THE GAY METROPOLIS: 1940-1996
By Charles Kaiser
Houghton Mifflin, 404 pages, $27
When I arrived in New York City as a college student in 1971, gay history was an entirely spoken tradition, passed down from generation to generation of gay men at dinner parties fueled by cognac, marijuana and an infectious, skeptical wit constituting almost a regional dialect. I would quietly take in all of the heady gossip about the lives and loves of famous gay poets, composers, painters and playwrights. Mixed in would be lessons in the argot used during a coded past that already seemed shocking in its double standards, though clever in its inventiveness (for example, “rice queens” for those at-tracted to Asians, or “dropping hairpins” for dropping hints to test whether a stranger was gay). I remember Joe LeSueur, who’d been poet Frank O’Hara’s roommate for more than a decade, bringing down the house when he’d announce about himself yet again, “Never cross a queen from the ’50s!”
I was moved to think back wistfully to those rarefied, intimate evenings, tinted with nostalgia and a retrospective in-nocence and naivete, when I read Charles Kaiser’s comprehensive, documentary-style history of gay life in New York City, “The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996.” (Any tale of gay life in New York during that time necessarily becomes a tale of gay life across America, and of a floating state of mind as much as of a place.) There have been a number of gay histories in recent years, most notably Allan Berube’s “Coming Out Under Fire,” about gay soldiers during World War II, and George Chauncey’s “Gay New York.” But Kaiser’s definitive tone and attitude remind us even more forcefully that one generation’s gossip has somehow been transmogrified into the next generation’s historical record. The shock of such a change is weird and almost embarrassing to any-one for whom such disclosures were once a matter of in-group tittering. But it’s also hopeful and inspiring. For romantic antics, or, more bracingly, the struggle against a virus that threatens the planet, are as en-gaging as those over-rated battles we’ve been subjected to by military historians for most of our lives.
“The Gay Metrop-olis” presents a time-lapse social history of nearly six decades using personal inter-views, newspaper ac-counts, books, movies and those inevitable pseudonymous accounts that are the dated equivalent of a black square placed over a witness’ face. The book allows the reader to trace changes that may have gone largely unnoticed in the dust storm of history. The most striking change involves the identities of the heroes, or at least the most recognizable faces, of gay culture. From the ’50s through the ’70s, these were usually poets, playwrights, artists, composers or architects: Paul Cadmus, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Philip Johnson, Virgil Thomson, John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol. With no openly gay politicians, a Cadmus painting or a Tom of Finland cartoon or a Mapplethorpe photograph became a form of politics by other means, whether intentionally or not. By the ’80s and ’90s, the gay movement was galvanized by the AIDS epidemic to a new level of engagement, and the group portrait arranged here by Kaiser gradually comes to include politicians, activists, lawyers, journalists and doctors: Randy Shilts, Larry Kramer, Tom Stoddard, Barney Frank. Given the brisk pace of the book, this change from symbolic, artful power to realpolitik is startling. (Kaiser apologizes for his uneven emphasis on men over women in this scheme: “While the women I have written about are among the most compelling characters in this saga, men gradually became my principal focus-because their story is also mine.”)
A danger in trying to present an epic-size gossip column as history is that it can become an excuse to serve up juicy bits and heavy breathing. And Kaiser does exploit this tell-all material. We hear from producer Howard Rosenman of his supposed bedding of Leonard Bernstein following a 1948 concert in Israel at which he’d been seated next to Bernstein’s wife. We read about architect Philip Johnson’s attraction to the ” ‘general aura’ ” of the Third Reich and the blond Hitler youths in prewar Berlin. We hear from Gore Vidal about a night he allegedly spent at the Chelsea Hotel with Jack Kerouac. All of this indiscretion is both alluring and anxiety-producing. It’s the literary equi-valent of a quick snort of cocaine.
Wisely, Kaiser doesn’t stay too long at this particular party. His true strength is in balancing the high, the low and the middle. Surprisingly enough, some of the most exciting and revelatory moments aren’t the bed scenes but the tales of more ordinary types living their lives, such as Sandy Kern, a lesbian who recalls her days as a teenage girl-gang leader in Brooklyn in the 1940s and her unblinking acting out of a hot desire to kiss her girlfriend Minnie during an air-raid drill following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Kaiser, author of “1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture and the Shaping of a Generation” and a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is also deft at detailing the shifting fortune of gays within the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Times, from the days when book reviewer Walter Clemons could be denied a post because of his confession of his predilection, to the change of policy when, in 1986, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. finally lifted the ban on the word “gay” in the Times.
Kaiser has constructed a clever time capsule. He satisfies our lust for insider information about John Kennedy’s alleged triadic weekends on his yacht with his close bisexual friend, Michael Butler, and revolving female guests. He makes a coherent time line out of a jumble of previously scattered remem-brances of things past: the play and movie “The Boys in the Band,” the play “Bent,” the nightclub Anvil, GRID (gay related immunodeficiency disease was initially the prejudicial medi-cal term for what we now call AIDS). He never offers any explanation for what all the debris might mean; there are no big questions or big answers here. Yet given the extent to which the sort of material he includes as history becomes increasingly commonplace in scholarly works-whether in telling of events gay, straight, bi or tri-Kaiser may also turn out to have been involved in rewriting not history, but the way history is written.
