Lisa E. Davis, Greenwich Village historian, author of Under the Mink and Undercover Girl, April 16, 2020

(Historian Lisa E. Davis)

The historian Lisa E. Davis was born in Georgia in 1941 and was educated at the University of Georgia, where she did her PhD in Comparative Literature. She escaped to New York in 1966, then lived and worked on Long Island, at SUNY Stony Brook. In 1974, she started working at York College, CUNY, in Queens, and moved into her apartment on Charles Street. She never left.

As a young historian in the 1980s, Davis began to organize thoughts and memories of several older lesbians who had been her friends on Long Island. When they were younger, the Village had been their hangout, and some had worked and performed at mob-nightspots like the 181 Club and the Club 82 in the East Village. Their stories inspired the first book Lisa Davis wrote, Under the Mink, published in 2001. It is a novel set in 1949 in the drag bars of the Village, with a murder story, a romance, and violent mobsters winding their way through it. The novel was reissued in 2015, with photos from the author’s collection, and is a modern lesbian classic.

Her second book, Undercover Girl: The Lesbian Informant Who Helped the FBI Bring Down the Communist Party, published in 2017, grew out of another important Village connection. An interview that Joan Nestle of the Lesbian Herstory Archives did with Buddy/Bubbles Kent, who had performed as a chorus boy at the Club 181 in the 1940s and later in her own strip act, as Bubbles, was the key. Buddy, who had changed her name early on from Malvina Schwartz (of East New York, Brooklyn) because nobody was hiring lesbians or Jews, made an offhand angry comment during her recorded interview about a lesbian named simply Angie, who had been an informant for the FBI in Greenwich Village during the 1940’s Red Scare in America. Further investigation by Davis revealed the complex story of Angela Calomiris, a wannabe photographer who destroyed the career of a lesbian police officer and the lefty Photo League. Davis found Angela’s personal papers, as well as her FBI file, and became friends with Buddy, a remarkable character from the Village of yesteryear.  

Under coronavirus lockdown, I spoke with Lisa E. Davis by telephone from her apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village.

DYLAN FOLEY:  How did you wind up in New York?

LISA E. DAVIS: Darling, I was born and raised in Georgia. I wish I’d done my PhD at Harvard or Yale. Those are the only two places that matter. But I did not. I did my PhD At the University of Georgia in Comparative Literature, under something called an NDEA Fellowship, the National Defense Education Act. They started that when the Russians put up Sputnik, because they were afraid. I look at these children who owe $60,000, $100,000 or $200,000 for some bullshit degree that will never do them much good. In my case, the NDEA paid for everything, and this was Comparative Literature, which wasn’t particularly useful against the Russians. The government paid for degrees in everything because they could.

DF: Was it a Pentagon program?

LD: What I did had nothing to do with the military.

DF:When did you finish your PhD?

LD: That would have been in the Year of our Lord and Lady 1969. I was born in 41, so I must have been 28. I had free graduate school.

In Georgia, I was born and raised in the last years of a slave society, for that is what it was. If you have any kind of a brain, you can’t miss it. Slavery is part of the American way. We just don’t talk about it

DF: Your specialty is in Spanish and Latin America?

LD: Yes. I had a very good teacher. He taught in the Army Language Schools. He knew how to teach. I know how to teach, too. I just never had the chance. When you have 50 students at 8 a.m. in Jamaica, Queens, you are not going to get much done. They were nice people, wonderful kids. That was York College.

I did the PhD in Georgia. The original job that I got was at SUNY Stony Brook. I had worked in an NDEA language institute with the man who the department chair. That’s how you get a job.

DF: Did you move straight to the Village?

LD: I was on Long Island. The most bizarre experience of my life. That’s where the school was.

DF: When did you move into the Village?

LD: 1974. I moved into this apartment. That’s where we are sitting now. It’s on Charles Street, which is between 10^thand Perry.

DF: Were you out at this point?

LD: Oh, for years. I’d been out since I was 16. I came out at the Women’s Missionary Society Camp one summer. The missionaries were sort of queer. That’s the Southern Baptists, who are opposed to everything.

DF: What was your social life?

LD: I was coming from the trauma of not having gotten tenure at Stony Brook, for diverse reasons, including the fact that my friend who got me the job was no longer there. 

The woman who was heading the department at York lived across the street. I had been entertaining her and as soon as I accomplished my seduction, I got the job. It’s not only the boys who do it. While I was visiting her across the street, there was a sign that said, “Apartment for rent.” I took a look. It was the same money I was paying on Long Island. And it had an elevator. Of course, I remember the rent and I tell everyone. All the young people ask. Three and a quarter, $325 a month. It’s a one bedroom. It has an indoor toilet. I took the apartment. Now they are $4,500 a month.

DF: What was your social life like in the 1970’s?

LD: Was I alone? I’ve always had somebody. I had a girlfriend in Brooklyn. I was on the train to the Village and Brooklyn, then I had to go to Queens to work. A lot of my social life was on the MTA.

There were numerous lesbian bars in the Village, though most are long gone. 


(The Duchess, formally at 101 7th Avenue)

There were places like the Duchess, the Cubby Hole, which has changed locations, and the Fat Cat. There were many places to go. It was not expensive. You could get drunk and try to pick somebody up, which was the idea, of course. And Henrietta Hudson has survived, over on Hudson Street.

(Stormy DeLarverie, legendary Village figure who protected other lesbians, in front of the Cubby Hole, 1986)

DF: Was there a bar that suited you better?

LD: When it was open, Bonnie and Clyde’s on 3^rdStreet was the loveliest. It was not there forever, but it was there for a while. Maybe it lasted 10 years. The Duchess was nice but there was some big thing with Ed Koch, who was always coming out of the closet to knock people around, and they closed the Duchess.

(Bonnie and Clyde's, 82 W. 3rd Street)

Bonnie and Clyde’s was very nice, and they had a restaurant upstairs that brought in a lot of people.

DF: How did you see the gentrification of the Village?

LD: A good friend of mine survived the AIDS epidemic. I am not sure how he did it. He said there were so many apartments available for these new arrivals because so many guys had died. It would be announced that So-and-So was sick, and then 2 or 3 days later, he was dead.

St. Vincent’s, now overpriced co-ops, thanks to Bloomberg and Mr. Rudin, and probably the people at Long Island Jewish Hospital/Lenox Hill… St. Vincent’s was one of the first places to take AIDS patients. Others wouldn’t take them, but the old nuns at St. Vincent’s took them in. People were terrified, but it is nothing like now, when the terror is real. You got AIDS from having sex. The latest virus is evidently free to all just by breathing.

DF: Did you know Buddy Kent was going to have such an influence on your life when you met her?

(A striking Buddy Kent, left, late 1940's, early 1950's)

LD: Buddy/Bubbles became a good and dear friend, and I often went to the SAGE socials that she managed when SAGE was at the Center on 13^thStreet. By then, she was working at St. Vincent’s as an x-ray technician until her retirement. She had a little training in photography during the war when she was in the Women’s Army Corps. She lived on 8th Street, right across from the old Whitney Museum. It’s now an art school that has been there for 100 years. The original Whitney was there, because it was in their backyard. Buddy had lived there forever, so she could afford to live there.

She took the name Bubbles when she got her strip act. Before that, she worked as Buddy. But she adopted the name Kent early on, because it was hard to get a job if you were Jewish, much less a lesbian. That was in the 1930s, 40s. Her family liked the name Kent, so some of them adopted it, too. 

(Buddy/Bubbles Kent, had a strip act, where she'd go from male drag to lingerie)

DF: What inspired you to write Under the Mink?

LD: Ah, Blackie…what inspired me was that I quit teaching. When people ask me, I say that it is a work of historical fiction, in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Most everyone is completely identifiable. They are not made up. Generally, the heroine was a composite of several people, who did that sort of thing. The rich girl from uptown is a composite of rich people who come downtown, because many people came down to see the queers. The drag shows were very popular. It wasn’t a gay audience. It was generally a straight audience, mobsters, high society and show people, plus the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Put a little excitement in your life, come down to the Village and see the performers! These stories were told to me by people who actually did it. They are all dead now. I am glad we kept some of that world alive. 

(Under the Mink, Lisa E. Davis' novel, inspired in part by the life of Buddy Kent and her old friends)

I put my bar on 8^thStreet. It was really the181 Club at 181 2^ndAvenue. I put it on 8^thStreet because I wanted to keep it in the Village. I used the Bon Soir address, if you remember the Bon Soir. Barbra Streisand had one of her first performance gigs there.

Speaking of the change in the Village, 8^thStreet used to be a street of lively shops and clubs, and the first movie house in New York City, the first venue dedicated to showing movies.

8th Street was a street of dreams. Now it is “Retail Space Available.” Little things are beginning to open up, little restaurants and urgent-care centers.

DF: Is the movie theater the old Eighth Street Playhouse?

LD: Yes, that’s right.

DF: Did you do other research on the Village in 1949?

LD: I read a lot of stuff. A great deal of it was based on talk. Whenever the girls got together, my older friends, the “old broads,” as they called themselves, they loved to talk about when they worked for those Mafia clubs on 8^thStreet, on 2^ndAvenue, the 82 Club, down the street in the East Village—when it was still the Lower East Side—on East 4^th. All run by the Mafia.

The 82 Club and 181 Club were run by Anna Genovese.

I got a second edition of Under the Mink from some crazy people I know. I didn’t have to pay, which was good. The new edition has photos. There are photos at underthemink.com.

The hookers at the 181 were very involved with the operation. Many of them were dating the girl performers. Madame Lucille in the novel was Lucille Malin. She was real. She was married to an old drag queen named Jean Malin who unfortunately for him drove his car off a pier in Venice Beach, with Patsy Kelly and another friend in the car. Fortunately, they survived. He did not. He drowned. He was quite young.  He was a big drag performer in the 1930s. Lucille and he were a couple of sorts. Lucille was the biggest madame in New York. Her girls got around.

(A new clipping of Angela Calomiris, on her "Red Scare" testimony)

DF: Could you tell me about the Photo League and Angela Calomiris’ work with the FBI to shut it down?

LD: Probably her destructive capabilities were exaggerated because the forces that were after the Photo League were there from the beginning.

The Photo League members were taking pictures of poor people. They had a project up in Harlem that was a no-no. I have complete FBI files on many of the major photographers of the era, who were being watched for 25 years. There was Margaret Bourke White, a big lefty, and Ben Shahn, who made the mistake of being Jewish. I keep trying to give them to somebody. I’ve been in contact with the Tamiment collection at NYU but their archives are in transition and there’s no response.


(LIsa E. Davis' Undercover Girl)

DF: Your Undercover Girl project started with Buddy/Bubbles making an angry comment about Angela betraying s lesbian cop and forcing her to be fired?

LD: Exactly. The reason I got on to this was because of Buddy/Bubbles. She was so cute and was a good-looking gal ‘til the day she died. She’s been dead for quite a while. She spoke in rather mysterious terms without naming names. One of the rules back then was that you did not name names of other gay people. That was the kiss of death. You did not show them in your photographs. I have many photos of entertainers. It is very frustrating because they cut the other people out of the photographs. Only they appear, and you don’t see the other people.

Buddy/Bubbles was talking frankly about the early days, and suddenly made a connection between the subject at hand and someone named “An-Gie Calamares.” It sounded important. Then I found, also rather by accident, information on someone called Angela Calomiris. Check. These must be the same person. I called up Joan Nestle, who by then had fled to Australia. She said, “Oh yes, we have her papers at the Archives. Just tell them. They’ll get them out of storage for you.” [Editor’s note:The legendary lesbian writer and memoirist Joan Nestle was a co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archive in 1974, now based in Brooklyn.]

(Catalog for the Jewish Museum's exhibit on the Photo League, the leftist organization that Angela Calomiris helped destroy through her 1949 testimony)

DF: Buddy was implying that Angela used her contacts to destroy the career of a lesbian cop?


(Judy Holliday, the Broadway and Hollywood star, whose lesbian police officer lover was ensnared by the "Red Scare" in Greenwich Village. Holliday was also harassed by the FBI.) 

LD: Her name was Yetta Cohn. Yetta Cohn was a well-known Village person. She was also Judy Holliday’s girlfriend, for quite a while until Judy became better known [Editor’s note:Judy Holliday later became a well-known Broadway and Hollywood actress. She was investigated by the FBI herself for left-wing sympathies.] She played the Village Vanguard with a group called the Revuers that was kinda leftie, but everybody was leftie back then. Judy went on to greater things but died young at 43. She had been called to appear before something called the McCarran Committee, that investigated arts and culture, and the stress took its toll.

Angie did what she could to make it worse. The FBI may have been after Yetta previously but Angie chatted up her FBI connections. She chatted up the NYPD, saying that Yetta was a Henry Wallace supporter, the Bernie Sanders of his day. Wallace was Vice President under FDR. He was too radical. That’s when they put in Truman, the guy from Missouri. Angie ratted out Yetta and Yetta lost her job. She had been editor of an NYPD newsletter. She was not a policewoman walking the beat.

Another old Village person who knew Yetta said that Yetta had gone a long time with no work and had practically had a nervous breakdown. Judy helped her out, of course. 

When Angela died, she died in Mexico, where she had some property, where a lot of expats have property. She couldn’t breathe. She thought she could breathe down there, better air. But she died anyway. She left all these papers behind because she had kept everything from her FBI years. This was the high point of her life. She was a star. What do you do with the papers? You either toss them or give them to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Which is what the executors of her estate did.

Because I made that connection, I could write that book.  It’s an important book because it shows what happened in America, when it drifted radically from left to right, and how the drift was engineered.

DF: There are so many levels to the book—the 1950s Red Scare, the FBI’s harassment of suspected communists, and attempts to destroy unions and leftist organizations like the Photo League. Then there is the story of Angela’s hard luck childhood living in a New York orphanage, her life as a closeted lesbian and her very public testimony on behalf of the FBI.

LD: I think that it was a quote from [the historian] Jonathan Ned Katz’s mother, who said here was an obvious lesbian up on the witness stand. In fact, everybody knew and the people who worked with her in the FBI knew that she was a lesbian. They needed her because she would testify. It was all about the money. The money was great. It was the best job she ever had.

DF: Angela sold out the members of the Photo League for $180 a month from the FBI. What influence do you think Angela’s childhood had on her life?

LD: What you said about the orphanage was true, and she was there for her entire adolescence. She was destroyed as a human being. She always told people that her mother was dead, and she was not dead. She would never live with her mother ever again.

Then there was the question of money because, of course, she had no money.  One of the great ambitions of all the women that I knew, the old broads, and that included Buddy/Bubbles and Angela Calomiris, was to go to college. Then Angela would have a real chance at some kind of a job. Towards the end of her life, she managed to insert herself into a college program, but it was too late to make a difference.

The Photo League was her salvation because they provided very inexpensive classes in multiple aspects of photography. Something like $15 for six months of classes. “Come to the Photo League and learn how to make photos.” She was working as a photographer but not making much. Living in Greenwich Village, where rents were $30 a month, $40 or $50, she could survive. $180 a month would have been a lot. The offer from the FBI would have been too good to turn down because the money was great. After all, it was her government. It wasn’t Moscow. It was a patriotic thing. Well, why not?

The FBI terrorized anyone with a brain. Nowadays, they don’t have to hire informants. They have all these electronic devices. The computer has made informing much easier.

DF: How did you find Angela’s FBI file?

LD: I received Angela’s file from a woman—otherwise I could not have done the book—from Veronica Wilson who had done her PhD dissertation at Rutgers, on informers, with a focus on gender. “Red Masquerades: Gender and Political Subversion During the Cold War, 1945-1963” That’s what people engaged in serious research do, if they have access to FBI files, because they are very hard to get. They let other people copy them.

I have Angie’s FBI file, which is unbelievable. Then I have all the papers she left. I couldn’t have done it without her FBI file.

DF: Was Angela Calomiris difficult to write about?

LD: She was not a pleasant person to write about. She was not heroic. This was a great problem for people who knew her in P-Town. [Provincetown, MA, on Cape Cod.] I took the book to P-Town.  The publisher, who I never would have gotten on my own but I got through somebody I know, is in Massachusetts. I did a run in Boston, then I went to P-town, where I had large audiences. Generally, the younger people were very interested, but there were old broads who knew Angela, who didn’t like the book at all. She had been their friend, somebody who had opened up P-Town to the lesbians. In P-Town, it was all about business. She ran one of the largest rental complexes in town. I know how she got that, by cheating some poor soul. He got into contract, he wanted to get out and she wouldn’t let him out. She got the property or $13,000 or $16,000 and sold it for millions. That’s real estate. She knew how to play the game.

Some of the women in P-Town said that I was demeaning lesbianism. I was always happy to explain to them if they wanted to meet some bad lesbians, I could introduce them to some of my exes. If they’d never met any bad lesbians, I’ve met quite a few who would take your money and whatever.

Angie was a very twisted personality who served the purpose of a very twisted time.

She became the lover for several years of the sister of her FBI recruiter. They owned a house in Connecticut. Angie made money she never would have made. If you are going to make money in this system, that’s how you make it.

DF: Are you still in touch with Joan Nestle? 

LD: Joan Nestle is still with us. Her health is very good. She’s 79 or 80. She’s in Australia. They have National Health.

DF: Are any of the women you knew who come up in the 1940s and 1950s Village still around?

LD: The old broads I knew are all gone, but whenever they got together—and that would be 20 or 30 years after the fact—the most fun thing for them to talk about was when they worked in those [Mafia] clubs.

They would at least be in the opening number and the finale. Someone I knew was a stripper and played the downtown clubs. She didn’t get much retirement from stripping. She didn’t have much money. They were all living in West Palm Beach, Florida, in a trailer park. At least they had a roof, and that’s what they would talk about, and they would show these photographs. Sometimes I would be able to get a few. On the last visit to them, I found photos in a garbage pail. One friend said, “Nobody cares about that anymore.” I took them out of the garbage, but a lot of stuff was lost. Nobody filmed and you didn’t record. Photography was a big thing. It was big business in the nightclubs. They took photographs, developed them in a hurry, came back and sold them to the customers.

A lot of people had fun. When Joan Nestle was interviewing Buddy/Bubbles, she knew nothing about Buddy’s career. She was interviewing her because she was in SAGE. In the 1950s, early 60s, Buddy and a friend owned a Village club called the Page Three. That was Jacquie Howe. The guy at the end of the bench was their agent Kiki/Kicky Hall, who had a drag review he took around the country.

DF: How many years did you spend on Undercover Girl?

LD: Only 10 years! I discovered this story through Buddy Kent, otherwise no one would have known. The Photo League knew Angela was a lesbian. Some thought she had been blackmailed into testifying, like so many gay people back then. Perhaps they felt sorry for her and hated her, too. They were certainly horrified when she appeared on the witness stand to testify against the National Board of the American Communist Party.

The FBI knew Angela was a lesbian and didn’t care. They took anybody who was useful.

DF: Angela’s testimony destroyed the life and career of her mentor, the photographer and Photo League head Sid Grossman. What happened to him?

LD: Sid never worked in New York again. That’s what happened when you were outed. You didn’t work. He went to P-Town. He and his wife would fish all day and sell their catch on the street. That’s how they stayed alive. [Editor’s note:Sid Grossman died in 1955 at the age of 42.]

DF: Do you know where I could find other lesbians who were involved in the 1960s bar culture? Should I try SAGE?

LD: I’ll be glad to try to unearth some people. They have a problem with SAGE, because of the trans thing. All the women at SAGE suddenly became trans women. The lesbians were feeling marginalized but maybe they’ve worked that out.

DF: What do you think caused the decline of the lesbian bars in the West Village?

LD: They were all mob bars. If it wasn’t for the Mafia paying off the cops, there wouldn’t be any gay bars anywhere. It was all supposed to be illegal.

The Sea Colony [on 8^thAvenue] was Joan Nestle’s specialty. She wrote about it and spent part of her decadent youth there. [Editor’s note:Nestle wrote an excellent essay on 1950s lesbian bar culture called “The Bathroom Line.”]

I think the increasing rents were very damaging. There was also some big scandal at the Duchess [at Grove Street]. Ed Koch was reigning then and they were always cleaning up New York. [Editor’s note:Ed Koch did succeed in closing down The Duchess, pulling the liquor license through using antidiscrimination laws.]

DF: Did social changes in the Village affect the bars?

LD: I suspect having the Gay and Lesbian Center there on 13^thStreet was a great boon to a lot of things socially and politically because it gave people a place to go. The LGBTQ center has become more and more gentrified, I suppose. Back in the day, it was very popular and open. They didn’t charge money. Now they charge for everything.

People may have had other things to do besides going to the bar and trying to pick someone up. Maybe they could pick them up at a political meeting. Always at the AA meetings.

DF: Are you working on anything?

LD: I have a performer I would really like to do more on than I may be able to do. I can’t get the papers and photos she left away from the cousin she left them to. Cousin Joan got everything that belonged to a performer named Blackie Dennis.

Blackie was a nice Italian girl from a nice Italian family. She grew up in East Harlem. Like all the girls from her generation, she knew that you came to the Village. That’s where you came. In the 1930s and 40s, the Village was the center and that was because historically the Suffragettes had set the tone. It was a very female, politicized setting, and had been for years. Many of the Suffragettes were a little queer. Who else had time to do that kind of thing and get locked up?

Blackie Dennis was one of the women who found her way to the Village. She performed in several places. Things got hot down here because they were going after the Mafia. The clean-up committee was trying to eliminate the Mafia in the 50s. The Mafia was supporting the gay bars and prostitution. Drugs came into the picture later. 

Blackie was working at the Moroccan Village on 8^thStreet. There was a shoot out there She was also named in a very important trial about prostitution, though they did not call Blackie a prostitute. One thing led to another and she decided to work out of Miami, another hot spot for gay nightlife. The mob kept everything working very well. She stayed there with her girlfriend, the stripper.

Blackie dressed like a guy and looked like a guy. In late adolescence, she wound up in the Village. There is no recording of her voice, but she must have had a nice voice, because she sang all over the country. She had a singles act. That’s the next person I’d like to write about.

    

Jonathan Ned Katz, historian, author of Gay American History, April 30, 2020

 (Jonathan Ned Katz)

Born in 1938, Jonathan Ned Katz was raised in the same Greenwich Village townhouse where he lives now. Educated at Antioch College, City College of New York, the New School and Hunter College, Katz broke onto the New York cultural scene in 1973 with his play “Coming Out!” which dealt with gay men and lesbians in the age of Gay Liberation in the early 1970’s. The play led to Katz being given a book contract to research and compile Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.

The 1976 publication of Gay American History began a radical confrontation with American academia, showing that America’s gay and lesbian history, though ignored or rejected, has existed since colonial times. Katz documented men being executed for sodomy in colonial Massachusetts, love letters that chronicled the romance of Alexander Hamilton with John Laurens during the Revolutionary War, women who passed as men in 19^thcentury America and the forced commitment to psychiatric facilities of gays and lesbians. Katz also lays out the early battles for Gay Liberation, including Harry Hay’s founding of the Mattachine Society in the 1950’s. The book helped inspire the creation of gay and lesbian historical studies at colleges and universities around the country.

Katz’s other books include the Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary(1983); The Invention of Heterosexuality(1995, with an introduction by Gore Vidal), and Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality(2001). He also has a memoir, Coming of Age in Greenwich Village: A Memoir with Paintings (2013).

Katz is also a fine artist, having worked in textiles and now painting.

In 2008, with initial support from Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, Katz launched OutHistory.Org, a website which publishes original documents and scholarly articles on gay and lesbian history.

Dylan Foley interviewed Jonathan Ned Katz by telephone at his home in Greenwich Village on April 30, 2020. We discussed Katz’s childhood in the Village during the anti-communist Red Scare, his own sexual and political awakening when he joined the Gay Activists Alliance in 1971, and writing the play “Coming Out!”, where he came out to his mother in an ad in the Village Voice. We also talked about how Gay American History not onlychanged the discipline of gay and lesbian history, but also changed Katz’s own professional life, allowing him to teach at Yale and New York University.

Here is our interview:

DYLAN FOLEY: You were raised in the Village. Your father was an active Communist. What was his story?

JONATHAN NED KATZ: About the Red Scare, the first thing was that my father was a Communist in the 1930’s and 1940’s. I got a sense from him that it was out of concern during the Depression. He went to see this play, “One Third of the Nation,” it was about one third of the nation being poor, not having proper housing or food. It was a play from the ‘30’s.

Mainly what his Communism meant was a concern about social equality. That took the form of being very bothered by discrimination against black people. This was very early for a white guy. I asked him about the origin for this once and it was that there was one black boy who was very smart in his high school class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The black kid was yelled at and called “Nigger” and all these things. My father felt for him. That was the origin of his caring about the discrimination against blacks.

This led to my father collecting jazz records and becoming an expert on the history of jazz. He was an expert on this major aspect of American culture that people didn’t even recognize then. He would play these records. I grew up with Bessie Smith being my lullabies.

We moved into this house in 1940, when I was 2. We rented an apartment. It was an odd place to live. There were factories, a frankfurter factory on one corner and a bakery on the other.  There was a commercial building that is now condominiums and rare apartments on the other corner.

Sometimes walking by, the bakery workers would say, “Do you want an éclair?” I remember that as a kid.

I’d also see the rats going into the frankfurter factory to be ground into rat frankfurters.

My father produced two or three concerts at Town Hall. One was about Bessie Smith, after she died. It was a jazz concert. He got all these old jazz musicians. It was a big success.

My brother also became an historian of black history, from my father’s interest. I became an historian, finally, with one of the great influences being my father.

My father’s Communism, what it meant in the U.S., was that he was a Stalinist. He thought the negative things being said about Stalin were lies. Finally, he gave that up. He just withdrew from being a Stalinist.

 (Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, 2001)

DF: What was your father’s profession?

JK: That’s quite funny. My father was in the advertising business. They had Communists in the ad business. He took his job very seriously as the provider. In that age, the husband was the provider. My mother went back to work when I was eight or 10. She was an editor at Parents Magazine for years, telling people how to bring up their children.

DF: Was she a therapist?

JK: No, she thought she was.

DF: Was she a Freudian?

JK: [laughs] I’ve written about this in my memoir.

DF: Do you remember the Red Scare in Greenwich Village in 1949 or 1950?

JK: Yes, I do. My mother said to me, “You are not supposed to tell people in your class at the Little Red Schoolhouse in the Village,” a very progressive school, “that your father was a Communist.” Some of the other kids’ parents were Trotskyites.

I knew my father tried to get a gay friend of his into the Communist Party. My father was very bothered that the Party rejected the guy as a security risk. That was the same reason that the State Department was using to fire homosexuals and Reds, people who were called Reds, maybe who had gone to one meeting and had put your name on a petition for something and got on a list.

I must have said, “What’s a Communist? or “what’s a homosexual?” He must have said, “A man who loves men.”

It was interesting that my father had a friend who was openly gay, who felt this conflict with the Party and not letting the guy in.

My father would also point out homosexuals sitting in Washington Square Park. There was a place in the west side of Washington Square Park where all these men would sit. It was like a cruising place. It was quite public and quite obvious. My father said, “These are homosexuals.” That was part of my life in the Village.

DF: How did your parents deal with the Red Scare?

JK: My parents handled it pretty well. I wasn’t terrified of the FBI. I was warned that we might be visited by the FBI. One day, the bell rang and these two guys in the typical uniforms that they wore, these overcoats and pressed suits. J. Edgar Hoover made sure you had to dress in a certain way.

They wanted to speak to my father. I guess I got him. Maybe it was 1950. It was scary.

My father, after speaking to them in the front room I am sitting in right now, where I wrote this thing I am telling you about, where my father was interviewed by the FBI.

After they left, he told me that they asked if he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. “I said no,” he said. “We didn’t have cards.” It was like a joke.

DF: Did your father lose his job or get blacklisted?

JK: I think he did lose a job over it. Nobody looked into this at the time, but I suspect something happened with a major job he was supposed to get. He was supposed to go to a new art directing job that had been announced in the Times, but never happened. I suspect it was because the FBI called the Gravenson Agency, the new job. I think they also called the ad agency that he did work for, and they were okay with it. He stayed for a while with the old agency.

After all of this, he had a major heart attack. I think it was related to the anxiety. For 20 years, he survived. It was an important heart attack. He retired soon afterwards. He died in 1970. He was 70.

My mother was not a Communist at all. She was somewhat liberal. She was the Freudian. I had the Freudian versus the Marxist in my family. That’s why I was interested in both.

My father loved the sexual stuff in the blues songs. In black culture, there was a different attitude towards sex that was much freer than the uptight mainstream white culture of the time. We are talking about the ‘40’s and ‘50’s. In the ‘20’s, the raunchy blues lyrics started.

They were a very liberated family. My family walked around naked, but I grew up very repressed, a product of the 1950’s. 

DF: You finally became involved in the gay liberation movement when you went to a Gay Activists Alliance meeting in 1971, at the age of 33.

JK: It was the winter of ’71 when I got involved with the GAA. I came to this church on 29^thStreet. It was open to groups that were organizing.

Sometimes there is this door you walk through. There is this physical door, it wasn’t a metaphysical door. When you walk through, it is going to change your life and you don’t know how. On one side, there were three guys in what I guess you’d call anti-drag. They looked like Auntie Tilly dressed for church with hats. Oh my god, I guess we are all in this together. I was uptightand I was in the process of getting over all this repression. On the other side were these street transvestites action revolutionaries. 

Then there were various things said at the meeting. One of the leaders, Arnie Kantrowitz, said we are fighting for our lives. It sounds banal, but it made me realize, “We really are fighting for our lives.” It’s my life that’s at stake there. I started going to demonstrations and going public. In a year, it led to me doing a play called “Coming Out!” The morning the play was to open, I got a phone call. It was my mother. She said, and I’ve told this many times, [Jonathan mimics a high-pitched, very prim voice] “Jonathan, is that you in the Village Voice?” Yes. There was an ad for the play. “Are you a homo-SEXUAL?” I don’t know why they say it with a hyphen in the middle. Yes. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because I knew that you’d act this way.”

It was the beginning of a new relationship with my mother. It took her about three years, but she ended up helping me edit Gay American History. I wanted her to edit it because it was better to have my critical mother, who was an editor, go over it before it was published. It was the beginning of a new life.

(Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, 1983)

DF: In your twenties, you didn’t address your homosexuality?

JK: I think there was a gay party that I went to. You just didn’t talk about being gay. You went to a party once in a while. I was so uptight about being gay and going to therapists to be straight. I did all that. Luckily, I got to a therapist who didn’t think that was my problem. I had other things. It was luck or maybe I chose her.

DF: You went to several colleges, including Antioch and the New School. Did you wind up with a masters?

JK: No. I didn’t finish with a bachelors. I was a dropout. It was the 1960’s. I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t even do rock and roll. I didn’t fit in any place. I didn’t fit in the gay scene because I was reading Marx. I had a deep interest in Marxism and sociology. I didn’t fit into the gay aesthetic scene. I didn’t fit in the left because I was gay. The leftist kids I knew seemed uptight. That may have been part of me being uptight. Some of them seemed to think there was going to be a revolution. That’s ridiculous. How could you think there was going to be a revolution?

Early on, I went on anti-war marches, before it became a mass movement.

DF: Please tell me about your play “Coming Out!”

JK: The play had bits that were dramatic, that could be acted out, scenes that were particularly dramatic. I think I had one piece that was from the colonial period.

One of the reasons why this play got so much attention was that it was the first introduction to people that there was such a thing as gay history.

The play was quite various. It had these dramatic speeches, political speeches at the end. We got away with the rabble-rousing speeches because the actors believed in it so much. It was so exciting. Because they were amateurs, there was a power to their acting.

The director of the play was a professional publicity agent for the theater, so he could call up the New York Times and say, “You should do a feature on this.” He got Marty Duberman to write a feature comparing my play to [Village playwright and Judson Poets’ Theatre founder] Al Carmines’ play. Duberman thought Carmines’ play [“The Faggot”] had traditional stereotypes about gay people.

Twenty years later, a director asked Al Carmines to play Walt Whitman in a play I did on Walt Whitman. He did it. We never talked about our initial contact. 

DF: How did you get a book contract for Gay American History?

JK: My brother, an historian, had published a book with the editor that he had sent me to.

 (Gay American History, the 1978 paperback)

DF: Where did you go for material?

JK: I was obsessive, I always say. Wherever I went, I talked about the research. At a gay party, somebody said, “Oh, you should look at Alexander Hamilton’s love letters to John Laurens, during the American Revolution.” I didn’t really believe it, but I read the letters and I think that Hamilton really was in love with this man. It turns out there was a sexual joke about the size of his nose. It was cut out of the letters, but you could figure it out what it was. Nobody’s talked about it. It is on OutHistory.org. 

I went to the library and looked up Alexander Hamilton and there were these love letters. That was one example.

I heard there was a lot of stuff about homosexuality in the old medical journals. In some tower at Columbia, there were some medical journals I was trying to get a hold of. I had to bow down to some crazy guy. “Why are you looking at this, why are you here, what are your credentials?” I never had credentials. I got into the NYU libraries because the gay librarians got me a card.

When I went to the 42^nd Street library, I had this experience. I told one librarian, that I was doing work on the history of homosexuality, which is what I would have said then. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a group of helpful librarians. All these queer librarians wanted to help me. It was following one clue after another. It turned out not to be that hard to find, once you start looking for it. It was just that nobody had looked for this material before.

What I did, the way I found stuff, was that I took every existing bibliography of homosexuality I could find, some of which were not medical, but the medical ones were helpful, too. I Xeoroxed them, I cut them up and put each entry on a 3 x 5 card and put them in chronological order.

The early bibliographies that were done by gay people were really useful. They helped me a lot.

 (Jonathan Ned Katz and his file cards, 1970's. Photo by Fred McDarrah)

I ended up with thousands of file cards, they were in my office. It was quite a sight. Fred McDarrah from the Village Voice took pictures of me with the cards.

DF: Did Gay American History have a tremendous impact on your life?

JK: Yes. I was sent around the country on a train by my publisher because I don’t like to fly. I stopped in Chicago and was interviewed by Studs Terkel on his radio show.  He got me to read the beginning ofGay American History, which is this very dramatic thing, sort of like the speeches at the end of my play. It’s quite poetic and I am very proud of the writing.

Studs Terkel documented the working-class history that had been ignored for so long.

DF: You’ve referred to yourself as a community historian and as a detective historian, for the work that you’ve down tracking down the hidden documents of gay history. In your academic travels, you’ve wound up teaching at Yale and NYU.

JK: I like that I made it to Yale, for a turn to be allowed in the walls of the Ivys. It was temporary. They only allow you in briefly, then they eject you.

(Jonathan Ned Katz)

DF: Were there parts of Gay American Historythat blew you away?

JK: Yes, a lot of it did. The discovery of passing women, which are called transgender now, which we understand in a different way. That was amazing, some of these discoveries, reading in a medical journal about a woman, who changed and lived as a man, had a hysterectomy, had two wives and ended up as a doctor and a novelist. It was an amazing story.

Contacting Harry Hay and talking with him was great. I first read about the formation of the Mattachine Society in 1950, when I was reading about it on the train going to my publisher to do some Xeroxing. They let me do Xeroxing there because I was concerned about the expense. I was reading about the Mattachine and realized that some of the people were still alive.

In this very room I am in now, Harry Hay once slept here with his boyfriend when he was in New York, to be the grand marshal of the Gay Pride Parade one year.

It was very exciting. In the aisles of the NYU Library, I was reading Hamilton’s letters, and I am like, “OH, MY GOD! They are love letters!” What to make of this? He’s famous for being a womanizer. None of that was mentioned in the play [The musical “Hamilton.”]. The most popular piece on OutHistory.org is about Alexander Hamilton.

 (Gore Vidal)

DF: Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to your book The Invention of Heterosexuality. What were your impressions of him?

JK: I was very excited when I met Gore Vidal. He entertained me. I got a call from him. Did I want to pick up the introduction he wrote for the heterosexuality book? I went to the apartment at the Plaza Hotel and for about two hours, he entertained me. He gave me a monologue. Everything was “funny.”

Vidal was leaving for a party with Robert Silvers, the founder of the New York Review of Books. On the steps of the Plaza, we were waiting for a taxi. I always loved his work, especially the political stuff. 

I said, “You sound like a Marxist.” “No, it is just living and growing up in Washington and seeing what the realities were.”

(The Invention of Heterosexuality)

DF: How has your historical process evolved from Gay American History to OutHistory.Org?

JK:  First, it was just showing that there is such a thing as gay history through the documents, presenting the documents. It was appropriate to do that.

In 1983, with the Gay and Lesbian Almanac, I was a part of a group of people that was questioning this—how are these ideas constructed, how is the language constructed, how human relations are constructed. In different ways and very different ways at different times. The death penalty…you are executed if you are caught committing sodomy in the colonial times. In some other time, they gave you five years. It’s a big difference.

And all the different ways of conceptualizing what’s going on in these human relationships. It was fascinating and great to be involved with other people who were interested in this. We had study groups that met for years. It was fun to talk about this. We laughed a lot. A lot of the people were really smart.

I got much more interested in collecting this information, which still needs to be collected. There is still not enough knowledge about all of this, but I was really interested in how to analyze this material, how to interpret this, all the stuff that’s going on. What do the changes mean and what brought on these changes? Why do people think this way in this time and that way in another time?

I got more theoretical in a way, how you think about the material, rather than just getting [the documents]. There’s a put down of people. “Oh, you just do the manual labor of collecting documents…Oh, I do theory.” There is a horrible snobbery among gay scholars. “Oh, I do theory. I wouldn’t touch a document.”

DF: Do you have any new projects?

JK: I have a book protect, a contract that is almost signed. It is about Eve Adams, a Polish Jewish lesbian who immigrated to the United States and fell in with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and gets on the FBI’s list and gets surveilled. She then publishes a book called Lesbian Lovein 1925, and they use that against her, to frame her. They put her in jail and deported her. During the war, she was in Occupied France and avoided the Nazis for three years, but in 1943, they finally caught up with her. She became a Holocaust victim, ultimately. Her life is very interesting.