The Gay Metropolis (49 page)

He was also extremely active politically. Two of his best friends were Morty Manford, a founder of the gay students organization at Columbia who became president of the Gay Activists Alliance; and Bruce Voeller, who left GAA to help found the National Gay Task Force. “Bruce was in GAA and he thought GAA had become, by 1973, too ideological, dogmatic, left-wing, fringy, too militant, too radical for him. We were never going to change America. We were never going to get legislation in Congress, unless we had a respectable mainstream civil rights organization like the NAACP. So Bruce led a walkout from GAA. He got up on the floor in GAA, and said, ‘Anybody that wants to meet with me so that we can have a mainstream NAACP-like civil rights organization. We're having fun here
making ourselves feel good with all these zaps and militant actions. But no one recognizes us. No one takes us seriously. We're a fringe group. We have to have professional staff, fund-raising, lobbyists!'”

GAA had no staff, but it had a fine sense of theater and a knack for gaining the attention of the media. “It was really the ACT UP of its time,” said Geto. “So Voeller founded the NGTF, and he and Jean O'Leary became the first co-executive directors. It was in New York at 80 Fifth Ave. Morty Manford and my crowd were on the GAA side.”

In 1972, Manford asked his mother Jeanne to march in the third annual Gay Pride March in June. She agreed, but only if she could carry a sign. It read “Parents of Gays Unite in Support for Our Children.” As she walked along, people on the sidewalk ran up to her, kissed her, and exclaimed, “Will you talk to my mother?” Dr. Benjamin Spock was marching right behind her. “The outpouring of emotion from our community was overwhelming,” Manford told Eric Marcus. “No one else got the loud emotional cheers that she did.” The following year, Dr. and Mrs. Manford held a meeting with other gay parents at the Metropolitan Duane Methodist Church and founded the organization that became Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, now one of the largest and most effective pro-gay organizations in America.

Jeff Katzoff, who had known Manford at Columbia University as well as through the Gay Activists Alliance, remembered a party at the Manfords' soon after Mrs. Manford publicly embraced her son. “We all trudged out to Queens,” Katzoff remembered. “It was a lovely, nice big suburban-type house, and we had a big sort of like graduation. And Morty's aunts were there helping his mother. And she had food for days, and Morty's father was there. It was just wonderful. I remember the overwhelming feeling was, I wish I could have parents like this. I now do, but it took twenty years to get them.”

Frank Kameny had not come out to his mother until 1967—just before he appeared in the CBS documentary “The Homosexuals.” Seven years later Kameny was in New York for the annual Gay Pride March and arranged to have his mother come in from Queens to watch the procession from the sidewalk at 50th Street. “She saw for the first time that parents of gays marched—Morty Manford and Jeanne Manford,” said Kameny. “I knew Morty very well and I knew Jeanne. And very hesitantly, because she had no idea what my reaction would be, my mother said, ‘Would you mind if I contacted them?' And I said
'Fine!
Go ahead.'” So Kameny's mother called Jeanne Manford, who became the center of her social life. “She went to meetings,” Kameny remembered. “At that time
it was Parents of Gays. It ultimately became PFLAG. She was one of their referral people. She used to get calls from people and advise them. And it worked out extremely well. I never had to come to New York anymore. My mother used to march for me in the Gay Pride March. And they always used to put her in a limousine or sometimes they would have a truck. She marched in style, and got all the applause. And I could stay home at the Washington demonstration.”

THE WOOSTER STREET FIREHOUSE
functioned as the first gay community center in Manhattan. Philip Gefter remembered political meetings “packed to the gills: I remember being
amazed
that there were that many homosexuals.” Arthur Laurents was dragged to one by his lover, Tom Hatcher. “I walked in, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I'm back with the lefties.' I mean, there was no difference. The beards and the leather jackets and the point of order and the furious lesbians and parliamentary procedure. And humorless. No theatricality except for a transvestite named Marsha. She was famous. She swam over from Rikers Island. Really. She was a black guy with women's hair, a tunic, blue jeans, and big boots. And he carried on: ‘You know what? Neither one of you want any part of us.' He was quite right. Neither the gays nor the lesbians. ‘We embarrass you. If you're really for freedom, you've got to include us.' And he was right. But it was tough.”

There were also weekly dances that were wonderfully democratic events. Jeff Katzoff remembered that the dances took place on the ground floor with a “very high ceiling because they had space for fire trucks. So it wasn't at all claustrophobic, though it got pretty sweaty in there when it got crowded. I remember the incredible energy on that dance floor. There were hundreds and hundreds of people; at some point you could not move. And I used to go up to the second or third floor just to escape the mob. Then there was a very claustrophobic basement, where you checked your coat and they had sodas. I used to work one of those concessions occasionally. And there was a second floor, above the main floor, that had administration offices. And then there was another floor above that. And that floor had a big lounge, and during the dances, that's where Vito Russo used to show films that he used to make of zaps. I used to watch them to get away from the craziness once in a while, just to chill out.”

One Saturday night Ethan Geto was on his way to the firehouse when he got behind a group of people on the street who were looking for a bathroom. “This was before SoHo was SoHo,” said Geto. “This was when SoHo was totally an industrial district. And it was gloomy and dark and
foreboding. And in this one place, in the middle of this block on Saturday night, all of a sudden you hear this thumping disco music! And you see dozens of people streaming in and they're milling around out on the sidewalk and smoking cigarettes.

“So someone in this group says, ‘Oh, there's a place!' And I'm walking in right behind this guy ‘cause I'm going to the dance. His friends are a mixed crowd of straight people. They stay outside and he goes up to the door of the firehouse. And I'm right behind him. And he says, ‘Hey! Ya got a bathroom in here?' And the guy supervising the door says, ‘That'll be two dollars.' And he says, ‘Yeah, but I'm not comin' in here to dance. I don't even know what this is. What is this here?' And the guy at the door says, ‘This is the headquarters of the Gay Activists Alliance.' And the other guy says, ‘Oh. Well, ya got a bathroom?'

“And this voice sounds so familiar to me. So I sort of lean over because he's right in front of me, and it's Bob Dylan. And the guy at the door doesn't recognize Bob Dylan! So Bob Dylan says, ‘Hey, listen, man! You're a gay place in here? Aren't you gays supposed to be for the people!' So the guy at the door, some grungy guy, says, ‘Hey, listen. Anybody could come in here and say they want to go to the bathroom. We need money to support this organization! Two fucking dollars or beat it!' Bob Dylan says, ‘Wait a minute. You say this is the gay activist group here! Aren't you, like, radical people?!' So finally Bob Dylan in total disgust throws his two dollars on the table, and says to him, ‘Fuck you!' and heads for the bathroom. And I walk in, and I say,
'That's Bob Dylan!'

“And this guy says, ‘I don't care if it's the fucking queen of England!'”

After Geto left his wife, he moved in with Morty Manford on 14th Street. They were very close friends—not lovers—and they were “working day and night on gay rights politics, very militant stuff.”

But Geto was still “totally in the closet to the straight world—to my career and in politics. I was totally hiding. And when Abrams would come over to the apartment, which he did often, I would put away anything that was gay, like magazines, or a gay calendar. It was really nerve-racking. And I'd tell my roommate, the famous Manhattan gay leader, Morty Manford, not to be there. It was really very upsetting and you felt sleazy. It was very unpleasant, the closet of that period. Or any period. Or anybody that feels they have to be in one.”

In 1973, the Bronx Democratic machine mounted a big effort to get rid of Abrams and recapture the patronage of the borough president's office, and Geto took a leave of absence from his job as Abrams's press secretary to become his campaign manager. In June, they beat the machine and won
the primary election. Now Geto was urging Abrams to run for state attorney general in 1974. But he could not go on without telling his boss the whole truth about his life.

“We sat down on a bench in City Hall Park, right outside city hall. He had no idea what I was going to tell him. And I made a big deal of it, like ‘it's real serious.' So he says, ‘Go ahead, what's on your mind?'

“I'll never forget this as long as I live. I said, ‘All right, Bob, here's the story. I'm gay. And not only am I gay, I'm a gay activist. And I've been working with the Gay Activists Alliance, secretly, for the last two years. Now you are about to run for attorney general. You and I have had a terrific professional relationship for these three years. I admire you and I want to continue to work for you and be associated with you and manage your career in politics, but I will resign if you want me to. I don't think someone should resign a job because they're gay. I don't think there's anything bad about being gay.' And I said, ‘Look, I'll tell you what I will do and what I won't do. I won't be an open, public spokesperson for the gay rights movement because it's inconsistent with my role as a campaign manager or a governmental employee on your staff at a high level. I won't project myself as a gay leader. But I will have relationships with men. I may walk down the street holding hands with another man.' This is 1973. I said, T will not hide my sexuality. And if you feel now, having heard this and, especially, because you're a bachelor'—he was the straightest person I've ever met in my life, believe me—‘but because you're a bachelor and because you're thinking of running for state attorney general, if you think it will be a terrible handicap to have an openly gay person as your chief aide, I will resign quietly and I won't have any hard feelings.'”

There was a long pause, and Geto had no idea what Abrams would say. Finally, his boss spoke: “Ethan, I respect you. You're my friend. I care about you. And I will support you in all of this. And I can accept everything you said. And I need you and want you on my team. And I will back you up. And I will take whatever negatives come along with this, if people try to attack me because you're gay.”

For Geto, it was “a wonderful moment.” He “felt totally free. To be able to hear this, in those days, that the guy was so supportive and so committed and would let me keep my job. I saw myself attached to him, managing him into big-time politics. It was very important to me in my career. It was just a wonderful thing. And I was very lucky because for years after that, very, very few other people in politics or government came out the way I did.”

“I don't think people's sex lives are very interesting, unless they destroy the person.”

—
JOHN FAIRCHILD

“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true. … The problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact?”

—
EDMUND WHITE
, 1980

“What everyone had wanted was bringing them death.”

—
RANDY SHILTS

“Out of the closets and into the streets!”

—
ACT UP CHANT

T
HE SEVENTIES
had been a time of amazing progress and almost nonstop celebration for much of the gay community. By the end of the decade, gay invisibility was just a distant memory, with the proliferation of gay characters on network TV sitcoms and frequent political battles over gay civil rights laws. Even damaging defeats, like Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami, were not without incidental benefits. Such reversals proved once again how much the movement could be strengthened by adversity.

Ethan Geto, who had temporarily decamped from New York to Miami to help fight Bryant's effort, saw the Florida fight as “a watershed.” He said, “I thought this was the first great opportunity nationally to mobilize
the gay community with a political consciousness. I hoped that gay rights would mature into a major civil rights issue on the national agenda. And it happened. We were on the nightly news a million times. We got letters and notes that came in by the thousands. They were like this: ‘I live in rural Indiana. And we can't really say we're gay here, but there is a place where we do hang out once a week on Sunday afternoons. It becomes like a gay bar, but nobody really knows it. There are three women and five men. We didn't have much money, but we said we'll take one week's pay check from everybody and send it to you people in Dade County because you're standing up for homosexuals.'”

By 1980, in response to the growing clamor for equality, 120 of the largest corporations, including AT&T and IBM, had adopted personnel policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and 40 towns and cities had passed similar laws or issued executive orders. (Mostly because of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church—whose lobbyist was Roy Cohn—New York City remained pointedly absent from this list at the beginning of the decade.)

Twenty-two states had ended all restrictions on sexual relations between consenting adults, and on the tenth anniversary of Stonewall, seventeen-year-old Randy Rohl took twenty-year-old Grady Quinn to the senior prom in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The National Gay Task Force announced that this was the first time two acknowledged homosexuals had attended a high school prom together in America.