ONE WINTER NIGHT in 1924, a 19-year-old named Dorr Legg snuck away to a “charming park,” where he had his first sexual experience with another man, something he had been desiring—and studying—for several years.
Born in a large home overlooking the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Legg came from a long line of Republicans: His family had been active in the GOP since its first convention in their state in 1854. Like many Midwestern Republicans, his father deplored Wall Street and the fat-cat bankers of the Northeast, even if they largely belonged to his political party; he taught his son that prosperity grew out of self-reliance and individual endeavor, not collusion and backroom deal-making. As for the Democrats, his father added, they ran corrupt machines in the big northern cities and used violence and intimidation to deny blacks their rights down south.
An autodidact from a young age, Legg had been spending time hidden away in the University of Michigan’s library stacks, secretly reading everything he could find on homosexuality in books of medicine, psychiatry, criminology, witchcraft, and Sigmund Freud. The readings showed Legg that he was not alone. They also convinced him that he was the expert on his own condition. When medical doctors deemed homosexuals sick and religious leaders called them sinners, Legg shrugged it off.
But the law, which counted homosexuals as criminals, was another matter: The threat of arrest and imprisonment required that homosexuals live a double life. Sometimes haughty, always self-assured, Legg resented the fact that he couldn’t live freely as he pleased. As Legg faced arrest by the police and harassment by the FBI through the years, his general Republican leanings hardened into what one historian called an impassioned “libertarian distrust of government.” The government, he believed, was the homosexual’s enemy.
IN 1928, LEGG moved to New York City. He’d just finished a master’s degree in landscape architecture, and he arrived just in time for the tail end of the city’s boom. The Great Depression meant his design work disappeared, so Legg then found employment with the new public urban planning projects in the city and on Long Island. But the Republican in him could never bring himself to support the New Deal, even if it had kept him above water.
New York was an electrifying place for homosexuals in the 1930s, and Legg dove right in. He met like-minded men at Child’s, a restaurant underneath the Paramount Theater
