It is always a little disconcerting to read a "history" of events that one lived through. This book covers the period from the forties to the mid-90s; I was born in the 50s and came out a in 1978. I was at some of the bars he describes in their heyday, attended gay rights rallies in the 70s, lived on the same block as at least one of the persons discussed. Kaiser is just enough older than me to have different generational experiences and attitudes (also, some of the views from the late 1990s have become somewhat quaint). The early part of the book is entertainingly gossipy, and throughout, Kaiser is perhaps a bit too fascinated with the glitterati of the gay scene (Bernstein, Capote, Albee, et al). The treatment of the 1980s (AIDS) is notable more political. It should be noted, that especially in the earlier chapters, this is largely a history of gay New York City. ( )

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/?tag=elimyrevandra-20

Kaiser has written a history of gay life in America from WW 2 to 1996 that is sure to grip the reader. Focusing on New York City, he moves through each decade with a combination of a dispassionate history of events and interviews with people who were actually there and lived through it. This technique humanizes the book, making it far more approachable than the average history book. And it’s a very lively book, full of reminiscences, headlines, ground breaking events and gossip.

Different eras emphasize different aspects of the gay experience: in WW 2 we have gays in battle (amazingly well tolerated for the time- so much for gays breaking down military cohesiveness); in different eras it’s the literary set, the theater (the groundbreaking premier of ‘The Boys in the Band’, for instance), Stonewall, the bars and bathhouses, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and the horrifying number of deaths that followed. I enjoyed this approach; it gives the reader a rounded view of gay history. My only complaint is that lesbians barely make an appearance in the book.

Originally written in 1997, Kaiser wrote a new afterword in 2007 with a brief update. I found it fitting that I was reading that update while listening to the news about the NY vote on gay marriage. ( )