About book The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History Of Gay Life In America Since World War II (1998)
It’s almost funny to read how Otis Bigelow (famous to be the most handsome man of the ’40s in New York City, and coveted by millionaires and artists) reported as being gay “was an upscale thing to be”, but at the same time the author reports as just “across town from Park Avenue swells who entertained him so lavishly in their duplex apartments, a completely different kind of gay life was thriving in Times Square”. This was and is New York City, and as in the ’40s, also now there is a melting pot of cultures, and each culture wants to reclaim their identity. Otis Bigelow was not wrong as they were not wrong the obvious fairies of Times Square, they were simply navigating in different circles.The “hidden in plain sight” approach was apparently pretty common in the ’40s, and so we learn from the memory of a fund boy from New England who wants to remain anonymous as he went to school with John Fitzgerald Kenney, and between the two, the outcast was Kennedy; but there is also the inside news of how JFK’s roommate, Lemoyne Billings, was gay and how he remained family friend even after the president election.And from the words of many gay men who was there and lived that ’40s atmosphere the general opinion is that, you could be gay since you simply didn’t flaunt it. One of them cite a certain Mrs. Patrick Campbell who said “My dear, I don’t care what people do as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses”. That is basically what Otis Bigelow and those other anonymous voices implied, you were free to be gay as far as you were gay inside “private” locations.And maybe that is the reason why, in a period when civil rights were starting to be a common agenda of many politicians, it was not the same when those rights regarded LGBT people. You were free inside your private home, btw if you were wealthy enough to have that safe home, but you were also captive of your own golden cage.There is a long session devoted to the gays in the military during the WWII. A nice introduction probably explains how the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was introduced, but mostly it’s about those men who remained (or went back) into the closet, not for the fear of being discovered, but to avoid to be refused the chance to protect their country as soldiers.In the post-war stories, the one I liked the most is the friendship between Paul Cadmus and E.M. Forster, and how Cadmus was aware of Forster’s novel Maurice, a novel the author refused to publish until after his death to not damage his policeman “friend” (who was married).The ’50s is a period of euphoria but apparently it also started the period when being gay was dangerous, and so it should be hidden; if in the ’40 you could be gay inside private walls, in the ’50s even that freedom was a danger, and the walls of a room became the more confined space of a closet. As for many others, gays became the target of a witch hunt. Maybe for this reason, late in the ’50s the main tendency was to “blend” and you see gays people getting married, with or without the knowledge of the wife.The ’60s see a surge of consciences, in all the level of society, and so also among gays and lesbians. New York saw not only the first religious congregation for gays, but also Columbia University became one of the first colleges to give formal recognition to a gay students organization. Homosexuality exited from the closet and arrived in television, with a ground-breaking documentary, The Homosexuals.The bridge between the ’60 and the ’70 is Stonewall, and so from that moment on there will be always a pre and post-Stonewall gay and lesbian movement and culture: “although millions would remain in the closet, within a year after Stonewall, thousands of men and women would find the courage to declare themselves for the first time”. Not only, being gay, or at least bisexual, was almost “fashionable”, and in many media, television, cinema, publishing, the gay characters not only started to make their appearance, they were also, sometime, positively accepted by the mainstream public. And also Forster’s Maurice came out of the closet. The ’70 see the sexual revolution, a sexual revolution that happened also within the LGBT community.The ’80 and the beginning of the ’90 is the Dark Ages of the LGBT community, the AIDS plague killed so many, that almost completely deprived the world of an entire generation. There is visibly a jump, if you browse the net for notably LGBT characters, those born in the ’50 and ’60 are almost all among the victims. As reported “New York had far more AIDS cases than any other city in America”. One man stated “I know 450 people that died of AIDS that I can count. Thirty to 40 of my close friends that I had made from 1967 to today died from this disease”. It’s painful to read this part of the books, even more painful if you compare it to the energy that you had just felt in the stories of those men of the ’50 and ’60 and ’70, men who were eager to claim their homosexuality.Maybe due to the imperative of being more mainstream to protect their rights among the massacre that was the AIDS catastrophe, the ’90 see the LGBT community enters politics and starting to put their weight on who has to represent them.It was a long ride to arrive to the end of this book, but it was a very enlightening ride. Charles Kaiser managed to always bring alive the men he is talking about, with their dreams, fears, love and betrayals. It’s a wonderful essay that you read like a novel, with the easiness of a collection of short stories, only that the characters in those short stories are real life men and women.http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802143172/?...
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of a Lambda Literary Award, The Gay Metropolis is a landmark saga of struggle and triumph that was instantly recognized as the most authoritative and substantial work of its kind. Filled with astounding anecdotes and searing tales of heartbreak and transformation, it provides a decade-by-decade account of the rise and acceptance of gay life and identity since the 1940s.From the making of "West Side Story," the modern Romeo and Juliet tale written and staged by four gay men, to the catastrophic era of AIDS, Charles Kaiser recounts the true history of the gay movement with many never-before-told stories. Filled with dazzling characters — including Leonard Bernstein, Montgomery Clift, Alfred Hitchcock and John F. Kennedy, among many others — this is a vital telling of American history, exciting and uplifting.To learn more, visit The Progressive Book Club: http://www.progressivebookclub.com/pb...
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This book offers a fascinating history of the gay "experience" from the 40s to the 90s. I thought at times, though, that the serious was replaced by the salacious. But I guess the gritty/dirty details make any book interesting, right? But in all seriousness, you have to give credit to the early pioneers of the gay movement who were only able to experience their identities in secret. We've come a long way! Full Disclosure: I didn't read the book all the way through. I skipped around, much like one might do with a reference book/textbook. :)
—Brandon Leighton
I really had high hopes for this book, but it turned out to be kind of a slog. It's less a narrative and more an oral history, focused around gay men living in New York City from the 50s on. That focus means that sometimes the book feels like listening to your gay uncle tell you boring stories about all the hook ups he had back in the day, and other things get missed - Harvey Milk is hardly mentioned at all, for example. The writing felt really disjointed in some places for the same reason. That said, one thing that delighted me, reading this the summer that gay marriage was legalized: this was written in the 90s, and the author and his interview subjects were so convinced that gay people had Made It and were so optimism and proud. Oh friends, you have no idea how much is yet to come!
—Katie
More or less does what I hoped it would, which is give the standard story of the USA gay rights movement, World War II to 1996, which I'll need in order to put more detailed or controversial versions in perspective. On the other hand, it could have been better focused and organized. A good deal of it was a sort of celebrity gossip, less judgmental than what you get in the media but just as trivial. For instance, I didn't think all the details of how West Side Story was created were relevant to learning what it was like to be an ordinary gay man in the US at that time and how it was changing. Also, the parts about lesbians were nowhere near enough to make the book a complete overview of the homosexual rights struggle, and yet didn't seem particularly relevant to gay men's history. The best parts were the excerpts from newspapers and documentaries, which seemed very good at showing what messages about gay people were coming through the media. The section on the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic was also eye-opening, probably more because of my own ignorance than because it was handled especially well.
—Silvio Curtis
