He was, that colleague believed, most likely gay.
Winograd, an elder colleague once told me, lived alone in a midtown hotel and frequently accompanied Anna Cahan, the boss’s wife, to the theatre. Morris Winograd, a onetime editor of the Forward. “New York,” he concluded, “was always changing.“ He noted the Irish, Italian, German, French and Jewish workers jostling for work, and the cafes open for business at various street corners on the Lower East Side. Several years before the Statue of Liberty even entered our harbor, and a mere few years after he escaped political arrest in Europe, he wrote in his memoirs of his joy at observing the town’s diversity. Those untold stories remind us that poet Emma Lazarus’s words on liberty, heard at many Pride rallies, still ring true: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”įreedom was clearly on founding editor Abe Cahan’s mind one June morning in 1882, when he made notes about his chosen city New York.
Together we uncovered many of those who were hidden in plain sight, all the while surrounded by the historic happiness, relationships, joys, nachas and the fully disclosed lives of others.
Just as historically queer folks drew hope from the musical theatre anthem popularized by our queen Barbra Streisand, “You’ll never walk alone,” It’s been a mazel in my work to have had Arlene Bronstein and Rivke Lela Reid, two longtime archive volunteers, join me. But while I’m considered a “lone arranger” in the Forward’s archives, a solitary comrade, I’ve been greatly helped over the years by several volunteers committed to inclusionary archival practices. It’s a lonely task, searching out those who were made to be invisible. LGBTQ archival research can mirror that solitariness. It was in his most public moment that he was, perhaps, most alone. While the HUAC hearings with Robbins at the center made our front page, it was years before we presented Jerome Robbins to the public as Jewish and queer - let alone began to tell the story of how the threat of being publicly outed led him to name names, an act that overshadowed the rest of his career. One hopes that for every archival silence, there are images like those of popular Yiddish entertainer Pepi Littmann to make up for the silences.Ī Forward front page recounts Jerome Robbins’ testimony in front of HUAC. The presence of a story like Weston’s highlights the absence of so many others.
Our archives echo with vanished histories. The Forward’s archive reminds me, a queer Yiddish archivist, of poet Marge Piercy’s description of poems as being made of sounds and silences. But right in the center of that front page, we reported that Weston’s surgeon certified his male gender so he could legally wed Alberta Brey, his longtime cis-gender female companion. A unique, upbeat article about British “lady athlete” Mark Weston’s gender confirmation surgery was counterintuitive. The rest of the Forward’s front page that day detailed a summer of hate, dominated by the fascists of Berlin’s Olympics and Spain’s civil war. Mark Weston, a transgender athlete, and his new wife Alberta Brey appeared on the Forward’s front page in 1936.