Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

A Trip Back to a New York Where Everyone Was Jewish and Gay

‘Gay Gotham,” the landmark new show at the Museum of the City of New York, doesn’t directly address the Jewish experience.

But culture impresario Lincoln Kirstein and maestro Leonard Bernstein, are among the ten figures the exhibit explores.

“Through both men, we tell different stories about just how ‘out’ artists could be in that period [of the 1960s],” says Stephen Vider, a co-curator of the exhibit. “Kirstein’s bi, and married to [painter] Paul Cadmus’ sister. Bernstein’s also married, but having relationships with men, which his wife knew about. They represent an important turning point in the story we’re telling — that of defining American art created by queer artists who aren’t necessarily openly queer to audiences.”

Told in three chapters across two sprawling galleries, the exhibition is built around the notion of “queer networks” that began sprouting in the early 20th century – artistic tribes whose radical thinking ultimately trickled up to the mainstream.

There are more than 225 works of art in the show, along with now-poignant ephemera such as nightclub invitations and personal scrapbooks.

The exhibit also features the work of Deb Margolin, whose routines include a Yiddish version of West Side Story’s “America”; Tony Kushner, whose “Angels in America” provided a groundbreaking navigation of gay and Jewish themes; and Paul Rudnick, whose essay “Is Everybody Gay” brightens a glass case of late-20th-century gay literature.

“The Rudnick essay, written for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, parallels Lenny Bruce’s idea about Jewishness,” Vider says. Bruce famously joked that living in New York means you’re Jewish even if you’re not. “Gayness has become so woven into the fabric of what it means to be in NYC. Rudnick’s idea is also that New York is a place where all outsiders go. So in that sense, everyone in New York is gay.”

Did the Jewish “outsiderness” of pioneers like Kirstein and Bernstein open the door for them to push sexual boundaries as well?

“We can only wrestle with question, not answer it,” says Vider. “For a lot of the Jewish artists in the ‘50s and ‘60s, their outness about Jewishness fits with a kind of sense of separateness, if not outsiderness. The broader mainstream celebration of Jewish culture happens a little before the celebration of LGBT culture, but there are interesting parallels. And as LGBT people got more representations in the mainstream, like “The Boys in the Band,” they tended to be a little more tortured than something like ‘Fiddler’”.

“We feature one of Andy Warhol’s screen tests of Susan Sontag, as well as a Peter Hujar photo of her in 1975,” Vider says. In her essay “On Camp,” Sontag makes a parallel between Jewish assimilation and gay integration. She sees Jewish integration through a critical sensibility, and gay assimilation through an aesthetic one. Whether right or wrong, she’s thinking about minority groups trying to make their mark on American culture in a new way.”

Michael Kaminer is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

Gay Gotham runs through February 26 2017 at the Museum of the City of New York, mcny.org

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.