The Martin Duberman Reader (26 page)

In his acid essay, Sagarin derided the emergent view that homosexuals “are as healthy as anyone else,” argued that “cure” was both
possible and desirable, and denied that social oppression was the primary cause of such psychopathology as existed in the gay world. Children must continue to be taught, Sagarin insisted, that “it is better to have heterosexual than homosexual patterns.”

Donald Webster Cory and Edward Sagarin were the same person.

Edward Sagarin was born in Schenectady in 1913 to Jewish Russian immigrant parents. The youngest of eight children, he lost his mother in the flu pandemic of 1918. After his father remarried, the family relocated to New York City, but Ed got along badly with his stepmother and eventually moved out. He then lived for varying lengths of time with different members of the extended Sagarin clan. His relationship with his father never recovered, and years later Ed had to be talked into showing up for his funeral.

Born with scoliosis, a lateral curvature of the spine, Ed had a noticeable hump on the right side of his back—his “posture problem,” he would wryly call it as an adult. Frail, small, unathletic, intense, and very smart, Ed grew up with the taunts of his cookie-cutter schoolmates ringing in his ears. Children thus stigmatized often become sensitive to the pain of others bearing marks of affliction, as well as fascinated with how they cope with the world's meanspirited assaults. But sensitivity need not automatically manifest as compassion. It can also breed murderous disassociation—or an uneasy mix of empathy and repulsion, affinity for another outsider alternating with oddly erupting, unbidden distaste (the projection of self-hate).

Though money was in scant supply, Ed did go to a good high school, and then managed to spend more than a year in France (where he met Andre Gide and learned French fluently—a skill that would prove important for his future business career). On his return to the United States, Sagarin enrolled at CCNY—in the late twenties and thirties notorious for its political passion and turmoil—and became active in left-wing politics. He felt special concern over the plight of black Americans (the concern would be lifelong), and the militantly left-wing National Student League sent Sagarin and two
of its other young members (a second, ironically, the also closeted poet Muriel Rukeyser) to observe the 1933 trial in Alabama of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women. After the three students were harassed by local sheriffs, Samuel Leibowitz, chief attorney for the Scottsboro boys, appealed to them to leave town—which they agreed to do.

In 1934, approaching his twenty-first birthday, Sagarin met another young radical, Gertrude Liphshitz. A shared interest in left-wing politics initially drew the two young people together, and would always be a strong binding force between them; but their involvement deepened beyond politics, and in 1936 they married. Gert came from a warm, caring, orthodox Jewish family—itself a powerful magnet for the love-starved young Sagarin. It was also a family of activists; her father was a staunch union organizer.

Those who
casually
knew the couple during their marriage of nearly fifty years tend to describe Gert as “a Brooklyn Jewish housewife, pleasant, level-headed, practical,” a woman who took care of the home (the couple had one child, Fred), eschewed a career, and devoted her energies to her family. But those who knew the couple
well
shade the relationship quite differently. They agree that Gert assumed a traditional housewife's role, but insist she was far from the shyly hovering background figure described by those who saw the couple rarely and judged them superficially. Gert, her intimates knew, had strong opinions, freely verbalized them, and strenuously argued with Ed over this public issue or that paragraph in something he was writing. An emotionally centered, deeply principled woman, she was powerful ballast for her husband's comparative fragility. She also remained politically involved, and astute, all her life—active in nuclear disarmament groups like Women Strike for Peace, and later participating in protests against the war in Vietnam.

The Sagarins' intimates also uniformly testify to the couple's mutual devotion: “Oh, the marriage hit some rough spots of course,” one of their close friends told me, “but what marriage doesn't? The fact is, they adored each other.” In his 1951 preface to
The Homosexual in America,
Sagarin, writing as “Donald Webster Cory,” put
his decision to marry in less heated terms: in “later adolescence and early manhood . . . I struggled against my homosexuality. . . . Homosexual love, I told myself, is a myth. . . . At the age of twenty-five, after determining that I was capable of consummating a marriage (In later life, Sagarin/Cory confided to a colleague that “Gertrude is the only woman I had ever had erotic feelings towards. . . .”), I was wedded to a girl . . . who brought deep understanding to our union and who shared many interests with me.”

The tone here is decidedly cool, not at all the stuff (or so we have been taught) of a promising union. The standard cultural script calls for the surging rhythms of romance, pressing sexual passion; their absence (we are told) connotes inauthenticity and foretells disaster. Add in the fact that Sagarin, even after marriage, would lead a parallel life as an active homosexual and would keep that secret from most of the world (and for a time from his wife), and we would seem to be looking at a relationship destined to fail.

But the cultural script most sexologists agree on is full of equations too glibly drawn. Sex is not the same as love (though it risks un-Americanism to say so), nor does emotional satisfaction hinge on ecstatic passion, nor “honesty” guarantee a secure peace. Besides, the sexologists contradict themselves. They also tell us that the most reliable bedrock for an
enduring
union is not rapture and frank-heartedness but more prosaic (and scarcer) stuff: being a reliable listener, an enjoyable companion, a caring friend. And all of
that
Gert and Ed had—plus a periodic sex life as well.
They
viewed their marriage as a success. Should we presume to know better?

As for when, and to what extent, Gert became aware of her husband's second—homosexual—life, she's preferred, in our several interviews, to leave the details shrouded. One close friend of the Sagarins believes that Gert went into the marriage knowing, without ever probing for specifics, that Ed had occasional (no more than that) homosexual experiences. But other intimates believe that Gert put the pieces together at some point later in the marriage—after hearing enough rumors, or receiving an anonymous letter, or herself coming upon evidence of a homosexual tryst.

What Gert was willing to tell me was that when Ed was writing
The Homosexual in America
in 1950 (some fourteen years into their marriage), she was well aware of the nature of the project—though not, it would seem from other sources, of the extent of the personal “research” involved. Whenever it was that Gert learned the full truth, she will not discuss (with me, at any rate) the extent, if any, of her turmoil over the knowledge, the shape of the resolutions she made, the exact measure of her accommodation. Perhaps she no longer remembers. Or ever allowed herself to.

With the Great Depression, Sagarin, like many others, had to drop out of college. He held down a variety of jobs to make ends meet, including ghostwriting and editing other people's manuscripts. He also put his fluency in French to good use, handling the European correspondence for a cosmetics firm. Gradually, he branched out into sales and management, and in the process learned a great deal about the chemistry of perfumes and the technology of their production. Born scholar that he was, Sagarin turned that knowledge into the stuff of serious, deliberative inquiry. He published several consequential articles on the sense of smell, and then—characteristically eager to maximize whatever restricted opportunities came his way—managed to persuade Columbia University to let him teach an adjunct course on the chemistry of cosmetics. In the fifties, he produced a massive, three-volume collection (
Cosmetics, Science and Technology
), for which he enlisted contributions from many of the country's leading specialists.

Sagarin stayed active in the perfume industry in various capacities into the sixties (for a while he was involved with a firm in which Lena Horne was a partner) without ever finding in it a true vocation or ever making much more than a decent living at it. Martin Rieger, a Sagarin associate from those years, vividly recalls him “with his old bound briefcase, schlepping through New York City, an intelligent type who didn't fit the business at all.”

Neither Ed nor Gert ever cared much about accumulating possessions or money—it was almost a matter of political principle. The woman who edited several of Sagarin's later books, and knew
the couple well, put it to me this way: “Ed never knew how to take care of himself,” was “hopelessly naive about money” and “an easy mark” for the assorted sharks of the academic and publishing worlds; “Gert was the more practical of the two, but they were both babes in the woods.”

Donald Webster Cory believed—and most sexologists would still agree—that Alfred Kinsey's two volumes
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1952) were unmatched for their integrity, scope, and influence. Cory made no claim that
The Homosexual in America
could “stand on the same shelf” with Kinsey's work. But he did claim—and there is no reason to doubt him—that he had “conceptualized [his own book] before I had ever heard of Kinsey.” For years, Cory later wrote, “I had been impressed by the gap in the literature of homosexuality”—namely, how homosexuals “themselves felt, how they saw their lives, how they reacted to each other.”

Before Kinsey and Cory, penologists and psychiatrists had been the designated experts on the subject, and they'd used their limited clinical samples to declare homosexuality pathological. In the sixties, the professional literature became more majestically moralistic and denunciatory still, as psychiatric “experts” such as Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides joined journalists like Jess Stern (
The Sixth Man
) in producing a widely accepted portrait of homosexuality as a diseased and dangerous scourge. Hollywood would begin to confirm that image with the 1962 film
Advise and Consent,
followed by a legion of movies with simpering, vicious gay men and murderous or suicidal lesbians.

The only partial exception in the early sixties—there were none in the early fifties—were psychoanalyst Robert Lindner's several books (
Rebel Without a Cause; Must You Conform?
). Though Lindner refused automatically to conflate homosexuality with pathology (or nonconformity of any kind with mental illness), he also believed that more needed to be known about homosexuality—“the source of immense quantities of unhappiness and frustration”—so that
it could be better “eradicated.” For a less tepid and compromised view in those years one had to look to Europe and to the sympathetic works of Magnus Hirshfeld, Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis (all of which, from today's perspective, suffer from too much pseudoscience and too many confident overgeneralizations about “third sexes,” and the like).

A good deal of fiction and poetry about lesbians and gay men
had
been published before 1951—from Gertrude Stein's
Tender Buttons
in 1914 to Gore Vidal's
The City and the Pillar
in 1948. But of “insider” nonfiction, there was almost nothing before Cory's 1951 book. The chief exception was
The Intersexes
(1908) by “Xavier Mayne” (the American novelist and scholar Edward I. Prime-Stevenson), a pioneering, underappreciated survey of homosexuality which Cory did not cite in his own book. He did, however, have high praise for Gide's
Corydon,
claiming it stood as a “great” philosophical discussion of homosexuality. It was in honor of Gide that Sagarin chose his pseudonym: Don Cory—a reversal of
Corydon.
He added the Webster to avoid the possibility, given the commonness of the name, of another Donald Cory suing him.

Cory had no team of assistants, no foundation support, no academic legitimization—none of the perks that today are the commonplaces of research in sexology. He did have one volunteer, a footloose, financially independent young man named John Horton, who'd recently gotten his BA in anthropology at Columbia. Cory gave Horton two specific jobs: to look up all the laws in the forty-eight states that applied to homosexuality, and to write to each department of the federal government asking if they had figures on the numbers of homosexuals who worked for them. (The results are printed as appendices to
The Homosexual in America.
)

When I asked Horton why he thought Cory had turned to him for help, he replied, “Maybe because I had a black lover. Cory had had a number of affairs with black men. He used to boast of the frequency with which he was able to pick men up along the benches at Central Park West in the Seventies”—then a major gay male cruising ground. According to Horton, Cory would occasionally invite a
sexual partner or friend he'd grown fond of home to dinner, but he, Horton, was “the only one Gertrude thought was homosexual” (so she told her husband, who repeated it to Horton).

In the years Cory spent preparing
The Homosexual in America,
he (as he'd put it in the book) “became more and more struck” by the notion that homosexuals were, like more established ethnic, racial, and subcultural groups, a distinct and legitimate minority. This became the main thesis of
The Homosexual in America,
along with the implied corollary that homosexuals were entitled to the same rights as other citizens, and that majoritarian mistreatment—and not anything inherent in homosexuality itself—was chiefly responsible for whatever “pathology” could be found in the gay world.