The reactions to the Proposition 8 decision—joy on side, rage on the other—turned my thoughts to a former professor of mine, the late sociologist Edward Sagarin. If Dr. Sagarin is looking on from somewhere in the cosmos, he is surely as astonished by the debate over gay marriage as he would have been to find himself in an afterlife to begin with.
In the mid-1960s, when I was one of Sagarin’s student at City College of New York, gay marriage would have been considered a futuristic fantasy of a satirist like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It was before Stonewall, when homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and gays were routinely arrested for solicitation in Manhattan. Civic passions were inflamed, but over civil rights and Vietnam, not anything sexual. Edward Sagarin, a diminutive man, with rodent-like features and a humped back caused by scoliosis, was in the middle of those battles. As an impassioned warrior for peace and the disadvantaged, he was a mentor to me and other young activists.
But while he was courageous, outspoken and radical about his political beliefs, he also carried a secret that he could not reveal. It is a point of history worth reflecting upon.
At one point, my closest friend (let’s call him Gregory) used the occasion of a required paper in Sagarin’s course to tiptoe out of the closet. In a private meeting, the professor told Gregory he was not alone, and that millions of ordinary men leading productive lives carry the same tortured secret. He suggested that he attend a meeting of the Mattachine Society, the first homosexual advocacy group. The featured speaker would be Donald Webster Cory, the author of a groundbreaking study called The Homosexual in America. A heroic figure in the underground gay life, Cory had written an insider’s account of homosexuals as a despised minority, similar to ethnic and religious groups whose civil liberties had been denied.
When Gregory arrived at the meeting, he was blown away by the crowd of older, normal-looking men. In an instant, he felt less alone and less of a freak. When the featured speaker was introduced to a standing ovation, Gregory peered over the shoulders in front of him and saw, striding to the podium, the gnome-like figure of … Edward Sagarin.
He was Donald Webster Cory, a pseudonym he’d invented in homage to Corydon, one of Andre Gide’s fictional gay characters. After his speech, in which he called for the decriminalization of homosexuality, Sagarin-Cory asked the flabbergasted Gregory to keep his secret. While Donald Webster Cory was a famous homosexual, Edward Sagarin was an ordinary middle-aged scholar with a wife and child in Brooklyn who knew nothing of his double life.
That night, Gregory told me the story. For our two remaining years at CCNY we kept our word—a remarkable feat for rebellious young potheads who enjoyed blowing minds. But we knew that exposure would destroy a good man. Not even a liberal college in the most liberal of cities could be counted on not to make his life miserable.
I lost touch with Dr. Sagarin a few years after graduating. His subterfuge finally ended in 1974, when he was outed as Cory. Sometime later I heard that he’d been denied tenure, and that a bitter controversy resulted. I also heard, to my astonishment, that he had become a critic of the burgeoning gay rights movement, that he clung to the theory that homosexuality was a pathology caused by childhood dynamics and that he claimed there was no such thing as a “well-adjusted homosexual.” That this firebrand who had preached a radical response to war and racism was considered a reactionary by the movement that his very own alter ego had helped to spawn was, to put it mildly, difficult to comprehend. He died in 1986.
Thanks largely to lessons I learned from that kind, idealistic, troubled man, I was able to understand my best friend’s gayness, and later my brother’s, at a time when most straight men did not know what to do with such information. And as I watch all the TV reports about Prop 8 wondering why anyone could possibly object to gay marriage, it occurs to me that the author of The Homosexual in America could not possibly have imagined such a debate taking place less than half a century after I sat in a classroom wishing I could tell him that I knew his secret.
Then again, he probably suspected that I was in on it, once I started sharing an apartment with Gregory. In one of his classes, Professor Sagarin had us read a chapter of The Homosexual in America. During the discussion, feeling mischievous, I asked him how he felt about a certain point that Donald Webster Cory made in the book.
He met my gaze, smiled slyly and said, “Cory and I are of one mind on that.”
I wish he were here to see how far we’ve come since he lived in fear that someone like me would reveal his secret.
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