The Gay Metropolis Read Free Page B

Princeton graduate who went to work for the Mercury Theatre that fall and participated in Orson Welles’s menacing broadcast of
The War of
the
Worlds
. Later, Barr became one of Broadway’s most illustrious impresarios. He was Edward Albee’s confidant and produced many of Albee’s most important plays, including
The Zoo Story, Tiny Alice
and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? He coproduced Mart Crowley’s
The Boys in the Band
in 1968, and, eleven years later, Stephen Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd
. For twenty-one years, he was president of the League of American Theatres and Producers.
    Bigelow would never be as famous as his roommates, but among gay men in New York he was a legend: a great many considered him the best-looking man in Manhattan. His life proved how far good looks and good manners could take anyone—regardless of gender or sexual persuasion.
    Bigelow socialized with a group of gay men whom his contemporary, the playwright Arthur Laurents, derided as “the silver and china queens.” Laurents described these gentlemen as “a class of gay from way back that was always as right-wing as possible, out of a desperate desire to belong. And they haven’t changed. It’s like gay couples who try to emulate heterosexual couples. Nothing could be more stupid. I mean that one is sort of the husband and the other is sort of the wife and they have to have fidelity and all this kind of nonsense—instead of seeing how lucky you are if you’re two men and have freedom.”
    Bigelow, Merrick and Barr selected an apartment on East 54th Street, sandwiched between the nightclub El Morocco and a store selling artificial limbs. A subway token still cost a nickel (as it had since the system opened in 1904); the rent for two rooms with a garden, plus kitchen and bath, was $45 a month; and a cluster of nearby restaurants offered shrimp cocktail, a small steak, dessert, and coffee for the grand sum of fifty cents. Instead of office buildings, Third Avenue was lined with brownstones, and it was dominated by the Elevated, whose rumblings Bigelow could hear from inside his apartment.
    The nooks and shadows created by this shaft down the center of the avenue played a significant role in gay life in New York before the war: theyoffered a multitude of discreetly darkened meeting places right in the heart of the metropolis. “It was a little bit spooky,” said Murray Gitlin, a Broadway dancer who remembered Third Avenue as “one of the only cruisy places” in the 1940s. “It was like being under palm trees on a summer night,” Franklin Macfie quipped. “You could very easily feel you were in Rio!”
    â€œThe city smelled totally different than it does today,” said Jack Dowling, who later worked for Colt Studios, one of the first emporiums of erotic photographs of attractive men. “There wasn’t that much trash on the street, and the air had the wonderful smell of washed concrete. Downtown it smelled of diesel truck exhaust. The Village around West 11th Street, late at night, smelled of baking bread from commercial bakeries. All of the East Side, from the Thirties all the way up to the Sixties, was filled with rooming houses which had their own unique odors.”
    But Otis Bigelow never went “cruising” outdoors. His good manners, beautiful features and handsome clothes made him immensely sought after at all the most fashionable cocktail parties. And even though he continued to believe that he was destined to marry a woman, he led a very gay Manhattan life.
    â€œI had a tuxedo and tails and all sorts of suits. What I wound up doing, pretty much, when I started, was living on my looks because it was terribly social in those days. Gay bars, no. I didn’t go to those until later. But there were elegant bars like Tony’s on Swing Alley on West 52d Street where Mabel Mercer sat and sang.
    â€œThere were a number of places where