The Gay Metropolis

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The Barnes & Noble Review
On May 20, 1996, 'the Supreme Court voted six to three to throw out the Colorado state constitutional initiative that had forbidden protection for gay people from discrimination," Charles Kaiser writes near the end of his cogent, highly entertaining, and often downright dishy look back at the Gay Metropolis. And if many gay activists saw this landmark decision as the most significant advance in a half-century of struggle for acceptance, Kaiser's readers will know, through his smooth, succinct marshaling of key historical (and personal) events, just how perilous — and at times joyously funny and bizarre — a struggle it really was. The Gay Metropolis, as Kaiser defines it, is not only New York City (though it is his primary focus) but 'encompasses every place on every continent where gay people have found the courage to be free.' A profoundly optimistic work of meticulous research (sources are compiled in an appendix) and interviewing (among the wittiest and wisest of many wonderful voices here are those of playwright Arthur Laurents, painter Paul Cadmus, and writer Gore Vidal), this history avoids the dullness and inflated jargon of an academic approach. Streamlined, intimate, rich in dazzling anecdotes and sexual frankness, it is also probably the liveliest compendium of the essential facts, dates, and records — many of them explosive — ever gathered under the heading of gay American history. Kaiser ties this sweep of elements (the impact of war, show business, and art; the abuses of psychiatry; McCarthyism; The Beatles; Stonewall; Studio 54; the formation ofACTUP; and almost everything in between) to an analysis that is refreshingly sensible and compulsively readable, even when our hair bristles or our stomachs tighten in anger. Especially then.

In addition to illuminating the primary political and cultural topography of these changing times, Kaiser takes us on scores of fascinating side excursions. He shows us how the media created a link in public perceptions between criminality and homosexuality that has persisted (the Leopold and Loeb murder case and the riveting Lonergan scandal are both presented here among Kaiser's delectably lurid tales of a pervasive American underworld). He takes us backstage at Judy Garland's legendary Carnegie Hall performance (yes, it matters!), and then to her funeral. Kaiser's insider account of the mounting of "West Side Story" is a gem, and his ability to draw out such private yet highly significant dramas and weave them into the bigger picture gives his story the narrative drive of an American epic. The cast of characters, from the most obscure and pseudonymous trailblazers to the diabolically infamous, is unforgettable.

We learn of the secret proclivities of Francis Cardinal Spellman (nicknamed "Nellie Spellbound"), J. Edgar Hoover, and Roy Cohn, among many others. We arrive, on a hot summer night, at the Stonewall Inn (mob owned, the rent was $300 a month; the nightly cover charge was $3, which got you two drinks; the weekend take was usually $12,000, and the payoff to the police was $2,000 a week), and it isn't long before we're listening to 1992 presidential candidate Bill Clinton endorsing an end to the ban on gays in the military (Ross Perot also endorsed lifting the ban). But before we arrive at the near present, we'll swing by the Anvil, and Larry Kramer's apartment over on Fifth Avenue; to the Supreme Court to hear arguments in Bowers Hardwick; to Cherry Grove and St. Patrick's Cathedral; to the editorial offices of The New York Times, and...

And there's much, much more in The Gay Metropolis, a history that brims with wonderful stories and gossip and yet can just as swiftly shift gears and astonish us with the seriousness of its subject matter. Not the least of Kaiser's accomplishments is a kind of subtle yearning his book inspires for a vanishing 20th century that, it turns out, was filled to overflowing with grace and wit and guts we barely knew we had. But there are also many moments of a kind of heroic sweetness, such as New Yorker Jack Dowling's remembrance, to Kaiser, of spring nights in the 1950s.

I used to leave the San Remo [a gay bar], when it closed, in a Packard convertible with a friend. I would take the car off the road in Central Park and drive across the meadow. We would cruise the park, then pick cherry blossoms from behind the Metropolitan Museum, filling up the rumble seat. On the way home, we would drop the boughs off at sleeping friends' apartments before going home to bed ourselves. Although there was police repression against gays, the police were really quite naive. You could go cruising across the lawns of Central Park in an old car, and if they saw you, they probably wouldn't believe it. —Brian Rieselman

San Francisco Chronicle

Fascinating...He shares juicy gossip, quotes catty remarks, refutes long-held myths, and recasts the role of gay men as he charts their major gains and significant setbacks over the last 50 years. A sweeping saga written with wit, insight, and poignancy.

The Washington Post

Brisk, splashy, dishy...Kaiser has brought all these materials together quite skillfully, shaping them into a dramatic, often affecting account of the emergence of gay people from fear and self-hatred into uncloseted, self-confident participation in society.

Library Journal

A former media editor for Newsweek on the sociopolitical history of gay America.

Booknews

Describes the historical, social, political, and cultural events that have affected modern American gay life and the treatment of gay people by the larger society. The author maintains that in little more than half a century, lesbians and gay men have been transformed from a despised minority with no legal rights or public advocates to a rugged, resourceful, and caring community. Although he focuses on New York city, he also discusses events in Washington, San Francisco, Paris, and other cities.

The Boston Globe

A mesmerizing journey.

USA Today

A fascinating and entertaining oral history of gay life.

Kirkus Reviews

This chronicle of gay life in New York City over the last half-century tells a story of progressive cultural, social, and political vindication. Seasoned journalist Kaiser's earlier book, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation examined a seminal year of modern American experience. Here he takes on six decades, beginning with WW II and its aftermath of sexual openness. One interviewee described it as 'a little distilled moment out of time,' when the horrors of war sparked a tolerance of and even a zest for the varieties of sexual experience. But when ordinary life and older prejudices resumed in the '50s, gay activists had to work all the harder to win both self-respect and social acceptance from often hostile parties. Kaiser recounts landmark events in the struggle—such as the Kinsey Report, Stonewall, the American Psychiatric Association's reclassification of homosexuality, the first descriptive use of 'gay' (instead of 'homosexual') in the New York Times—as well as offering the personal reflections of people then on the scene: mostly gay men (and several lesbians), many of them well-known artists or public figures. He shows a weakness for alluding to the rich and famous (Philip Johnson, Leonard Bernstein, Montgomery Clift, for example) and for stacking up sequences of anecdotes about their private lives. Amid all the glitter, at least one omission is conspicuous: the lack of any mention of Andrew Holleran's defining 1978 book, Dancer from the Dance, which ushered facts of New York's gay reality into a fictional work of beauty and pathos still cherished by readers. Nevertheless, Kaiserhas done gay men (and others) a service with this brightly toned narrative—many will find a sense of themselves and their experiences in it, warmly affirmed.