Читать книгу Spine Intact, Some Creases - Victor J. Banis - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

WHERE THE BEE SUCKS, THERE SUCK I

(Shakespeare, If You Want to Know)

We knew from the very first, from the moment we saw them on the sidewalk outside, that they were going to come in, though we tried to reassure ourselves otherwise.

Roughs, some called them. Punks by any name, under age thugs whose growing bodies had left their redneck minds behind. You could follow their thinking by watching, as we did from a darkened window, their changing expressions; A party. Maybe they’ll invite us in. Wait, what kind of party is this? Hell, it’s a bunch of queers. We oughta go in there and kick their asses.…

Which they do, kicking down doors, smashing dishes, glasses, bottles, throwing food on the floor, demanding money and watches and rings, punching a few noses here and there and even breaking a window before departing, not entirely unscathed—one walks with a pronounced limp, as a result of a bad kick in his crotch, and two are bleeding, one profusely. They take the beer and the booze with them, and threaten to come back another time.

The Indianapolis police arrive just minutes later. “They can’t be more than a block or so away,” Ernestine, our hostess, naively insists, but the cops, two burly, sweaty men in blue—older, bigger versions of the boys who have just left, it occurs to me—take their time surveying the damage and questioning the remaining guests. They want to know who phoned the police, but no one says. I stay carefully out of sight. I am underage, just sixteen, and sure to be taken in if noticed.

Finally, they tell Ernestine that she is under arrest. Ernestine is straight, but she likes to hang out with the gay boys. She is disbelieving at first, but finally comes to realize the cops mean what they say; this isn’t a joke on their part—do they look like they are kidding?

They take her away. When they are gone, a chorus of voices wants to know who called the police. I did, but I make no admission and avoid all eyes.

Lesson learned. Our kind don’t call the cops. They will never, ever, be on our side.

* * * *

Of all the decades of the twentieth century, probably none has taken a worse rap than the fifties. Yet, having lived through them, I can tell you that there was much about that period that was wonderful indeed.

It was the last “Golden Age” of opera, for instance. Callas and Di Stefano were knocking audiences out, as were Milanov and Bjoerling, Tebaldi and Tucker, De Los Angeles and Del Monaco, and an astonishingly long list of others.

If you liked your music on the lighter side, you could listen to Sinatra, Sarah, Ella, or Rosemary (we had Perry Como too, and he was a fine singer, but let’s face it, when your career peaks at “hot diggety, dog diggety, boom what you do to me,” the chances of your becoming a legend are slim). Patsy Cline and Hank Williams were going Crazy, and crossing over from the country charts, while a whole new breed of performers—Elvis and Little Richard (with a little known guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, backing him up), Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly—were setting the stage for the rock and roll era.

At the movies, we had Marilyn and Ava and Lana and Rita, not to mention Rock and Marlon and Montgomery and the endless rebel himself, James Dean. You could drive to your favorite theater in one of those fabulous cars; American cars ruled the world, great metal sculptures with names that sang to the ageless boy in all of us—Wildcat, Clipper, Hawk. (Who could possibly get excited about cars like Escort or Prizm? Or, worse yet, Passatt? That sounds like someone breaking wind, doesn’t it?)

Didn’t feel like going out? Stay home. It was the “golden age” of television, too. Lucy and Jackie were blowing home audiences away and Dinah Shore was blowing kisses. Playhouse Ninety and Lux Video Theater and others offered the likes of The Days of Wine and Roses and Twelve Angry Men and Requiem for a Heavyweight, all original live tv dramas. And every Sunday night came with its own “really big show.”

Alternatively, you could curl up and read. Say, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Or if it was more to your taste, Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious.

Julia Child had not yet ignited that whole foodie thing but there were good restaurants where you could count on a real steak and maybe pan-fried chicken, practically non-existent by the end of the twentieth century. Every bartender knew how to make a real martini and the banana sidecar and Sex-on-the-Beach had not yet sullied that noble profession.

All of which is to say that, contrary to what you might have heard, the fifties were practically a time of Heaven on earth. Unless, of course, you needed to think or feel or give in to your sexual urges. Well, nothing is quite perfect, is it?

For the gay man or woman these were the dark ages, only more so. Homosexuality had always been officially frowned upon but in the twenties and thirties no one seemed to give it much mind, and in the forties the war made everyone horny, the way wars do.

Unfortunately, by the fifties everyone had gotten their rocks off. Like the randy jock who agrees to a blow job and when it’s over remembers that he disapproves of that sort of thing, by the fifties some of the same men who had paused a decade earlier in a dark doorway for a quickie were now pounding their pulpits and denouncing those who had knelt before them so adoringly.

It’s difficult for those who grew up after the sixties to comprehend the world in which gays lived before the revolution. It wasn’t just gay activities that were illegal—the simple fact of being or even appearing gay was often enough to get you arrested; indeed, in some states, Florida for instance, it was against the law just to be homosexual, practicing or not.

In San Francisco, one of the country’s more tolerant cities, a homosexual could be arrested for loitering at a place of business—which is to say, if a police officer thought you were looking with too much interest at the wrong buns you could be pinched at your local bakery, whether anything was cooking or not.

In California a third arrest required you to register as a sex offender and that label was with you for life. Sadly, you didn’t have to engage in sexual activity to become a “sex offender.” I had one friend who was cruised in a park restroom. He told the individual who approached him, “Honey, don’t you know that you can get arrested for that in a place like this?” And, boom, next thing he knew there were handcuffs on his wrists. It wasn’t safe even to turn down a pass in those places.

It was dangerous just to be in a gay bar. You could be sitting in a beer bar on a rainy weeknight, alone and speaking to no one, when the police, uniformed and plain clothes, might appear, going along the bar and picking patrons at random—”You—and you—and you” who were arrested for lewd conduct.

In those days before court-appointed attorneys it could be all but impossible to find anyone to represent you on a gay-related charge. Even in Los Angeles there were only one or two attorneys you could turn to. One of those, a woman who was known as much for her flamboyant hats as for her legal skills, automatically pleaded you to disturbing the peace. The fine was $600.00, but you avoided jail or sex registration and had only a misdemeanor charge on your records.

I was lucky. I avoided public restrooms except in direst emergency, when I neither spoke to nor looked at anyone. And I was at a couple of those “walkthroughs” in the bars so I know whereof I speak, but I was not arrested. I liked to think, “There but for the grace of God,” but I was ever so mindful of his evident lack of grace for the less fortunate. Nevertheless, until Sioux City, as I have said, my only real legal difficulty was that divorce case back in Dayton.

1950 was a black year in gay history (it was also not a very gay year in black history but that’s another subject). In that year the chief of the vice squad in Washington, D.C. charged publicly that the federal bureaucracy currently employed what he estimated at 3,500 sex perverts—300 to 400 of them in the State Department.

When Senator Clyde Hoey (a classic name-freakism if I’ve ever seen one) of North Carolina looked into the matter, he found no fewer than 4,954 perverts, mostly in the armed services. And to think military heads in the nineties were worried about their boys showering with homos! In 1950 you dropped the soap at your own peril.

Not to be outdone by anyone’s Hoey, J. Edgar Hoover came up with a staggering 14,414 federal workers whose backgrounds were “suspect.” Armed with these numbers, he got additional money from Congress to start his “Sex Deviates” program. Handsome FBI agents in sexy costumes began to spend their time cruising in gay bars and clubs—a tactic that police would employ right into the present era. Talk about a cushy job. Soft lights, good music, the occasional blow-job—and no nasty robbers taking potshots at you. Oh, a jealous queen might try to scratch your eyes out, but you have to expect some downside.

You can be sure that some of the information these dedicated cruisers gathered went into their own little black books. You never knew when you might be faced with a cold, lonely night.

The rest of it went into Hoover’s files and was used to warn colleges and law enforcement agencies, among others, of the dangerous perverts within their organizations. The rationale for this was that as homosexuality was illegal, the knowledge of an individual’s homosexuality made him subject to blackmail. That this threat could be negated by removing the legal constraints on homosexuality seemed not to have occurred to anyone at the time.

It was not until 1977, by the way, that the Sex Deviates files were destroyed—or at least we are told they were destroyed. No one ever said what happened to those little black books. By that time the official files numbered between a quarter and a half million pages. To put that in perspective, think of each page as the potential ruin of a life, the destruction of a career. Sadly, there were many for whom the tragedy was more than “potential.”

Things got worse. In 1954 the crusaders turned their attention to the comic books, beloved of the nation’s youngsters and not a few oldsters as well. As early as 1948, New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham had launched his attack on the comic book industry, charging that comic books created juvenile delinquents and made perverts of their youthful readers. Wertham was a senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals of New York City, and treated mostly troubled children. He found that without exception these children were reading comic books—nearly all children did in those days. Wertham saw a cause and effect in action. Comic books were teaching these youngsters that crime pays, good doesn’t always win over evil, and authority figures needn’t be taken too seriously.

At first no one had taken him too seriously. Undeterred, in 1954 in his book Seduction of the Innocent he broke the news to the unsuspecting world that Batman and Robin were gay, pointing out their “sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases.” Even the presence of Alfred, the butler, was somehow proof of the pair’s perversion, though personally I don’t recall a single comic book that showed the three of them in bed together. “Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown,” Wertham pouted. “It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Well, yes, now that I think of it, if it weren’t for that pesky Penguin.…

Robin is described as “a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown [with] bare legs […] devoted to nothing on earth […] as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.”

Frankly, it would seem to me that a genital region “discreetly evident” would be preferable to one flagrantly evident but what do I know about costumed ephebes? I’ve never had one devoted to me in that way. Certainly not one in tights.

As for the presence of women, there is only “the Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip.” I can only thank God the man never visited San Francisco’s late September Folsom Street Fair, high holy days for the leather set. I shudder to think what he would make of some of those ladies and I am sure many of them have never even seen a comic book.

Don’t think it was only this lavender duo who were corrupting innocents, either. Captain America had his young Bucky, the Torch had Toro, and the Green Hornet almost never went out at night without Cato. Practically every superhero had his little boy wonder. Granted, Cato was the Green Hornet’s servant, but we have all heard about backstairs romances. What is certainly apparent is that adoption agencies in those days were quite liberal when it came to pairing up bachelors and young male wards.

Nor did the women come off Scot free. In Wertham’s opinion, Wonder Woman was “a frightening image […] her followers are the gay girls.” To be honest, most of the gay girls I knew got turned on to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I think it was the animal skin teddies, which you have to admit are sexier than bulletproof bracelets.

Wertham made no mention of Superman but I think we can agree that those blue tights and the red skimpies were a giveaway. Be honest now, how many genuinely straight men can you picture gadding about town in that get up? The cape alone would raise eyebrows almost anywhere west of Greenwich Village.

Seduction of the Innocent launched a full scale investigation in Congress, headed by Senator Estes Kevauver. Can you see the scene? The busy Senator comes home for the evening and his wife asks, “Estes, darlin”, what matters of world importance did you deal with today?” and he replies, “Little honey, today my fellow Senators and I got into that Rascally Robin’s padded tights. That’s the last time he’ll give Batman a hand.”

Well, all right, what he actually did say, in addressing the opening session of the Senate Subcommittee to investigate Juvenile Delinquency, in 1954, was “The Subcommittee wishes to reiterate its belief that this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children a concentrated diet of crime, horror and violence.”

With that, they were off and running. It’s hard now to think anyone could have taken all this seriously, but Wertham had proved to be good at exploiting the press and arousing librarians, teachers, parents and churches.

Wertham described comic books as a “correspondence course in crime […] a distillation of viciousness […] the world of the strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief.” Frankly, I think that is rather a harsh description of Donald Duck, though those nephews could be pretty feisty.

Yes, true, there was stronger stuff, too, and admittedly the comic book industry didn’t put many limits on their writers and artists. “Don’t chop the limbs off anybody,” DC Comics advised its authors. EC Comics—i.e., William Gaines—had practically no restrictions. In EC Comics, people suffered being devoured by rats, chopped up, skewered, buried alive, and countless other degradations, limited only by the authors’ imagination. Gaines argued before the subcommittee that even children could tell the difference between fiction and reality.

* * * *

In 1952, George Jorgensen, an ex-GI, set aside his Batman comics long enough to travel to Denmark for a sex-change operation, coming home as Christine Jorgensen. This only fueled the anti-gay hysteria sweeping the country. In the 1956 presidential race Walter Winchell would cry that “a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen,” which truly made no sense at all. It’s doubtful if the two even met, and so far as I know Stevenson had no plans to name Jorgensen to his cabinet had he been elected. What post would it have been? Secretary of Lingerie and Make Up? (“My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you frankly about the Menace of Mascara.…”)

The problem had become, who was a real man to trust? Not his Washington bureaucracy apparently, where perverts skulked beneath every desk, like early Monica Lewinskys in long pants. Not the men in military uniform, any one of whom might be a WAAC at heart, nor the comic book superheroes, when the increase in pulse rate they inspired might rouse Walter Winchell’s suspicions. And now not even his women, who might merely be physically altered male sex perverts.

Elvis Presley’s hip shaking caused him to be labeled “morally insane.” In San Francisco, poet Allen Ginsberg was charged with obscenity and put on trial for his Howl. Almost everywhere they looked the crusaders found someone at whom to point a finger. Holy Moley, was everyone a deviate?

Well, yes, probably so, since the media made a habit of lumping together every sort of sexual nonconformity under the general label “sex deviates.” So adulterers, peeping toms, flashers, cross dressers, masturbators, homosexuals, foot fetishists, and users of dirty words were in the same boat as rapists and those who molested and murdered little boys and girls.

And, oh yes, Seduction of the Innocent and the ensuing Congressional hearings all but destroyed the once booming comic book industry. In the forties a comic book might sell as many as six million copies, sometimes even more—and remember, the population was much smaller then. Today a bestseller means 100,000 copies. This was done, you understand, in the name of wiping out juvenile delinquency.

And it worked, didn’t it, at least in part? You can prowl the streets today of almost any major American city and you will be hard pressed to find a single juvenile delinquent wearing a cape.

Shazam! Welcome to the fifties, Beav!

(And I still say Spiderman looks like he’s humping in most of those pictures.)