The Martin Duberman Reader (30 page)

When Frank Kameny came up from D.C. to speak at MSNY in July 1964, he pulled the plug on the epistemological torture machine. “We owe apologies to no one,” Kameny thundered. “Society and its official representatives owe us apologies for what they have done and are doing to us.” He insisted that the homophile movement put less effort into trying to educate an indifferent heterosexual mainstream and more into direct demands for civil rights.
He assailed the unproven assumptions behind the psychoanalytic model of homosexuality as a “disorder” and insisted that “the entire movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether homosexuality is a sickness, and upon our taking a firm stand on it.”

Sagarin was in the audience the night of Kameny's speech and (according to Kameny) expressed his disagreement “courteously.” But disagree he did, and proceeded to work hard against Kameny sympathizers taking over MSNY. He even allowed his name to be placed in nomination for president on an opposition slate in the crucial 1965 election. Shortly before, Kameny wrote Sagarin a prophetic letter of warning: “You have gotten yourself associated with bad company . . . you have become no longer the vigorous Father of the Homophile Movement, to be revered, respected, and listened to, but the senile Grandfather of the Homophile Movement, to be humored and tolerated, at best; to be ignored and disregarded, usually; and to be ridiculated [sic], at worst.”

The militants won the 1965 election, and most of the Old Guard within MSNY, Sagarin included, left the organization immediately and for good. Sagarin tried to adopt an attitude of resigned inevitability: it is in the very nature of social movements, he counseled his allies, to turn against their founders; but “the politics of rejection would one day lead to the possibilities of rehabilitation.” This Olympian abdication concealed considerable indignation and hurt. Sagarin let some of it surface when writing to Dorr Legg the following year: “. . . the homophile movement is a hopeless mess . . . the biggest gang of potential blackmailers against real or alleged or ex-homosexuals in America consists of the leadership of the homophile movement. . . . I should like to state that I regard the homophile movement as inimical to the interests of homosexuals.”

During the last twenty years of Sagarin's life, much changed: he ascended the academic ladder, reveled in the interchanges, intrigues, and joustings of scholarly life, and approximated his long-sought dream of working in harness with a group of like-minded comrades. He became an encyclopedic, adept teacher, and for his favored students—mostly male—an admired mentor. And he became
the proud paterfamilias: his son Fred, who had chosen to teach handicapped and autistic children as a career, married and had three children of his own, whom Sagarin doted on.

While much changed, nothing changed. Edward Sagarin, his new alias, added volume upon volume to the already lengthy list of writings he'd produced as Donald Webster Cory (none of which he'd any longer formally acknowledge as his). A few of his many books remain in print and toward the end of his life he even got a novel published and a play produced.

Sagarin's nearly two dozen sociological works are (mostly) liberal in content and accessible in style. In his later years he often sounded themes (as he had in 1951) with a strikingly contemporary resonance: the malleability of the self, the need to historicize “expert” opinion and thus limit its claims to universality. (“Part of the changing process,” Sagarin wrote in 1977, “is to believe in the possibility of change . . . in the interests of freedom of choice, one must reject identity.”) None of his many books, however, can be seen as formative, theoretically innovative, or heretically heart-stopping. (On this, every sociologist I spoke to agreed—and every one requested anonymity.) Sagarin continued to champion outsiders and underdogs of various kinds (blacks, Jews, antiwar protestors, socialists, prostitutes, alcoholics, gamblers, pornographers, schizophrenics, dwarfs). He fought through his writing to rescue them from the categories of enemy, freak, or sinner, stoutly defending their rights against the smug majoritarian morality employed against them.

And yes, he even defended homosexuals—that is, on the limited grounds learned at Albert Ellis's knee: homosexuality should be decriminalized but not normalized. One should work toward alleviating the many injustices that gay people currently suffered, but “without accepting the traits that mark them as different.” “In an analogy which I find striking,” Sagarin wrote in a 1979 essay, “I have noted that blindness is undesirable but a blind person is not an undesirable.” Homosexuality remained to him a “condition,” a “pattern of adjustment” (as he put it in 1973) that represented, in essence, “a perversion of the instinctual drives.” Sagarin felt no more
need in the 1970s than he had in the 1950s to define the loaded, self-enclosed vocabulary that he continued to assert with such unabated confidence.

Yet his own sexuality remained unchanged—argue though he did in theory for the “malleability of the self.” Barry Sheer dropped out of his life after some three or four years. Increasingly militant in the post-Stonewall years, Sheer wrote an article in 1970—“The Anti-Homosexual in America: Donald Webster Cory”—in which he cuttingly denounced his old mentor, advising the newly empowered young to forget but
not
forgive him.

Sagarin always scrupulously avoided approaching any of his students sexually. But he would still—the frequency decreasing with age and declining health—do a bit of cruising here or there, have a brief encounter, engage the occasional Times Square hustler. One of his forays to Times Square in the late sixties had particularly dire repercussions. The story centers on “Richard Stein,” a young colleague of Sagarin's in the sociology department at CUNY. Stein was part of a group of New Leftist faculty whose politics had proved offensive to some of the older members of the department and who had therefore failed to get tenure. When Stein himself came up for a tenure decision, he felt that Sagarin's sponsorship would produce a positive outcome. But on the day the five-person executive committee of the department met to vote on Stein, Sagarin failed to show up and the vote, by three to two, went against Stein's tenure.

What had happened to Sagarin? The accounts vary. According to one of his colleagues (who feels certain that his version is the accurate one), Sagarin had picked up a hustler in Times Square and gone back with him to one of the fleabag hotels that then catered to trysts and transients. The trick had turned nasty, had mugged Sagarin, and then fled. Sagarin had had a heart attack in the hotel bathroom and been taken to the hospital. His wallet gone, he could not be identified for a full day. Stein himself doubts the accuracy of this account, primarily because he “saw no bruises of any kind” on his mentor when he visited him in the hospital.

In any case, Sagarin felt terrible about missing the crucial tenure
meeting, and after he got back on his feet, he took Stein to lunch to express his deep regret. During the lunch Sagarin spoke openly—as he almost never did and had not before to Stein—of the fact that he was gay. That he did so—since the heart attack would itself have been sufficient explanation for missing the meeting—suggests intense guilt and remorse, giving added credence to the tale of the Times Square hustler. As for Stein, his career never truly got back on track.

By the early seventies, the “secret” of Sagarin's double identity had become known to a number of his colleagues and even to some of his students and friends. But those who were aware of Sagarin's other life, both sexual and authorial, mostly ignored it. As one of his most admiring graduate students told me, “There's a distinction between knowing and acknowledging. I felt it was impolite, not fair, nasty, to acknowledge Sagarin's homosexuality if he preferred not to discuss it.”

But far from everybody knew. Robert Bierstedt, for example, who'd been chair of Sagarin's doctoral committee in 1966, was astonished when I revealed to him that Sagarin and Cory had been one and the same person; Bierstedt had never, in the intervening thirty years, heard any rumor or gossip to that effect.

Sagarin himself was still not publicly owning up to the double identity. The sociologist Vern Bullough told me that after Sagarin saw galley proofs in 1975 of Bullough's forthcoming
Sexual Variance
—in which he'd said something like, “Donald Webster Cory is also known as Edward Sagarin”—Sagarin contacted the publisher, Wiley, and threatened to sue. Before Wiley would agree to go to press, they made Bullough get depositions from various individuals who'd been active in the homophile movement affirming that Sagarin and Cory were one and the same person.

When the January 1973 issue of
Contemporary Sociology
appeared with Sagarin's denunciatory essay-review of a dozen recent gay liberationist books, Laud Humphreys, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College in California, hit the roof. Humphreys's own (by then notorious) 1970 book
Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public
Places
wasn't among those damned in the review, but Sagarin had managed glancingly to refer to Humphreys's “unconvincing” work.

The two men had some startling commonalities in their histories: both had come late to academia and sociology, both were left-wing in their politics—and both were gay men who'd married and fathered children. The parallels may have fueled Humphreys's anger; he was feeling suffocated by his own half-opened closet door and enraged at the homophobic hypocrisy of his own university, which had tried to delay his degree and also the publication of
Tearoom Trade.

After reading Sagarin's essay, Humphreys's first reaction was to send off a rip-snorting letter of protest to the editors of
Contemporary Sociology.
He accused them of having “ordered this mass slaughter . . . as a sort of ‘protective reaction' strike to rid us of the troublesome ‘homosexual researchers' and that embarrassing gay question all in one operation . . . a whole genre of contemporary sociology, not to mention a movement for human freedom, is scheduled for clever annihilation.”

When Humphreys failed to get a response that satisfied him, he decided on a second line of attack: he would speak out publicly at the 1974 annual sociology convention in Montreal. Humphreys was scheduled to appear as a discussant on a panel (“Theoretical Perspectives on Homosexuality”) where Sagarin was due to give a paper surveying the recent literature. In the paper, distributed to the panelists in advance of the session, Sagarin denounced those fellow sociologists who encouraged or supported homosexuals in “coming out.” In particular, he denounced the respected “pro-gay” researchers Evelyn Hooker and John Gagnon as special pleaders who'd falsified or misread their own data.

After reading Sagarin's paper, Humphreys contacted a number of sociologists who he knew to be gay and urged them to attend the panel on the following day. He then stayed up all night preparing his rebuttal. Humphreys would ever after refer to the next day's events as “Bloody Monday.” Sagarin read his paper exactly as he'd prepared it; he attacked recent “liberationist” scholarship and for
good measure appealed to homosexuals to seek therapeutic counseling. According to
The Body Politic,
a leading gay publication of the day, Sagarin's remarks “were greeted with disbelief and laughter from attending delegates.”

Humphreys then rose to respond. He began by fully coming out himself for the first time as “a gay man,” and then—as he'd rehearsed the night before—periodically inserted “fake slippage” into his responding remarks; that is, he'd refer one minute to “Professor Sagarin,” the next to “Mr. Cory”; at one point he addressed Sagarin directly as “Mr. Cory.” In all likelihood, most of the audience had never heard of Donald Webster Cory—just as today almost everyone I've mentioned the name to responds with a blank stare (my favorite: “Don Cory? Was he the Mafia owner of the Stonewall bar?”). But Sagarin himself got decidedly rattled. When Humphreys moved in for the kill and sardonically asked, “And where did you get
your
data?” Sagarin's hands clenched and his voice choked up. “I am my data,” he finally said. Tears fell from the corners of his eyes. To no one's surprise, Sagarin was not one of the participants when, soon after the 1974 convention and in part to protest it, the Sociologists' Gay Caucus was formed. Humphreys served on the original steering committee.

Edward Sagarin/Donald Webster Cory died of a heart attack in 1986 at age seventy-three.

—Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review,
Fall 1997

B
eware the facts; they can lead you away from the truth. James H. Jones has unearthed an enormous amount of new information in his biography,
Albert C. Kinsey.
Let no one underestimate the achievement. But let no one confuse it with an understanding of Kinsey's life and work. Diligence is the beginning of scholarship, not the end point. Through research, scholars discover what material exists. Then they must decide what it
means.
Jones gets high marks for industry, low ones for insight.

The most myopic moment comes near the beginning of his book and is repeated throughout: Alfred C. Kinsey was “a homosexual.” Oh, really? By what definition? Jones presents evidence—full, incontrovertible, and previously known only to a small circle of insiders—that Kinsey often had sex and occasionally fell in love with people of his own gender. Yet Jones also tells us that Kinsey was lovingly married for some forty-five years to Clara McMillen, and that their relationship was in no sense perfunctory, certainly not sexually. A decade into their marriage, Alfred and Clara were “eagerly” exploring various coital positions newly recommended by a friend, and they maintained a sexual relationship until Kinsey became ill near the end of his life. With Clara's knowledge, Kinsey also slept with other women during their marriage—as did Clara with other men.