The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996.

In his introduction to The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996, Charles Kaiser quotes academic essayist Joseph Epstein, who wrote in a 1970 edition of Harper's. "If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth." Kaiser -- a former Newsweek editor and New York Times reporter -- uses Epstein's contemptible quote to point out how far gay men and lesbians have come in little more than a quarter of a century. Today, Kaiser infers, our civil rights have been transformed and no thinking person would openly admit his hatred of homosexuals.

In The Gay Metropolis Kaiser unfurls the rich history that led to that transformation. His collection of first-person accounts of six queer decades puts a personal spin on milestones most of us have read about before. And if Kaiser confines his coverage to the gay movement in New York, it's with good reason: He's acknowledging that much of the groundwork for our gay crusade began -- and continues -- there.

An account of gay life in Manhattan isn't a new idea. Several books -- most memorably George Chauncey's exhaustive but less stylish Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 -- have chronicled the evolution of the East Coast gay scene, and so many queer novelists have set their stories in the Big Apple that future generations may believe that every one of us lived there. But Kaiser sells the same locale and stories by mixing the memories of famous folk (Ned Rorem, Arthur Laurents, Gore Vidal) with dishy accounts from the movement's unsung heroes and by approaching landmark events from a fresh perspective.

Countless writers have replayed the Stonewall riots, but no gay text has so effectively explained how Judy Garland's death may have been the impetus for that historic brawl. And Kaiser's overview also goes far beyond gay New York itself, to the wider pool of influence its big-city luster produced -- a figurative gay metropolis that sprang up wherever the urbangay-based sense of style appeared.

While we've all read our share of opinions on gays in the military, The Gay Metropolis gives us fresh information going all the way back to the Army's extensive sponsorship of drag shows during World War II. (Kaiser quotes Dwight Eisenhower as telling a group of soldiers who have just performed an all-male production of Clare Boothe Luce's New York-based campfest The Women, "You are not fighting with machine guns -- but your job is just as important.")

When right-wing yahoos talk about "gay recruitment," their teeth are chattering about what they picture as a direct threat (or promise!) of sexual seduction. But gay recruitment, as Kaiser's multiplicity of information shows, is something else entirely. It's that sense of style, that hipness, that springs up in the gay ghettos of New York, San Francisco, Paris, and so on: As gay ideas make their way out into the hinterlands, often with their gay origins obscured, the gay metropolis constantly spreads. Combining amusing anecdotes with new voices, Kaiser builds an accurate and enormously entertaining rerun of our queer past. The Joe Epsteins of the world can wish all they want, Kaiser seems to be saying -- but if our strengths and the strides we've made in the past 50-odd years are any indication, homosexuals aren't going anywhere. Or rather, homosexuals are going everywhere.