The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser

said, ‘what does this mean? I saw you holding hands with Morton in the movies.’
    â€œWell, I told her,” Strickland continued. “I said I was very fond of this fellow and we liked to be together. We’d had no sex yet, but we loved to be together. We’d walk along the beach at night singing popular songs and go skinny dipping and that sort of thing.
    â€œShe said, ‘I think you need some help.’ So she arranged for me to go to a doctor who had arrived in Huntington from Hitler’s Austria. He heard my story, and he said, ‘Roy, I will advise you to stop seeing this chap, cultivate the friendship of girls, and I’m going to give you male sex hormones.’ Which he did. For six sessions, my sister paying twenty-five bucks a session, which she could ill afford. In those days it was a hell of a lot of money.
    â€œThis was the standard procedure. He was going to turn me from a homosexual into a heterosexual by sticking that damn thing up my rear end. So, after six sessions I finally went to my sister, and I said, ‘Look, this is doing me
absolutely
no good. It’s only making me hornier.’ And she didn’t even know what the word meant. But I did stop the shots.”
    Long before he met Morton, Strickland knew he was gay: like so many other men and women he was aware that he was different from most of his friends at a very early age. “I knew it from when I was three or four or five years old. I used to love to try my mother’s hats on and go up in the attic and put on old dresses that she had. And I enjoyed playing with the girls on the block rather than baseball with the boys. In high school, I didn’t go out for baseball or football or basketball. I went out for tennis and loved to swim.
    â€œI always knew I was gay and I didn’t fight it. While I was still in highschool, a chap who lived two doors above us—this fellow was a
real
basketball star and track star—came one day, and said, ‘Roy, do you want to go up in the woods and shoot some crows?’
    â€œHe had a BB gun. So we went into the woods, and we didn’t shoot any crows. But we had sex, and it was absolutely incredible! Then he said, ‘Would you like to meet me at the doctor’s one evening?’
    â€œI said, ‘Sure,’ and he told his family he was going to the library.
    â€œHe was a bit older. And I went down and met him at the house of a doctor who was there in Huntington. I did this fairly often that winter, and it was quite an experience. Because the doctor had been married, had children. His wife had died, and his family had moved away. But he loved to entertain young men.
    â€œHe did not participate in it. He stood by the bed and told us what to do. And supplied Vaseline. Simply incredible experience. We went about once a week. That was my visit to the library in the evenings. It was really quite amazing.
    â€œAnd then I learned from this chap that I was not the only one he was taking down there. He was taking four other guys, two of whom were basketball stars in high school. Simply amazing. Later I heard that this guy had married and fathered a couple of children—this guy who had taken me to the doctor’s.”
    NOTHING WOULD HAVE a greater impact on the future shape of gay life in America than the explosive growth of the United States Army during World War II. Six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 14,000 men were entering 250 different training centers every day. The wartime draft * pulled all kinds of men together from every hamlet and metropolis. The army then acted like a giant centrifuge, creating the largest concentration of gay men inside a single institution in American history. Volunteer women who joined the WACS and the WAVES enjoyed an even more prevalent lesbian culture.
    The army’s attitude toward homosexuals during World War II created a new kind of official stigmatization. But it also