Victory

Linda Hirshman

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062202253
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política social

In the vein of Taylor Branch's classic Parting of the Waters, Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit Linda Hirshman delivers the enthralling, groundbreaking story of the gay rights movement, revealing how a dedicated and resourceful minority changed America forever.

When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted in the summer of 1969, forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in 2011, New York legalized gay marriage and the armed services stopped enforcing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Successful social movements are always extraordinary, but these advances seem like something of a miracle.

Linda Hirshman recounts the long roads that led to these victories, detailing the remarkable and revolutionary story of the movement that has blurred rigid gender lines, altered the shared culture, and broadened our definitions of family. Written in vivid prose, at once emotional and erudite, Victory is an utterly vibrant work of reportage and eyewitness accounts and demonstrates how, in a matter of decades, a focused group of activists forged a classic campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements.

"Remarkable for its emotional punch as for its historical insight."— New York Times Book Review

1

Gays and the Cities:

Community First, Politics Later

When twenty-year-old “Jeb Alexander” chose his seat in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, on a hot August night in 1920, he knew it was “the best bench in the park.” In a matter of minutes, Randall Hare plucked him off that bench, and Jeb finally got laid. The shy, slender youngster with the widow’s peak and the wide-set eyes started cruising the park every night, dreaming of an ideal love, but settling for sex when he found a man who met his finicky standards.

Jeb wasn’t the first gay man to find sex in Lafayette Square. He wasn’t even the first one to get it on that particular bench or get it at all. There had to be a first one. There’s a lot of argument about who was the first person identified as “homosexual” at all. Everyone knows about the same-sex goings on at those old Greek chat-fests we call symposiums and scholars have found networks of “sodomites” in medieval Europe as well as early gay bars called “molly houses” in Reformation England. Letters and diaries reflect American women with warm “friendships” as their central emotional bond in the late nineteenth century. Of course it’s one thing to have one drunken tryst with Socrates and another to be something you only do once in a while: “homosexual.” For most of history, there could be no gay revolution because there was no category “gay.” The word “homosexual” appears for the first time in Germany in 1869.

But identifiable gay history in America really got started after people began making stuff in factories rather than in the kitchens of their family farms. Immigrants and rural youths, male and female, gay and straight, flooded into American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Jeb Alexander, sitting on the bench in Lafayette Square, is the living embodiment of the birth of the American gay revolution. Gay men left the small towns, with their furtive bus stations and “bachelor” apartment rendezvous, and came to the anonymity of great cities like New York and San Francisco. Just like all newcomers, they wrote to friends back home about what they were finding in their new worlds. One homeboy followed the crumbs dropped by another, and, one link at a time, they created a chain of migration to American cities. Composer Gean (pronounced “Gene”) Harwood, author, sixty years later, of The Oldest Gay Couple in America, found out where to go from an older gay friend in Albany, New York. Mississippi publisher George Henri Ford learned about gay New York from one of his writers. Jeb Alexander, whose diary would one day present an invaluable record of this much neglected world, made his way to Lafayette Park, one of the many urban neighborhoods where homosexuals gathered.

YMCA

The hall monitors were mostly looking the other way. As the great urbanization began, rural-based Protestant vice squads were focused on controlling the heterosexual behavior of males, especially of working-class males, and keeping the newly emancipated female factory workers safe. The vice squads—along with the anxious families back home—saw to it that urban boardinghouses and indeed whole neighborhoods were segregated by sex.

But in building single-sex residential hotels with shared bathrooms, the YMCA became “YMCA.” The mere act of showering at the Sloane House YMCA in New York produced so many sexual encounters that gay diarist Donald Vining once had to give up bathing in order to get some rest. Because boardinghouses had no kitchens, restaurants and cafeterias sprang up nearby.

Rooming houses, restaurants, the YMCA, and soon whole neighborhoods in growing cities like Los Angeles, Washington, New York, and San Francisco became centers of gay settlement. By the time gay people started keeping the diaries available to us, the young gay men pouring into the cities from farms and small towns already knew to go to Greenwich Village and DC’s Lafayette Square.

The women were not so fortunate. In the late nineteenth century, when middle-class women started to attend women’s colleges and hold jobs, the evidence of passionate female friendships multiplied in the historical record. Society pretty much left them alone. However, the Victorian concept of the sexless woman met up with reality and passionate same-sex relationships started looking more like social subversion than innocent friendship. Being private, female relationships were extremely vulnerable to social pressure to conform to a heterosexual norm. The combination of economic independence and social indifference that made a space for lesbian relationships in the late nineteenth century was more like a brief window into the future than the beginning of a social movement. Since women were never in command of the city streets the way men were, women would have to wait decades before they got a toehold in spaces like lesbian bars.

Jeb, on the other hand, was lucky to find a vacancy on a desirable bench at all. All over DC, New York, and Los Angeles, gay men were escaping the heat and crowding of their new urban homes and taking to the parks in search of sexual partners or just to meet their friends. Once out, they formed societies, gossiping and socializing as well as cruising. They even divided into subcultures based on looks and sexual tastes. In New York, conventional-looking men gathered in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the sailors down in Battery Park, and gorgeous painted queens up in Bronx Park. And, of course, Central Park was central.

The city streets were filling up with gay society. Gay men gathered near their work; in New York the streets around Bloomingdale’s windows and in the theater district blossomed into favorite gay gathering spots. Being on the street was a lot more dangerous than finding like-minded souls at the Y, so the men developed elaborate signaling mechanisms. They wore somewhat gaudy suits. At one point the clue was a red necktie. Gay men looked each other right in the eye and opened their eyes ever so slightly. They shared a secret language—including careful definitions of terms of self-description like “queer” and “swish”—advertising for “roommates” and “stopping by to see the apartment.”

Jeb met a young man with a perfumed handkerchief at the DC library and went to a party at his apartment in the Riggs building. Apartments sprang up everywhere in America’s growing cities between 1895 and 1920, and, as the apartments became available, gay tenants with a few extra bucks moved in and brought their friends. Sitting at the Riggs, listening to someone’s recording of Enrico Caruso and lounging in a wicker chair, Jeb felt he had found his circle. A year later he left his family home and moved into a room at the local YMCA. The other gay men at the Y and in the Riggs gang introduced him around. They went to restaurants, galleries, and shows. Jeb took the civil-service exam and got a job as a publications clerk in the United States Department of Agriculture. With its rich clerical job pool, Washington was a very gay town.

Miraculously, Jeb’s college crush J. J. Dasham showed up one day at the YMCA where Jeb was staying and went to work at the State Department. For the first, loving months of their relationship, they had breakfast every morning at the Allies Inn cafeteria. After Dash broke it off, their morning ritual was interrupted by visits from the many men Jeb thought had taken his place. Music-loving Randall, with the “beautiful eyes and sensuous lips” of Jeb’s first sexual encounter; the tall, gangly German Hans Vermehren; the occasional cross-dresser Isador Pearson; the “effeminate” Junior Whorley all appeared, to Jeb’s torment. Postcoital or postrelational, no one managing the Allies Inn cafeteria ever said a word to Jeb or Dash about their little gay breakfast club, including the effeminate and the cross-dressing. As the cities filled with restaurants, gay city dwellers figured out which ones, like the Allies Inn, were safe to patronize and pushed the envelope of how open they could be.

After 1920, Prohibition had transformed the urban restaurant scene, replacing the tony and respectable restaurants with a whole apparatus of social defiance—cheap cafeterias like the Childs chain, illegal clubs, and speakeasies. One Halloween, a bunch of Jeb’s friends went to the DC Childs and put on “a reception there in one of the brightest spots on the Avenue, with the people inside Childs as spectators. Isador’s face was flushed and hysterical. Junior put his arms around Dash and Isador, jumping up and down.” Gay men colonized spaces like the Childs restaurants, turning their social life into a “show,” sitting heavily made up at tables by the plate glass windows, camping it up, and loudly discussing their affairs.

The making of the gay male world, as historian George Chauncey calls the process in the subtitle of his book Gay New York, comes as close as Western culture has to answering the first question of Western political thought: what kind of society would people make if they suddenly “sprang up” with no preexisting ties or institutions? These men did not all come from the same European country or town, as other migrants did. They had no preexisting cuisines, anthems, or folk dances. And yet they did not fall into the brutish and short war of all against all that philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined, but, rather, created places to work, live, and find—or seek—sex and love, a “collective,” as Chauncey says, “social world.”

A (Ball)room of Their Own

In 1903 the police raided a bathhouse in the basement of the Ariston Apartments at Fifty-fifth Street and Broadway in New York. Like the other fancy bathhouses around town, the Ariston had provided rooms obscure with steam and “cooling” rooms with cots for the men to use afterward. Caught having sex when the bath was raided, several men were sentenced to years or even decades in the penitentiary. As early as 1903, gay men had begun to create spaces they didn’t have to share, gay speakeasies, gay bathhouses like the Ariston, and drag balls. The bars, baths, and balls were the locales that offered gay men the opportunities to transcend their private social circles of roommates, lovers, pals, and private apartments and create a web of community across race and class.

Like the Y, these semipublic institutions of gay culture were the unexpected consequence of institutions created by the dominant culture. Reformers and public officials tried to help tenement dwellers living without bathing facilities by opening public baths. Immediately, entrepreneurs began to open “Turkish” baths—private baths in hotels and apartments, with steam rooms, cafes, and other facilities, that emphasized pleasure over necessity. Some of them morphed into an extensive network of “gay” baths, which excluded people who were not gay and presumably kept the police away in the customary fashion of greasing palms. The grande dame of New York baths, the Everard, lasted as a gay institution from 1919 until it burned down in 1977.

Masked balls and masquerades mimicked the entertainments of some of the toniest groups in mainstream American society. In 1925, Jeb watched his pal Hans dressing up to go to the Bal Bohème, the annual gala of the snooty nongay Arts Club of Washington. Men routinely dressed up as women at the Bal Bohème, a contemporary newspaper reported, one guy in seven-inch heels and another in a red wig disguised as the Old Maid. Soon gay men were organizing their own, much livelier balls.

It was not a big leap. In New York, by a quirk of law, people were forbidden to appear masked on city streets unless they were going to a licensed masquerade ball (masked protesters had in the past engaged in genuinely disorderly conduct rather than the so-called disorderly conduct charge used against gays). Technically, there was no way to distinguish between something like an arts club asking to have a masquerade party and someone like the famed gay entertainer “Jackie” Mason organizing a drag ball in Greenwich Village. Men dressed up like women, the elaborately costumed “women” danced with the men, and before long Harlem’s Hamilton Ball and comparable affairs in Chicago and New Orleans were attracting thousands of participants—and spectators, including the cream of heterosexual society. The toilet, one participant at a Chicago ball reported, was so crowded with men having sex that you could not even use it to pee. By the 1920s, there were enormous gay balls filled with participants in ostrich plumes, monkey fur, sequins, chiffon, silk, and satin at places like Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel.

The drag queens in their sequins and monkey fur are the ultimate in camp, that gay cultural behavior that adopts and mimicks female roles in exaggerated and humorous ways, which dates back at least to the twenties. Historian George Chauncey speculates that bitchy, humorous camp behavior helped gay men express anger at the loss of status that came from their being grouped with women, but also helped them to assert their superiority through humor and mockery.

However comforting camp culture was, some people were loath to close the closet door again so quickly after the ball. After the Harlem Balls of 1929 and 1931, two men—a telephone operator in a flame red dress and a ballet dancer in a velvet cape—were arrested for trying to eat in a restaurant. After spending time in the fantastic world of the drag ball, dressed to their wildest imaginings, dancing with each other, and having sex in the toilet, having to go under cover again turned out not to be so easy.

The Cold Comfort of the Closet

Jeb Alexander did not go to the balls. Instead, his diaries record a life of discreet aversion. He certainly didn’t tell his family about his sexual orientation. When his brother Henry came to the Y to visit and remarked on what he’d like to do to the “ ‘fairies’ in the lobby,” Jeb “wondered for a hellish moment if Henry knew that I was one of those he contemptuously speaks of as ‘fairies’ and if he was saying that for my benefit.” Jeb spent many holidays eating two dinners, one with his parents and then a second one with his friends. (But, of course, they suspected. When he died forty-some years later in 1964, he left his diaries to his niece, Ina Russell. At the funeral, her parents and aunts came sidling up to her, one after another, to ask her point blank if Jeb was gay.)

Although no one actually ever confronted him directly, Jeb lived in terror of getting caught at work. When his homosexual companions Max and Junior showed up in drag at the theater where one of his coworkers happened also to be attending the play, he spent the evening in a pool of sweat. At the office Christmas party, secret Santas gave him cigarettes and a poem about “fags,” along with a stuffed doll for his “lonely hours.” When he wondered aloud why anyone would want to work at his office, his boss replied that it was the most “liberal” department in the government, except of course for that legendary refuge of the marginal, State, where, his boss noted, Jeb’s “friend” Dash worked.

Jeb never contemplated revealing himself to his family or his coworkers. Most gays were closeted from the straight world and they supported one another in their efforts to conceal their sexual orientation from the hostile environment. Many closeted gay men saw nothing to reveal. They considered their forays into the gay neighborhoods to be random events that did not identify them as “homosexual,” if they even knew there was such a category in the first place. According to Chauncey, the only moral discussion of coming out during the decades of gay community formation involved whether it was immoral for a gay man to conceal his homosexuality from other gay men whom he happened to meet.

It was indeed a dangerous world for men who had sex with men, no matter how hard they denied or tried to hide their same-sex attraction or activities. When Jeb was in college at Washington and Lee University, two classmates got the boot when the college found out they were “that sort.” A few days later, one of them was found dead in the local river. Although the undercover cop in Lafayette Square was laughably obvious and known to all the regulars as the “Sneak,” Jeb was terrified when the “hideous plain clothesman” interrupted Jeb’s regular lunch date with his father to tell Dad to “keep an eye on this fine young man.” The Y suspected Dash and evicted him. One of the gang, Hans, had the bad fortune to be staying at the apartment of a gay friend one night in 1931 when the friend got caught shoplifting. When the police searched the apartment, they found Hans in bed with a visiting professor from Sweetbriar College and everyone got hauled off to jail. A day or two later, Hans saw his name in the local paper and decided to go back to Germany.

If Jeb did nothing to change his careful balance of private homosexual community and closeted work and family life, it wasn’t for lack of insight. Jeb knew his same-sex desires were “congenital and entirely inescapable” and that he was still the “bashful good child” he once was, not someone who should be treated as a “criminal.” “Filthy policemen!” Jeb wrote in his diary. “Why in hell can’t the beasts leave us alone?” But, cocooned in the original regime of don’t ask/don’t tell, Jeb and Dash did not organize a rebellion. Protected by their willingness to limit their confrontation with straight society and by the temporary relaxation of moral vigilance during Prohibition, they and their friends drank bootleg liquor, moved from the Y to various lodgings, worke...