The Martin Duberman Reader (28 page)

Ellis had agreed to write the introduction for
The Homosexual in America
—and it had proven a curious one. While applauding the book as “by far the best non-fiction picture of the American homosexual” available and as a “well-warranted indictment of our smug and sadistic heterosexual persecution of homosexuals,” Ellis had disputed several of Cory's views—and in particular his “pessimism concerning the possibility of adjusting homosexuals to more heterosexual modes of living.”

Cory had argued in his book that homosexuality was “involuntary though not inborn,” and therefore not susceptible to “change”—through psychoanalysis or otherwise. Ellis believed that exclusive male homosexuality denoted a neurotic fear of women, and thus could and should be treated. (In these years, almost nobody thought lesbianism was frequent or important enough to be worth much discussion.)

Ellis's treatment goal was not the standard psychoanalytic one of
annihilating
a male homosexual's drive, but rather of adding heterosexual attraction to his repertoire of desire. He claimed a high success rate with his own patients, but never bothered to explore whether those who'd successfully “expanded their options” had actually shifted the focus of their desire or merely their outward behavior—and even in terms of behavior, how many had subsequently “backslid.” Similarly, nowhere in Ellis's voluminous writings, then or later, does he satisfactorily define the loaded terminology he casually employs (“neurosis,” “disturbance,” “inborn,” etc.), nor ever question his basic assumption that
some
degree of heterosexuality is a prerequisite for happiness. His logic remained self-enclosed: he simply defined “exclusivity” as “neurotic,” without ever offering a cogent discussion of “normalcy” as a concept, or discussing the criteria he used for recognizing it.

Ellis insisted when I talked to him that he'd never argued that
all
exclusively gay men were “disturbed”—merely “most.” Yet in tracking his writings through the decades, it becomes clear that he admitted the
possibility
of some exclusively homosexual men being non-neurotic only in the seventies, after the modern gay movement had come into existence. But it needs to be added that as early as 1954 (in his book
The American Sexual Tragedy
), Ellis took the position—remarkable for that day, or this—that “what is scientific sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander . . . that exclusive heterosexuality can be just as fetishistic as exclusive homosexuality.”

As early as 1951, moreover, Ellis, like Cory, had been arguing that heterosexual prejudice was itself of major importance in
accounting for the psychological problems sometimes found in gay people. Moreover, both he and Sagarin were scornful of the monogamous ideal, seeing it as part and parcel of a sex-negative culture, and both argued for a reevaluation of prevailing moral values that disapproved of all sexual activity not (as Sagarin put it in a 1952 article) “romantic in origin and procreative in direction.”

But for several years, some distance continued to separate the two men ideologically. Their disagreements centered on the degree to which homosexuality was “curable.” Following Kinsey, Sagarin agreed that “people can and do change their patterns of sexual life over a period of years,” and he was willing to believe “that certain psychologists can aid certain homosexuals in accepting a bisexual pattern of life.” But (doubtless thinking of his own life) Sagarin continued to insist that those able to make a bisexual adjustment nonetheless went right on feeling “a major need for gratification with their own sex”—and therefore “cannot be said to be ‘cured.' ”

Unlike Ellis, moreover, Sagarin continued to assert in the early fifties that many if not most homosexual men could not—even when they badly wanted to and underwent prolonged psychotherapy—simply “add” heterosexuality to their repertoire of desire. He also insisted that the typical homosexual “can only make a satisfactory adjustment when he is prepared completely to accept himself and his way of life, without regrets, misgivings, shame, or unconscious defense.”

By the end of the fifties, however, Ellis and Sagarin had come to hold nearly identical views about male homosexuality, with Ellis standing ideologically pat and Sagarin shifting his views in Ellis's direction. The likely explanation for the shift is that it resulted from Sagarin entering into therapy with Ellis. Ellis denies this (“It was a case of parallel evolution that we came to hold nearly identical attitudes about homosexuality”) and even denies that Sagarin was ever in
formal
treatment with him. “The fact is,” he told me, “Sagarin and I were never more than moderately close.” From time to time, in the course of discussing other matters, Sagarin would talk over some of his problems, “but he was never an actual patient of mine.”

But if Ellis wants no credit for either behavioral or ideological persuasiveness, several of Sagarin's intimates insist otherwise. One of his closest friends has strongly hinted to me that Sagarin turned to Ellis as a result of family pressure at a “tumultuous” moment in the marriage—perhaps when his son Fred was born: it was time, Sagarin was told, “to get control over himself.” According to this same friend, Ellis's “repression technique”—which insists that one can learn consciously to control disruptive personal “obsessions” (what Ellis would later come to call “rational emotive therapy”)—did help Sagarin curtail his homosexual “promiscuity.” Sagarin believed enough in Ellis—by Ellis's own testimony—to send him “lots of referrals” throughout the 1950s, mostly “young men who had been his lovers.”

On the other hand, we know for certain that Ellis was not Sagarin's first therapist. As he revealed in
The Homosexual in America
back in 1951, Sagarin had earlier realized that marriage had not “reduce[d] the urge for gratification with men,” and “to rid” himself of it he had entered a “long analysis.” To his surprise, Cory wrote in
The Homosexual in America,
the therapist had focused not on repressing or dissolving Cory's homosexuality but on overcoming his feelings of guilt about it—a goal achieved, Cory claimed in his book. His guilt did diminish and he found himself enjoying homosexual relations more than before, even while feeling fewer “fears and repugnances toward sexual union with a woman.” Thereafter, as Cory completes the tale in
The Homosexual in America,
he'd adopted “a temperate and disciplined indulgence in homosexual affairs,” and became entirely content with his “successful marriage” and “happy home.”

Ellis agrees that Sagarin did have a good marriage, but disputes the rest of Cory's narrative. That first “long analysis,” in Ellis's view, “didn't take. . . . When I met Cory he was an exceptionally promiscuous gay man.” And remained so—though after
their
“few, informal sessions” together, according to Ellis, “Cory was able to get more pleasure from the sex he had with his wife.” By 1959, in any case, after their views had become nearly identical, Ellis described
Cory (in print) as “the best adjusted homosexual, by far, whom I have ever met. . . .”

As part of his gradual involvement in the public gay world, Cory had joined the Veterans Benevolent Association (VBA), a state-chartered New York City gay male organization begun after World War II and serving its seventy-five to one hundred members largely as a social group. The VBA ceased to exist in 1954. (It had “run into a little difficulty,” was Cory's oblique reference to a correspondent.) But the very next year saw the founding of a more overtly political organization: the New York City chapter of the Mattachine Society (MSNY). Cory had little involvement with MSNY during its first few years of existence, despite the fact that as early as 1953 he'd praised Mattachine's work on the West Coast as “remarkable.” He'd occasionally attend one of MSNY's monthly meetings in its shabby rented loft space on West Forty-Ninth Street, but it wasn't until 1957 that he agreed to be a guest speaker there. Soon after, he brought Ellis along to a meeting and before long Ellis, too, was invited to speak. (This was at a time when most “experts” scornfully turned down Mattachine's invitations.)

Ellis's talk at MSNY raised the hackles of at least a segment of his audience. Many members of Mattachine, though brave and unorthodox enough to join the organization or at least show up at some of its meetings, nonetheless were prone to defer to psychiatric authority and to agree with the profession's then-commonplace equation of homosexuality with pathology. Yet Ellis's overbearing manner and dogmatic assertions that “fixed” homosexuality was a sign of “disturbance” and that psychotherapy should be given “a fair trial” so that “repressed” heterosexual desires could emerge, brought some angry rebuttals.

When he finished speaking, “slings and arrows . . . flew thick and fast” (according to the
Mattachine Newsletter
) with several people in the audience challenging Ellis's view that some degree of heterosexuality was a prerequisite for happiness. Though Ellis, as always, held his ground, he was not only invited back for additional talks but was also asked to write for the
Mattachine Review.
After all,
in the context of the psychiatric profession of the day, Ellis was a decided liberal: he called for the decriminalization of homosexuality and was willing to testify in court against the common practice of police entrapment. By the late fifties, moreover, Ellis and Cory had joined forces to compile a comprehensive
Encyclopedia of Homosexual Behavior
—though despite several years of work and the completion of dozens of in-depth interviews, the project, due to lack of funding, was never finished nor published.

After 1957, Cory's own involvement with MSNY quickened. He never took on much of the nitty-gritty organizational work, but he did speak at the fifth annual Mattachine convention in 1958, let himself be listed on the board of advisors, and was then elected to the more hands-on board of directors (where, up through 1965, he compiled the highest attendance record of any director). Yet it wasn't until May 1962 that Cory finally took out formal membership. “After watching your valiant work for many years,” he wrote in his application letter to Mattachine, “I have come to the conclusion that the movement for education and social justice deserves my active support. If I can be of some aid in this work, I shall feel gratified and honored.”

Cory thereafter served on several committees, spoke before social and religious groups, and initiated dialogues with the YMCA on the treatment of homosexuals and with the New York Board of Health on venereal disease among the homosexual population. Randy Wicker remembers that at Mattachine meetings, he and Cory would, like competing auctioneers, try to outdo each other in exhorting members to increase their donations. By late 1962, Cory, with more than a touch of grandiosity, was writing Dorr Legg of ONE Institute, “There is a danger that the New York group might grow too dependent on me, and I do not want to exercise too much influence.”

It was also in 1962 that Cory's real name became known in Mattachine for the first time. When a new book of his,
The Anatomy of Dirty Words,
was published, Randy Wicker remembers someone rushing into the MSNY office one day with a copy—with author
Edward Sagarin's picture prominently displayed on the back. If Sagarin (like so many other members of Mattachine) had tried to conceal his name, he'd never hidden the fact that he was married. As Frank Kameny, the pioneering Washington, D.C., gay activist, told me, “Everyone was aware that Cory was married—[it was] known and accepted, no deal made of it. Almost nobody in Mattachine was out of the closet. People's private lives were considered their own business. Besides, Cory had short-circuited any distrust of him as a married man by having written that book.”

Sagarin himself drew firm boundaries, never inviting any discussion of personal matters. Mattachine bigwig Curtis Dewees, who probably got to know Sagarin better than anyone else in the organization, was occasionally invited to the Sagarins' Brooklyn apartment—but not when Gertrude was there. Dewees and his lover, Al de Dion, also active in Mattachine, viewed Cory (in de Dion's words) as “an icon, like a Godfather.” Yet even so, they knew not to cross the line. As Dewees recalled, “My conversations with Cory were limited basically to the organization, the direction of the movement—that kind of thing; he
never
discussed his inner feelings with me.”

Within Mattachine, Cory was regarded more with awe than affection. Not even Dewees was much drawn to him personally. “I respected the man's intelligence,” he told me, “his capabilities, what he had done,” but he “wasn't much fun to be around.” He was too “dead serious” and when his opinion was challenged he could be “thin-skinned, easily offended, aggressive.”

Harry Hay, the founder of Mattachine and
himself
often called “the father of the homophile movement,” actively distrusted Cory. Hay first met him (the two had corresponded earlier) when Cory went to the West Coast in 1955 to speak at the new ONE Institute of Homophile Studies. “I did not like him,” Hay told me. Having himself been in the Communist Party—and “astounded” when I told him that as an undergraduate Cory had had decidedly left-wing views—Hay had grown accustomed to sniffing the air and avoiding what he sensed might be risky people or places. “I never
felt safe with Cory in the room. I had the sense I was dealing with someone shifty. I remember thinking, I wish he wasn't here at ONE. Who is he really?”

Young Barry Sheer felt no such reluctance. When the famed author of
The Homosexual in America
came across the room at an MSNY meeting to introduce himself, Sheer was delighted. He'd read Cory several years earlier when, as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Sheer had joined the tiny local Mattachine chapter. It was there that he'd been introduced to
The Homosexual in America.
“It was,” Sheer told me,
“the
book; we would read it and discuss it all the time.” Sheer flunked out of Colorado after two years, returned to the East Coast, enrolled in Fairleigh-Dickinson College in New Jersey, and quickly hooked up with MSNY.