The Martin Duberman Reader (27 page)

Cory may not have been entitled to his claim of absolute originality in applying the minority concept to homosexuals. As early as 1921, Kurt Hiller, the left-wing German homosexual activist, had suggested something similar; and Harry Hay, the pioneering American gay radical, expressed much the same notion at much the same time Cory did. Yet it remains indisputably true that
The Homosexual in America
gave the “minority” concept wide circulation for the first time, thus laying the cornerstone for what has come to be called “identity politics.”

Read today,
The Homosexual in America
has its decidedly dated and conventional sections. For starters, its title: the book is not about the homosexual; it's about gay men, and the references in it to lesbian lives are perfunctory and ill-informed. Other offhanded orthodoxies dot the pages: “the sexual instinct . . . is usually stronger in the male”; “a permanent relationship” is the surest guide to happiness; “promiscuity” represents a flight from intimacy; the aging homosexual is a “sad specter”; and so forth. Moreover, even as
The Homosexual in America
tries to demolish many of the reigning stereotypes about the gay world, it corroborates others. Denying the standard (and still current) view that homosexuals are more prone to depression and suicide than other people, Cory nonetheless maintains that “instability and restlessness” are defining features of gay male life. Though he was able—far in advance of his day—to
see the iconoclastic stance as central to gay subcultural identity, he also negatively characterized the subculture as “fickle” and “rootless.”

Yet the original, even visionary sections of
The Homosexual in America
outweigh the conventional ones and mark its true distinction. Against the current of his day, against the deep-seated tradition of American sex-negativism, Cory insisted that there was nothing dishonorable about sexual pleasure; that the human animal was “basically, instinctually, and naturally” bisexual; that biological theories about homosexuality were mostly bad science; that there existed a well-defined gay subculture, which was all at once unassimilable to mainstream culture and “a banner bearer in the struggle for liberalization of our sexual conventions.” Cory urged homosexuals “not [to] fear the group life of the gay world. . . . It is a circle of protection. . . . Alone, you cannot change the world, but the combined efforts of many will surely effect a beneficial change.”

Cory also sounded an astute—and astonishingly contemporary—note in insisting that “many homosexuals are, in the totality of their lives, not queer people at all, and many heterosexuals are extremely queer.” He emphasized that “hard and fast categories”—homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual—are “rather meaningless oversimplifications.” Some sixty years later, such views are at the ideological heart of what is called queer theory—the latest and purportedly new advance in gay self-understanding. Who would believe it? The themes of contingency, change, and fluidity being sounded in 1951 by a frail, gnome-like perfume salesman, trapped in a quixotic body, pulled in the deepest recesses of his being between anarchic Dionysian desires and the ordered virtues of Apollonian civics.

The civics part (“Promiscuity is a flight from intimacy,” etc.) might have been less strenuously declared had Cory written in a less fearful and suffocatingly conventional time. In the early fifties, Joe McCarthy was in full, vulturish flight, political and sexual nonconformists were being purged from public and private employment alike, and not even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
would lift a finger on behalf of homosexuals. When Cory, among others, tried to win the ACLU's support in 1952, the organization informed him (as he later described it) that “if we feel our rights have been denied, we should go to the district attorney and to the grand jury and fight without their aid.”

Cory decided that “under the circumstances” the individual homosexual had little choice but to “take refuge behind the mask.” For himself at least, he couldn't justify “subjecting those close to me to possible embarrassment or injury. . . .” Yet Cory made the decision for pseudonymity ruefully, aware that he was perpetuating a vicious cycle, realizing that “until we are willing . . . to identify ourselves . . . we are unlikely to . . . break down the barriers of shame or to change public attitudes.”

But he hoped for the dawn of a different day, and at the close of
The Homosexual in America
he struck a millenarian note: “In the millions who are silent and submerged, I see a potential, a reservoir of protest, a hope for a portion of mankind. And in my knowledge that our number is legion, I raise my head high and proclaim that we, the voiceless millions, are human beings, entitled to breathe the fresh air and enjoy, with all humanity, the pleasures of life and love on God's green earth.”

Today such words may sound vacuous and trite, when for decades growing numbers have been coming out and joining up. But in 1951, secrecy and fear were in the saddle, and visionary calls to arms all but unknown. A handful, like Cory, were doing
something,
however locally or anonymously, to change the oppressive climate, but most gay people, having been dutifully socialized in self-disgust, were spending their energies and exercising their willpower in concealing or denying their sexual orientation—or trying to change it through psychotherapy. Even had the needed self-esteem and courage been in greater supply, there was, in 1951, scarcely any organized political movement to come out into.

A handful of gay men, led by Harry Hay, Rudi Gernreich (later famous as a designer), and Chuck Rowland, had just launched the tiny and secret Mattachine Society in Los Angeles—the name
taken from a medieval fraternity of unmarried townsmen. That same year of 1951, the owners of a San Francisco gay bar, the Black Cat, won the landmark right from the state Supreme Court
legally
to serve gay customers. Then, in 1953, the homosexual magazine
ONE
(and subsequently its corporate entity, ONE, Inc.) was launched in Los Angeles, followed two years later by the birth in San Francisco of the first lesbian organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, the name taken from Pierre Louys's erotic poem “Songs of Bilitis.” These organizations comprised by the midfifties the minuscule “homophile” movement. The choice of the name “homophile” over “homosexual” itself illustrates the nervous hope of these pioneers that if they emphasized the nonlustful emotions (
philia
= friendship/love) they might better win sympathy and support from the antigay mainstream—not that it was aware, or cared.

When
The Homosexual in America
was published, Sagarin's employer somehow found out about his double identity and fired him. As he lamented in a letter to Kinsey, “I lost my job . . . directly and exclusively due to the book. It is difficult to understand how any progress can be made if economic punishment is inflicted on all who protest.” (Kinsey and Cory had met briefly back in 1951 and occasionally corresponded until Kinsey's death in 1956. By mid-1952, Sagarin was using his real name when writing to Kinsey, though the level of intimacy between the two men never proceeded very far.)

Upsetting though the firing was, Sagarin did soon find another job in the cosmetics industry. Besides, the book itself proved a success. It went back to press several times during the fifties, was translated into French and Spanish, and elicited two thousand letters from readers—many of them versions of “Thank you for a ray of hope.” Writing to a member of ONE, Cory contentedly summarized his newfound notoriety: “My correspondence is from all over the world, in many languages; people beg me to read a manuscript, leave it on my doorstep, threaten me with a lawsuit for failing to return it, take offense when I tell them how bad it is, and would not
dream of paying for the return postage. Oh well, why think of the ungrateful when so many have written me letters that reassured me, if ever I needed it, that my work was worth undertaking?”

The Homosexual in America
did indeed prove a landmark for many, including a number of people who went on to play important roles in the pre-Stonewall gay movement. Randy Wicker, active in both the early black and gay civil rights struggles, told me that he considers Cory's book “the most important thing in the early gay movement. . . . I was like a religious fanatic underlining passages of the Bible. . . .” For young Jim Kepner, who joined the fledgling Mattachine Society in 1952 and became an editor of
ONE
magazine,
The Homosexual in America
was “a clarion call in the dark for gays all over the country.” Cory's book, Kepner told me, “gave a shot in the arm” to the newly formed Mattachine Society. He leapt with excitement one day when he was passing Pickwick's (the Hollywood bookstore) and saw stacks of
The Homosexual in America
displayed in the front window.

Barbara Gittings was so stirred by the book when she read it a few years after it appeared that she wrote the publisher (Greenberg, a small press that for two decades had been issuing gay novels, bringing down a post office suit on its head) for Cory's address, then went to New York City to meet with him several times. Cory told her about Mattachine and ONE, and in 1956 Gittings managed a trip to the West Coast, where she also hooked up with Daughters of Bilitis; two years later, she helped found its first East Coast chapter in New York City, was elected its first president, and later edited the pioneering lesbian periodical
The Ladder.

The impact of Cory's book carried beyond gay circles. Kinsey, pressed by Cory for some sort of endorsement, managed (with characteristic Midwestern restraint) to call it “a worthwhile addition to the factual material that is available on the subject.” Norman Mailer (with characteristic New York brio) hailed the book as revelatory. He even wrote an article about it for
ONE
magazine, in which he announced that “few books . . . [had ever] cut so radically at my
prejudices and altered my ideas so profoundly. . . . I found myself thinking in effect, ‘
My God, homosexuals are people, too
.' ”

In short order,
The Homosexual in America
became the ur-text for the pre-Stonewall homophile movement. And Donald Webster Cory became widely regarded as its “father,” an admired, celebrated figure—even if within limited circles. Sagarin slowly began to involve himself further in the embryonic public gay world—always as Cory, not Sagarin. He also—using as a subscription base the large correspondence he'd received in response to
The Homosexual in America
—set up in 1952 the Cory Book Service; it selected for subscribers a gay-themed title each month, usually of high quality (
The Poems of Cavafy
; Angus Wilson's
Hemlock and After,
Roger Peyrefitte's
Special Friendships
).

Further, Cory began to give public lectures as well, most notably a militant speech at the 1952 annual meeting of the International Committee for Sex Equality at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In it, he excoriated the puritanical view of sex and lauded Kinsey's work. But more, much more, had to be done, Cory argued at Frankfurt. He urged that efforts be made “to enlist friends among the medical, psychological, legal, and other professions,” and, as well, to educate homosexuals themselves away from self-condemnation and toward a realization of the necessity of struggling against social oppression—precisely the kind of work that the Mattachine Society would increasingly undertake during the fifties. What had been accomplished thus far, Cory said, might appear “meager.” But he stressed “the enormous importance of . . . beginnings. . . . This is a new cycle and a dynamic one. . . .”

When
ONE
magazine made its first appearance in January 1953, Cory agreed to appear on its masthead as contributing editor, a position he held for more than three years. In the most notable of the articles he wrote for
ONE,
he denounced the contempt most homosexual men held for the effeminate among them, labeling the attitude “anti-feminist, anti-woman”—for the day, strikingly phrased. He underscored, too, the irony of homosexuals “pleading
for acceptance from the world at large,” yet refusing tolerance and understanding to those effeminists within their own ranks who differed from their norm. Once again, Cory was sounding themes rare in that day, ones that continue to resonate.

Cory also distinguished between effeminacy and the “very distinctive [male] homosexual method of speech,” with which it was often confused; the latter was a special argot, an “over-distinctive pronunciation of consonants and lengthy pronunciation of vowels.” Here Cory was building on his earlier argument that homosexuals constituted a definable subculture—a matter still contested today—itemizing as well what he took to be a distinctive gay walk, stare, and handshake. He viewed these as reflexive, not conscious, and “neither masculine nor feminine, but specifically and peculiarly homosexual.”

Back in 1951, after completing the manuscript for
The Homosexual in America,
Cory had asked Kinsey to approach Harry Benjamin, the pioneering transsexual (the term transgendered is now preferred) researcher, about writing an introduction to the book. Benjamin had begged off, but had suggested Albert Ellis as a replacement. Ellis at the time was chief psychologist for New Jersey's Diagnostic Center and had just published an iconoclastic book,
The Folklore of Sex,
in which he had mocked the American need to justify sexual pleasure with an overlay of romantic rhetoric and had made the unorthodox suggestion that “society makes sick people out of ‘perverts.' ” Meeting Ellis would prove a milestone for Cory—liberatory according to some, disastrous in the eyes of homophile activists.