The secrets Ed Koch carried
Ex-NYC mayor confided he was gay to close friends
Edward I. Koch looked like the busiest septuagenarian here.
Glad-handing wellwishers at his favorite restaurants, gesticulating through television interviews long after his three terms as mayor, Koch could seem as if he was scrambling to fill every hour with bustle.
But as his 70s ticked by, Koch described to a few friends a feeling he could not shake: a deep loneliness. He wanted to meet someone, he said. Did they know anyone who might be “partner material?”
“I want a boyfriend,” he said to one friend, Charles Kaiser.
It was an aching admission, shared with only a few, from a politician whose brash ubiquity and relentless New York evangelism helped define the modern mayoralty, even as he strained to conceal an essential fact of his biography: Koch was gay.
He denied as much for decades swatting away long-standing rumors with a choice profanity or a cheeky aside. Through his death, in 2013, his deflections endured.
Yet, as much as he hoped to silo his private identity, his efforts to obscure it helped set in motion much of the past half-century of New York politics. Koch coyly positioned himself as a sought-after heterosexual bachelor in his 1977 mayoral victory, defeating Mario Cuomo and redirecting a Cuomo family dynasty to Albany. He struggled to manage the AIDS crisis in ways that cannot be disentangled from his closeted status.
During a particularly stressful time in his third term, aides remembered, Koch stunned senior staff members assembled in his City Hall office one day with a sudden declaration:
“I am not a homosexual.”
No one in the room had asked about this subject.
For the gay friends in whom Koch confided during and after his time in office, completing this record of his life is something of a collective unburdening. Some had nudged Koch for years to come out, suggesting he might be happier for it, that the city might be better for it. Their failure disheartens them to this day.
For the loyal lieutenants who protected Koch and feel compelled to protect him still, the topic remains uncomfortable.
“He was our father,” said George Arzt, his longtime spokesperson. “You don’t ask a father those questions.”
Romance, whispers
In the politically energized Greenwich Village of the early 1970s, Koch had established himself as a reform-minded Democrat, a Bronx-born son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and self-styled enemy of the party machine.
An Army veteran and lawyer before reaching Congress in 1969, Koch pushed progressive social policies that befit his job representing one of New York’s bluest enclaves.
The question of whether Koch would ever come out was not a question at all to his friends in the Village. His highest ambition was politics, and, as a general rule then, successful politicians were not openly gay. He had come of age amid the “lavender scare,” the homophobic midcentury purge that had driven thousands of gay people from government service.
But the life of a congressman in the 1970s allowed Koch to cordon off parts of his identity. During this time, he was involved in a sustained romantic relationship with Richard W. Nathan, a high-achieving, Harvardeducated health care consultant, according to onrecord interviews with six people who knew about the pair. These include Rothenberg and Arthur Schwartz, boyfriend of a senior Koch aide at the time, as well as four people whom Nathan told about the relationship: Leonard Bloom, a former city health official; Frederick Hertz, a close friend of Nathan’s; Dr. Lawrence Mass, co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis; and Noemi Masliah, a relative of Nathan’s. (Nathan died in 1996.)
Koch, though early in his political ascent, was by then around 50; Nathan was in his 30s.
For Koch, the relative freedom of semi-anonymity did not last. Hoping to energize his longshot dream of becoming mayor, he persuaded the city’s most sought-after campaign operative, David Garth, to steer his 1977 race for City Hall.
Garth believed that Koch could win, but he had his concerns: He needed to be assured that rumors about the bachelor congressman’s being gay were not true. Koch told him they were not.
Unsatisfied with Koch’s word, Garth personally investigated several leads about purported dalliances, although he turned up nothing. One day, Garth stormed into a campaign office to confront Ethan Geto, a Koch friend whom he knew to be an openly gay political fixture. They made their way to the basement.
“Is he a fag?” Garth demanded, according to Geto. “If that son of a bitch lied to me and he’s a fag, I would never have taken him on.”
Geto feigned ignorance. “He says he’s not gay,” he told Garth, “I take his
word.” (“Of course I knew,” Geto said in a recent interview.)
At the least, Garth recognized that his candidate had a perception problem. And Koch’s most glamorous surrogate — Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America — was called upon to solve it.
The candidate and the beauty queen became strategically inseparable, their pinkies entwined at public events, inviting welcome, if misguided, tabloid speculation about an imminent engagement. Koch himself called her his “first lady” and hinted at how lovely it might be to get married at Gracie Mansion.
Still, the whispers continued.
On Nov. 8, 1977, Koch held on to win the election. Shortly afterward, Nathan told friends, associates of the new mayor unsubtly urged him to find work outside New York. At a party after the inauguration Nathan sounded resigned to his fate.
He would start a new life in California.
“The gauntlet has been drawn for me,” Nathan told Rothenberg.
And with that, the only long-term relationship anyone in Koch’s orbit could remember was over.
A new tenant
So much about being mayor was everything Ed Koch could have wanted.
Yet, for all its commotion and a revolving cast of visitors, life in the mansion could be isolating.
Often enough, it was staff who kept Koch company. When companionship seemed to elude Koch, friends tried delivering some directly, if discreetly. Herb Rickman, a top aide who served as the official liaison to the city’s gay community, arranged for occasional double dates at his own Park Avenue apartment, according to Schwartz, a former food editor for The New York Daily News who was Rickman’s boyfriend at the time. (Rickman died in 2013.)
More publicly, Koch wrestled with gay rights as a cautious ally. He seemed at once determined to demonstrate allegiance to gay New Yorkers where he felt he could and sensitive to the political risk involved in doing so.
Koch signed a landmark executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, appointed gay bureaucrats and judges, and became the first mayor to march in the city’s Pride parade.
Fear of exposure
Those close to Koch had long described him as a master partitioner. But as his time in office wore on, amid overlapping crises, his finely crafted dividers began to crumble.
Gay men were dying by the hundreds, then the thousands. The disease was menacing every corner of the city. And New York’s broadly popular mayor, who won a third term in 1985 by more than 60 points, seemed unwilling to spend political capital on the issue.
Despite the increasingly urgent situation, some city officials were blunt with activists: Voters already had their suspicions about Koch. He had to proceed carefully before throwing himself into a “gay issue.”
If Koch had for a time sought a fragile balance between advancing gay rights in targeted ways and maintaining some distance from the community, the AIDS emergency was simply too vast, too merciless to accommodate triangulation.
It is impossible to know just how Koch’s personal identity might have colored the city’s approach to the disease.
The city’s first comprehensive AIDS plan was not issued until 1988. Pleas for increased funding and the full use of the executive bully pulpit often went unheeded.
By the end of that year, city deaths among people with AIDS approached 10,000.
As his third term teetered, Koch began betraying the psychic strain of the job as never before. It did not help that several Chekhovian guns seemed to fire in succession: Myerson, the would-be “first lady” whom he had given an administration post, became enmeshed in a bribery scandal that reinforced escalating concerns about corruption in his government. Nathan had mentioned his past relationship with Koch to Larry Kramer, a playwright and activist who fiercely criticized the city’s AIDS response. Kramer was by then actively working to out the mayor.
City Hall kept tabs on efforts to chase the story, with Koch plainly fearful about what might be exposed. In August 1987, before a scheduled appearance at a forum on AIDS, the mayor could not sleep.
“I couldn’t understand why Koch was so upset,” Arzt, his press secretary, remembered. “He was scared that Larry Kramer would be in the audience and yell something out. I said, ‘So what?’”
The forum was uneventful. Kramer was not even there. Walking out afterward, Koch complained of a headache. He stepped into his car with Arzt. “My speech is slurred,” Koch said suddenly. “I think I’m having a stroke.”
He was correct. Arzt draws a straight line between Koch’s preforum anxiety and the stroke, which sidelined him for only about a week. Koch later speculated, more generally, that a fourth term would have killed him.
In his final, futile reelection campaign in 1989, Koch unfurled a denial about his sexual orientation that went beyond his stock deflections. “It happens that I’m heterosexual,” he said in a radio interview that March.
Two weeks later, an estimated 3,000 AIDS activists descended on City Hall, some with signs mocking the mayor’s pronouncement.
Painful memories
Like many politicians, Koch looked like a younger man after leaving office — to a point.
Koch grew close to Maer Roshan, an editor at the gay weekly NYQ and later New York magazine, who became a regular platonic movie date and social wingman.
Still, old sources of angst occasionally encroached on Koch’s postmayoral life. He shared an apartment building with Kramer, who mumbled to his dog about “the man who killed all of daddy’s friends.”
Koch experienced another jolt after phoning Bloom in the mid-1990s. A mutual friend had died of AIDS, and Koch called to offer condolences.
“Do you know who else died of AIDS a few weeks ago?” Bloom asked Koch. “Who?”
“Dick Nathan.” Koch said nothing. Then he ended the call.