7. The Great Erasure, 1945–69

August 14, 1945, the day the Japanese surrendered, was a busy one for Bill Miller. In flowing blue script, he jotted down a whirlwind of appointments in his tiny pocket journal. He dropped off drawings for a new work project; met up with friends at Tony’s, a popular gay bar on Fifty-second Street (known as Swing Alley for all its jazz clubs); and he was supposed to model for Paul Cadmus, but Cadmus canceled. Then at 7:00 p.m., when the announcement of the Japanese surrender went out over every radio station in the country, he threw on his sailor suit and rushed to Times Square, along with millions of other New Yorkers. Life magazine described the crowd as “ten New Year’s Eves rolled into one.”¹ Champagne bottles popped, car horns blared, and people tore phone books into impromptu confetti, which rained down from windows all over the city. The war was over, the soldiers were coming home, and nothing would ever be the same again.

For the most part, Miller’s pocket diary is just a dry log of his daily activities. Even his sexual history (which he was keeping for Alfred Kinsey’s research) is simply notched down in a tiny series of coded letters in the lower right corner of each entry. But on August 14 he recorded a rare outburst of emotion, noting, “Lunch Barclay Joe Marvel—hot!”² The Barclay was a high-class hotel, opened by the Vanderbilt family, just off Times Square. And Joe Marvel? Prior to the war, he was the assistant director of the Brooklyn Museum for eight years, where he organized the first show of Picasso in America, and the first performances of ballet ever at an American museum (no longer was ballet the province of rough workingmen’s saloons, as it was when Ella Wesner got her start on the stage). In his spare time, Marvel was on the board of the National Urban League, worked with fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli to create high-art anti-venereal-disease posters, and helped Margaret Sanger open her first birth control clinic, in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. As a conscientious objector during the war, Marvel was one of the only people allowed into Gestapo-controlled prisons in France, where he brought food and critical medical supplies to members of the Paris Underground.³ After the war, he would become one of the few people in the country to work with returning gay veterans, which was probably the reason he had lunch with Bill Miller.

A few months after their meeting, Joe Marvel wrote a letter to his fellow members of the Quaker Emergency Service, an organization he had founded to provide assistance to conscientious objectors, war wives, orphans, and others affected by World War II. “With the beginning of the draft,” he informed them, “a large number of young men were found to be disqualified for the performance of military duty by reason of psychiatric maladjustment”—the military’s nom de guerre for homosexuality. “Inasmuch as there are practically no existing facilities for dealing with this small group of returning service personnel and draft rejects,” Marvel suggested that the QES turn their efforts toward aiding these men.

Bill Miller, in many ways, was one of the lucky ones who didn’t really need Marvel’s help. He was allowed to serve in the Coast Guard as he wanted; once in the service, his sexuality was not discovered, or if it was, no one cared; he survived a war that killed nearly half a million Americans; and after it ended, he was eligible for benefits under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—aka the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill did many things, such as authorizing $500 million to create a network of hospitals and medical coverage for veterans, and guaranteeing a yearlong stipend of $20 a week to any vet who was looking for work. It also provided college tuition benefits, starting at one full year (plus a living stipend) for anyone who had served at least ninety days, and growing from there depending on the length of service. After his time with the Coast Guard in Brooklyn was over, Miller used the G.I. Bill to enroll at Dartmouth, where he studied literature and had a brief, intense relationship with philosopher, inventor, and author Buckminster Fuller. Miller would be one of the 7.8 million World War II vets who would take advantage of the educational benefits of the bill in some fashion.

Many returning soldiers were not so lucky, as Joe Marvel must have known. The experiences of Marvin Liebman, a young Jewish soldier from Bay Ridge, were prototypical in this regard. Upon entering the Army, he had his first sexual experience with another man, and on a troop transport ship to Europe, he fell in with a large group of other queer soldiers. When a commanding officer discovered Liebman’s letters to one of those men—full of Dorothy Parker witticisms and always ending on the line “Damn Miss Rose. I could spit.”—Liebman was publicly humiliated, tormented, and labeled a “New York Jew faggot.”⁴ He was sent to an army psychiatrist, who laid out his bleak options: he could be declared straight and sent back to his regiment, where the men would likely make his life hell; he could get transferred to a base in Bahrain, where troublesome privates were sent to work in 130 degree heat as punishment; or he could get a blue discharge. Liebman took the discharge, lied to his family about the reason behind it, and bought a secondhand army medallion that was given only to honorably discharged soldiers, to serve as proof of his service. Shortly thereafter, he married a woman, became a conservative Republican activist, and stayed in the closet until 1990, when he was sixty-seven years old.

Men like Leibman who were punished for their sexuality took great pains to hide their 4F status and their blue discharges, so it’s not unsurprising that one of the few well-known contemporary examples was fictional: Angelo Maggio, from James Jones’s 1951 bestseller, From Here to Eternity. Described as being “of Brooklyn immigrant Italian stock,” and an “absolute hater of the Army,” Maggio is the closest friend of the novel’s protagonist.⁵ Although the book and resulting film (which starred Frank Sinatra as Maggio) were heavily censored, Jones’s original text had Maggio explaining that he had sex with men for money, and that he in fact liked Hal, his regular fairy. Maggio is ceaselessly harassed by a superior, which eventually lands Maggio in the stockade, where he goes insane and is given a blue discharge. Jones wanted to accurately portray the life he had witnessed in the military, which included a lot of sex between men—some tender, some violent, some paid. Jones protested the censorship of his book in a letter to his editor, writing, “The things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will in five years, or ten years, come in someone else’s book anyway … and we will wonder why we thought we couldn’t do it.”⁶ It wasn’t until 2011, however, that the book was reissued with the gay content restored.

Upon receiving a blue discharge, many servicemen were forced to sign a paper stating, “I understand that I may be deprived of virtually all rights as a veteran under both Federal and State legislation; and that I may expect to encounter substantial prejudice in civilian life.”⁷ This was a way of recognizing that even though a blue discharge was not technically dishonorable, it was still treated that way in practice, and it obviated the government’s commitment to take care of returning soldiers. During the war, military policy leaned toward rehabilitating homosexuals or finding ways for them to serve despite their sexuality, but afterward (when they were no longer necessary), they were explicitly banned from service. In peacetime, the dismissal rate for homosexuals would be nearly three times what it was during World War II—and during the Korean War dismissal numbers would again dip. Gays and lesbians were good enough to die as soldiers, but not to live as veterans. On average, two thousand members of the military were dismissed from service for homosexuality every year of World War II, and an unknown number received other-than-honorable discharges that were sexuality related in fact, if not on paper. The other group that disproportionately received these blue discharges were black men and women (most likely because a blue discharge didn’t have the same high and specific misconduct threshold that it took to issue a dishonorable discharge, making it easier to use based on racism and personal opinion). Unlike Bill Miller, these veterans did not qualify for the educational or health benefits of the G.I. Bill. They couldn’t use their service records in place of résumés, and when they were therefore out of work, they didn’t receive a stipend. During World War II, nearly fifty thousand men and women would receive a blue discharge. Nearly 25 percent of those who received them were black service members, despite the fact that only 6 percent of the armed forces were black.⁸

Joe Marvel wanted to help these men—but how to reach them? Many didn’t think of themselves as homosexual, and even if they did, there was no easy way to contact large numbers of queer people. Thankfully, Marvel soon encountered two individuals familiar to anyone researching homosexuality in New York City at this time: Alfred Gross and Dr. George Henry. After attending a semipublic meeting where the two men explained the work they had done at the Payne Whitney Clinic under the auspices of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants and the Selective Service, Marvel suggested they join forces—and thus the Civil Rehabilitation Committee of the Quaker Emergency Service was launched. In the quiet, understated way he seemed to do everything, Marvel and the QES would provide lifesaving help to an uncountable number of gay men—hundreds certainly, thousands probably, and if you include the ripple effects of his work, tens of thousands. Ironically, that work would be embedded in a criminal justice system that would increasingly define homosexuality as a threat to society, and the Civil Rehabilitation Committee itself would be used to paint queer people as sexual psychopaths.

Henry and Gross knew that the easiest way to reach gay men was via the police, who were busily arresting thousands of them every year, mostly in subway toilets, movie theaters, and parks. In 1945, for instance, a staggering 2,147 men were arrested for “disorderly conduct-degeneracy,” aka soliciting for sex in a public place in New York City.⁹ This represented a 100 percent increase over 1944. By 1948, that number would hit 3,289.¹⁰ In Brooklyn, cops were quietly trying to stem a new tide of “sex degenerates” cruising in Prospect Park, a lush and wild landscape not far from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.¹¹ The city had also just reinstated a court specifically to deal with low-level arrests at Coney Island, including ones for degeneracy and cross-dressing. Times Square, Fort Tryon Park, the docks in downtown Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, the Bowery, Fourteenth Street, Harlem; the list of cruising grounds in the city was long, and the police were known to raid them regularly to meet arrest quotas, and occasionally to shake down “fairies” for money.

The public meeting where Joe Marvel met Alfred Gross and George Henry was also attended by Jacob Panken, a socialist reformer and New York City judge. Panken urged the men to use his name to develop a relationship with the courts. However, in a move that would ultimately prove disastrous, the QES ended up partnering with Justice Edgar Bromberger, the chief city magistrate of New York. Bromberger would provide the homosexuals; Gross and Henry would provide the expertise in treating them; and the QES would act as fund-raisers, organizers, and arbiters of disputes—of which there would be many.

From the beginning, the Quakers, the courts, and the queers had vastly different ideas of what the Civil Rehabilitation Committee was doing. Henry and Gross wanted to help gay men find some level of self-acceptance and avoid future arrest. Magistrate Bromberger wanted to isolate and cure these men of their deviance, and if a cure was not possible, to figure out why people became homosexual so that it could be prevented. The Quakers vacillated between these two poles, taking a little from each. Marvel didn’t believe homosexuality could be cured, and he wanted to help these men, but he also believed that if children under the age of six could be reached, the knowledge gained through the Rehabilitation Committee could be used to prevent them from turning gay.

The QES assembled a team of psychiatrists, social workers, and religious figures, any or all of who could be called upon to work with a particular client. The QES also brought in a wide array of consulting staff, including lawyers, nonprofit leaders, and physicians. Their work touched men from every borough, and fittingly, the committee did as well. Brooklynites involved included Frank Ortloff, a lawyer who would provide legal guidance both to the committee and to its clients, and Leland Barnes, the director of social service at the Brooklyn Division of the Protestant Council, who helped affiliate the committee with the greater Protestant Church in New York.

In the committee’s first full year of operation, they saw 414 men, or about 15 percent of those arrested for soliciting in 1946. The committee developed a system whereby these men were evaluated before being sentenced by the court, and if they were considered redeemable, they were given two years of probation and required to report to the committee. The committee recommended probation for a number of reasons. First, jail time did nothing other than lock a man away for a short while and probably cause him to lose his job, sending him spiraling further down into dissolution. But simply paying a fine was too light of a slap on the wrist to dissuade future soliciting. They believed probation would instill a healthy dose of fear, “a reminder that society cannot tolerate the particular type of sexual misconduct which brought these men to the notice of the court.”¹²

What men were considered redeemable? First, although it was never stated, the committee generally accepted only white men, later estimating that only 1 percent of their clients were “colored.”¹³ Given that black men, as well as gay men, were more likely to receive blue discharges, this was a painful, racist irony that left gay black men with few therapeutic options and an increased likelihood of incarceration while removing their experiences from any reports, findings, or recommendations that would come from the QES (or from any historians using their wealth of data to reconstruct the queer world of the late 1940s and early 1950s).

All factions of the QES agreed that it was best to work with younger men who had relatively stable lives, were employed or at least actively looking for work, wanted the help they were being offered, and, most of all, weren’t too effeminate or vocal about being gay. Their program, groundbreaking though it was, emphasized respectability, and men who lacked an interest in hiding from the straight world infuriated the committee. Take, for example, their thoughts on one “Pete Maguire,” a “blondined fairy … of the most extreme type.” Maguire was arrested after a police officer, seeing that he was obviously gay, had spent the day following him around the city, waiting for an opportunity to entrap and arrest him in a subway bathroom. Yet the committee couldn’t understand why he considered having to report to a probation officer for two years “irksome and meaningless.” The real problem, according to the committee, was that Maguire took out his parental-abandonment issues on authority figures and could never get a job because “a prospective employer would have to look at him but once” to know he was queer. Maguire was “a complete social casualty” and “must be written off.”¹⁴

However, for the men they would assist, the help provided by the QES was often lauded as lifesaving. Alfred Gross told the chief probation officer of the courts that the most significant contribution of their work was “the re-establishment of the offenders’ self-respect.”¹⁵ In the second year of its existence, the committee began tracking voluntary visits by its clients. These surpassed the ones required by the courts by a margin of almost two to one. At the end of the year, its office was inundated with cards filled with gratitude for its work. The committee offered the first—and only—alternative-to-sentencing program in the country for men arrested for their sexuality. In an unofficial capacity, they helped these men get jobs, warned them against predatory lawyers, and even set them up on dates with one another. They also taught many of these men (even the ones who were married or who had attractions to women) that they were “homosexuals,” not just “normal men” who sometimes had sex with other men. Through the work of the committee, the modern psychiatric model of sexuality would spread to working- and middle-class communities around the city.

But after a year and a half, things started to go off the rails. The first sign of trouble was a splashy, two-page article about the committee, published in Collier’s magazine in February 1947. Titled “The Biggest Taboo,” it began by praising their work as a “brave venture,” before distorting it out of all recognition. Collier’s discussed their work entirely within the context of violent sex crimes and fetishistic murders, and the “biggest taboo” they evoked was pedophilia, which the article returned to over and over. “Without help,” the author wrote, their clients “might sink into any one of the fierce distortions of the sex drive: not only homosexuality, abuse of children, rape, and incest, but also such crimes as fire setting, sadism, and murder.”¹⁶

In the article, the differing opinions among the committee members were suddenly made clear. Whereas Gross told the author that his long-term goal was helping these men achieve self-respect, Magistrate Bromberger said that homosexuals “direct their activities toward those incapable of resistance” and “impose themselves on children.” “From this point on,” he said, their “path leads inexorably to crime.” The article toyed with the idea of killing all homosexuals (“we have enough electric chairs”), before endorsing a solution from Samuel Leibowitz—the Brooklyn judge in the Swastika Swishery case—for the creation of an institution “midway between a jail and a hospital” where deviates could be kept until they were cured. “In some cases,” Leibowitz pointed out, “that means the rest of their lives.”¹⁷

Behind the scenes, things were even tenser. Henry and Gross wanted to expand their work to include giving free legal advice to men arrested for the first time, whether or not they were clients; Magistrate Bromberger and the Quaker lawyers objected. Shortly after the Collier’s article was published, Gross wrote a stiffly worded letter to Marvel, noting that he was owed some $4,000 in back pay and questioning if the committee members thought “he is really worth what they are paying him—which is precisely nothing.”¹⁸ Clashes also occurred over entrapment, which Bromberger argued was a necessary part of police procedure, but both Marvel and Gross thought was illegal. Rumors started up that Gross was once again fraternizing with, and perhaps even dating, some of the clients. Bromberger soon became suspicious of what was actually happening at the clinic and made an unannounced visit, where he discovered that (once again) Gross was meeting with patients, not Dr. Henry. Bromberger immediately wanted Gross fired, which Henry resisted. The Quakers supported Henry, but instituted a humiliating policy whereby Gross was no longer allowed to handle the committee’s money and had to request petty cash from Henry weekly.

By early 1948, the committee was on the ropes. In meetings with the entire group, Judge Bromberger suggested that the clinic leave its current home in the court on Mulberry Street because it sent the wrong message to prospective clients; in behind-the-scenes conversations with the Quakers, he revealed that the real reason he wanted the clinic gone was Gross. By May of that year, Henry and Gross had officially parted ways with the QES and the courts.

Unmoored but still committed to the work, the Quakers recruited Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German psychologist who had recently had success setting up a free psychiatric clinic for working-class African-Americans in Harlem. Under his auspices, a new venture was launched, confusingly called the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center. Despite his lack of experience with homosexuality, by all accounts Wertham was dedicated to the clinic’s work and resisted calls to criminalize or cure homosexuals. At first it seemed that he would act as a counterbalance to Magistrate Bromberger’s vocal homophobia, but this was not to be. The court soon overwhelmed the clinic with cases, which were no longer limited to men arrested for soliciting, but included exhibitionists, Peeping Toms, rapists, pedophiles, prostitutes, thieves, runaways, check forgers, burglars, and drunks. Little by little, Magistrate Bromberger was forcing the clinic to conform to his idea that homosexuality and general criminality were linked. Soon, the clinic was seeing over a thousand people a year, far beyond its capacity, many of who had no interest in treatment. Although Dr. Wertham believed that no new sex crime laws were necessary, with the backing of Magistrate Bromberger, New York State passed a new law in 1950 that allowed for indefinite sentences for people convicted of sex crimes and required a psychiatrist’s recommendation before release. As psychiatrists were rapidly teaching men who had sex with men that they were homosexual, they were also teaching the country that psychiatrists were the only ones who knew how to properly handle this problem. Meanwhile, the court increasingly leaned on the clinic to violate patient confidentiality, to provide recommendations for sentencing, and to allow court-approved researchers access to their confidential files—initiatives that Joe Marvel vocally opposed.

The clinic staff, lacking any expertise in sexuality, produced reports that became confusing and contradictory. On two back-to-back pages, they asserted that “exclusive homosexuality occurs in a relatively small percentage of cases,” but also that most homosexuals were lying about having heterosexual sex. The staff believed that “homosexuality in men is nearly normal,” but also that their goal was to cure their patients and render them heterosexual.¹⁹ The volunteer psychiatrists recruited by Wertham were a motley crew. Some, such as Dr. Harry Benjamin, a pioneer in working with transgender individuals, had extensive experience in sexuality; others had crackpot theories such as that asking people to draw a tree would reveal when in their life they had experienced serious trauma, by the subconscious placement of knots at different points on the trunk. Some were downright dangerous, such as Rorschach expert Luise Zucker, who felt that her job was to make a client “understand, in as realistic a manner as possible, that he is lonely and dissatisfied, and that he is getting less out of life than others.”²⁰ Only by teaching homosexuals that they were miserable, she felt, could they get them to change.

These kinds of disagreements over the nature and treatment of homosexuality were common among early psychiatric practitioners, as they had been generations earlier among medical physicians. But in the homophobic 1950s, psychiatry as an institution quickly joined the chorus of official voices asserting that homosexuality was a fundamentally damaged and damaging condition. By 1952 the American Psychiatric Association would include homosexuality in their newly created Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, officially defining it as a mental illness for the first time. But the great experiment of the QES was already over by then, ironically destroyed by the very forces they were working to ameliorate.

The only thing that had been keeping their wobbly, disjointed alliance together was the behind-the-scenes work of the Quakers, particularly Joe Marvel, who spent his days fund-raising, organizing meetings, and getting the various parties to agree on basic operating issues. Without Marvel, the clinic would never have existed and could not continue—as they were to discover on a Thursday afternoon in March 1951, when he was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover cop in a subway toilet.²¹

Dr. Wertham quickly wrote a letter to the judge testifying to Marvel’s good character, and the charges were dropped, but the damage was done. Sudden accusations of fiscal and clerical impropriety were leveled at the clinic from Magistrate Bromberger’s office. Within three weeks of Marvel’s arrest, the courts had stopped sending clients to the clinic, and within four it was closed forever. Years later, Dr. Wertham would tell one of the volunteer psychiatrists that he had to close the clinic because “there were things going on which I’m sure you didn’t know”—almost certainly a reference to Marvel’s arrest.²² The clients were abandoned, the volunteers were disbanded, and the New York City courts seemed to give up on understanding homosexuality at all. They stopped tracking degeneracy arrests separately from other kinds of disorderly conduct, and in 1954, working with the head of the Brooklyn State Hospital, they would refocus their psychiatric sex-related work on “sexual psychopaths”—a media-created panic that equated any sex-related arrest with violent assault and murder.²³

In the aftermath of his arrest, Joe Marvel’s wife separated from him, and he would soon retire due to “ill health” to a farm in Vermont, where he committed suicide in 1959. His New York Times obituary simply noted that the QES clinic handled “lewdness and other things.”²⁴

The great work started by pioneering lesbian journalist Jan Gay in the 1930s, which had sought to demystify queer people to bring about greater understanding, had finally sputtered to a halt, brought down by the very homophobia it fought to undo. Gay herself bounced through a dozen different jobs—including researcher, publicist, children’s book author, and journalist—before settling down in Sausalito, California, where she lived with her partner until Gay’s death in 1960. Never again would she research queer lives, but in a final poignant attempt to increase our shared knowledge of the world, she left her body to science.²⁵

The same year that Joe Marvel was arrested, another queer Brooklynite by the name of Edward Sagarin would publish one of the most important early works of the newly fledged organized homosexual movement. Perhaps more than anyone else, Sagarin exemplified the double life of closeted men in the 1950s—so much so that he has often been referred to as the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” of early gay rights.²⁶ As Edward Sagarin he was a devoted husband and father living in a quiet residential area of Brooklyn, just off Prospect Park. Born in 1913, he had severe scoliosis and a hunched back. He studied chemistry and published a book in 1945 called The Science and Art of Perfumery.

However, as Donald Webster Cory, he was the author of The Homosexual in America, a point-by-point rebuttal of the homophobic myths, slanders, and rumors that were now commonly associated with homosexuality. As Cory, he argued that the opinions of an experienced homosexual were just as “essential as those of the psychiatrist, the jurist, or the churchman”²⁷ for understanding homosexuality. Although his book is deeply rooted in psychiatry, which led to many of its worst flaws, it struck back at the idea that the homosexual was a problem to be defined and fixed by others. He pointed out that most heterosexuals saw only a small slice of the homosexual population, and—like blindfolded men trying to explain what an elephant looks like—made erroneous assumptions based on their limited knowledge. The book discussed everything from Freudian analysis, to the American legal code, to queer practices among ancient civilizations. In a scholarly yet readable voice, Sagarin asserted that homosexuals were not sick, deranged, criminal, or emotionally stunted; rather, they were a despised minority deprived of their civil rights.

For this, he was hailed as a “mythic hero” by members of the nascent homosexual rights movement that was coalescing around the country.²⁸ The Mattachine Society, a gay men’s civil rights group that was founded in California in 1950, would make many of these same arguments, and Sagarin would be one of the early members of the New York branch. Shortly after publishing his book, Sagarin founded a brief-lived social and civil rights organization called Homosexuals Anonymous, which ended up bringing him into dangerous contact with Alfred Gross.

After being asked to leave the Quaker Emergency Service, George Henry and Alfred Gross set up the George W. Henry Foundation, a small operation that ran out of a janitor’s closet in a building on the Lower East Side. Almost entirely under Gross’s direction, the foundation taught gay men “the delicate skills required to live” in the closet and worked within the Episcopal Church to advocate for more pastoral tolerance of homosexuality.²⁹ Gross walked an uneasy line, calling for less repression by the state and more understanding from the church, but also condemning gays who were too effeminate, too sexual, or too interested in organizing politically.

When Sagarin heard about the foundation’s therapeutic work, he invited Gross to speak at a Homosexuals Anonymous meeting in 1952. Gross found the group, well—gross. They were drinking, socializing, camping it up, and organizing. He coldly informed the members, that the “‘homosexual had no rights as such that the community was bound to respect,’ and that they should be aware that homosexuals would be judged ‘by the conduct of [their] worst members.’”³⁰

Clearly, Gross considered those “worst members” to be the very men he was speaking to, and he left before their meeting was finished. We know all this because Gross then took it upon himself to report Sagarin and Homosexuals Anonymous to the FBI, with whom he apparently had an established relationship, most likely dating back to his work with the Selective Service. Although Sagarin wasn’t arrested, the FBI kept track of him from this point on, and it’s likely that the FBI’s influence is part of the reason Homosexuals Anonymous quickly folded. Gross would continue his strange breed of counseling into the early 1970s, but it would become even less tolerant as years passed. In the preface to a faux-scholarly book on homosexuality in 1962, Gross would state that “homosexuality, with its lack of responsibility for the procreation of the species,” was a factor in the decline of American civilization.³¹ Despite all his work to help other gay men improve their self-esteem, Gross seemed to live his own life mired in self-loathing.

Unfortunately, Sagarin himself soon went down a similar path. As the 1960s wore on, he became more and more conservative in his outlook on homosexuality. In 1963, he coauthored The Homosexual and His Society, which argued that while some homosexuals might appear well adjusted, the vast majority were disturbed. He followed this up in 1964 with The Lesbian in America, in which he wrote, “Some lesbians see themselves only as victims of hostility; some onlookers and specialists see them only as disturbed. The truth would seem to be found in a combination of both.”³² After he got his PhD—as Edward Sagarin—with a thesis on the Mattachine Society, he publicly propounded that homosexuals were disturbed and needed therapy. In 1974, when he attacked the post–Stonewall Riots gay liberation movement during a panel at the American Sociological Society, Edward Sagarin was publicly outed as Donald Webster Cory, and he retreated from organized gay life and scholarship until he died in 1986.

Aside from Cory, a few other early homophile leaders also lived and organized in Brooklyn, like Curtis Dewees, a leader of the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1950, Mattachine became the second gay rights organization founded in America (after the Society for Human Rights, a brief-lived Chicago-based group from the 1920s). In 1955, activists launched a New York chapter. Primarily an organization of white, middle-class men, Mattachine mostly pursued a political strategy of getting heterosexual experts to publicly declare that homosexuality was neither an illness nor a crime, in hopes that society at large would listen. They also organized gay men socially. In an interview conducted by Martin Duberman, Dewees recalled helping to establish Mattachine “discussion groups” around the city, including two in Brooklyn. “The Brooklyn one became quite large,” he said, “so we broke them into a Brooklyn Heights discussion group and the Greater Brooklyn discussion group.”³³ These groups served many functions, but they were mostly a place for consciousness-raising and the creation of a local queer community. Aside from Manhattan, Brooklyn was the only borough to have more than one group—and they were the only non-Manhattan ones to gain strong, loyal followings.

Dewees’s self-published autobiography, Memoirs of a Gay Rights Maverick, also contains tantalizing hints of other brief-lived moments of gay social organizing in Brooklyn. Twice, he writes about living in semi-intentional queer spaces. From 1957 to 1960, he lived with his boyfriend Al de Dion (another Mattachine leader), at 331 Cumberland Street in Fort Greene, a half block from Marianne Moore’s apartment. For $25 a month, the pair shared a cold-water flat, heated only by a fireplace in the living room, on the top floor of a four-story walkup. According to Dewees, “the entire building was gay except for the one other apartment on our floor.… The super was an early middle-aged guy on some kind of disability who picked up extra money making dresses for drag queens.… A very fat, feminine lesbian lived on the floor beneath us, with her tiny but very butch lover and a gay guy.”³⁴ How they all came to share the same building, or whether the others stayed after Dewees left, remains a mystery.

After Dewees and de Dion broke up in 1960, Dewees bounced around a few Brooklyn apartments, until in 1965 he purchased a building on State Street, “on the fringes of Downtown Brooklyn.” The area was rapidly gentrifying, with well-to-do Manhattanites snapping up and repairing buildings that had been abandoned due to suburbanization and white flight. Soon after Dewees moved in, he began renting rooms in his building to queer friends, and other gay men purchased a number of other buildings on the block. Within a few years,

half of the homeowners on the block were gay.… We formed our own little self-contained community. As everyone got to know each other, we began to give parties winter and summer for other like-minded block residents.… As we all fixed up our houses inside, we each agreed to paint our façades a different color, coordinating with the others.… In the summer, the sidewalk became our communal living room. There were almost always two or three outside gossiping, camping, or talking about some one’s latest trick. The block was now so beautiful that it became a local tourist attraction, as it stood out in an otherwise drab neighborhood. People would drive cars by slowly on summer Sundays, to see the houses and their queer inhabitants socializing on the sidewalk. I soon became aware that gays were buying on surrounding streets and blocks as well.³⁵

Both on Cumberland and State Streets, Dewees found (and helped to nurture) informal queer communities, the kind that leave little institutional evidence once they disappear, making it impossible to pinpoint exactly how, when, or why they began or ended. Dewees stayed on State Street until the early 2000s, by which point the rest of the block’s queer community was long gone.

Around the same time he landed on State Street, Dewees parted ways with the Mattachine Society, as newer members became interested in more radical tactics. “When they started active demonstrations, I was not in favor of that.… I felt that was jumping ahead too fast,”³⁶ he told Duberman. Despite his early gay rights activism, Dewees had a conservative streak, and he eventually joined the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization for LGBT people in the Republican Party. The discussion groups he started foundered without him (except for one, the West Side group in Manhattan, which became an influential stand-alone organization). Future leadership in the Mattachine Society, and in the LGBT organizations that followed, would mostly be made up of Manhattanites.

Although the stories of Edward Sagarin, the Quaker Emergency Service, and the Mattachine Society in New York are filled with mistakes, infighting, and tragic ends, they at least represent some kind of recognition of the difficulties men who had sex with men were experiencing after World War II. For lesbians, no equivalent city-supported, religiously organized therapeutic program existed, nor any three-hundred-plus page book dedicated to their concerns. Nor was there any kind of G.I. Bill to help the women who lost their jobs when the men returned home from the war. If anything, the nation turned its energy toward convincing those women that their proper place was in the home, the kitchen, and the suburbs—leaving lesbians such as Rusty Brown to fend for themselves. The Brooklyn Navy Yard cut some sixty-five thousand workers in the year after World War II ended, beginning the decline of the entire area.³⁷

Brown may have been fired from the Navy Yard at the end of the war, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to be a machinist. She liked the job, and it was all she knew how to do. After a brief break to get her head sorted, she came up with an idea: using her grandfather’s name, she headed to one of the civilian factories in Brooklyn. She was slim and small, and although she was around twenty-five years old, she managed to pass for a sixteen-year-old boy. By claiming to be too young to have been in the war, she avoided the awkward questions about her discharge papers that bedeviled the clients of the QES. Any healthy man of the right age who couldn’t furnish his military record was automatically suspected of being a shirker or a Communist or a homosexual, and who wanted to hire one of those?

When they asked how she learned her way around a machine shop, Brown told the factory that her father had owned one. When they asked why she wasn’t working with him, she said he was dead. Perhaps out of empathy for a poor, young Brooklyn orphan, they hired her. But keeping up her disguise was a constant challenge. “When I went to the bathroom, I’d go in to the one stall that had a door on it,” she remembered years later. “I tried to go … as infrequently as possible.”³⁸ After her shift, she’d go out with the other workers, who gave her man-to-man advice, which mostly boiled down to play the field and don’t get married.

However, Brown couldn’t pass as a boy forever—eventually, she knew, her lack of a beard would give her away. So she drifted back to the military and this time was allowed into the navy, where she shipped out to Korea around 1950. During World War II, homosexuality in the military had been kept mostly quiet, both by gay service members and by the military bureaucracy. But starting in the late 1940s, the military instituted lectures to warn all new recruits about the dangers posed by gays and lesbians. As Allan Bérubé described in Coming Out Under Fire, these talks were “vehemently antihomosexual” and warned women that “homosexuality threatened their ability to assume their proper roles in life as feminine women.” Normal men and women were expected to police themselves and their surroundings for any trace of homosexuality and report what they found. Furthermore,

in order to “emphasize the seriousness of this business and the danger in associating with ‘homos’ in any way whatsoever,” a 1948 Navy lecture linked grisly murders with homosexuality. “You read in the newspapers of fiendish and horrible sex crimes committed against men, women, and ofttimes, small children,” the lecture explained. “Sometimes the bodies of these victims are horribly mutilated.” In most every case, this kind of sexual perversion “can be related to homosexuality,” and “ofttimes the person who commits such an act is found to be a homosexual.”³⁹

The military, the courts, psychiatrists, and journalists now all spoke with one voice: a screeching Klaxon warning the world of dangerous queers.

Shipside in Korea, Brown heard rumors about military and government purges of homosexuals, headed by a vicious Senator Joseph McCarthy, but she didn’t believe them. “That was a comedy.… Here he is, all this to-do about being a homosexual in Washington,” she told an interviewer in the 1980s, “and there’s millions of us wearing the military uniform.”⁴⁰ But on leave, when she would return to Brooklyn, she realized McCarthy was no joke, and the homosexual panic he helped gin up—aka the Lavender Scare—was just getting started.

Around the time Brown shipped off to Korea, the Senate Appropriations Committee issued a report on the “employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in government.” Its purpose was to consider why their “employment by the Government is undesirable”—a clever way of ensuring it found the results its authors wanted. It claimed to have identified some 5,000 homosexuals in Washington, DC, 3,750 of who worked directly for the government.⁴¹ It verified that 91 suspected homosexuals had already been fired from the State Department,⁴² and by the end of 1950, over 600 employees would be forced out.⁴³ As the Korean War was ending in 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which banned anyone who might be a security risk from working for the federal government or for private contractors hired by the government. The list of potential security risks included alcoholics, neurotics, and homosexuals. However, while these purges were patterned on efforts made in the navy immediately after World War II, the idea that homosexuals posed a security risk was a conspiracy theory concocted entirely by the government. According to Allan Bérubé, top military officials gave “the security risk argument little credence.”⁴⁴ The only instance Senator McCarthy could point to was that of an Austrian military official being blackmailed in 1912. To most of America, however, homosexuals and Communists were now lumped together as insidious forces out to destroy the American way of life.

Brown didn’t have much trouble with the antihomosexual purges in the military, but when she hung up her uniform, things changed. She might have started off doing drag as a survival tactic, but she discovered she was good at it. So good that when a friend found out that she could also dance, he brought her on as his partner in a drag act, “doing a take-off on Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”⁴⁵ Brown soon became a professional drag king, often working down at Coney Island.

But the entertainment industry had been infected with McCarthyism as well. Although people today are more familiar with the blacklists of supposed Communists in movies and television, queer people were also targeted. “Producers got scared of who they hired in a show,” Brown recalled. It wasn’t just the visible talent who were in danger. “The director would ask certain pointed questions of just ordinary stagehands,” she said, “for fear that if there was a stagehand that was caught, it could reflect on them.”⁴⁶

Brown managed to avoid the government, but the police were another matter altogether. “I had been arrested in New York more times than I have fingers and toes, for wearing pants and a shirt,” she told historian Len Evans. As she explained:

You had to have three pieces of female attire. Now, let’s put it this way. At the time I was young, I had nothing on top so what the hell was I going to put in a brassiere? I’m not exactly the type for lace panties. And if I’m wearing pants, I sure as hell didn’t need a pretty coat. So there goes your three pieces of female attire.⁴⁷

This “three-piece rule” is often cited by people writing about postwar New York, and by the folks who lived at that time, such as Brown. But no such law appears on the books. It seems likely that police policy specified wearing three pieces of clothing of the “appropriate gender” to avoid a cross-dressing arrest, since so many people reference it, but all the arrests relied on the same set of laws that had been used to police gender identity and sexuality for decades: the old masquerade, public nuisance, and disorderly conduct laws. Arrests were simply more frequent, in part because more women were wearing pants in general, giving gender-queer women slightly more room to express themselves on the streets (and thus making them that much more visible to the police). Although the laws hadn’t changed, enforcement had.

Once, when Brown’s partner convinced her to switch parts—to dress “appropriately” for their genders—Brown was arrested again, and this time thrown into the men’s jail overnight, where she recalled the other prisoners screaming, “Bad enough you got us in this jail, you have to put this damn fag in here with us.”⁴⁸ Too masculine for dresses and not allowed to wear suits, Brown seemed to have no way to win.

Coney Island burlesque star Madam Tirza, date unknown. (Photo courtesy of the collection of David Denholtz.)

Working as a drag king brought Brown down to Coney Island, where she would meet the love of her life, a burlesque dancer named Terry. When Terry noticed Brown in the front row of Terry’s show at Madam Tirza’s Wine Bath, she sent a note inviting Brown to her dressing room afterward. “This chick has got to be straight,” thought Brown.⁴⁹ But the two were together for the next twenty-eight years.

Madam Tirza herself was a fascinating woman. According to another of her dancers, Mary Hood, Tirza was “a he-she, she-he … she’ll either fall in love with a man or a woman.”⁵⁰ If Tirza was out late the night before with a girl, Hood recalled, she or another of the backup girls would be Madam Tirza for a day, shimmying beneath a many-headed fountain of red-dyed water, surrounded by a phalanx of mirrors that turned one dancing girl into five.

Tirza had invented her wine-bath routine shortly before the war. While contemplating the beautiful Bethesda Fountain in Central Park one day, she realized how fabulous her act would look set inside it. So she hired an architect, who developed a prototype that weighed so much it was impossible to move. Frustrated, Tirza took a sledgehammer and refashioned it herself, just in time to get sponsored by a Chicago wine company and present her act at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York (the same one that featured Gypsy Rose Lee). After that, Tirza was on the road for years, dragging along her twelve-hundred-pound wine fountain.⁵¹ The tank required a lot of setup and maintenance, and the ranks of skilled workers had been badly depleted by the war, so Tirza became a member in good standing of the plumbers union, as well as a licensed trucker. She summered at Coney Island, where her act soon became a well-known draw. Later, Tirza would recall this time as the “best run” she ever had.⁵²

After the war, however, Coney Island quickly began to hit the skids. In 1945, for the first time ever, its summer crowds were bested by Rockaway Beach, which had twice the number of visitors.⁵³ In June 1946, Tirza’s Wine Bath—along with two other Coney Island burlesques—was temporarily shuttered by the city license commissioner, Ben Fielding. Tirza’s mother, who helped with the show, shadily pointed out that even under the restrictive La Guardia administration (which had closed all the official burlesque houses in the city), Tirza had been allowed to operate. “I think Mr. Fielding is a very fair and square gentleman,” she told a reporter, “even if we were allowed to continue under La Guardia’s administration without a bit of trouble. Maybe we went a little further than we meant this time, thinking it was a Democratic administration and a little gayer somehow. But we guessed wrong.”⁵⁴

(Gay was already being used to refer to homosexual men by this time, and it still retained echoes of its earlier slang meaning, referring to female sex workers, but it’s not clear in what sense Tirza’s mother meant it here.)

By August of that year, the women’s columnist at the Star newspaper noted that the city wasn’t just going after the bump-and-grind joints. All of Coney Island seemed set in its sights. “Every day brings a new wave of censorship,” she wrote. “Coney Island bath houses by the dozen have been closed in the clean up.” The barkers, whose ballyhoos brought the rubes in to see the shows, were now forced to submit their scripts to the License Commission for advance approval.⁵⁵ Coney Island restaurants would be hit with numerous sanitary citations. Even the visiting crowds were suddenly subjected to increased scrutiny. Over six thousand people were ticketed in the first half of 1946 for such crimes as “undressing on the beach,” “ball-playing,” and “peddling.” This was nearly a 40 percent increase over the year before.⁵⁶

This wasn’t just an attack on Coney Island, it was a growing war on poverty—or rather, a war on the poor and the places they congregated. Soon, Commissioner Fielding promised, “each of the city’s 102 bathing establishments … will be the subject of unexpected visits by our department.”⁵⁷ Coney Island bathhouses most likely came under particular scrutiny because both poor people and homosexuals could be found in them. Coney Island was rapidly losing its reputation as a destination for all New Yorkers and being reimagined, in the words of one city magistrate, as a “Devil’s play pen,” where “one million poor people swarm onto the beach.”⁵⁸

By 1949, the signs were serious that Coney Island was in trouble. The long-standing Mardi Gras festival was canceled that year, “a victim of economic pressure.”⁵⁹ Luna Park, the famed amusement park that burned down in 1945, had been purchased by real estate speculator Fred Trump (father of President Donald Trump). Although Fred Trump planned in 1950 to turn it into a drive-in movie complex, eventually he built a parking lot instead.⁶⁰

In 1952, the License Commission would again shut down Madam Tirza, and in 1953, put off by the dwindling crowds, the increase in petty crime, and the constant government harassment, none of the bump-and-grind shows even bothered to apply for a license.⁶¹ As Tirza recalled, “Coney Island had deteriorated so badly I was afraid to open.”⁶² Around this time, she married a Coney Island local named Joe Boston, and the two spent the next thirty years together on the road. (As for Rusty Brown and Terry, they moved to California, where they lived together until Terry died, and Rusty remained active in queer life up through the late 1990s.)

In the face of this increased regulation, Brooklyn residents yet again showed a more blasé attitude toward sex at Coney Island than their Manhattan overlords. Under the headline “Poor Man Must Be Protected from Girls in Bath,” one local wrote to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle to drily observe:

The poor man who cannot enter a New York night club with a well-stuffed wallet and a collar and tie—the same man, who simply can’t resist the barkers appeal to ‘hurry,’ ‘hurry,’ ‘hurry,’ to see Tirza, should and must feel a deep sense of appreciation to our Acting Commissioner of Licenses for protecting his morals.⁶³

Newspaper articles tried to put a good face on the closings, insisting that “some merchants hereabouts say it’s better for business,” but Coney Island was inexorably dwindling away.⁶⁴ Boosterish headlines blared that Coney wasn’t folding, but their very protests seemed to certify the exact thing they were trying to deny. “The Nickel Empire” was once a compliment to the pinnacle of New York attractions, but now it was a snide reference to how cheap and tawdry Coney had become.

What had happened? The answer, in two words: Robert Moses.

No history of twentieth-century New York City and its marginalized communities can avoid talking about Moses, the incredibly powerful city administration figure who almost single-handedly redesigned New York as a city for cars and the people who could afford them. At one point in his career, he held twelve simultaneous government positions (all appointed, none elected), including commissioner of the NYC Parks Department, chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, chairman of the Long Island State Parks Commission, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, and others. A short list of New York City projects that are wholly or mostly the work of Moses include the Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Henry Hudson, and Verrazzano Bridges; the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, and the Meadowbrook Parkway; the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel; Idlewild Airport (now JFK); Lincoln Center; Shea Stadium; and much of the city’s public housing.

Robert Moses obviously disliked Coney Island. In 1949, he said in a public meeting that he “wouldn’t want to sink Surf Avenue on Coney Island, but just get rid of about a third of it.” He imagined a clean, empty expanse of beach—much like the ones he had created on Long Island—where there were no “gadgets or catch penny devices.” When he looked at the history of Coney, he said, “The trend is downward.”⁶⁵

In part, that trend can be traced back to Moses himself, who had been surreptitiously eating away at Coney Island since the mid-1930s. In 1935, for example, Moses wanted twenty-five acres of land on Coney Island to build a park. The land was in the hands of the Board of Education, which planned to build a “badly needed school” for the local community.⁶⁶ When Mayor La Guardia had the temerity to suggest a mixed-use site, with a park on one side and a school on the other, Moses savaged him in public, causing the mayor to back down. Moses got his park, and Coney Island residents were forced to make do. In 1938, Moses—again via the Parks Department—took control of the Municipal Bathhouse at Coney Island. The year before, it had seen some 150,000 visitors, of who approximately 7,500 were “charity admissions,” who paid no fee. Seeing the great need that the bathhouse was meeting, Moses turned it into a storage complex for Parks Department equipment.⁶⁷ That same year, Moses succeeded in having jurisdiction over the boardwalk and beaches of Coney Island removed from local borough-president control and placed under his aegis.⁶⁸ Although World War II slowed him down, from this point on, it was only a matter of time before Moses remade Coney Island to his wishes.

As Madam Tirza’s history shows, many of the attractions at Coney Island were temporary. Some returned every year, others were there for a while and then moved on. Like the Brooklyn brothels, they depended on some turnover to keep functioning. Moses saw in this an opportunity. By 1949, he estimated that through his powers at the Parks Department, he had acquired about one-third of the land along the boardwalk in Coney Island. The owners of these properties had slipped into bankruptcy or simply skipped town when winter arrived, never paying the debts they had accumulated. By buying up the properties, Moses could keep the businesses empty, inexorably accelerating the decline of Coney Island, and thereby allowing the Parks Department to gobble up more and more land. By 1952—Madam Tirza’s last year—he was ready to deliver his coup de grâce: a giant redevelopment that would turn Coney Island from a “noisy amusement area to a beautiful, residential center with its buildings set in spacious, landscaped grounds.”⁶⁹

Publicly, he claimed that the redevelopment would provide the city with renewed tax revenue, without ever discussing how the freeways and parkways he was building were creating a commuter class that left the city for the suburbs, taking their tax money with them. He ironically insisted that he was protecting Coney Island from “outsiders,” who had abandoned the businesses he had purchased.⁷⁰ Coney Island residents weren’t fooled, however, and they protested vigorously against the redevelopment. In April 1953, the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce unanimously rejected Moses’s plan. In particular, the members were concerned about the rezoning of major parts of Coney Island from business to residential or retail. Both designations would effectively outlaw the games, music halls, dance pavilions, bathhouses, and other establishments that made Coney Island the unique destination it had been for decades. However, their concerns were ignored, and the redevelopment moved forward.

Moses was eager to redevelop Coney Island for a few reasons. It was the only beach that was easily accessible by public transit, and he wanted to push city residents out to his farther-flung, car-accessible beaches. Also the city’s “poorest residents happened to live” here already, making it an ideal spot, in Moses’s mind, for high-rise public housing projects, which could contain a maximum number of poor people at the farthest distance from the city’s core—aka Manhattan. And from his experience on the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, Moses knew that poor communities were less likely to be listened to if they protested his plans.⁷¹

Coney Island had also accidentally got caught up in another of Moses’s schemes. He loved bridges and hated tunnels, though the latter were cheaper to build and displaced fewer people. Instead of the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, he had wanted to build a bridge; when his plans were thwarted, he came up with a creative fuck-you to the city. In October 1941, he summarily began the destruction of the beloved New York Aquarium, which had been located in Battery Park, Manhattan, since 1896. He claimed—erroneously—that building the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel would undermine its structural integrity. He proposed relocating the aquarium to Coney Island and pressured the mayor to spend $1 million on land for its new home. Moses claimed it would cost just an additional $2 million to build the new aquarium, and that the money would come from the New York Zoological Society (which oversaw the Bronx Zoo). In the end, it cost $11 million, all paid by New York City taxes. As Moses’s biographer Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker:

The high admission fees Moses set for it insured that many New Yorkers were going to be able to visit infrequently if at all. The poignance of this situation was accentuated by the location of the Aquarium at Coney Island, the lone bathing beach reachable by public transportation and therefore the one to which, because of Moses’ class-separating policies, the city’s poor were herded.⁷²

The old aquarium was free; despite claims from the city that the new aquarium would cost “considerably less than a dollar”⁷³ to visit, the admission price was set at ninety cents.⁷⁴ Since Moses started demolition of the old aquarium with no plans for a new one, New York City would spend sixteen years without an aquarium. Construction would take so long that for eleven of those years, Coney Island had twelve acres of desolate, unused land directly abutting the boardwalk. When it finally opened, Moses called the aquarium “the symbol of a new era,” one in which they were “shrinking the amusement section to proper limits and getting rid of its worst manifestations.”⁷⁵ In one last stab in the back to old Coney Island, Moses erected a quarter-of-a-million-dollar ramp from the subway station to the new aquarium, which was designed to “‘funnel all’ potential customers to and from the beach and waterside aquarium area and away from the amusement[s].”⁷⁶ What little of Coney Island Moses could not buy or bully into closing, he starved into submission.

Moses’s plan had direct effects on the businesses of Coney Island that provided queer women with work, but its ripples would disturb the cruising grounds that gay men had established on the beach and in the bathhouses at least as far back as the 1920s. By 1949, when the mysterious author Swasarnt Nerf (Sixty-Nine) published The Gay Girl’s Guide (the first gay guide to New York ever written), it listed only two places in all of Brooklyn: the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and the beach at Coney Island, where “some of the lowlier faggots on occasion form a large party to take over a section.”⁷⁷ Thomas Painter, now long separated from the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, was one of those faggots, and he carefully tracked cruising culture at Coney in his letters to Alfred Kinsey throughout the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

That Painter loved Coney Island is inarguable. When he first started going, men and women of all social classes and identities still crowded together on its beaches from Memorial Day to Labor Day, sometimes millions at a time. A group of Jewish matrons might sit under umbrellas just a few feet from a raucous collection of Italian-immigrant teenagers necking to Sammy Kaye on the radio singing “Careless Hands.” Beachcombers made a living plucking dropped nickels and lost jewelry from the dunes. Young men impressed young women by doing acrobatics and weight lifting on the forgiving sand, and if they were lucky, they could retire to the cool shade beneath the boardwalk, where nameless, transient joints served soda, beer, and cheap beach food, in an atmosphere that Painter described as “sex, delinquency, sex, sordidness, and sex.”⁷⁸ This was the dawn of the baby boom, when teenagers would begin to rule American pop culture, and nowhere in New York was this more evident than at Coney Island.

Painter’s diaries describe three distinct but overlapping subcultures of Coney Island men who had sex with men, two that were evident by the late 1940s, and one that emerged later, in the early 1950s.

The first group consisted of men such as Painter himself: older homosexuals who were (at least to each other) fairly obvious about their desires and identities. Many of these men spent a great deal of time in the bathhouses, particularly the Washington Baths and Stauch’s, which Painter described as “Times Square in Coney Island.” These institutions were multilevel, formerly grand bathing pavilions, with restaurants, cafés, exercise equipment, pools, tanning salons, smoking areas, etc. Most were directly on the boardwalk, across from the beach, and many of them had their own stairs leading down to the sand. Under the boardwalk, they built rows of small pavilions, much like the changing rooms in department stores, where people could put on the bathing suits they had rented upstairs. It was still illegal in New York City to wear a bathing suit on the street, and though this law was routinely flouted, Robert Moses would increasingly use it to target poor people at Coney Island. Painter would refer to Moses as his “bête noire” for this very reason.⁷⁹

Although Painter went to the bathhouses fairly regularly, usually to tan naked on the roof, he disliked the scene because “there were too many faggots.”⁸⁰ Painter was rarely interested in having sex with other out gay men, particularly ones who were in any way “swishy” or effeminate. Also, other gay men represented competition for the younger, primarily heterosexual (or at least straight-seeming) men that Painter was after. And lastly, even just one too-obvious homosexual could put the kibosh on an afternoon of cruising by being too forward, too flaming, or too public about his desires, driving away the boys for whom same-sex activity was an afternoon of fun (and, often, profit), but not an identity they wanted to be publicly associated with. These young, white, working-class men, primarily from Brooklyn, made up the second subculture Painter documented.

Painter perfectly captured the tension between these two groups in a scene he described at the Washington Baths on July 4, 1947. It started when he noticed “a group of the young tougher characters,” ranging from about sixteen to twenty-five, tanning on the roof. For a brief period, an “extremely obvious homosexual of middle age” chatted them up, and the group “kidded him and half tolerated him.” Once he was out of earshot, however, things got interesting.

When he had gone there was a flood of comment among the group, principally being a repetition of how if he had “started anything” or “made a pass” they would have picked him up and thrown him down the fucking stairs.… All disapproved of the matter and of fellation (being “blowed”) … and made out as to how none of them had or would, except one who [allowed] as to how he might follow the person and get him to blow him, and they laughed loudly and said they wouldn’t put it past him, he would fuck a snake.⁸¹

Being gay was disgusting, but getting an occasional blow job from a man still existed in a sexual gray area. As Painter discovered, many young Coney Island men had more open attitudes toward homosexual sex than did the majority of supposedly sophisticated Manhattanites. Painter usually referred to these young men as heterosexual, which some definitely were. But many seemed to live outside our modern idea of sexual orientation as a permanent and unwavering condition defined by the sex of the people to whom you are generally attracted. A lot of the youths were in it for the money, but they also seemed to enjoy it, and sometimes did it for free. As one of his young partners explained to Painter, “It does him no harm, is not unpleasant … so why not do it?”⁸²

The sunbathing roof deck at Stauch’s bathhouse on Coney Island (c.1950). (Photo courtesy of the collection of Hugh Hagius.)

Painter was surprised to discover that so long as he respected their boundaries, these men often wanted to be friends, or at least friendly, unlike the professionals who worked Times Square. An astute observer of sexual mores, Painter pointed out in his diaries that the straight world was willing to tolerate an underclass of gay men and male sex workers if they kept their interactions to the “minimum required for [their] unnatural and obscene practices.”⁸³ Friendship with a gay man endangered fragile heterosexuality as much as did gay sex. But parts of Coney Island still seemed to exist outside the rigid hetero-homo dichotomy that was taking over America. For Painter, not only did this present an opportunity for picking up the trade that he was attracted to, it also helped him feel better about himself. As he wrote to Kinsey:

Remember how I used to say “Each and every homosexual is an individual tragedy.” Well, that statement … was colored by the subjective. And I have changed. Some one … recently remarked to me that I seem to have made a good adjustment to my condition. (Especially since Brooklyn.)⁸⁴

By the late 1940s, Painter perfected a method of cruising for these young men: asking them to model. This period saw an explosion in what were referred to as “strength and health” magazines, or what we would today call beefcake. For many of these working-class young men, the idea of being paid to have their pictures taken was an incredible opportunity—a way out of communities that were on a downward slide into poverty and dereliction. Painter was a hobbyist, at best. The only audiences for his pictures were himself, the men he photographed, and Alfred Kinsey (to whom he sent duplicates of nearly every photo he took). But professionals such as Lon of New York would help make some of these Coney Island boys into famous models, and soon they all knew that an older man with a camera was a sure sign of quick cash, and perhaps some sexual fun.

The vast majority of these guys were working-class Italians and Irishmen, or as Painter characterized them, men of the lowest social order. Many were friendly, some were dangerous, and a few verged on being sociopaths. In his diaries, Painter recounted being threatened, robbed, blackmailed, beaten, and (once) raped. Yet he also developed close friendships with many of these men—including some of the ones who robbed him. Of the men Painter kept in touch with, many married, a few found long-term boyfriends, some drifted off to the military or jobs in other states, and some continued hustling. A not insignificant number would go on to be models, movie stars, professional dancers, and Olympic athletes.

Rumors of hustling or queer desires have dogged many famous beautiful men, and it’s retrospectively easy to dismiss them as wishful thinking, malicious gossip, or sexual boasting. But on Coney Island, Painter repeatedly picked up a teenager whom he described as “a Brooklyn Italian … well fed and well mannered … [and] incredibly, shockingly beautiful.”⁸⁵ At sixteen, this boy seemed to have a better head on his shoulders than all the other hustlers combined. He was determined to get an agent and get to Hollywood. Thus, at first, he would only allow Painter to take clothed photos, then eventually nude ones, before finally allowing some limited sexual contact between them. Soon, the boy had attracted a stable of powerful, well-connected gay men, including a big-shot agent, who pointed out that, “Brando, Cary Grant, and others … had similar backgrounds [and] the general public doesn’t know, will never know.”⁸⁶

Soon, the boy landed in Hollywood, where he became a star whose career would last well into the 2000s. Quickly, he realized that his years on Coney Island could become a liability, so he wrote a long letter to Thomas Painter.

Dear Tom,

I won’t begin this letter in the usual fashion making excuses for not having written previously.… The story is, in brief, that I don’t feel particularly comfortable with those photos in existence.… You could relieve the situation some by sending me the negatives of the photos I took with you. I don’t doubt that you have kept your promise and not sold any, but one can never tell if they should be stolen or lost. I have no idea how many pictures you have, so if you should agree I can only trust you to send all of them.… ⁸⁷

This youth was one of the last “Great Beauties” that Painter encountered at Coney Island, as its sexually permissive scene would not last for long. Painter cruised there occasionally right after World War II, but the area really picked up in the late forties, when part of Coney Island became known as Muscle Beach, so named for all the “strength and health” boys who hung out there. It was one link on a chain of places where gay men and trade could still hang out together, similar to Sands Street, some parts of Harlem, Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, and a number of bars near Times Square.

The first sign that this sexual archipelago was under attack was a series of crackdowns in the Manhattan bars where gay men and trade gathered. In 1950, Painter wrote that his favorite such place, the Famous, had been declared off bounds by the military, effectively killing the flow of trade. Sailors and soldiers quickly shifted to other bars in the area, but these places “shoo out idling hustlers, [and] hesitate to serve Negros and queer looking queers.”⁸⁸ In May 1951, Painter recounted the emergence of a number of Manhattan bars that catered only to homosexuals, but contrasted that with the closing of “queer-man bars,” including the Famous, the Moss, Gilroy’s, Perry’s, and the Times Square. “There is not now, and has not been for almost a year,” Painter told Kinsey, “a real rip-roaring queer-man bar in the old fashioned tradition.”⁸⁹ The trajectory of homo-hetero separation, which had begun before World War II with the ending of Prohibition and the onset of the movie code, was accelerating. It would fold neatly into the mental and physical suburbanization of America that would come to dominate the culture in the fifties and early sixties.

Soon, Painter began sending chilling newspaper articles to Kinsey about gay men being murdered all around New York. Simultaneously, however, papers were painting homosexuality as “the real sex menace,” in the words of The New York Age.⁹⁰ Echoing Magistrate Bromberger, journalists now routinely evoked the specter of queerness even in cases that had nothing to do with homosexuality. For instance, after four Brooklyn teens beat and murdered a man in a case that captured headlines for months, one psychologist—who had only ever seen photos of the boys—opined in the press that they were “probably homosexual.”⁹¹ Suggesting latent homosexuality was the perfect way for psychiatrists to claim a deeper understanding of human nature than laypeople, because their theories couldn’t be disproven. Thus, psychiatrists burnished the reputation of their field at the expense of those they were purportedly out to help. Queers and Communists were now all-purpose bogeymen, to be summoned up whenever blame was to be assigned.

Attitudes at Coney slowly began to shift with the times. In 1951, for example, Painter told Kinsey about the harassment some of his regular models faced when they tried to pick up a few girls on the beach: “These two young, handsome, muscular youthes [sic] couldn’t get a girl to speak to them, except to get told to ‘go away,’ ‘get out,’ and ‘you fag,’ ‘you fairies.’”⁹² That these men were masculine and interested in women no longer mattered the way it once did. Any amount of queer experience instantly and irrevocably defined one as a homosexual. By 1952, Painter’s regular crowd at Muscle Beach had begun to disappear, heading instead to Robert Moses’s newly created Orchard Beach, which was clean and lacked Coney Island’s growing aura of poverty and sleaze. In June 1954, Painter told Kinsey that Muscle Beach was completely dead, the strength-and-health boys were all gone, and no new ones had come up to replace them. Another of his favorite cruising grounds, the area around Fourteenth Street in Manhattan (where once upon a time Jennie June had been the queen of the Fourteenth Street rialto) was similarly abandoned. Again, all the “queer-man bars” had been shuttered by the police, and the once semi-available street youth had coalesced into dangerous gangs that were more likely to kill a queer than service one. “So there we are at a series of dead ends,” Painter wrote in 1954. “Times Square, the muscle boys, and 14th Street” were cruising grounds no longer.⁹³

Arrests ramped up throughout the rest of the year. In September, Painter informed Kinsey of an “unprecedented” series of raids in the city:

It started in the Square, continues there, goes on all over.… Over 700 (seven hundred) were arrest[ed] last week end—in all four burroughs [sic], from Coney Island to Van Courtland Park to the Rockaways: loiterers, drunks, bums, disorderly, “suspicious,” panhandlers … included in the unsavory aggregation are “homosexuals.” There is no explanation of how they were arrested, and what for—just for being (suspected of being?) homosexuals? IE looking like one?… The result on the Square is amazing—no hustlers, no faggots.⁹⁴

This wasn’t just an antihomosexual crusade; it was an attack on all kinds of public immorality, and in particular the kinds of “crimes” committed by poor people who lack private space: loitering, public drunkenness, panhandling, street hustling, etc. While this was happening in the cruising grounds of Times Square and Coney Island, the city launched Operation 25, which flooded Harlem with hundreds of additional beat cops in a similar attempt to harass or jail marginal communities out of public existence. In 1955, the police followed up with Operation Hazard, which poured battalions of cops into the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, which had recently seen an influx of black residents. The theory seemed to be that the city couldn’t get rid of homosexuals (or black people), but they could ensure that they stayed hidden as much as possible.

However, even in moments of great repression, queerness finds a way. As Painter was documenting the disappearance of the working-class, white queer-man scene at Coney Island, he found a new group blooming in its place: a queer Puerto Rican community that would briefly flourish at Coney Island in the early 1950s, right up until Robert Moses’s plans for major redevelopment went into effect in 1954.

In 1920, there were just over 7,000 Puerto Ricans living in New York City; by 1950, there were over 180,000, many of who settled on Brooklyn’s waterfront.⁹⁵ What caused this influx? To begin with, at the turn of the century the United States had seized Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and in 1917, its people were officially declared US citizens. In 1900, the island was primarily rural, an agglomeration of small towns and individual farmers. Even by 1930, more than 70 percent of Puerto Ricans still lived in places with populations under twenty-five hundred people.⁹⁶ However, annexation into the American empire swiftly transformed local agriculture into a monoculture of giant sugar plantations, as American agribusinesses (and some Puerto Rican–owned ones) leaped to buy up land. Industrial farming techniques meant that these plantations employed vastly fewer people than the small farms they replaced, leaving many people with neither land nor jobs. In 1950, the unemployment rate in Puerto Rico was 10 percent⁹⁷—more than double what it was in the rest of America.⁹⁸ After World War II, the mainland United States desperately needed workers, particularly in the booming field of housing construction, which was rapidly creating the idealized white world of suburbia. The pull of jobs—and the push of unemployment—created the perfect storm for a mass exodus from Puerto Rico.

In 1951, a few months after Thomas Painter first mentioned the declining white queer-man scene, he began to notice more and more Puerto Rican men hanging out at Coney Island. “Who cares,” he told Kinsey, as “the more they come the prettier they seem.”⁹⁹ By 1952, he informed Kinsey that the beach now had a primarily Puerto Rican area, much like the Italian area where he had first met his strength-and-health boys. This new group was centered around an area designated Bay 13, which was also where Stauch’s bathhouse—the most popular among gay white men—was located. Soon, the area where the steps from Stauch’s hit the sand would become a popular hangout for the Puerto Rican community, and in particular its queer members. Painter only fully realized this in 1954, by which point the majority of the new boys he was meeting at Coney were of Puerto Rican descent. At its zenith, the scene at the nameless “tavern” under Bay 13 was perhaps the most queer-friendly, ethnically mixed environment Painter had ever found. In his letters, he contrasted it with the Italian area he had once frequented and found the Puerto Rican one vastly superior. As he wrote:

On week ends it is packed … almost like a subway car or a queer bar. The predominant customers are aged 23-15 … of both sexes even tho with a slight majority of males. They are of the lowest social level, a large proportion being obviously delinquents and semi-criminal. They are a complete mixture racially, but, as they are the lowest social level, the majority are Puerto Rican and Italians, Negroes (less than the proportion should be) and some blonds. The juke box blares continuously. Beer and soft drinks are guzzled, but many just hang around for the fun.… They loll on the tables in informal poses—feet on the table if you wish, including the girls. Introductions are not required. “Mingling” seems not banned. As to necking, you can do anything short of actual sexual intercourse, but there is less than you would expect (it is more comfortable on the sand of the beach, after all). If you are a boy obviously not old enough to buy beer an older boy buys it for you. Queer[s] stand around and ogle, while the regulars chat with and paw their boys.…

The Italian place is similar except there are no queers, and one gets the impression of an intense, blaring heterosexuality and virility which would not tolerate it. There is no racial mixture, just Italian.… The sense one has of potential hostility (due to one’s sexuality) and mere toleration of one’s non-Italian-ness (due to one’s being Nordic) make me nervous. In the P.R. place it is more relaxed, more tolerant, completely accepting.

Obviously, Painter was a more visible outsider in the Puerto Rican area, and his sense of safety and acceptance was influenced by his being a white man. Whiteness offered him no protection from the Italian youths down the beach, but probably mitigated any similar discomfort he might have felt in the predominantly Puerto Rican area of Bay 13. Still, his experiences suggest that this area was more accepting of sexual and racial diversity than anywhere else on Coney Island.

Unfortunately, the same forces that were pushing white queer people out of Coney Island seem to have quickly pushed Puerto Rican queer men out as well. After 1954, as Painter documented in his diaries, their world no longer centered on Coney. Instead, he would meet most of them in the Lower East Side, Chelsea, South Harlem, and Puerto Rico itself. In a large oral history project conducted by the Brooklyn Historical Society with members of early Puerto Rican communities in Brooklyn, Coney Island wasn’t even mentioned once.

A fire (probably arson) destroyed the Washington Baths in 1955, and although Stauch’s would linger on as the last Coney Island bathhouse up into the seventies, it would no longer be a landmark on the map of gay New York. By 1958, when Ann Aldrich published We, Too, Must Love, a field guide to lesbian New York City, she would quote one lesbian as saying that at Coney Island “you feel funny if you’re different.”¹⁰⁰ By 1964, even the last of the famed amusement parks, Steeplechase, which had operated at Coney Island since 1897, would close, and in 1966, Fred Trump would throw a demolition party as he razed the site to prevent it from gaining landmark status.

Stauch’s Bathhouse, abandoned (1984). (Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society. [Stauch Baths], 1984, v1992.48.1; Anders Goldfarb photographs of Coney Island, v1992.48; Brooklyn Historical Society.)

Sometime in the early 1950s, it seems, Coney had completed its transformation from a sexually anarchic playground to a place where—as Martin Boyce, the Stonewall veteran, would later remember—gay people no longer dared gather in large public numbers. Another piece of queer Brooklyn had been wiped away.

The city didn’t just build public housing at Coney Island around this time, it also developed large housing projects next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard; near where poet Marianne Moore still lived in Fort Greene; in downtown Brooklyn; around Red Hook; in the center of Brooklyn Heights; and over in Gowanus; all waterfront or waterfront-adjacent neighborhoods where low-income people (including many queers) had lived, worked, and cruised for decades. Although these developments were intended to help low- and median-income New York City residents, they would ironically play a critical role in destroying the social fabric of these neighborhoods and displacing existing working-class people. Without ever being singled out by name, the fragile queer communities of Brooklyn would be particularly assailed by city housing policy.

To the city government, the poor were abstract, fungible numbers, and removing a few thousand for a few years was the equivalent of a rounding error in a massively complex equation. As far back as 1934, the city housing administration had begun demolishing “slum” areas and placing crippling regulations on the buildings they left behind, destroying or causing to be abandoned an estimated forty thousand low-income residences by 1936 alone. Why? In an effort to force the city to build better public housing, of course, by creating a housing crisis. As one reformer put it, “From excellent and humane motives we have thus accelerated the housing shortage.… If we keep on this course we shall have the highest housing standards in the world, while a third of the population sleeps on park benches.”¹⁰¹ This was part of the reason why Brooklyn’s brothels shut down after the war—the lack of housing stock made it impossible to stay one step ahead of the cops.

This destruction didn’t start with Robert Moses, but he used the chaos it caused to his advantage once he took the helm. He sold his housing projects “as a putative destination for slum clearance tenants displaced elsewhere,” but it rarely worked out that way.¹⁰²

Take, for instance, the Farragut Houses, built on either side of Sands Street right where it intersected with the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 1946, the city used eminent domain to take ownership of a twelve-block, eighteen-acre area that was home to an estimated eight hundred residences and two hundred businesses.¹⁰³ These were demolished to create eleven fourteen-story-high apartment buildings, surrounded by what was generously called “parkland,” which mostly consisted of flat expanses of cement and fenced-off grass, without benches, amenities, trees, or amusements. One member of Moses’s Parks Department would later claim about these newly constructed areas, “There is no room for trees, and even if there were trees, children would run into them and get hurt.”¹⁰⁴ As early as 1943, one of the first executive directors of community planning for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) warned that these so-called towers in the parks “might prove troublesome” because of the way they warehoused the poor and “should be abandoned,” but they would be the norm in public housing for the next decade and a half.¹⁰⁵

The Farragut Houses, public housing units built where Sands Street once met the Brooklyn Navy Yard (1954). (Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Eagle Photographs—Brooklyn Public Library—Brooklyn Collection.)

To accommodate the expected uptick in traffic caused by the Farragut Houses, large stretches of Sands, Nassau, and Gold Streets were widened, necessitating the destruction of even more of the bars and businesses that had once served sailors, sex workers, factory women, artists, and entertainers.¹⁰⁶ After construction began, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a “swan song for the Sands St of old,” noting how all the businesses that had once made the area “colorful” were now gone.¹⁰⁷ Thereafter, the delights of Sands Street would never again be praised by queer Brooklynites.

In a conference extolling their virtues, the president of the Brooklyn Real Estate Board announced, “When the Farragut Houses are completed, the displaced tenants who qualify could be given first choice in the new buildings.”¹⁰⁸ The operative words here are qualify and could. Spoiler alert: most of the old residents didn’t qualify and wouldn’t be given first choice—or any choice at all.

First off, in the intervening years between when they were kicked out and when new developments were completed, most former residents had moved and were probably not eager (or able) to uproot themselves again. Even had they wanted to, shortly after the houses were completed, NYCHA instituted a twenty-one-point moral code to keep out unwanted inhabitants, which would virtually guarantee that no former Sands Street residents could move in. Although never listed in name, queer people were particularly penalized under this code. Included on the list of undesirable qualities were:

•  any court contact in the last five years (such as an arrest for cross-dressing or disorderly conduct);

•  any “other than honorable” discharge from military service (such as a blue discharge for sexuality); and

•  any history of mental illness that required hospitalization (an increasingly popular option for dealing with homosexuality after it was added to the psychiatric diagnostic manual in 1952).

Other parts of the code targeted poor people generally, banning anyone who had moved too frequently in the past, or who was considered to have poor housekeeping habits, or who lacked furniture, or whose conduct was considered “obnoxious” by NYCHA officials, or who possessed a highly irregular work history, or who had a history of trouble paying rent.¹⁰⁹ These policies were enforced in public housing in New York City until 1968.

In a separate set of policies, NYCHA set a hard income cap on tenants in these new buildings, which meant that as working-class families began to get their feet under them and earn more money, they were forced to move yet again. This created a revolving door of poverty and destabilized the communities that might have formed within the projects. Moreover, these new buildings were constructed with a belief that simply moving working-class people into modern homes would naturally help them climb the economic ladder. Thus, they did not include the “social services that characterized early public housing.”¹¹⁰ By the 1960s, NYCHA housing would become synonymous with poverty and crime. With the old residents gone, and the old buildings destroyed, the queer history of Sands Street was effectively erased—particularly once the Brooklyn Navy Yard shut down for good in 1966. The bustling two-hundred-acre campus that had housed and employed so many queer people over the last hundred years would be left derelict, until trees grew up through the buildings and you were more likely to find graffiti than people inside them.

Meanwhile, a very different set of housing policies was pushing middle-class (and less precarious working-class) white families out of the city, and into single-family homes in the suburbs. These included many of the same families that NYCHA administrators had imagined would move into their new public housing developments, which were intended at the start to be racially integrated communities for the striving classes. But racist suburban housing policies would ensure that only white families could escape the city’s decaying urban core, thus creating what is popularly known as white flight. As a result, public housing became a way to warehouse poor people of color, while the suburbs became the white American dream.

In the decade after World War II, the federal government authorized billions of dollars in mortgage insurance through the Federal Housing Administration, which was designed to promote private home development by guaranteeing builders a return on their investment. Included in the G.I. Bill was a similar provision, designed to provide mortgages to veterans to enable them to “return to civilian life with a home of their own.”¹¹¹ Much like NYCHA housing, these mortgages came with moral codes, which included “unsatisfactory domestic relationships” as a factor for denying a mortgage application.¹¹²

With the Veterans’ Emergency Housing Act of 1946, priority in construction loans and scarce building materials was given to anyone building dwellings for married returning vets—which functionally excluded queer people. Despite the fact that 50 percent of veterans wanted to rent (presumably in the city) and not own a house in the suburbs, only 12 percent of the buildings constructed in 1946 and 1947 would be urban rental units.¹¹³ Under these new policies, it was cheaper to build single-family homes in the suburbs than to build or renovate apartments in the city—and the real estate business followed the money. These new homes were so cheap to build, they could be offered to prospective buyers with no down payments, a much more attractive deal than the standard first-month, last-month, and security deposit that was required to secure a city apartment.

As a result, suburban development skyrocketed, peaking in 1950 when nearly 1.7 million single-family houses were built.¹¹⁴ The most prolific developers in the country were the Brooklyn-based father-and-son team of Abraham and William Levitt, who used mass-production techniques to build whole towns in record time. Their first “Levittown” was on Long Island, and it had 17,400 houses with eighty-two thousand residents. New York City families waited in line for days to purchase homes in Levittown, with fourteen hundred contracts being drawn up on a single day in 1949.¹¹⁵ And each and every one of them was for a white family.

Levittown leases included a clause that read, “The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.”¹¹⁶ However, this wasn’t just a personal prejudice of the Levitts; it was a structural practice pushed by the government. The same Federal Housing Authority manual that listed “unsatisfactory domestic relationships” as a reason to deny mortgage applications also took into account whether the neighborhood had “inharmonious racial groups.”¹¹⁷ Integration was seen as a potential indicator of future community strife, which could in turn lead to defaulting on a mortgage. To qualify for FHA funding, most building developers simply didn’t build any homes for people of color at all. Even when people of color had the money and the desire to leave the city, they thus rarely had the option to do so. Out (or too-obvious) queer people, particularly queer people of color, were left with even fewer options. They were considered unfit for the suburbs and for the projects, while their old neighborhoods had been destroyed to make way for both.

By 1950, suburbanization had become a crisis, leading The New York Times Magazine to publish an article with the blaring headline “The Suburbs Are Strangling the City.” Its author detailed how “the outer neighborhoods of commuting New Yorkers—comprising 40 percent of the total population and increasing daily—are living on the lifeblood of the central city without contributing the nourishment necessary to sustain it,” in the form of tax dollars.¹¹⁸ Not only did they use all the elements of the city that dwellers of the five boroughs did—the police, the fire department, public transport, hospitals, parks, etc.—these commuters also required more and more car-friendly roads and parking lots. These would be provided by Robert Moses.

If you look at a map of modern Brooklyn, you’ll see a ring of roads that separates the waterfront from the rest of the borough—primarily the Shore Parkway, the Gowanus Expressway, and the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, along with on-ramps for the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge and the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. To a large extent, these roads made it possible for suburb dwellers on Long Island to work and play in New York City. They also completely cut off the waterfront from the rest of Brooklyn—and they were all built by Robert Moses between 1934 and 1960, or approximately the years when most of queer Brooklyn collapsed in on itself. To ensure that the flow of traffic was mostly one-way, enabling wealthier suburbanites to access the city, but not vice versa, Moses built the connecting highway on Long Island—the Southern State Parkway—with overpasses too low to accommodate the city’s public buses.

The waterfront wasn’t just becoming physically isolated; it was also becoming economically isolated. The development of container shipping in New Jersey in the early 1950s made it easier and cheaper to off-load ships there than in Brooklyn, in much the same way that the port of Brooklyn itself had eclipsed lower Manhattan in the late 1800s. When the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, it made the now-ancient Erie Canal—the critical artery that had connected Brooklyn shipping to the rest of the country for 130 years—obsolete. As the Seaway was being built, the Port of New York Authority estimated that it would annually divert 1.5 million tons of cargo away from Brooklyn; cost the city some additional $15 million in federal taxes for upkeep; wipe out the jobs of some four thousand Brooklyn longshoremen; and destroy or vastly scale back “hundreds of thousands” of other jobs that were dependent on shipping trades in Brooklyn.¹¹⁹ This would help set the stage for the financial crisis that engulfed the city in the mid-1970s.

Together, these housing and transit policies radically altered the demographics of Brooklyn. While the population steadily declined through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the borough went from 96 percent white in 1940 to 73 percent white by 1970. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, a record 856,000 people (or about 12 percent of the population) left New York City.¹²⁰ This intense churning tore apart the existing communities (including queer ones) that had developed in Brooklyn over the last hundred years of steady growth and prosperity. In the long term, new residents would establish their own queer institutions and locales, in such areas as Crown Heights (home to the Starlite Lounge, a bar for queer black Brooklynites for decades) and Park Slope (where a large lesbian community would form in the 1980s). However, the building up of a new community takes time, leaving a gap in history before these new institutions appeared. The only thread of Brooklyn’s older queer waterfront-related communities that survived through these trying times was the oldest, most established, and wealthiest queer area in Brooklyn: Brooklyn Heights. Even the Heights, however, was not completely immune to the pressures experienced by the rest of the borough.

In 1945, Robert Moses attempted to send the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway (BQE) shooting through the heart of the Heights. In a rare setback for the master builder, his plan was opposed by residents, who called on allies all the way up to Eleanor Roosevelt to defeat the proposal. (A decade later, Moses would experience similar resistance in Manhattan, when urban-planning activist Jane Jacobs successfully opposed his plan to put a four-lane highway through Washington Square Park.) Instead, the BQE was shunted much closer to the waterfront. Moses then built an on-ramp that destroyed some of the area’s most important queer history. In one vicious swoop, he knocked down 110 Columbia Heights—where Washington Roebling, Hamilton Easter Field, Emil Opffer, and Hart Crane had all resided—and most of Middagh Street, including February House. George Davis, the last of the original residents remaining, was finally compelled to leave Brooklyn. In 1951 he married his good friend Lotte Lenya, both as a way of taking care of each other and as a cover for his perhaps too-open lifestyle in previous decades, and he died of a heart attack in Berlin in 1957.

With the destruction of February House, Brooklyn Heights lost the reputation it had gained as an international destination for artists of all kinds. However, while it may have dropped off the mental map of the global queer intelligentsia, it continued to have a strong (if sub rosa) queer presence. In many ways, the Heights was the one place in Brooklyn where “Bohemians” could thrive even in straightened postwar circumstances—as Thomas Painter was shocked to discover when he moved into the storied St. George Hotel in 1953. Painter moved because his job with the city transferred him to the courthouse in Brooklyn Heights. He was excited to find that the area still had a mix of the run-down, the disreputable, and the genteel, telling Alfred Kinsey it was “like Greenwich Village” in the 1930s.¹²¹ Painter liked living at the hotel because it was anonymous yet lively, making it easy to bring home tricks without putting himself in danger. Moreover, he quickly discovered that the hotel was a popular cruising ground, as it had been when Hart Crane and his friends lived in the area thirty years earlier. “Les fleurs du mal flourish in this hotel,” he wrote with surprise, despite the fact that from the outside “it seems to be a terribly stuffy joint.”¹²² Given Painter’s wide knowledge of queer New York, and his intimacy with members of February House, his surprise about the 1950s gay scene in the Heights suggests that it was already well hidden.

After the BQE was completed, Painter discovered that the Promenade, a long scenic walkway built to hide the BQE and provide Heights residents with a view of Manhattan, was quickly turning into a gay cruising ground. He groused that it was “pure homosexual,” however, and lacked the trade that interested him.¹²³ According to Martin Boyce, the Stonewall veteran, the Promenade would be one of the few places in Brooklyn that still had a citywide gay reputation by the time of the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

Thomas Painter was still living at the St. George Hotel on the afternoon of March 7, 1955, when a city investigating committee grilled him about his work for Kinsey, and whether he was now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Although they didn’t ask directly, he could tell they were trying to ascertain whether he was gay.¹²⁴ Within a year, he would be abruptly—and without reason—asked to leave his job at the court, becoming one of the innumerable hidden victims of Senator McCarthy’s purge. Without a job keeping him in Brooklyn, he moved back to Manhattan, where the majority of the Puerto Rican men he now associated with were living. Brooklyn was no longer on his queer map either.

Yet queer artists were still to be found in the Heights. Just three blocks away from the St. George Hotel lived the married couple Willard Maas and Marie Menken, who created one of the first American experimental art films, Geography of the Body, in 1943. The pair was famously alcoholic, and although devoted to each other, they fought often—primarily over Menken’s two miscarriages and Maas’s bisexual philandering. Their fights would be immortalized in their friend Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.¹²⁵

Together, Menken and Maas created the Gryphon Group, an experimental film collective. Although Menken was the heterosexual of the pair, she had the larger effect on queer culture. A tall woman with a commanding presence, Menken began as a painter, but made her mark as a filmmaker. Her films were often non-narrative and visually evocative, using collage, animation, stop-motion, and cut-up techniques. In the 1960s, she would become a mentor to two of the most important queer filmmakers of a generation: Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. In his book Popism, Warhol described Maas and Menken as “the last of the great bohemians.”¹²⁶

Anger lived with Maas and Menken for about three months in 1963, during which time he visited Coney Island and met an Italian biker gang. Anger was fascinated by their “hand-customized bikes” with incredible details such as “surrealist shark-like tail fins.” He was also fascinated by their handsome leader, Bruce Byron. The bikers inspired Anger’s film Scorpio Rising, which Byron starred in.¹²⁷ A film critic for The New Yorker called it “by far the best of the so-called underground movies.”¹²⁸ But Scorpio Rising would be Anger’s only film set in Brooklyn, and like Maas, Menken, and Warhol, most of his public, artistic life would happen in Manhattan, or outside New York entirely. The same was true for two other prominent Heights gay artists: Oliver Smith and Truman Capote.

Truman Capote in the backyard of Oliver Smith’s Brooklyn Heights home. (Photo by David Attie.)

In 1953, the same year that Thomas Painter moved into the St. George Hotel, set designer (and former February House resident) Oliver Smith purchased a gorgeous Greek revival mansion at 70 Willow Street. The luxurious yellow brick villa was nearly the oldest remaining home in the neighborhood. Perhaps to hark back to the harbor views he’d once had at 7 Middagh Street, Smith placed his studio in the attic. From 1955 to 1965, he rented out the basement apartment to his good friend Truman Capote, who likened its lush, secluded garden to his native Louisiana.

Here Capote would write both Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, as well as his 1959 essay for Holiday magazine, “Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir.” Famously, he opened the piece with the words “I live in Brooklyn. By choice.” Like nearly every other artist who lived in the Heights, Capote extolled its long artistic and literary histories as some of the virtues that drew him to the neighborhood. However, he also worried about what we would today call its rapid and recent gentrification, writing:

Soon after the war, the Heights commenced attracting a bright new clientele, brave pioneers bringing brooms and buckets of paint: urban, ambitious young couples, by and large mid-rung in their Doctor-Lawyer–Wall Street–Whatever careers, eager to restore to the Heights its shattered qualities of circumspect, comfortable charm.¹²⁹

Soon, disagreements between those new up-and-comers and the neighborhood’s established queer residents would spill out all over the pages of the local paper, the Brooklyn Heights Press. They revealed a gay community of surprising size and acceptance for the era—one that would be almost completely forgotten by the time of the Stonewall Riots.

It began in October 1962, when a Heights resident sent in an “omnibus” of complaints to the Press. Point two on his list was “The Heights Peace Corps—Homosexuals.” The author complained that he had been reduced to taking women with him when he went on his nightly stroll to protect him from advances by the “Princes of the Promenade.” “When I go walking on a cold night—alone—and one of those misbegotten pansies starts to try and find out if I am a foot warmer,” he threatened, “I’m going to belt him, or her, or it, right in the chops!”¹³⁰

In the next issue, multiple Heights residents responded in protest. Shockingly, all of them signed their names, showing a surprising willingness to defend homosexuality in public. One writer urged the police to crack down on heterosexual couples, who were frequently being seen “loving it up in a most flagrant and disgusting manner.” A second said that the writer of the original letter is “on another planet” and recommended that he read the Constitution. A third suggested he simply try saying “no.”¹³¹

Responses continued in the next issue as well. This new round of letter writers wasn’t just protesting the first letter, they were actually celebrating the Heights’s diversity. “You see every race and creed on these streets—but they have something in common,” said one, “taste and intelligence.” It noted that the original letter writer had mentioned his Syrian heritage and suggested that his own experiences with discrimination might open his eyes to the plight of the homosexual. A married father of two with many gay friends wrote that he was “distressed by the uncouth condemnation of our Brooklyn Heights homosexuals,” saying he found “most of them to be cultured, quiet, and amiable, a credit to our community.”¹³² No residents wrote to support the original author, or if they did, the Press didn’t publish the letters. The next year, however, a less lopsided debate would take over the letter section, suggesting that even the Heights was getting less tolerant with time.

In the fall of 1963, the police began an extended crackdown on homosexuals in Brooklyn Heights, which eventually caused the closure of Tony Bonner’s Heights Supper Club, a popular neighborhood restaurant. Tony Bonner had been a photographer during World War II, and afterward he settled down in Brooklyn, where he helped launch a couple of other restaurants, before going in with some backers to open the Supper Club at 80 Montague Street in 1950. The Supper Club would be the first gay bar in Brooklyn (and by this I mean what we would today think of as a gay bar, not the queer-friendly trade bars that existed in such places as Coney Island and on Sands Street).

The motto of the Supper Club was “Where it’s never too late to dine,” because although it opened at 3:00 p.m., it was known for its late hours. The fare was fancy for the day, heavy on seafood, with Asian and Italian influences. The rather intimate room was mostly given over to long rows of two-person tables. A decorative wrought-iron screen of lacy leaves acted as a proscenium separating the dining area from the small “cocktail lounge.” Bonner had snagged the screen from the nearby Temple Bar Building when it was being reconstructed and installed it himself.¹³³ Candles were on every table, a tiny piano was next to the bar, and sprays of fake flowers were in the corners. During the day, it was a place to see and be seen for the neighborhood’s society women.

It’s impossible to say when exactly it became a gay bar, but a suggestive note in the Brooklyn Heights Press hints that it might have been around July 1953, when Bonner bought out his backers. As sole proprietor of the Supper Club, the unsigned article noted, he planned to “manage it in the manner to which his many friends have become accustomed.”¹³⁴ Given the Press’s gay-friendly coverage, this seems like a nod to those in the know. On the one-year anniversary of becoming sole owner, Bonner celebrated with a champagne fountain and a twenty-six-dish buffet.¹³⁵

Regardless of when it began catering specifically to gay men, the Supper Club was certainly an established gay bar by December 1963, when The New York Times reported that its liquor license had been revoked for being a “homosexual haunt” that had been “repeatedly raided by the police.” The chairman of the State Liquor Authority (SLA) called the Supper Club one of the city’s “notorious congregating points for homosexuals and delinquents.” According to the SLA, the bar had a system of lights that were flashed on whenever a suspected police officer attempted to gain entry, to warn “the boys to stop dancing with one another.”¹³⁶

The Times article listed a number of areas in the city that were known for being thronged with “identifiable homosexuals.” Although the article centered on a bar in Brooklyn, its author did not include the Heights, or any other neighborhood outside Manhattan, on this list of early gayborhoods.

These arrests were hotly debated in the Brooklyn Heights Press. Again, the first letter was a complaint. “Homosexuals project their ‘femininity’ to the nth degree on the street,” the letter raged, before suggesting that all homosexuals were prostitutes and pedophiles, and congratulating the police on their efforts. The author made specific reference to the changing character of the neighborhood, writing “as for the homosexual in Brooklyn Heights, I consider him a menace—economically as well as morally.… In my seven years in Brooklyn Heights, I have seen it change from a fag haven to respectability and back again.”¹³⁷ Another letter writer railed that society had become too tolerant of homosexuals, and that they were now repressing heterosexuals by existing in public. Tellingly, both of these letters went unsigned—as a series of signed responses pointed out in the next issue. One author mocked them as “individuals who are reluctant to accept public responsibility for their views,” before stating that “the neighborhood has had a significant and growing homosexual population” since at least the time the BQE was built.¹³⁸

The final word on the debate was an unsigned article by the Press editors, bluntly titled “Homosexuality,” which avoided the moral and legal issues and focused instead on facts. “Despite the differences of opinions,” they wrote, “no one denied that homosexuals in large numbers were frequenting several bars in the Heights.” The editors’ main complaint was that The New York Times, in “listing areas where homosexual colonization is high,” had left the Heights off the list.¹³⁹

Already, queer Brooklyn was being forgotten. Tony Bonner’s Supper Club never reopened. In 1965, when a writer for the Press suggested banning Walt Whitman in schools because of his sexuality, protests would again flood the letters section—but none of them would mention the local gay community. In fact, after 1963, the issue of gays in the Heights seems never to be mentioned in the Press again. A 1969 gay guide to the city would mention two other bars in the Heights, but it seems that they no longer enjoyed the approbation, or even recognition, of the greater neighborhood.

By this point, most of the midcentury artists who had given Brooklyn cultural cachet before and during World War II were gone. Truman Capote moved back to Manhattan in 1965, as did the poet Marianne Moore in 1966. Willard Maas and Marie Menken remained in Brooklyn Heights, but their prestige had long since been eclipsed by that of their protégés, and they would die within days of each other right around New Year’s Eve, 1971. Oliver Smith also stayed in Brooklyn, but he conducted most of his public life in Manhattan, and his mansion never became the kind of artistic commune he’d had in February House. By the time the Stonewall Riots rolled around on June 28, 1969, queer people remained in Brooklyn, but no part of Brooklyn—not the Heights, or what remained of Sands Street, or even Coney Island—was considered “queer” in the public imagination.

Queer Brooklyn could be likened to a canary in a coal mine—a small, fragile thing whose passing indicated larger dangers. Since 1800, Brooklyn had been on a growing, upward trajectory, but after World War II, its population shrank. From 1950 to 1960, it lost over one hundred thousand residents, and from 1960 to 1970, it lost twenty-five thousand more. And that’s just counting the change in the total population, not the thousands of residents who left and were replaced. The waterfront, which had been the economic engine that enabled so many queer people to build lives in Brooklyn over the last hundred years, would cease to be the borough’s defining element of prosperity. Although queer people would obviously continue to live and work in Brooklyn as they always had, a major moment of disjuncture was created in the infrastructure, loci, and visible evidence of queer people in the borough.

Around the time Bonner’s Supper Club closed in Brooklyn Heights, the Starlite Lounge opened in Crown Heights, and slowly became an underground institution in the city’s black queer community. In the eighties, Park Slope would be rechristened “Dyke Slope” thanks to the large number of queer women living there (and still today, one of the city’s few lesbian bars, Ginger’s, can be found in the Slope on Fifth Avenue). Williamsburg, a neighborhood just one stop from Manhattan on the subway, would become a hot spot for artists in the 1990s, some of them queer. These and other new queer institutions set the stage for Brooklyn to become the queer arts mecca it is today, but they were only dimly connected to the century of history that came before them, if they were at all. In the 1980s, when the queer magazine The Advocate published an article about queer Brooklyn, one Heights resident even went so far as to say that the gay history of Brooklyn Heights started in the 1960s—mistaking a midpoint for a beginning.¹⁴⁰

These new communities were also disconnected from the queer world of Manhattan, which became more insular as the city (and country) became increasingly more dangerous for queer people. Brooklyn would no longer exist on the queer mental map of the city, at least for most people outside the borough. In the popular imagination, Brooklyn post-1950 was reduced from the “second city of the Empire” to Manhattan’s rinky-dink sister—a place people came from, but never went to. When Brooklyn was represented, it was as poor, provincial, and resoundingly heterosexual, a world of mooks and molls, race riots, and insular Orthodox Jews. But mostly, it was just never talked about. Pick a random book about “New York City” history, and chances are, it will mention Brooklyn (or any borough other than Manhattan) sporadically if at all. The chance that it talks about the queer history of Brooklyn? Nearly zero.

But nothing lasts forever, even silence. If this history shows one thing, it is the resourcefulness of queer desire, which found ways to express itself long before America even had words for it. With the dawn of the new millennium, queer Brooklyn has rebounded with a fierceness and a cultural relevance that now threatens at times to outshine Manhattan. In 2011, the American Cultural Survey found that the area of New York City with the highest proportion of same-sex households wasn’t Chelsea or Greenwich Village, but a ten-block area along the waterfront between Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights.¹⁴¹ On television, NBC has a half-hour sitcom called Champions, which focuses on a young, queer boy of color being raised by his father and uncle, above the gym they own in Brooklyn. And in downtown Brooklyn, an organization called the Red Umbrella Project (which was founded by queer women) empowers and advocates on behalf of sex workers—not far from where Gustave Beekman’s brothel was once raided during the Swastika Swishery.

New queer history is being written; old queer history is being restored to its proper place. Let us hope that this time, it is written in indelible ink; in sweat and blood; in hopes and tears; in letters one hundred feet tall that will never be forgotten.