end of the sixties, side streets were often steeped in shadows. The air was dirtier too, in an era when cars lacked catalytic converters and most apartment houses still belched heavy black smoke from their incinerators. To many New Yorkers in the fifties, the city seemed more ominous—and its future more uncertain—than it ever had before.

But nothing would deter a new wave of mostly invisible immigrants, whose arrival was almost never mentioned in the pages of the daily papers. These were the lesbian and gay veterans and recent college graduates who had tasted a different life in Manhattan during the war. Here, many of them had discovered for the first time that they were not alone; and they came back by the thousands to fill up the apartments in Greenwich Village, the East Fifties, and the Upper West Side. The revitalizing effect of these invisible immigrants—invisible in the same sense as Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
—would go unreported for twenty-five years. But they played a vital role in New York's postwar renaissance.

And unlike many of the city's more established white residents, many of these lesbians and gay men welcomed the influx of poorer immigrants. “I loved the Puerto Ricans coming to New York,” said Franklin Macfie. “It really gave energy to a dying city. My oldest sister married a Puerto Rican, a sensationally wonderful guy.”

MURRAY GITLIN
was the West Hartford boy who got posted to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and found his first pickup in the orchestra seats of Radio City Music Hall. He had black hair and a long, attractive Semitic face. His low, warm, carefully modulated voice and precise diction made him sound almost British. His close friend Stanley Posthorn remarked that Gitlin was so charming that he could convert anyone he met into a friend.

In 1949 Gitlin moved back to New York. His first temporary residence was the elegant apartment belonging to his uncle Aaron and aunt Helen on the Grand Concourse, still a magnificent Bronx boulevard right after the war.

He didn't have time to look for his own place because he “just had to become a dancer,” Gitlin explained. “I was a late starter, and I didn't have time to waste. I was twenty-two.” His aunt Helen was a “very powerful woman” who was seeing a psychiatrist because she was having terrible abdominal pain that her doctor thought was psychosomatic. One night after dinner, she said, “'You know, Murray, Aaron and I know that among male dancers, there are many who are homosexual.' She was suspicious of me. ‘And we wonder, since you're a dancer now, what your relationship is to those men.'

“I thought she had balls. You know: 1950. And I said, ‘Well, Helen, I am.' And Aaron was there. She said, ‘Oh.' I said, ‘Oh yes.' And I said, ‘I've accepted it, and I think I understand it.' And she said, ‘Well!'

“She insisted I go to her psychiatrist and have a preliminary consultation with him. And then we'd see.”

Gitlin went to the psychiatrist, but it had no effect. “I think there was never any choice for me, which is, you know, par for the course. And as far as I know, as far as I can remember, there was never another way for me. I felt confident because I'd thought it through.”

Soon he found a magnificent cold-water flat at 426 West 56th Street with a bathtub in the kitchen and the bathroom in the hall. The rent was $16 a month. During the next forty-four years, Gitlin would never leave the neighborhood, although he did move once to another apartment six blocks away.

He was very good-looking, but too chubby to think of himself as really attractive. His first job was in the chorus of
The King and I
. “I was very happy to be in that show—it was a very glamorous thing to be in. It was just beautiful. I've directed it since and played roles in it since, but that was the most important.” In the chorus line, Gitlin replaced Otis Bigelow—the best-looking man in Manhattan in 1940, the one who had chosen a beautiful sailor over a suntanned millionaire.

A year earlier at Martha Graham's dancing school in Vermont, Gitlin spotted a “tall beautiful young man, who looked like a swimmer—which he was. I'll never forget my first impression of him. After class, I asked Martha if she would introduce me to him, and she did. He was very shy. And I said I was living in New York. I said when you come to New York—and I knew he would—look me up if you want to. I'd be very happy to see you.”

One day Gitlin was leaving the St James Theatre, where
The King and I
was playing, and he recognized the same young man. “He was sitting out there just waiting for me. And he said, ‘Hi. Remember me?' In a small voice. I said, ‘Yes, I do remember you.' And that's when our friendship really began.”

The young man was Paul Taylor, who became one of Manhattan's most famous modern dancers and choreographers, as well as the founder of his own dance company, which is still flourishing. Gitlin found him an apartment in his building, and soon Taylor was bringing over a painter friend named Bob Rauschenberg. “Rauschenberg used to come over and he would go to the bathroom,” Gitlin remembered. “And I would keep painting that bathroom—to cheer it up a little bit. And I painted it red and orange and it would peel almost immediately. And one day, I'll never forget, Rauschenberg went to the bathroom, and he came in, and said, ‘When I become famous'—not if, but
'when
I become famous'—
that
bathroom is going to be part of the exhibit I have. Because I think it's so beautiful the way the paint's peeling off so delicately.'”

Another frequent visitor was Jerome Robbins, whom Gitlin knew slightly because Robbins had choreographed
The King and I
. A couple of years later, Robbins would choose a photograph of Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence standing in front of Gitlin's West Side apartment building to illustrate the cast album of his most spectacular musical.

“Jerry used to come over and visit and we'd laugh,” said Gitlin. “But he was always weird. We always got along in those days. I don't know; something happened. He does this to people. He turns people off. Something snaps. Somewhere along the line, something must have happened between
him and me. I mean we really liked one another. And in some of my early days on Fire Island, he was out there. He loved the island as much as I did. He loved games and I loved games. And we played with some of the ballet people who were out there. And it was so much fun. He loved to have fun.”

EVEN FOR THOSE WHO
weren't mingling with the famous or soon-to-be-famous, Manhattan could be full of exhilarating new experiences. For young lesbians and gay men exploring their sexuality for the first time, a certain amount of danger was often quite exciting. For some there was even an occasional epiphany.

It was the summer of 1955 when Roy Aarons found his very first gay bar. “I was twenty-one, going on twenty-two,” and he was handsome. “I walked down an alley and opened a door. There must have been 160 men in the bar. It was all jammed around the bar, with a piano on a pedestal in the middle of the bar. It felt to me like
The Wizard ofOz
, when the house lands, and she opens the door, and the black-and-white turns to Technicolor—the whole fucking world has suddenly gone to Technicolor. That was exactly how I felt—the power and the impact. That was my initiation. And from then on you couldn't stop me: I was crazed.”