Charles Kaiser > Quotes

“So many important New York musicians were gay, one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America since World War II

“that the Rhineland should be occupied by an international force until the dispute with Hitler can be resolved, the”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“But when the New York Post columnist Max Lerner researched an unprecedented twelve-part series on the “Washington Sex Story” he made a remarkable discovery: “At no point, whether I talked with State Department officials, Civil Service Commission officials, or Senators, was I able to track down a single case” of a homosexual being blackmailed. “Almost in every case, when I had kept pushing my questions, I was told ‘Well, Hoover says they’re more vulnerable.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

“(If I want, when I want), Christiane campaigned for the legalization of both. In 1967, the Neuwirth Act finally legalized the sale of contraceptive devices, but abortion wasn’t legalized until 1975, and advertisements for contraceptives remained banned until 2001, four decades after the pill was introduced in America.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“right from the start most German generals knew that Hitler was psychotic. But as long as he was winning the war, almost all of them were happy to overlook that detail”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“If you carry a weapon, it is always to kill. Do not think it is to defend yourself. If you draw your weapon, never get closer than three meters to the person you want to kill,”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“The Sorrow and the Pity,”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“recalled Sir Edward Spears, the wartime liaison between Churchill and de Gaulle. “We had 15,000 French sailors at Liverpool. I went to speak to them. I tried to persuade them to continue the fighting. Impossible …”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“When you see what organized religion does to legitimize homophobia, you begin to appreciate the enormously complicated issue of attacking this fear. If the church says gay bashing is all right, then people can say, ‘Why the hell isn’t it?’ “That is to me the biggest sin of all.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

“man was not made to be guilty, sin is not interesting, the only ethics are those which lead man toward the greater things he carries in himself.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“if the French army was defeated, it was impossible to imagine that the English would survive.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“all but 50 of these officers and 200 of these sailors will return home to occupied France, rather than stay in Britain to fight the Germans. “Their idea was to get out of the war”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“eight hundred small boats had loaded 338,000 men into larger ships during the legendary evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, including 500 French officers and 18,000 French sailors, to prevent them from being captured or killed by the Germans.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“Truman Capote, bolder than most journalists, described Hoover as a “killer fruit,” a “certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream.”*”
― Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

“Only one deputy, one admiral, and one leading academic remain with the Free French in London, and de Gaulle notices that all of his earliest supporters are either Jews or Socialists. A man of mythic pride, de Gaulle is infuriated by his total dependence on the British.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“canon gives orders that no more prayers are to be offered up for the British government.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Cost of Courage

“Ben Small’s boyfriend was hit moments after Small said good night to him in his tent. “This plane came overhead and all we heard was explosions and we fell to the ground. When I got up to see if he was all right, the thrust of the bomb had gone through his tent and he was not there. I went into a three-day period of hysterics. I was treated with such kindness by the guys that I worked with, who were all totally aware of why I had gone hysterical. It wasn’t because we were bombed. It was because my boyfriend had been killed. And one guy in the tent came up to me, and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were gay? You could have talked to me.’ I said, ‘Well, I was afraid to.’ This big, straight, macho guy. There was a sort of compassion then.”
― Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America