The Martin Duberman Reader (29 page)

Sheer was a good-looking young man with a muscular body and (in his words) “an excess of testosterone.” He discharged it generously into the less-laden bodies of the homophile leadership, gaining a reputation (applauded by some, deplored by others) as a “star fucker.” Cory spotted Sheer at a Mattachine meeting one night in 1960 and—never one to play the shrinking violet—invited him out for coffee. “If he hadn't written this book and been a famous person,” Sheer told me, “I would have said, ‘No,' because he wasn't a heck of a lot to look at. Small, a loud, high-pitched voice, bald, somewhat deformed, and walked with a limp.”

Yet Sheer quickly found himself involved in what he now calls “a ‘Death in Venice' relationship. . . . Cory would give me a little money and have me help him with some of his research and I would let him have sex with me. . . . I couldn't be especially emotional, but he was quite happy with that, it seemed. . . . He'd come and see me two or three times a week. This went on for about three years.” The “comrades” in Mattachine weren't kind about Cory's relationship with Sheer. As one of them told me, “Sheer was generally regarded as predatory,” and Cory was privately mocked as a john who had to pay for sex—and who then confused it with affection. Sheer soon learned that Cory's real name was Edward Sagarin, and he even met
Gertrude once. He found her “a right and proper Jewish matron” and, in retrospect anyway, remains a little indignant at the way Sagarin was “two-timing” her.

Sheer enjoyed helping out with Sagarin's research, was attracted to his “powerful intellect,” and enjoyed their frequent arguments about homosexuality and “the movement.” By 1960 Sagarin's views had not only become indistinguishable from those of Albert Ellis, but were held no less rigidly. “We're a tree that's stunted,” he would tell Sheer, “but even if a tree is stunted, does it not grow in its own way and offer shade and beauty? And shouldn't gays be treated that way?”

Sheer rejected that attitude as “condescending tolerance.” He was part of a new generation emerging within Mattachine in the early sixties (epitomized by Frank Kameny and the militant Washington, D.C., Mattachine chapter), insistent that there was nothing to apologize for, nothing “stunted” about homosexuals, nothing other than society's irrational prejudice that needed “curing”—much of which, in a more tentative, diluted version, Cory had himself argued in
The Homosexual in America,
way back in 1951, before almost anyone else, before perhaps even
he
was fully prepared for the radical potential in his own message. In the interim had come Albert Ellis, a ton of psychoanalytic books “proving” that homosexuality was “pathological,” Cory's growing doubts about the quality of comradeship available in the homophile movement, and his growing ambition to find greater “legitimacy” as an intellectual in the straight world.

At this same time, in the early sixties, the ideological struggle was heating up in MSNY about whether homosexuality was or wasn't a “mental illness,” and the emergent forces, forgetting or never knowing what Cory had once stood for, were increasingly targeting him as the epitome of the played-out old guard. Simultaneously, Ellis (and family members as well) was encouraging Sagarin to follow his long-standing scholarly bent and formally pursue an academic career.

In 1958, at age forty-five, Sagarin entered an accelerated BA program
for adults at Brooklyn College and completed his undergraduate degree in 1961—graduating in the same class as his son, Fred. He then, at age forty-eight, entered the MA program in sociology and wrote his thesis on “The Anatomy of Dirty Words.” Scandalized at so unorthodox a topic, Sagarin's department rejected the thesis, but Sagarin got it published as a book in 1962, thumbed his nose at Brooklyn College, and enrolled in the doctoral program at New York University.

He'd accumulated just enough money to put the perfume business permanently behind him. Against great odds, he'd emerge by 1966, at age fifty-three, with a PhD, an academic job, and a prolific future career as scholar, teacher, and mentor. The orphaned, taunted, physically handicapped youth, the proto-intellectual toiling away uncomplainingly for decades in a business world for which he was temperamentally unsuited, the triply deviant (disabled, homosexual, left-wing) misfit with a double life—these burdensome, knotted earlier selves would never disappear but would recede, soften, inflict less internal pain, less centrally define a life that had refocused in the legitimizing, deeply gratifying new identity of Professor Edward Sagarin. Donald Webster Cory would remain alive in print, and in a corner of Sagarin's heart—but oh, the relief of not having him constantly tugging at the sleeve, demanding to share center stage.

Sagarin's personal transition during the early to midsixties took place at a time when cataclysmic events—the quickening civil rights struggle at home, the escalating war in Vietnam—were pummeling and reshaping American consciousness. The tug-of-war within the tiny homophile movement mirrored in miniature the larger social upheavals: the challenge to “expertise” (like those East Asian “specialists” who'd gotten us into the Vietnam war) and the new value placed on “differentness” (like the heralding of “Black Is Beautiful” and SNCC's rejection of the hallowed goal of assimilation).

Police harassment of gay bars had long been standard, and the clientele of those bars had dutifully cowered under the cop's club. But by the midsixties, knee-jerk deference to authority had
weakened, and when the police raided a gay bar in San Francisco in 1964, a new organization instantly sprang up—the Society for Individual Rights—to protest police harassment; by 1966 it had enrolled a thousand members, becoming the largest homophile organization in the country. That same year, a group of progressive heterosexual ministers joined with gay activists in forming the influential Council on Religion and the Homosexual to combat homophobia.

On the East Coast, too, militancy was on the rise. Under Kameny's leadership, Washington, D.C., Mattachine brandished a new “Gay Is Good” slogan that spelled an end to apologetics and prefigured the aggressive confrontational politics of the post-Stonewall period. At MSNY, the conservatives dug in their heels and fought a rear-guard action, but the handwriting was on the wall. The young Turks started to snicker about Cory “the closet queen,” Cory “the old auntie,” “Auntie Donnie.” Where once he'd been almost uniformly hailed for his pioneering role, he was now being ridiculed in
ONE
magazine as a “so-dreary goodykins.”

Despite his new legion of detractors, Cory was more active in Mattachine from 1962 to 1965 than ever before, perhaps not least because he was
studying
it: the topic of his NYU doctoral dissertation was “Structure and Ideology in an Association of Deviants”—that is, the Mattachine Society. He sent the manuscript to Dorr Legg of ONE, Inc., who spent considerable time critiquing it and digging out additional source materials for Sagarin's use.

In these same years Sagarin also began his teaching career—on the Baruch campus of the City University of New York, where he offered a course on minority groups. One of his students at Baruch was Phil Goldberg (today a novelist), who was part of the counter-cultural coterie on campus; he and his friends had formed a Human Rights Society, raised money for SNCC, and gone South to help with the voter campaign drive.

According to Goldberg, Sagarin was one of the few faculty members sympathetic to their activities, and they were delighted when he agreed to serve as faculty adviser for the Human Rights Society. Sagarin may have begun his retreat from the homophile movement,
but he remained decidedly left-leaning in his politics. Barry Sheer recalls how heatedly Sagarin would insist that “the government should take care of you and give you a good start,” and if you then failed, “society should still take care of you.”

One of Phil Goldberg's close friends, Eddie Zimmerman, enrolled in Sagarin's “minority groups” course. Sagarin encouraged his students to write in a nonacademic, personal style (he rightly prided himself on the lucidity of his own prose), and so when it came time to do his term paper, Eddie decided to write about what it felt like to be coming out as a gay man. When he got the paper back, he saw that Sagarin had written on it, “This is very remarkable. Please see me.” Eddie did drop by the office, and (as he tells the story today) Sagarin expressed “great empathy for what I'd gone through.” “I've done a lot of research on this,” Sagarin told him, “and I think you would benefit from knowing about a group I'm acquainted with—it's called the Mattachine Society.”

Mattachine's monthly meeting, he told Eddie, was coming up, and it promised to be a lively one: the well-known writer Donald Webster Cory was scheduled to speak. Eddie decided to go to the meeting, and when he arrived was delighted to see “so many ordinary-looking, mainstream types who were gay. It was important for me.” Then, with considerable fanfare, the speaker of the evening was introduced—and out from the wings strode
his
Professor Sagarin! As Eddie tells it, Sagarin came up to him afterward and simply said, “Look, I took a big chance inviting you here, but I thought I should. But it's our secret.” They had little subsequent contact, though Eddie does remember Sagarin introducing him one day to a young, blond-haired man, who he later told Eddie was his lover.

Eddie, of course, told his friend Phil Goldberg the whole story, and the following semester Phil—though not gay—decided he, too, would sign up for Sagarin's course. But he didn't much like the man (“He was strange, troll-like, put people on edge”), and planned a little theatrical coup of his own. For the section in the course on “the homosexual minority,” Sagarin assigned reading from
The
Homosexual in America.
Phil carefully rehearsed his plan for how the classroom discussion would begin. Raising his hand, smothering his glee, he boldly asked, “Mr. Cory says such and such. How do you feel about that?” Sagarin momentarily blanched, then said, “Mr. Cory and I are of one mind about it.”

Sagarin's ongoing discussions with Barry Sheer had made it clear to him (as Sagarin wrote in 1963) that “I was no longer viewing the new homosexual scene from within. . . .I was not of the generation that grew up after Kinsey (and Cory), the peer-oriented and other-directed youths,” whose voices were beginning to be heard. Yet despite the growing disparagement of his views within Mattachine, Sagarin felt no need to adjust them. Instead, he decided to restate them in a new book,
The Homosexual and His Society,
and shrewdly asked young Barry Sheer to be its co-author. (Sheer used the pseudonym “John LeRoy,” under which he had earlier written articles for the gay press.)

The book appeared in 1963 and became known as “The Second Cory Report.” In it, the authors argued that the homophile movement should primarily concern itself not with trying to get people to join up, but rather with “trying to ease the difficulties” of those already involved and “to enlighten the public on its attitudes.” That enlightenment would begin with the acknowledgment that homosexuality was “a disturbance”—but not “antisocial in its nature.”

The Homosexual and His Society
bravely devoted considerable space to what was widely regarded as “unseemly” topics—like hustling and venereal disease. Moreover, the authors justified their inclusion in words that have a decidedly contemporary ring: “The hustler, the cruiser, the lonely and the distressed, the muscle-flexer, the partner-changer, the effeminate hairdresser, the closet queen who is frightened, and the clothes queen who is courting social ridicule: yes, even the poor disturbed people who are caught up in the sad world of sadomasochism—they are all our brothers, and their cause is ours.” This defense, however partial and patronizing, of outsiders of every stripe was complexly at odds with the fact that Sagarin was simultaneously fighting
within
Mattachine to hold homosexuals
to a “responsible,” nonconfrontational appeasement of the social and psychiatric authorities of the day.

“The Second Cory Report” was immediately and angrily attacked: the reviewer in
ONE
magazine, for example, denounced it as “pseudo-scientific” and a mere “rehash of other people's ideas.” Sheer himself, in retrospect, regrets having lent his name to those portions of the book that claimed there was no such thing as a “well-adjusted homosexual” and that homosexuality originated in “a pathological situation based on fear, anxiety, or insecurity. . . .”

Yet in the counterattack, Sheer and Cory published at the time in
ONE,
they gave no ground. Indeed, Cory never thereafter budged from his now formulaic views: homosexuality was not inborn but was a “disturbance”; the homophile movement should “accept therapy for some and adjustment within the framework of homosexuality for others”; the movement should not waste its energy either trying to argue “the utter normalcy of the homosexual” or emulating “a monogamous, romantic concept of sexuality” that derived from the official model of heterosexuality.

Cory left unaddressed most of the troubling questions a new generation of gay activists had begun to raise: By what criteria does one establish “disturbance”? Why, if there was “no such thing as a ‘homosexual,' ” was there any such thing as a “heterosexual”? Why should an increased capacity to have sex with someone of the opposite gender be taken as the measure of increased health—or, for that matter, an increased capacity to have sex with someone of the same gender? What was a “normal” sex life anyway? And who decided? And on the basis of which fragment of the limited “evidence”? And who had the right to decide?