SCIENTIFIC FACTS OUGHT TO BE ACCEPTED BY EVERYBODY BY definition, but as proponents of global warming and evolution know, Republican leaders under George W. Bush refused to recognize the former, and the religious right denied the latter. There’s a third inescapable scientific fact about a segment of our citizenry: gay people are gay from birth and have no choice in the matter.
Again, the religious right disagrees, contending that gays choose to be gay and as a result are damned to rot in the afterlife. It is this bigotry that led to the annihilation of the gay population in occupied Europe during the Nazi reign of terror and to bigotry in America that until the 1970s forced most gays and lesbians to keep their sexual identity a deep, dark secret. Not even famous Americans such as Rock Hudson, Johnny Mathis, or Liberace dared reveal their sexual orientation. Hudson, who once married his secretary to keep the truth from the public, did so only after contracting the AIDS virus. Liberace was outed shortly before his death by a jilted lover.
Renee Cafiero (née Pachter) is currently the secretary of the Lambda Independent Democrats, the largest gay and lesbian political organization in Brooklyn. Born in 1943 to a Jewish father and a Christian mother two years after her parents came to New York from France to escape the Nazis, Cafiero grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her father, a socialist who grew up in Berlin before fleeing to France ahead of the Nazis, during World War II worked as a translator and wrote a dictionary of Nazi terms for the U.S. government. He and his wife, Hedwig, also worked for Dissent, a quarterly magazine of the American Socialist Party. It was, and still is, an anti-Communist publication.
Renee was apolitical until she was in her twenties. After graduating from Hunter High School, she attended Queens College, where she aspired to become an opera singer. At age eighteen she fell in love with a gay man by the name of Cafiero. Their marriage lasted a year, but she kept the name because she figured that the judges of her opera singing would favor Italians.
Renee Cafiero protesting for gay rights in Lower Manhattan in 1964. Courtesy of Renee Cafiero
RENEE CAFIERO “I was going to be an opera singer, but I didn’t have the chutzpah. If you want to be an opera singer in New York City, when you go for an audition you not only have to be convinced you can do the role, you have to be convinced there is no one else in the world who can do the role, and I just never had that conviction.
“I was eighteen years old, and it was right about that time that it occurred to me that I might be bisexual or gay. My so-called husband was gay. I fell in love with this guy—including the fact he was gay. Of course, when you’re a teenager, you figure you can change the world, so I figured I would make him fall in love with me and it didn’t matter if he was gay. Before then, I had not known anything about that. Suddenly it dawned on me, with no previous knowledge whatsoever: Oh, this guy likes guys.
“The way I was raised, if you love somebody, you love them. End of story. Knowing my parents had some difficulty because they were of different religions added to my tolerance. I loved him, and he did love me. It wasn’t a question of that, but he didn’t love me in that all-encompassing way I wanted, and the marriage only lasted about a year.”
After the marriage ended, what was clear to Renee was that she preferred relationships with women to those with men.
RENEE CAFIERO “In 1964 I was casting about for a summer job, and a friend of mine said I should look into working for the Mattachine Society. He thought it was a lesbian organization, and it wasn’t. There were a few women, but it was mostly guys. They weren’t hiring anyone, but they needed volunteers, so I started giving my time.
“We had monthly programs, which were lectures, discussions, or panels. We put out a newsletter every month. We did a certain amount of agitation for change.
“I was in the first gay picket in the United States. It was in ’64, and we went to Whitehall Street to picket the Selective Service and protest the lack of gays in the military. Forty years later we still don’t allow gays in the military.
“It was a Saturday, and there was practically no one around. The few people who passed by looked at us very strangely. There weren’t any nasty comments. I don’t know why we picked Saturday, except that we all worked during the week.
“That same year, I moved to Brooklyn. I was twenty-one, and I had met a lady. A friend of mine had been telling me about his friend Nancy for quite a while. He finally introduced us. She was a writer working at the time for a literary agency. Her name was Nancy Gordon, and she’s now a very well-known writer. She wrote Annie on My Mind, one of the first lesbian novels for teenagers. Hers has survived many, many book burnings.
“Nancy lived in Brooklyn Heights, and I moved into her apartment very briefly, and then we moved into a slightly larger apartment. We were together for five years, and then she got back with her first love and has been with her ever since. They live in Massachusetts, and they got married about two years ago.
“I didn’t hide the fact I was gay. I was still in college. I really didn’t have anything to lose. Most of us felt the same way. Obviously, no celebrity would come out.
“I attended several more demonstrations sponsored by a coalition of gay and lesbian groups called ECHO—East Coast Homophile Organization. The New York Mattachine Society was one of the member groups.
“One of the projects of the Mattachine Society was to try and get the state liquor laws overturned, because at that time it was illegal to serve a homosexual in a bar. Some people went on ‘sip-ins.’ They’d go up to a bartender and say, ‘We’re gay. Serve us.’ But the bartenders kept saying, ‘Okay.’ They didn’t care. Finally, they went to one place where they found a bar owner who was afraid a police officer was lurking in the background, so he refused service, and they got some publicity out of it.
“I was never harassed by the police, but I have friends who were. I wasn’t a drinker so I didn’t go to the bars. In New York the cops did some entrapment and closed down bars, unless they got payoffs from the Mafia. All the gay bars were Mafia bars up until the 1970s. If the Mafia was paying off the cop on the block, the place didn’t get raided.
“Back then not only couldn’t you sell liquor to gays, but there was a law that same-sex people could not dance together. There also were masquerade laws, which said you couldn’t dress as the opposite gender except on Halloween. So you had drag queens dancing and drinking, and the cops had three reasons for performing a raid. And they’d load up the paddy wagons, and if they really wanted to get people in trouble, they would jail them overnight and call their employers and say, ‘Hey, your employee is in jail tonight because he was in a gay bar.’ That wasn’t very nice, because there were no antidiscrimination laws on the books. Outing often meant dismissal.
“New York was a much better place for gays than Los Angeles. In Los Angeles the cops really did numbers on gays. Why did the police do this? Paul Goodman, who was a philosopher of the 1960s, came to one of our dinners, and he talked about societal homophobia. He said, ‘In every society you have kikes, niggers, and queers. You have somebody who is going to be the one who is stepped on, because people have to see people as lower than them. People have a need for looking down on someone else.’”
In 1969 the gay rights movement began in earnest at a bar in Manhattan called Stonewall Inn. The police moved in, and the gay customers, instead of going meekly, fought back and staged a protest.
RENEE CAFIERO “The drag queens basically said, ‘Enough is enough. They fought back. I wish I had been there, but I was on the Cape, breaking up with Nancy. When we came back, I said, ‘Did anything new happen?’ ‘Oh yeah, something happened,’ and it was a source of great pride in the gay community. It was a big deal. The Mattachine Society had been working quietly through the politicians to try to get these laws changed, and all of a sudden here was this civil disobedience, and everyone began to sit up and take notice.
“It was 1969, a time when other groups—Black Power and antiwar—were demanding their rights, and finally somebody reached the breaking point and said, ‘I want my rights too.’ And they didn’t want to pursue them in a nice way anymore. The Mattachine Society had been viewed as Uncle Tomish and ‘go along to get along,’ and once people wanted to be more militant, the organization died a couple years later. It just petered out.”
Shortly after the Stonewall riot, militant groups formed, including the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance. The chant arose, “We’re out, loud, and proud.” Gay Pride parades began to gain attention from the media.
RENEE CAFIERO “I didn’t join either of those groups. After I split up with Nancy, I was a bit of a hermit for a while. There was a group that formed, called the Gay Alliance of Brooklyn. A guy by the name of Jim Jarman decided he wanted to form a Brooklyn group. He lived in Brooklyn Heights, which had quite a large gay population. He got himself a place to meet in a church, and he stood at a subway stop handing out flyers. I went. I thought, I’ve been a hermit long enough. Jim was expecting ten or twenty people and three hundred showed up.”
Things began changing for the gay and lesbian community in the early 1970s. Jill Johnston, an openly gay columnist in the Village Voice, wrote a groundbreaking book called Lesbian Nation. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association broke new ground when it declared that being gay no longer was to be considered a mental illness.
RENEE CAFIERO “People say the sixties ended in 1969, but they went on until about 1973. There was black militancy and antiwar militancy, and gay people started being tired of being in the closet. The change by the American Psychiatric Association came as a direct result of pressure from a woman by the name of Barbara Giddings. Barbara lived in Philadelphia and was active there, and she was one of the movers and shakers when we did demonstrations in Washington and Philadelphia in the 1960s. She and Frank Kameny, a World War II vet, were very active in getting the psychiatric classification changed.
“Barbara, who died in 2007, was also active with the American Library Association. She fought to get decent books on homosexuality out on the library shelves, because when I first started exploring the whole subject, I would go to the public library and try to take out books on homosexuality, and you had to ask the librarian for them. They were not on the open shelves.
Renee, left, worked on the George McGovern presidential campaign in 1972. Courtesy of Renee Cafiero
“There was no bar to taking them out. You didn’t need a note from a parent, but you had to ask for them. That was a barrier for anyone who didn’t have the guts to say, ‘I want this book.’
“I was mad enough to say, ‘Okay, I have to find out about this, and I’m mad this barrier is being put in my way. It’s not correct.’ I would ask for them, but very few people checked them out because you couldn’t be anonymous. Barbara worked on that.
“The Gay Alliance of Brooklyn lasted for a few years, but there were a bunch of us who wanted to be more political. The GAB was more a social thing. We had huge dances every couple of weeks. It was quite a phenomenon having all these out people—or semi-out people—at a dance. But a bunch of us wanted to be more politically active, wanted to talk to actual politicians, to get things done and not just dance, so in ’72 we joined the local Democratic club, the West Brooklyn Independent Democrats, and because I was female and had an Italian name, I got to be a delegate for George McGovern. I came out in the New York Times and the Daily News. I was working in the children’s book department at Harper and Row, and I warned my boss beforehand, and she approved. My boss was in the closet, but she allowed me to be out of the closet. I got a couple of weird phone calls after that from someone who read the article in the Daily News and was being snotty. Other than that I didn’t get any flak.
“That year we tried to get a gay rights plank into the ’72 Democratic platform. There were five openly gay delegates nationwide out of three thousand delegates and another two thousand alternates. We didn’t have much clout, and we got to make our presentation after the abortion presentation, which also was not in prime time but was given by Shirley MacLaine, who was quite eloquent. Shirley told us she was for gay rights but she couldn’t ask for both planks. She said, ‘We can’t get both planks, and you know which one is going to be more popular.’ [New York Congresswoman] Bella Abzug said the same thing.
“I stayed active in the West Brooklyn Democratic Club for quite a while, until there were some political problems. In 1978 the Lambda Independent Democrats was founded. Today it is the largest gay and lesbian organization in Brooklyn. I decided to move my activism to Lambda. Lambda takes up a lot of issues but looks at them mostly through a lesbian and gay prism. It’s a little more limiting, and I’m of two minds about that.
“Our club has become very successful. Brooklyn politicians clamor for our endorsements. Most of the local clubs are not very political—most people aren’t political—and somehow we manage to get things done because we are political.
“You know, people keep voting for term limits. I don’t believe in term limits. They think, My representative is great, but all those other guys, I wish they’d go away. So therefore they vote for term limits, and they find out their beloved leader has to be out too.
“We had a decent relationship with several mayors. Not that much with Ed Koch. He talked to everyone, but mostly he said, ‘How am I doing?’ We had some relationship with David Dinkins. Rudy Giuliani was elected in 1993, and we had no relationship with him, and I’m glad of that.”
One indication of the strong prejudice against homosexuality was how long it took the country to overturn the sodomy laws, which criminalized gay sex. In 1965, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law barring married couples from using contraceptives. It was the first case to recognize the right of privacy under the Constitution. The court limited its ruling to married couples, but later expanded the ruling to all heterosexual couples.
In 1986, in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, the court explicitly refused to give this privacy protection to homosexuals. Then in 1998, in the case of Lawrence & Garner v. Texas, the Texas Supreme Court struck down the state’s sodomy laws, and in 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed by a six-to-three vote. Gays no longer had to fear the police banging down their doors and arresting them for consensual sex.
RENEE CAFIERO “It took the Lawrence case to get the sodomy laws off the books. They are still fighting about that. There are still many states that have no antidiscrimination laws on the books. There are localities that have specifically voted against antidiscriminatory laws. The voters in Colorado passed a law that said no town could pass an antidiscriminatory law. I had friends who lived in Denver, and they couldn’t understand how the state could pass this amendment. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided you can’t have a law like that on the books.
“I worked against a similar bill in Maine one year. It had been put before the voters three times—the religious right kept trying—and it was defeated three times, fortunately. But they literally stood in front of the voting booth and would not let a voter in until they found out how he was going to vote. If the voter was going to vote against the amendment, their people blocked the voting booth. The cops had to come and physically remove them, and they just kept coming back. It was horrendous. This is what they mean by Christian tolerance? Excuse me.
“How can people who believe in the goodness of Jesus be so bigoted? I wish I understood it. I truly wish I understood it. It boggles my mind. I don’t get it, why someone who supposedly worships somebody who said, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ and ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s’ can then go and do the opposite? I don’t get it.
“But because of this opposition, Massachusetts is the only state that allows same-sex marriage. Canada has it. Holland does. Spain is about to. This is one thing we’ve been fighting for all along, and, interestingly, this is one fight the leaders of the movement didn’t think should be fought at this time. They thought it was too soon, and apparently for a lot of people it is, but this all came up from the grass roots.
“New York State was going to have same-sex marriage. The issue went all the way to the Appellate Court, the state’s top court, and the court said the legislature should deal with it. But it did not mandate that the legislature deal with it, which is what both Massachusetts and New Jersey did. Now those people who were decrying activist judges were saying, ‘The courts did this terrible thing in Massachusetts, and they should have left it to the legislature.’ Then you look at California. Well hey, the California legislature passed a gay-marriage law, but then the Austrian governor said, ‘No, this should be left to the courts.’ Schwarzenegger vetoed the legislation saying the legislature should not be doing this. At the same time everyone else is saying, ‘What are the courts doing?’
“Obviously it has nothing to do with either the legislature or the courts. It has to do with ‘We don’t want this,’ and I have yet to understand why if John and Mary Smith are living in one house, it harms their marriage if Dick and Tom live in the next house over and have their union made official by the government.”
According to Cafiero, getting married in Massachusetts doesn’t necessarily give partners sanctuary. Partners who marry in Massachusetts, she says, face a potentially serious scrutiny from the IRS because of their declared union.
RENEE CAFIERO “I actually asked a friend of mine who lives in Massachusetts if he and his partner were going to get married, and he said it wasn’t the right time, because what happens, when you file your state taxes, you can file jointly. But then when you file a federal return, you can’t, and that automatically looks funny to the auditors, and so you get audited. So there are all kinds of roadblocks.
“New Jersey allows civil unions instead of marriage, but what they are finding is that it doesn’t work, because there are too many gray areas where people don’t know what their rights are.
“That may change relatively quickly. We’re hoping that in New York, if we manage to elect a Democratic state senate, we should be able to push it through. At this point, the senate is Republican and the assembly is Democratic, and they hate each other. If the leadership of one says the sky is blue, the other says, ‘No, it’s brown.’
“New York City Mayor Bloomberg is wishy-washy. We had a New York City judge rule that a marriage could be performed, but Bloomberg overturned it. I don’t know how he did that, because he can’t veto a judge, but Bloomberg said no, even though he might or might not be for gay marriages. He says it should be up to the legislature, that he doesn’t want the courts to deal with it. So he talks as if he’s for it, and then he overturns the decision. That’s not wonderful. Of course, because of term limits, he’s out in 2009.”
Christine Quinn, the majority leader of the city council, will be one candidate running for mayor. Quinn, from Chelsea, is gay. One can be sure the Lambda Independent Democrats will be backing her. Meanwhile, over the years, despite the roadblocks, gays and lesbians have gained important rights. Of the top fifty Fortune 500 companies, forty-nine allow domestic-partner benefits. Only Exxon-Mobil does not.
RENEE CAFIERO “Most companies see that it’s to their benefit. They get good people that way. It makes economic sense. It has nothing to do with discrimination or being tolerant. They are looking at the bottom line, and the bottom line is they are getting good people because they are opening their doors.
“Before the merger, Mobil gave domestic-partner benefits. When Exxon acquired Mobil, they cut it out. So that was a case of actively regressing.”
It was noted that recently a number of Republicans had turned out to be gay, including Idaho senator Larry Craig, who for years campaigned against gay and lesbian rights.
Renee with friends today. Courtesy of Renee Cafiero
RENEE CAFIERO “I have to tell you that I don’t know any Republicans, but there is this myth that you can’t be gay and have any kind of public life, so you hate yourself for what you are just because of the social ramifications, and if you are in a religious right congregation, you also can’t be gay, because you’ll be damned, and so they defeat themselves because they keep trying to deny it, and then they get into these pickles. Instead of being in a loving relationship, they go out and have anonymous sex, because that’s all they can admit they can like.
“There’s a phenomenon in a lot of AIDS literature. They don’t talk about people having gay sex. They talk about men who have sex with men, and they specifically do not call them gay, because especially in the African-American and Latino communities, that’s a no-no. Even if they admit they have sex with men, they aren’t gay.
“If you remember Roy Cohn in Angels in America, he was the prototype of the self-loathing gay. In his era you might understand it, but this is 2007. Cohn and McCarthy had more gays thrown out of the State Department than Communists, because that was the way you proved you were a red-blooded, macho American.
“A couple years ago, the United Church of Christ endorsed same-sex marriage, but the Episcopal Church is being torn apart at this point, which is really too bad, because they should be happy to have people in loving, committed, monogamous relationships. But some people…I don’t get it.”
Today Renee Cafiero lives in Park Slope, which boasted such a large lesbian population for a while that the area had taken on the nickname “Dyke Slope.” Despite the greater tolerance for gays over the years, and Brooklyn’s reputation for being a borough that accepts all people, Cafiero says that gays, especially gay men, still have to be careful.
RENEE CAFIERO “I had a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and my landlords wanted the apartment, and my lawyer didn’t know what he was doing, and I lost the apartment. My mother died right about then, so I was able to sell her apartment for a ridiculous amount of money, and I bought a tiny brownstone in Park Slope. Now I don’t have a landlord who can throw me out.
“Things happen in Brooklyn. We’ve had a few assaults, incidents of gay-bashing. When I have people visiting, I say, ‘I wouldn’t worry any more than you would anywhere else.’ It’s a pretty open society in our neighborhoods. It doesn’t happen that often, but it’s still acceptable on some level, where beating on blacks or Latinos is less acceptable. I don’t know why any violence is acceptable.”