This was America. Indivisible. With liberty and justice for all.…
CHAPTER THREE
WHERE THE BEE SUCKS, THERE SUCK I
(Shakespeare, If You Want to Know)
We knew from the very first, from the moment we saw them on the sidewalk outside, that they were going to come in, though we tried to reassure ourselves otherwise.
Roughs, some called them. Punks by any name, under age thugs whose growing bodies had left their redneck minds behind. You could follow their thinking by watching, as we did from a darkened window, their changing expressions; A party. Maybe they’ll invite us in. Wait, what kind of party is this? Hell, it’s a bunch of queers. We oughta go in there and kick their asses.…
Which they do, kicking down doors, smashing dishes, glasses, bottles, throwing food on the floor, demanding money and watches and rings, punching a few noses here and there and even breaking a window before departing, not entirely unscathed—one walks with a pronounced limp, as a result of a bad kick in his crotch, and two are bleeding, one profusely. They take the beer and the booze with them, and threaten to come back another time.
The Indianapolis police arrive just minutes later. “They can’t be more than a block or so away,” Ernestine, our hostess, naively insists, but the cops, two burly, sweaty men in blue—older, bigger versions of the boys who have just left, it occurs to me—take their time surveying the damage and questioning the remaining guests. They want to know who phoned the police, but no one says. I stay carefully out of sight. I am underage, just sixteen, and sure to be taken in if noticed.
Finally, they tell Ernestine that she is under arrest. Ernestine is straight, but she likes to hang out with the gay boys. She is disbelieving at first, but finally comes to realize the cops mean what they say; this isn’t a joke on their part—do they look like they are kidding?
They take her away. When they are gone, a chorus of voices wants to know who called the police. I did, but I make no admission and avoid all eyes.
Lesson learned. Our kind don’t call the cops. They will never, ever, be on our side.
* * * *
Of all the decades of the twentieth century, probably none has taken a worse rap than the fifties. Yet, having lived through them, I can tell you that there was much about that period that was wonderful indeed.
It was the last “Golden Age” of opera, for instance. Callas and Di Stefano were knocking audiences out, as were Milanov and Bjoerling, Tebaldi and Tucker, De Los Angeles and Del Monaco, and an astonishingly long list of others.
If you liked your music on the lighter side, you could listen to Sinatra, Sarah, Ella, or Rosemary (we had Perry Como too, and he was a fine singer, but let’s face it, when your career peaks at “hot diggety, dog diggety, boom what you do to me,” the chances of your becoming a legend are slim). Patsy Cline and Hank Williams were going Crazy, and crossing over from the country charts, while a whole new breed of performers—Elvis and Little Richard (with a little known guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, backing him up), Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly—were setting the stage for the rock and roll era.
At the movies, we had Marilyn and Ava and Lana and Rita, not to mention Rock and Marlon and Montgomery and the endless rebel himself, James Dean. You could drive to your favorite theater in one of those fabulous cars; American cars ruled the world, great metal sculptures with names that sang to the ageless boy in all of us—Wildcat, Clipper, Hawk. (Who could possibly get excited about cars like Escort or Prizm? Or, worse yet, Passatt? That sounds like someone breaking wind, doesn’t it?)
Didn’t feel like going out? Stay home. It was the “golden age” of television, too. Lucy and Jackie were blowing home audiences away and Dinah Shore was blowing kisses. Playhouse Ninety and Lux Video Theater and others offered the likes of The Days of Wine and Roses and Twelve Angry Men and Requiem for a Heavyweight, all original live tv dramas. And every Sunday night came with its own “really big show.”
Alternatively, you could curl up and read. Say, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Or if it was more to your taste, Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious.
Julia Child had not yet ignited that whole foodie thing but there were good restaurants where you could count on a real steak and maybe pan-fried chicken, practically non-existent by the end of the twentieth century. Every bartender knew how to make a real martini and the banana sidecar and Sex-on-the-Beach had not yet sullied that noble profession.
All of which is to say that, contrary to what you might have heard, the fifties were practically a time of Heaven on earth. Unless, of course, you needed to think or feel or give in to your sexual urges. Well, nothing is quite perfect, is it?
For the gay man or woman these were the dark ages, only more so. Homosexuality had always been officially frowned upon but in the twenties and thirties no one seemed to give it much mind, and in the forties the war made everyone horny, the way wars do.
Unfortunately, by the fifties everyone had gotten their rocks off. Like the randy jock who agrees to a blow job and when it’s over remembers that he disapproves of that sort of thing, by the fifties some of the same men who had paused a decade earlier in a dark doorway for a quickie were now pounding their pulpits and denouncing those who had knelt before them so adoringly.
It’s difficult for those who grew up after the sixties to comprehend the world in which gays lived before the revolution. It wasn’t just gay activities that were illegal—the simple fact of being or even appearing gay was often enough to get you arrested; indeed, in some states, Florida for instance, it was against the law just to be homosexual, practicing or not.
In San Francisco, one of the country’s more tolerant cities, a homosexual could be arrested for loitering at a place of business—which is to say, if a police officer thought you were looking with too much interest at the wrong buns you could be pinched at your local bakery, whether anything was cooking or not.
In California a third arrest required you to register as a sex offender and that label was with you for life. Sadly, you didn’t have to engage in sexual activity to become a “sex offender.” I had one friend who was cruised in a park restroom. He told the individual who approached him, “Honey, don’t you know that you can get arrested for that in a place like this?” And, boom, next thing he knew there were handcuffs on his wrists. It wasn’t safe even to turn down a pass in those places.
It was dangerous just to be in a gay bar. You could be sitting in a beer bar on a rainy weeknight, alone and speaking to no one, when the police, uniformed and plain clothes, might appear, going along the bar and picking patrons at random—”You—and you—and you” who were arrested for lewd conduct.
In those days before court-appointed attorneys it could be all but impossible to find anyone to represent you on a gay-related charge. Even in Los Angeles there were only one or two attorneys you could turn to. One of those, a woman who was known as much for her flamboyant hats as for her legal skills, automatically pleaded you to disturbing the peace. The fine was $600.00, but you avoided jail or sex registration and had only a misdemeanor charge on your records.
I was lucky. I avoided public restrooms except in direst emergency, when I neither spoke to nor looked at anyone. And I was at a couple of those “walkthroughs” in the bars so I know whereof I speak, but I was not arrested. I liked to think, “There but for the grace of God,” but I was ever so mindful of his evident lack of grace for the less fortunate. Nevertheless, until Sioux City, as I have said, my only real legal difficulty was that divorce case back in Dayton.
1950 was a black year in gay history (it was also not a very gay year in black history but that’s another subject). In that year the chief of the vice squad in Washington, D.C. charged publicly that the federal bureaucracy currently employed what he estimated at 3,500 sex perverts—300 to 400 of them in the State Department.
When Senator Clyde Hoey (a classic name-freakism if I’ve ever seen one)