TO BE YOUNG AND GAY IN OLD MANHATTAN

Author: By Alan Helms

Date: SUNDAY, November 23, 1997

Page: E3

Section: Books

It's a crisply told social history of the last half-century of gay Manhattan, which Kaiser rightly takes as the center of American activism and the emblem of the worldwide struggle for gay liberation. Interspersed with much personal testimony (unfortunately overwhelmingly male), it's also a mesmerizing journey that sometimes has the allure of an eight-car crash, for it's clear from the outset that ``it's going to be a bumpy ride.''

Kaiser begins in the deeply closeted 1940s, when bar owners could have their licenses revoked merely for serving a homosexual (apparently you could tell by looking), and when World War II created a revolution in gay America by putting 20 million Americans into uniforms and same-sex barracks: ``the largest concentration of gay men inside a single institution in American history.'' (There's a nice irony for you: the Pentagon as unwitting midwife to gay liberation.) Judging from the testimony of Kaiser's respondents, the '40s were also something of a sexual nirvana in that even the people who never did it a lot, along with the epochal 1948 ``Kinsey Report,'' made it clear that such goings-on were more ``natural'' than anyone had supposed.

Then came what Gore Vidal calls ``the bad decade,'' the conformist 1950s, enlivened by the horrors of the McCarthy hearings, which demonstrated that although it was unspeakably bad to be a communist, it was far worse to be a homosexual. Gay observers could nevertheless take heart from three important events: the founding of the Mattacine Society, the first organization devoted to gay rights; psychologist Evelyn Hooker's pioneering research, which challenged the myth that gay men were mentally ill; and the publication of ``The Homosexual in America,'' until then ``the most comprehensive description of gay male life in America ever written.''

With the invention of the Pill in the '60s (penicillin had appeared in the 1940s), sex became something people were doing for pleasure, thus undermining the religious notion that nonprocreative sex is ``unnatural.'' There were other hopeful signs: Kennedy's election to the presidency, the civil rights march on Washington in 1963, the end of police entrapment in New York, Mike Wallace's first-ever documentary on homosexuality, and a general relaxation of Puritan ethics. The decade ended with the Stonewall riots of July 1969 -- begun by those sissy drag queens, let's never forget.

Yet the need for continued struggle was clear when Joseph Epstein announced in Harper's in 1970 that ``if I had power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.'' Pace Epstein, politicians began to acknowledge the gay community, partly thanks to increased media exposure by empathetic people like Phil Donahue. The determining event of the decade, and probably of this entire history, was the American Psychiatric Association's vote in 1974 to remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders. Gay people were finally visible in American society, and a bit less repugnant.

The big news in the 1980s, of course, was the AIDS pandemic, fully underway by 1983. President Reagan made bad things worse, being both beholden to the religious right and determined to cut social spending on behalf of bigger military budgets. The story of those early years of AIDS is painful reading, but inspiring, too, because of the gay community's resourcefulness in finding ways of doing what the government and the medical establishment refused to do. In that sense, the 1980s represented a coming of age for gay men in this country. Kaiser closes with a brief view of the 1990s: the continuation of AIDS, the absurd issues of gays in the military and gay marriage, corporate America's belated recognition of gay consumers, and the benefits of the Clinton administration (the president has ended federal discrimination save for the military and appointed nearly 100 openly gay men and lesbians). The 1996 Supreme Court decision to strike down Colorado's antigay Amendment 2 brings us up to date.

But this brief synopsis fails to convey one of the book's best virtues -- the unending wonder of a half-century struggle among America's most despised minority, what Kaiser himself accurately calls ``an incredible journey: from invisibility to ubiquity, from shame to self-respect, and, finally, from the overwhelming tragedy of AIDS to the triumph of a rugged, resourceful and caring community.'' Amen, although I wish the community were all that Kaiser says it is. His book makes clear how far we've come, but the fact that 10 of his 64 respondents have chosen to remain anonymous makes equally clear how far we have to go.

Kaiser is a good writer and raconteur and he marshals an amazing amount of information, but I sometimes wished his book were more carefully shaped. His un-famous respondents rarely register as individuals and thus are hard to keep straight, and the proliferation of names, dates, facts, percentages, initiatives, organizations, polls, votes, decisions, etc., can feel overwhelming, as if the book were a feature article suffering from elephantiasis.

It's a blessing that ``The Gay Metropolis'' is not heavily indebted to theory (a virtual guarantee of bad writing these days); still, when used well, theory can focus and lead a reader through heavily congested territory, and I sometimes missed some such guiding principle. Nevertheless, I'm glad to recommend this book. For those in the know, it collects the important information in organized and readable fashion; for those still in the dark (including all my straight friends), it's an essential narrative of recent gay male history. And in making the important link between gay liberation and black and women's liberation, Kaiser's book is a salutary reminder of something no civilized people can afford to forget: that in destroying ignorance and prejudice, a disenfranchised group benefits everyone.