The Gay Metropolis (45 page)

“We were ecstatic,” Kameny recalled.

Still Socarides refused to give up. He described the letter financed by the task force as an unfair campaign practice—because it hadn't mentioned who had paid for it. The psychiatrist demanded a new election, but this time the association rejected his protest. The men who had dominated the public debate about homosexuality for thirty years were now officially outsiders in their own profession.

The losers considered the result illegitimate because they thought the APA had been manipulated by gay activists. “They claimed the whole thing was handled within the APA on a political basis,” said Kameny. “It was not. It was a mixture of efforts from the inside and the outside. Those were times of rapid cultural change. Things were being looked at that hadn't been looked at before. I think our effort precipitated the internal action. I don't think it would have happened for a very, very long time, if ever, otherwise. As often happens in a culture that was pervaded by democratic principles, it was a good, sound, scientific decision,
administered
by a political process. But there's a very real difference between that and saying that the whole thing was political, which it was not.”

Marmor agreed: “I don't in any way want to minimize the importance
of the gay liberation movement,” he told the historian Eric Marcus. “But there were people like myself and Evelyn Hooker … who were independently developing their views about the wrongness of our attitudes toward homosexuality.”

For Frank Kameny and the rest of the movement, the action of the APA was a stunning achievement. It came just nine years after Kameny and Jack Nichols had been forced to wage a battle
within
the movement to convince gay people to think of themselves as healthy human beings. The psychiatric establishment had been one of the biggest roadblocks to that early victory. Now, in less than a decade, Kameny and his friends had converted the movement's most potent enemy into an important ally.

“We stated that there was no reason why … a gay man or woman could not be just as healthy, just as effective, just as law abiding and just as capable of functioning as any heterosexual,” said Marmor. “Furthermore, we asserted that laws that discriminated against them in housing or in employment were unjustified. So it was a total statement, and I think it was a very significant move.”

The Stonewall riot had served as the movement's de facto Declaration of Independence. Just four years later, psychiatrists had become the wildly unlikely ratifiers of its Constitution.

ONE BENEFIT
of the sexual revolution, combined with the action of the APA, was the obliteration of the doubts that haunted so many gay men in the fifties—even radicals like William Wynkoop—who had to convince themselves that “the pleasure of most homosexuals in sexual activities is
equal
in
passion
and enjoyment to that which the majority of heterosexuals experience.” In the seventies, gay New Yorkers never doubted their ability to have as much fun as anyone else.

Some Greenwich Village saloon owners decided to catch the wave of the new revolution by changing the nature of their businesses. The Ninth Circle, which occupied the bottom two floors of a row house at 139 West 10th Street, had been a very successful steak house in the sixties with a slightly bohemian and overwhelmingly heterosexual clientele. In its heyday, waiters there made as much as $150 a night, a huge sum in that period. It was just a couple of blocks north of the Stonewall Inn, but the Circle was “totally straight” and “totally antigay.” John Koch started there as a dishwasher but quickly worked his way up to bar manager. “They used to get on the microphone, and say, ‘If you're gay go away,' Koch recalled. “Everybody would laugh. I don't know if it was meant seriously or what.”

The rent was a bargain: the restaurant owner, Bobby Krivit, who was a
veteran of the carnival business on the Jersey Shore, leased the entire building for $600 a month. But by the end of 1971, business had dropped off sharply, and Krivit decided to go in a new direction. His partner had already left him to found Max's Kansas City, a famous East Village watering hole.

In January 1972 Krivit told Koch he wanted the Ninth Circle to become a gay bar. At the time, Koch wasn't sure whether Krivit, who was straight, knew that Koch was gay. The owner asked Koch if he could hire a whole new staff within two weeks, and his manager told him he thought he could. Koch believed this was the first straight establishment in Greenwich Village to “go gay” overnight in the seventies.

The old staff was fired, and the bar bought an ad in
Michael's Thing,
a guide to New York nightlife, to announce the makeover. The response was instantaneous—and “overwhelming.” The owner hedged his bets a bit by keeping the restaurant going for a while on the lower floor after he converted the upstairs into a gay bar. This transition caused a certain amount of amusement because the men's room was downstairs, forcing gay bargoers to walk through the straight restaurant to relieve themselves. But within a few weeks the gay part of the business had taken over the whole place. However, the big black and white sign outside announcing the “Ninth Circle Steakhouse” remained unaltered; no one saw any need to change it. Within a month, it was the hottest gay bar in Manhattan, a distinction it retained for most of the decade. Practically every night of the week, both floors were jammed from wall to wall with beautiful young men, eager to sample the spoils of the Stonewall revolution.

“It was like a victory for gay people or something,” said Koch. “They conquered this straight bastion. We really weren't ready for it. And it just went up and up and up from that.”

There were two separate bars, a long one upstairs with a row of low tables in front of it, and a smaller one below, with a dance floor and a pool table. Everyone from Andy Warhol to Harvey Fierstein was an occasional customer. An autographed poster of Janis Joplin next to the front door nurtured the myth that the singer had once been a customer. The garden in the back provided a third place to sit on languid summer evenings, and patrons lined up at the same table every night to purchase their drug of choice. Nearly everyone smoked joints outdoors, and no one bothered to be discreet about it. When Koch suggested to the owner that such flagrant commerce in illicit substances might be imprudent, Krivit was always dismissive. “You don't understand this younger generation,” the owner would say. “It's good for business.”

Koch never witnessed any payoffs, but he was certain there were “Christmas gifts” for the local precinct, and he believed the owner had “big dealings” with police headquarters. “That cost him some money. He'd make a pretty big contribution there, which protected him all the way down.”

Everyone remembered Stormy the bartender, whose real name was Norman Sabine. He had walked into the bar for an interview in 1974, and Koch was immediately beguiled by him; he started work that same night. Eventually, Koch broke his own rule against sleeping with a staff member and became Stormy's lover after the bartender seduced him on Fire Island.

Stormy was the fastest bartender most customers had ever seen, serving drinks with amazing speed—and making matches among his customers between almost every two pours. From where the customer stood, Stormy always looked utterly smooth. But he benefited from the camouflage provided by a dark bar, which hid his shortcuts; after washing a glass, he never bothered to dry his hands. As a result, “When we'd take his drawer out at the end of the night it would be half full of water,” said Koch. “All the money was soaking wet. And when he came home from the bar, he was literally soaked from the waist down. He was the messiest bartender I ever knew in my life. But he got it done.”

Eventually Stormy and Koch worked behind the bar together on Wednesdays and Thursdays. “We made so much. We used to take the money home and we would just throw it in a dresser drawer. And it used to be such a pain in the ass, like once a month, to count that damned money. We hated counting that damned money! We'd always argue about it: ‘It's your turn to count the money. I'm not counting it!'”

Naturally the owner was delighted with his booming new business, but success was not without its consequences. “He ended up going to a psychiatrist over this,” said Koch. “Bobby was so freaked out that his friends were going to think that he had turned gay.” According to others, Krivit also spent
all
of his profits on drugs, gambling and girlfriends. Krivit died in 1990, and the bar finally closed in 1993.

PHILIP GEFTER
was twenty-five in the fall of 1976, a beautiful young man in New York City, where young men and women come to be beautiful. Gefter had graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In college, he was a fixture at demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and he had been tear-gassed during the March on Washington in 1970. “My view of the world was shaped by the Utopian values of the sixties.” Gefter said.
“My attentions were always divided between art and politics, and my life quest was to find a way to integrate the two.” He was involved in GAA activities at the Wooster Street firehouse, and he had joined the Gay Academic Union. He worked as a picture researcher at Time-Life, but there was no question about his favorite activity.

“I was a slut,” Gefter remembered, laughing out loud. “And proud of it. I mean that in the highest sense of the word, you know. An ironic locution that signifies my reckless abandon to the pleasure, joy and celebration of sex.” In 1976 he left his “respectable career path” at Time-Life and took a job as a waiter at Berry's in Soho.

“This period was really fun for me,” Gefter said. “Almost every afternoon I would go down to the Christopher Street pier, where there were always people hanging out. I would inevitably meet some cute guy. We'd talk for a while, smoke a joint, then end up at his apartment or mine, and have sex. My daily recreational activity.

“Sex was like a handshake at that point in time. It was so accessible and easy, and there were always attractive people on the street. So many beautiful men parading around in T-shirts and cutoffs, and sex was on everybody's mind. The streets were so fertile then.”

Like many of his contemporaries, Gefter thought the constant pursuit of sex certified him as a liberated gay man. “I recorded every sexual encounter in my journal as if they were running tallies of my gay identity, as if they were proof of my defiance of convention, as if the highest number of sexual encounters meant that I would win in the Olympic sport of ‘being gay.'

“At one point during this period, I had accrued enough fuck buddies so that I didn't even have to leave my apartment. For several months, a different fuck buddy would come over each day of the week. There was Nick on Monday. Rodney on Tuesday. Tucker on Wednesday. David on Thursday. Michael on Friday. I had them on a schedule. These are their real names; I don't remember now if those were their days of the week. I met Nick while riding my bike through the Ramble in Central Park. He was Italian, he was great. I met Rodney at the gym, in the showers. He was a tall, blond baritone who went on to sing with the New York City Opera. I met Tucker in the back room at the International Stud. Michael I met at the pier. Nick was a school bus driver, and came over in the afternoon because he had a lover. Tucker was in graduate school at NYU, and came over at night. Rodney came over in the daytime, after his voice lessons. We'd talk for a while, smoke a joint, fuck, and shower. Or shower and fuck. They were all such lovely interludes. Such easy relationships.”

But none of this activity prevented Gefter from going out at night.

“As a waiter at Berry's, I'd work from five to midnight. After my shift, I'd have several drinks at the bar, usually with Chuck, the chef, who became my cruising buddy. Chuck and I would go off into the night, often smoking a joint along the way, sometimes after taking drugs of every variety: cocaine, MDA, Quaaludes, and angel dust—which I rarely did because it numbed me, made me feel stupid, half-conscious, subhuman, unlike MDA, or THC, which made me feel alive, made everything seem to glisten, as if everything were outlined in electric pastels. I hated angel dust, but a lot of people used it. Chuck and I would begin our rounds at various bars. We'd arrive at the Ninth Circle to see who was there. We'd walk down Christopher Street, which was still lively at one o'clock in the morning. We'd hang out for a while at Keller's across the street from the trucks, or the Cock Ring, where people would dance with handkerchiefs doused with ethyl chloride clenched between their teeth. Eventually, we'd wend our way up West Street to the Stud and to our inevitable destination, the Anvil.”

The Anvil was an extraordinary establishment in the meatpacking district of the West Village, located on the two lower floors of a building at the corner of 14th Street and Eleventh Avenue. Tom Stoddard remembered its special “Weimar Germany” quality, which meant it sometimes felt a little bit like the cabaret in
Cabaret.
Upstairs, after 4:00
A.M
., the closing time for regular bars, hundreds of gay men would move in waves around a bar decorated with go-go dancers, one of whom later became the Indian in the Village People. Downstairs customers checked their shirts, watched grainy porno movies, and had sex in a pitch-black back room. Pickpockets were a permanent fixture, prompting the shouted warning constantly repeated by one of the bouncers: “Gentlemen: watch your wallets!”

“I remember long lines to get in on Friday and Saturday nights,” said Gefter, “and, sometimes, you'd see women on line masquerading as men. Women were not allowed inside, and there were always rumors that Bianca Jagger or Diane Von Furstenberg or Susan Sontag had been spotted there in disguise.

“The Anvil was my favorite bar in the entire world. It was what I imagined Weimar culture to be like—on acid. It seemed more like a club with a kind of festive, ersatz honky-tonk atmosphere than the dingy, seedy dive it appeared to be from the outside. Not that it wasn't seedy. It was. Dark, dank, dirty. Thank God the lights were out in the back room. I
can't imagine what really lived and crawled on those floors in the vague light of day.