The Gay Metropolis (14 page)

Lieutenant Roy E. Blick had produced his official estimate this way: first he took sixty percent of the men arrested, and added the names of all the friends whom they had identified as homosexuals. Then he took the other forty percent of the list and multiplied it by five. “It's 60–40,” he explained. Lerner wrote: “This adventure in higher mathematics had exhausted both of us. … I reflected grimly, thinking back to the reverent way in which Senators and security officers used Blick's estimate of 5,000 homosexuals in Washington, with 3,750 in the government. This was how a statistic got to be born.”

Ben Bradlee was a young
Washington Post
reporter in 1950—“low, low, low general assignment”—and Roy Blick was part of his beat. “Blick specialized in young apple-cheeked police recruits who did the worst things in the world,” Bradlee recalled. “They hung around the cans in Lafayette Square and in first-run movie theaters. They'd hang out in the John and wave their tallywackers around and see if anybody was interested. The newspapers at that time were not modern. Shall we put it that way? And if they got a senator's aide, or especially someone in the CIA or the State Department, it was just too good to be true.

“Blick was a poisonous man,” Bradlee continued. “He loved it and he relished it. At first he hadn't gotten any ink at all in the vice squad because nobody was particularly interested in rubbing out prostitution or little after-hours clubs. They were all terribly sad stories—most of the guys probably married. Even if you weren't in any way enlightened, you felt there was something terrible about this. There was entrapment, and the joy that this asshole Blick took out of it was wrong.

“He was a nasty little man.”

In 1950, “The lack of sensitivity or awareness was total,” said the newspaperman. “We're not talking about unenlightenment or enlightenment, we're talking about ignorance.” Bradlee hated these stories: “I couldn't get off from this sort of thing”—and they were one reason he ended his first stint at the
Post
in 1951. After he returned fourteen years later, he became the executive editor—and one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation.

Lerner urged his readers to distinguish between men who might have had occasional homosexual experiences and what he called “the compulsive” who was unable to control his impulses. He also pointed out that “alcoholics, reckless and compulsive gamblers, or sexual adventurers who
get themselves into frequent scrapes with women” were just as vulnerable to blackmail as any gay person. Lerner compared the new campaign to eliminate homosexuals from all government posts to the attitude of the Soviets and Big Brother in George Orwell's
1984
.

“When the security officers of government agencies start firing people because their sexual habits seem strange it is a case of the sick being pursued by the sicker,” Lerner wrote. “For while homosexuals are sick people, the ruthless campaign against them is symptomatic of an even more dangerous sickness in the social atmosphere.… The communist regime in Russia takes command not only of the political thinking of its people, but also of their private lives, including their sex habits.”

This emphasis on the sickness of the homosexual hardly sounds progressive five decades later. But at the time, it was not only the attitude of almost every psychiatrist; it was also the way most homosexuals viewed themselves.

Ironically, while no one gave Lerner any proof that Communists were successfully blackmailing homosexuals, there were rumors about congressional investigators threatening to blackmail American homosexuals if they refused to discuss their previous ties to the Communist party. When the renowned choreographer Jerome Robbins testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in New York City in 1953, he disclosed his own three-year membership in the party and named eight other former party members. Some of his friends believe that Robbins agreed to testify only after committee investigators threatened to expose him as a homosexual.

The day after Robbins testified, Peter Kihss wrote in
The New York Times
, “While other witnesses denounced the committee for staging what they called a ‘circus' and relying on ‘stool pigeons,' Mr. Robbins said he was testifying because ‘I think I made a great mistake before, entering the Communist party, and I feel I'm doing the right thing as an American.'”

Robbins denied that he testified after a threat to expose him as a homosexual. But Victor Navasky wrote in
Naming Names
, a history of the McCarthy period, that Robbins's testimony was “so compliant… it had the aura of social blackmail.” Ring Lardner told Navasky, “I don't know whether it's true or not, but if you were Jerome Robbins, wouldn't you like to have people believe that's the reason you did it?”

“He wasn't threatened with exposure,” said Arthur Laurents, who was unable to get his passport renewed during this period because of his own former connections with leftist organizations. “It was very simple. I knew him very well at that time. It was the same thing as with Kazan. They wanted
movie careers. That was it. He wanted to do
The King and I
, and he did. Jerry said, ‘It won't be for years until I know whether I did the right thing.” I said, ‘Oh, I can tell you now. You were a shit.” But I wasn't so pristine myself. I worked with him afterwards and I knew he'd been an informer.”

When Laurents first arrived in Hollywood after the war, he found it “wildly exciting intellectually: there were really bright people and all the cream of the European refugees, like Thomas Mann.” But after the blacklisting period, most of those people left the movie business for good. “The blacklist destroyed Hollywood,” Laurents said.

James Baldwin described his own homosexuality with frankness and ambivalence in
Giovannis Room
, the novel he published in 1956. The book came out of “something which tormented and frightened me: the question of my own sexuality,” Baldwin explained many years later. One reason he wrote it was to eliminate the nagging problem that other closeted writers faced in the fifties. Baldwin said the book “simplified” his life because it “meant that I had no secrets. You couldn't blackmail me. You didn't tell me, I told you.”

Coming out of the closet gave Baldwin the freedom that thousands of his contemporaries would not experience until they emulated him two, three, or four decades later. Of course, thousands of others would never emulate him at all.

“It's only the twentieth century which is obsessed with the details of somebody's sex life,” Baldwin said on another occasion. “I don't think the details make any difference. Love comes in very strange packages. I love a few men and I love a few women. I suppose it's saved my life.”

Alfred A. Knopf had published Baldwin's first novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, in 1953. A semiautobiographical account of a poor boy growing up in Harlem during the 1930s, the book was a critical success. “I'd been a boy preacher for three years,” said Baldwin. “That is what turned me into a writer really.… My father frightened me so badly I had to fight him so hard, nobody has ever frightened me since.”

But when he submitted
Giovanni's Room
a couple of years after his first big success, Knopf rejected it. “I guess they were scared,” said William Cole, who was Knopf's publicity director—and the first person to bring Baldwin to the publisher's attention. “Homosexuality wasn't on the books in those days and they turned it down,” Cole recalled. When he learned the young author's second novel had been rejected, Cole was “horrified.”

BELIEVING THAT HOMOSEXUALS
in the federal government could become a potent new campaign issue, right-wing Republicans greeted the
State Department's disclosures gleefully. John O'Donnell, a rabid right-winger, wrote in his syndicated column that the “primary issue” was that “the foreign policy of the United States, even before World War II, was dominated by an all-powerful, supersecret inner circle of highly-educated, socially-highly-placed sexual misfits in the State Department, all easy to blackmail, all susceptible to blandishments by homosexuals in foreign nations.”

O'Donnell also reported that of the first 2,500 letters McCarthy received in response to his campaign against the State Department, “a preliminary sampling of the mail shows that only one out of four of the writers is excited about the red infiltration into the higher branches of the government; the other three are expressing their shocked indignation at the evidence of sex depravity.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Guy Gabrielson mailed a newsletter to seven thousand party workers to alert them to the new “homosexual angle” in Washington. “Sexual perverts … have infiltrated our government in recent years,” wrote Gabrielson, and they were “perhaps as dangerous as actual communists.” He said the Republican party had a special responsibility to spread the news because “decency” constrained the media from “adequately presenting the facts.” This occasion was the first of many over the next fifty years when the Republican party would try to exploit anti-gay prejudice to win votes on election day.

Senator Kenneth Wherry, a Nebraska Republican, issued the first of two Senate reports on the “pervert problem.” He told Max Lerner, “You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. Mind you, I don't say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don't say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.… There should be no people of that type working in any position in the government.”

JOE MCCARTHY HIMSELF
never did much to exploit the gay issue, perhaps because of the swirling rumors about the Wisconsin senator's own bisexuality. On January 14,1952, Drew Pearson, the liberal investigative columnist, made the following entry in his diary:

[Maryland Democratic Senator] Tydings has an amazing letter which a young army It. wrote to Senator Bill Benton of Connecticut telling how McCarthy performed an act of sodomy on him after picking him up in the Wardman Park Bar. The letter was sent to Benton about January 1,
but two weeks have gone by and apparently nothing has been done. Tydings and I, knowing how McCarthy operates when he knows a witness is against him, thought we had better interview the It. immediately. So Tydings got Benton on the phone in New York. Benton was evasive and appears to have done little. Therefore, Tydings thought I should arrange for Jack [Anderson] to go to New York.

However when I called Benton as a precautionary measure, he told me that the White House had stepped in and that the It. was being handled by the FBI. I am a little skeptical as to how the FBI interviews certain witnesses, especially with James Mclnerny, head of the Justice Department Criminal division, playing cozy with McCarthy for the last two years.

Two days later, Pearson wrote in his diary, “This is the third report on McCarthy's homosexual activity,” but when the FBI interviewed the young lieutenant in New York, he denied writing the letter to Tydings, and “claimed it was planted by another homo who was jealous.”

Like Hoover, McCarthy was never publicly accused of being gay during his own lifetime. But Lerner pointed out in the summer of 1950 that McCarthy seemed uncertain about how to handle the homosexual issue. “The portrait of the Wisconsin Senator as a tortured Hamlet is novel enough to stir some reflections about what may have caused his paralysis of action in the face of a sure-fire issue.… The answer is when you try to use the twisted sex issue as a weapon for twisted political purposes, there is a danger of a boomerang.”

In one of his frequent attempts to be “one of the boys” with reporters who covered him, McCarthy once remarked, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be a communist or a cocksucker.” Then the senator roared with laughter. To journalists like Pearson that must have sounded like a bizarre double entendre.

Ben Bradlee believed “there was a lot of time spent investigating” the possibility that McCarthy was gay, but “nobody ever came dose to proving it. What a wonderful solution to this problem it would have been.” McCarthy's appointment of Roy Cohn as his chief counsel rekindled all the private speculation about the senator's sexuality, especially after Cohn threatened to “wreck the Army” if it failed to give special treatment to his close friend David Schine. In a speech on the Senate floor, Ralph Flanders, a Vermont Republican and McCarthy's enemy, said the Army-McCarthy hearings needed to get to the “real heart” of the matter—the “mystery concerning the personal relationships of the army private, the staff assistant, and the senator.” And when Cohn himself became a witness before
the committee, Arkansas Democrat John McClellan asked him if he had “any special interest in Mr. Schine.”

“I don't know what you mean by ‘special interest,'” Cohn replied. “He's a friend of mine.”

But the transfixing moment for millions of American television viewers occurred when the army's counsel, Joseph Welch, interrogated former FBI agent James Juliana about a photograph that had been cropped to imply that Schine was close enough to Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens to be alone with him at an air force base. The altered picture was supposed to disprove the idea that Cohn and Schine might want to blackmail the army. Welch discovered that the original photo had been “shamefully cut down” to eliminate the other men near Schine and Stevens, thereby creating an unwarranted impression of closeness between them. “Did you think this came from a pixie?” Welch demanded of Juliana. “Where did you think that this picture I hold in my hand came from?”

“I have no idea,” Juliana replied. Then McCarthy interrupted, “Will counsel for my benefit define—I think he might well be an expert on it—what a pixie is?”