Ed Koch's Sad Secret

When I was a kid, Ed Koch was mayor. He presided over NYC for twelve years, from 1978-1989, and was very popular in his early years before his administration became consumed by scandal late in his tenure.

During my childhood Koch was the only mayor I knew, like he always had been and always would be running the city. In many ways every mayor since I've unintentionally compared to him. When he lost re-election in 1989 and left office on January 1st, 1990, it felt like an earthquake in NYC, like the city would never be the same.

And it wasn't -- the city changed dramatically after he left office, and many people either credit or blame Koch's time as mayor for it. 

In the twenty-plus years he lived after his mayoralty, Koch re-invented himself as a kind of city mascot, a media personality and ubiquitous commentator on everything political, cultural, social, you name it -- he had an opinion about everything, and shared it with everyone, non-stop.

But he had a secret that most suspected but that he refused to talk about and that, back then, most chose not to ask him about -- that Ed Koch was gay.

I remember some kid in my class once saying to me, "Ed Koch is gay, everyone knows it." I barely knew what "gay" meant back then but how could everyone know this if it wasn't being talked about in the press? And in the many years he lived after being mayor, it never came up in the media, was never talked about in polite society. And even in the decade since his death, this fact hasn't really been commented on -- until now.

This weekend the Times published a long article about Ed Koch's secret gay life -- and how sad, empty, and really tragic it was that he remained closeted. He did so in order to have a political career at a time when open homosexuals really couldn't get elected to anything. He did so when the AIDS crises was decimating the city's gay community and his sympathies and assistance was minimal (although a lot more than President Reagan ever did).

And most of all he did so because he was scared -- this tough-talking leader of the nation's biggest, toughest, richest city lived in constant fear and sadness that his secret might be exposed. 

It's a tribute to our times, however rough they might be, that being gay is no longer that career-killer it once was. Along with slavery and segregation, "the closet" is one of our society's great shames, and its destruction has been long overdue. In many ways, you can't blame Ed Koch for living this way -- all of us imagine ourselves as brave until the time comes when it could cost us everything we want. It's easy to say that someone else should make a sacrifice when it's not us.

I never met Ed Koch but I literally bumped into him once --  at the Union Square multiplex on December 24, 2004 in the early evening. My brother and I had just seen The Aviator and were headed to our mother's place for Christmas Eve. And leaving through the theater door I bumped into an older man waddling past, holding a tub of popcorn, staring at the ground, looking downcast and sad. It took me a moment but I knew I recognized this guy -- and then I realized it was Ed Koch, going to see a movie all alone. I felt sorry for him. Off camera, out of the spotlight, he just seemed lonely and depressed. 

This article is further proof that the "open secret" -- the thing lots of people know or suspect to be true, the thing that doesn't get talked about in mixed company, stuff that we used to consider nasty gossip, the stuff that would be considered "inappropriate" to discuss -- is dead. Everyone and everything is fair game to be laid bare. Secrets and privacy is a thing of the past.