NYC Mayor Koch - Being a gay politician in a homophobic era

Post Reply New Topic

Edward I. Koch looked like the busiest septuagenarian in New York.

Glad-handing well-wishers at his favorite restaurants, gesticulating through television interviews long after his three terms as mayor, Mr. Koch could seem as though he was scrambling to fill every hour with bustle. He dragged friends to the movies, pursuing a side career in film criticism. He urged new acquaintances to call him “judge,” a joking reference to his time presiding over “The People’s Court.”

But as his 70s ticked by, Mr. Koch described to a few friends a feeling he could not shake: a deep loneliness. He wanted to meet someone, he said. Did they know anyone who might be “partner material?” Someone “a little younger than me?” Someone to make up for lost time?

“I want a boyfriend,” he said to one friend, Charles Kaiser.

It was an aching admission, shared with only a few, from a politician whose brash ubiquity and relentless New York evangelism helped define the modern mayoralty, even as he strained to conceal an essential fact of his biography: Mr. Koch was gay.

He denied as much for decades — to reporters, campaign operatives and his staff — swatting away longstanding rumors with a choice profanity or a cheeky aside, even if these did little to convince some New Yorkers. Through his death, in 2013, his deflections endured.

Now, with gay rights re-emerging as a national political tinderbox, The New York Times has assembled a portrait of the life Mr. Koch lived, the secrets he carried and the city he helped shape as he carried them. While both friends and antagonists over the years have referenced his sexuality in stray remarks and published commentaries, this account draws on more than a dozen interviews with people who knew Mr. Koch and are in several cases speaking extensively on the record for the first time — filling out a chapter that they say belongs, at last, to the sweep of history.

It is a story that might otherwise fade, with many of Mr. Koch’s contemporaries now in the twilight of their lives.

The people who described Mr. Koch’s trials as a closeted gay man span the last 40 years of his life, covering disparate social circles and political allegiances. Most are gay men themselves, in whom Mr. Koch placed his trust while keeping some others closest to him in the dark. They include associates who had kept his confidence since the 1970s and late-in-life intimates whom he asked for dating help, a friend who assisted in furtive setups for Mr. Koch when he was mayor and a fleeting romantic companion from well after his time in office.

Even members of his family never knew, Mr. Koch told gay friends through the years, and close aides knew not to press. “Ed Koch compartmentalized his life,” said Diane Coffey, his longtime chief of staff, adding that the two had never discussed his sexuality.

That he seemed to share so much of himself with his constituents — blustering, badgering, letting few thoughts escape his consciousness unsaid — only magnified the tensions around what he did not reveal, an unyielding conflict that could lead to unsettling moments.

During a particularly stressful time in his third term, aides remembered, Mr. Koch stunned senior staff members assembled in his City Hall office one day with a sudden declaration: “I am not a homosexual.”

His team was unnerved. No one in the room had asked about this subject. “You can see how much pain he’s in,” his first deputy mayor, Stanley Brezenoff, told another aide once the mayor was out of earshot.

For the gay friends in whom Mr. Koch confided, during and after his time in office, completing this record of his life is something of a collective unburdening. Some had nudged Mr. Koch for years to come out, suggesting he might be happier for it, that the city might be better for it. Their failure disheartens them to this day.

For the loyal lieutenants who protected Mr. Koch and feel compelled to protect him still, the topic remains uncomfortable. To them, some facts will always be best left unconfirmed.

“He was our father,” George Arzt, his longtime spokesman, said. “You don’t ask a father those questions.

In the politically energized Greenwich Village of the early 1970s, Mr. Koch had established himself as a reform-minded Democrat, a Bronx-born son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and self-styled enemy of the party machine.

An Army veteran and lawyer before reaching Congress in 1969, Mr. Koch pushed progressive social policies that befit his job representing one of New York’s bluest enclaves. But his liberal leanings had their limits.

In 1973, David Rothenberg, an activist and friend of Mr. Koch’s who would later run for local office himself, came out of the closet in a television interview. Many who knew Mr. Rothenberg applauded him. Then he bumped into the congressman on the street. “Why did you do that?” Mr. Koch asked.

“I thought it was curious,” Mr. Rothenberg said recently. “I think he was asking: Was I hurt by that? Were my fortunes hurt?”

The question of whether Mr. Koch would ever come out was not a question at all to his friends in the Village. His highest ambition was politics, and, as a general rule then, successful politicians were not openly gay. He had come of age amid the “lavender scare,” the homophobic midcentury purge that had driven thousands of gay people from government service.

But the life of a congressman in the 1970s — shuttling between Washington and New York with minimal media scrutiny — allowed Mr. Koch to cordon off parts of his identity. During this time, he was involved in a sustained romantic relationship with Richard W. Nathan, a high-achieving, Harvard-educated health care consultant, according to on-record interviews with six people who knew about the pair.

For Mr. Koch, the relative freedom of semi-anonymity did not last. Hoping to energize his long-shot dream of becoming mayor, he persuaded the city’s most sought-after campaign operative, David Garth, to steer his 1977 race for City Hall.

Mr. Garth, renowned for elevating political underdogs, believed that Mr. Koch could win, but he had his concerns: He needed to be assured that rumors about the bachelor congressman’s being gay were not true. Mr. Koch told him they were not.

Unsatisfied with Mr. Koch’s word, Mr. Garth personally investigated several leads about purported dalliances, though he turned up nothing. One day, the combustible Mr. Garth stormed into a campaign office to confront Ethan Geto, a Koch friend whom he knew to be an openly gay political fixture. They made their way to the basement.

“Is he a fag?” Mr. Garth demanded, veins flaring, according to Mr. Geto. “If that sonofabitch lied to me and he’s a fag, I would never have taken him on.”

Mr. Geto feigned ignorance. “He says he’s not gay,” he told Mr. Garth, “I take his word.” (“Of course I knew,” Mr. Geto said in a recent interview. “I had known for many years.”)

At the least, Mr. Garth recognized that his candidate had a perception problem. And Mr. Koch’s most glamorous surrogate — Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America — was called upon to solve it.

The candidate and the beauty queen became strategically inseparable, their pinkies entwined at public events, inviting welcome-if-misguided tabloid speculation about an imminent engagement. Mr. Koch himself called her his “first lady” and hinted at how lovely it might be to get married at Gracie Mansion.

Still, the whispers continued. Adversaries deployed the “Greenwich Village bachelor” label, less as a euphemism than a slur. Signs appeared in Queens, the home borough of Mr. Koch’s opponent, Mario Cuomo, urging New Yorkers to “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” Mr. Cuomo denied responsibility.

With his lead in the polls appearing tenuous days before the vote, Mr. Koch was unequivocal in his media appearances. “I don’t happen to be homosexual,” he told WNEW, after a day of dismissing questions about whether Ms. Myerson’s outsize presence was intended to dispel rumors about him. “But if I were, I would hope that I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. God makes you whatever you are.”

Among some gay allies, the response stung. Misdirection was one thing; this felt almost taunting. “The most hypocritical cover-up,” Mr. Geto said.
As the election drew closer, Mr. Koch also seemed determined to distance himself from Mr. Nathan, expressing wariness when Mr. Nathan was discussed for a top health care post in the future administration. “I can’t do that,” Mr. Koch said, according to Mr. Schwartz, who hosted Sunday brunches for the team.

On Nov. 8, 1977, Mr. Koch held on to win the election. Shortly afterward, Mr. Nathan told friends, associates of the new mayor unsubtly urged him to find work outside New York. At a party after the inauguration — where Mr. Koch arrived with Ms. Myerson, according to Mr. Rothenberg — Mr. Nathan sounded resigned to his fate.

And with that, the only long-term relationship anyone in Mr. Koch’s orbit could remember was over.

So much about being mayor — the purpose, the pageantry, the built-in audience — was everything Ed Koch could have wanted.

Yet for all its commotion and a revolving cast of visitors, life in the mansion could be isolating.

When companionship seemed to elude the mayor, friends tried delivering some directly, if discreetly. Herb Rickman, a top aide who served as the official liaison to the city’s gay community, arranged for occasional double dates at his own Park Avenue apartment, according to Mr. Schwartz, a former food editor for The New York Daily News who was Mr. Rickman’s boyfriend at the time.

The setups did not appear to amount to much

More publicly, the mayor wrestled with gay rights as a cautious ally. He seemed at once determined to demonstrate allegiance to gay New Yorkers where he felt he could — in certain conditions, on certain issues — and sensitive to the political risk involved in doing so.

Mr. Koch signed a landmark executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, appointed gay bureaucrats and judges and became the first mayor to march in the city’s Pride parade.

“It is not easy to stand up on that issue when you are single and male in New York City,” Mr. Koch said many years later. “I did it anyway.”

In smaller settings, the mayor would sometimes share disarming fragments of himself with gay friends, even some journalists he trusted.

Mr. Koch was especially moved, he told Mr. Dunlap, by the images of Mr. Milk’s friends revisiting his assassination. Mr. Dunlap left the encounter wondering if Mr. Koch had been trying to tell him something about himself.

In other moments, Mr. Koch was more direct.
Mr. Koch opened the meal with a question: “Do your parents know that you’re gay?”

They do, Mr. Kaiser replied.

“Too late for me,” the mayor said.

Gay men were dying by the hundreds, then the thousands. The disease was menacing every corner of the city, ravaging Mr. Koch’s own neighborhood. And New York’s broadly popular mayor, who won a third term in 1985 by more than 60 points, seemed unwilling to spend political capital on the issue.

Despite the increasingly urgent situation, some city officials were blunt with activists: Voters already had their suspicions about Mr. Koch. He had to proceed carefully before throwing himself into a “gay issue,” as some advisers saw it.

If Mr. Koch had for a time sought a fragile balance between advancing gay rights in targeted ways and maintaining some distance from the community, the AIDS emergency was simply too vast, too merciless in its march, to accommodate triangulation.

The city’s first comprehensive AIDS plan was not issued until 1988. Pleas for increased funding and the full use of the executive bully pulpit often went unheeded, a reticence that advocates found especially maddening.

“In a city at the epicenter of this disease, one would expect regular statements from you,” Richard Dunne, the executive director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, wrote in a July 1987 letter to Mr. Koch.

While Mr. Koch long chafed at the consensus that cities like San Francisco managed the disease more effectively, those who spoke to him about AIDS at the time could come away unpersuaded that he grasped its horrors.

Even people like Mr. Bloom, once a regular dinner mate, struggled to get on his calendar for a meeting about AIDS. When he finally did, Mr. Koch was visibly uncomfortable.

As his third term teetered, the mayor began betraying the psychic strain of the job as never before, particularly when he worried his privacy might be punctured. It did not help that several Chekhovian guns seemed to fire in succession: Ms. Myerson, the would-be “first lady” whom he had given an administration post, became enmeshed in a bribery scandal that reinforced escalating concerns about corruption in his government. Mr. Nathan, who would seethe for years from California, had mentioned his past relationship with Mr. Koch to Larry Kramer, the playwright and activist who fiercely criticized the city’s AIDS response. Mr. Kramer was by then actively working to out the mayor, telling reporters about his conversation with Mr. Nathan and urging them to write about it.

In August 1987, before a scheduled appearance at a forum on AIDS, the mayor couldn’t sleep. His nerves confused his staff.

“I couldn’t understand why Koch was so upset,” Mr. Arzt, his press secretary, remembered. “He was scared that Larry Kramer would be in the audience and yell something out. I said, ‘So what?’”

The forum was uneventful. Mr. Kramer was not even there. But the toll on the mayor was real. Walking out afterward, Mr. Koch complained of a headache. He stepped into his car with Mr. Arzt. “My speech is slurred,” Mr. Koch said suddenly. “I think I’m having a stroke.”

He was correct.

In his final, futile re-election campaign in 1989, Mr. Koch unfurled a denial about his sexual orientation that went beyond his stock deflections. “It happens that I’m heterosexual,” he said in a radio interview that March.

Two weeks later, an estimated 3,000 AIDS activists descended on City Hall, some with signs mocking the mayor’s pronouncement. “And I’m Cary Grant,” one read, beside a headline declaring Mr. Koch straight. A new chant was born, too, wafting over Lower Manhattan as hundreds of protesters faced arrest:

“AIDS care’s ineffectual. Thanks to Koch, the heterosexual.”

Like many politicians, Mr. Koch looked like a younger man after leaving office — his face less creased; his shoulders looser; his burdens lifted, to a point.

He entertained at dinner parties with an assemblage of younger gay friends, quizzing them on their relationships and occasionally telling them they could do better.

“With other gay people, he seemed completely comfortable as a gay man,” Mr. Kaiser said. “He went to every gay movie, so the chauffeur had to know.”

Still, old sources of angst occasionally encroached on Mr. Koch’s post-mayoral life. He shared an apartment building with Mr. Kramer, who mumbled to his dog about “the man who killed all of daddy’s friends” when they passed in the lobby.

Mr. Geto, who had protected Mr. Koch in 1977 by lying to Mr. Garth, his campaign guru, finally decided to tell the former mayor about it over dinner.

“He looked very rattled and shaken,” Mr. Geto said, adding that Mr. Koch did not exactly thank him. “He said something along the lines of, ‘You handled it right.’”

In his final years, Mr. Koch could seem like the first and the last of a kind.

He had become a pioneering New York character on his own terms, the mayor whose civic cheerleading and abundant ego still paced the political class. He also belonged to perhaps the last generation in the city for which being openly gay felt politically prohibitive.

Mr. Koch did try to date a little, asking friends like Mr. Kaiser and Mr. Geto to introduce him to someone, and sometimes found short-term romance — cooking for one companion at his apartment, the man recalled recently in an interview, before a courtly invitation to bed. But there was no second date. Nothing seemed to stick for long.

Mr. Roshan offered some high-visibility help, devising a personal ad as part of a 1999 New York magazine “Singles” issue in which Mr. Koch agreed to appear. The proposed script read, “GWM” — a shorthand for “gay white male” — “interested in politics, seeks same for love and friendship,” according to Mr. Roshan.

Mr. Koch balked, Mr. Roshan said, citing “family that didn’t know,” and drawing up revisions that hedged his sexuality. “Have belatedly concluded that everyone, straight or gay, needs a partner in life,” the final version read.

Friends suspected that Mr. Koch’s reluctance, even long after being openly gay would have posed a political issue, owed largely to his grudges and his pride: He did not want to give activists like Mr. Kramer the satisfaction of seeing him come out, after they had tried so hard to see him outed.

Publicly, Mr. Koch often said his silence served a higher principle, setting a precedent that might protect other politicians against those inclined to “torture everybody running for office.”

Privately, pressed by those close to him about his hesitation to come out, Mr. Koch would simply repeat, “I don’t want to.”

“That’s as far as that conversation ever got,” Mr. Kaiser said.

As his health faltered in his final years, Mr. Koch made clear he was lonely, suggesting that finding a partner was the only pursuit of his life that he counted as a failure.