Ed Koch drew a curtain around his sexual orientation during his life, but after his death, gay writers in the mainstream press gave full voice to the betrayal and anguish they felt during his three terms as New York City’s mayor. Many of them think that he was a closeted gay man, and that this was what made him move too slowly when AIDS first reared its lethal head in New York City.
Andrew Sullivan writes:
I sure don’t want to know about Ed Koch’s sex life, if he had one. But the plain fact of your orientation is not the same as the details of your sex life. And when you are such a public figure and single and your city is grappling with an epic health crisis among gay men, it does become other people’s fucking business — especially if he was inhibited from a more aggressive response because of not wanting to seem gay.
That’s key for many people who care about gay issues, says Richard Kim at The Nation: Koch seemed to spend a lot of energy “aggressively — if unsuccessfully — attempting to eliminate any whiff of homosexuality from his profile,” partly by escorting former Miss America Bess Myerson to many public events, though he admitted later they were never romantically involved. Like Sullivan, Kim says that we should look at how “the particular way in which Koch was closeted shaped his halting, seemingly indifferent reaction to the epidemic.” By January 1984, Kim says, Koch’s New York City had spent only $24,500 on AIDS while, in a San Francisco with one-tenth the population, Mayor Dianne Feinstein had spent $4.3 million.
This meant that New York suffered in a way that San Francisco didn’t. David France, director of the Oscar-nominated “How to Survive a Plague,” writes in New York magazine, where he is a contributing editor, about how people in the city were turned away from hospitals because of overcrowding and how nurses, terrified, refused to bandage the wounds of AIDS patients. “In the days before cell phones and the Internet, when the New York Times still refused to use the word gay and the hometown gay newspaper sold just 6,000 copies — a time when it was impossible to reach the at-risk community outside of the mainstream — he could have shown leadership,” he says. “He could have promoted risk reduction and community education… . Koch’s failure in AIDS should be recalled as the single-most significant aspect of his public life.”
But potential fallout from closeted public figures is not just a historic relic, says Michelangelo Signorile in the Huffington Post. Koch is “Exhibit A” of what happens, still, when powerful people are in the closet. “At this very moment, there are closeted gay politicians in Washington and across the country voting against gay rights in part to cover for themselves,” he writes.
Koch was not all bad for gay people. In fact, he was pretty good, at least early on. His friend Charles Kaiser, the author of The Gay Metropolis and a former journalist, points out in an op-ed on CNN.com that “Koch had the longest and strongest pro-gay rights record of any public official of his generation, dating back to 1962, when he first called for the repeal of the New York state law prohibiting sodomy.” Kaiser notes that one of Koch’s first acts as mayor was “to sign an executive order banning discrimination against gay employees of New York City.” (Andy Humm, in an exhaustive piece in Gay City News, notes that this progressive streak faded as Koch eyed the governorship; though he had promised to get a city-wide gay rights bill passed within his first six months in office, it took years.)
My recollection is that questions about the sexual orientation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan were considered to be typical examples of 'conservative' Borking. There were similar objections to overt discussion of the sexual orientation of the California federal judge who overturned voter-approved Proposition 8 because he didn't like it. I guess, as always with self-absorbed and hypocritical bourgeois liberalism, it just depends.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 8 Feb 2013 at 12:31 PM
Yes, yes, doesn't matter what the issue is, the failure of public officials to deal with a public health crisis, or whatever the case, it's always those evil, hypocritical liberals who are at fault. It's important, no matter how nuanced the arguments may be, no matter had multi-faceted the ideas and questions discussed, to boil them down liberal hypocrisy.
Never mind that there's exactly no difference -- no hypocrisy -- between the opinions expressed regarding Kagan and the Prop 8 judge and the legacy of Koch.
In the case of Kagan and the Prop 8 judge, many "liberal" commentators objected to the idea that, if you're gay, you are somehow tainted and should be disqualified from positions of power or making decisions about public policy.
That's EXACTLY the argument that's driving recent critiques of Koch's legacy -- that you shouldn't be disqualified from holding public office or making public policies simply because you're gay. Koch, commentators argue, failed (and people died) because he failed to push back against this homophobia. He let his fears about the political damage of being identified as gay prevent him from responding sensibly and responsibly to a health crisis in the city he claimed to love so much.
#2 Posted by whm, CJR on Fri 8 Feb 2013 at 05:48 PM