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Closet Crisis: Ed Koch
Send J. Harvey a text! (Try to be nice, but I get it, everyone's a little cranky sometimes...)
Ed Koch was the semi-beloved mayor of New York City from 1977 to 1989. I say semi-beloved because NYC's gay community didn't appreciate how he, as a closeted gay man, was doing the bare minimum when it came to the AIDS pandemic.
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New York City. Some time after 1989.
#2 Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village.
Two of the building’s most famous tenants came face to face in the lobby one day.
Two men with a historically combative relationship—who, ironically enough, had ended up living under the same roof.
One of them had his dog with him, a Wheaten terrier named Molly.
When the other reached out to pet her, Molly’s owner pulled the dog back.
Molly’s human was playwright, screenwriter, author, and activist Larry Kramer. The other man? Former New York City mayor Ed Koch.
They were sworn enemies.
And if Ed didn’t already know just how much Larry despised him, he probably figured it out when Larry leaned down and told Molly: Molly, you can’t talk to him. That is the man who killed all of Daddy’s friends.’ ”
You’re listening to Wicked Gay—a true crime podcast about gay people doing awful things
Hello! I’m your host J. Harvey! And did you know I finally finished a Wicked Gay VIDEO episode? If you follow Wicked Gay on Patreon (www.patreon.com/wickedgay), you can check it out now. I haven’t made it public on YouTube yet, because I think I want a couple more in the chamber before I pull the trigger. But if you HAVE seen it, I want you to let me know on Patreon, or email me at wickedgaypod@gmail.com or hit me up on the social things and let me know what you thought.
I’ll get better. I got better at podcasting didnt I? Crickets.
Ok, so - TONIGHT.
What happens to your right to privacy when you’re in political leadership?
And here’s an even thornier question: if you have power—power that could help people in a public health crisis, power that could possibly save lives—but revealing a part of yourself might cost you that power… what do you do?
Koch served three terms as mayor, from 1978 to 1989. He styled himself as a man of the people, famous for walking the streets and asking New Yorkers his trademark question: “How’m I doin’?”
No, seriously, this guy would stand outside of the subway and ask people that as they came up the steps. I’d be wwwwhhhhaaaa? I’m just trying to get to work, Ed. But a lot of New Yorkers loved that sort of thing.
But Ed has his faults. He wasn’t UNVERSALLY beloved, he was polarizing, a love him or hate him type guy, and he lost some of his fanbase’s goodwill when things started to kinda go off the rails for him in his third and last term as mayor..
Ed Koch did some good. And he did some not so good. And some of that not so good might have been due to his choice to remain in the closet about his sexuality.
This is episode 58, and I’m calling it Closet Crisis: Ed Koch.
My sources for this episode were a May 2022 New York Times article by Matt Flegenheimer and Rosa Goldensohn called The Secrets Ed Koch Carried. That article’s gist is basically Ed Koch was gay, everyone, and they cite a gaggle of reputable sources. And it seems a little silly at first to have a whole article about one guy’s sexuality but when you look back at his record and issues he chose to focus on and issues he seemingly chose to ignore, and his status as a politician and public servant, it does matter. I’ll explain why,
My other sources included a 2009 documentary about closeted politicians and the harm they have caused in recent times called Outrage, which had a whole segment about Ed Koch’s secret male lover, we’ll get to it, and I also used the New Yorker, New York magazine, and Wikipedia.
Koch grew up in the Bronx, fought in World War II, then came home, became a lawyer, and climbed the political ladder—first as a councilman, then a congressman. And he had his sites set firmly on Gracie Mansion, where NYC’s mayor lived.
By 1977, with New York City on the brink of bankruptcy and crime at record highs, Koch saw his chance to run for mayor, positioning himself as a tough-talking reformer who could turn the city around.
But there was a tiny little detail that could hinder Ed Koch’s political ambitions.
Ed Koch was an eternal bachelor and questions about his sexuality haunted him throughout his career. You know, if you’re single and what you’re into isn’t immediately evident, people get HYPER interested in who you’re putting it to or want to put it to. How else are they going to put you into a box so they can define you in their tiny minds?
And he wasn’t open about his sexuality, which led to people assuming he was gay, which, yes, he was, but he wanted to keep that about 5000 miles from City Hall because NYC was not ready in 1977 through 1989 for an openly gay mayor. Ed wouldn’t have gotten or kept the job.
Some of his friends dared to suggest hey Ed, maybe coming out would OH HELL NO, was basically Ed’s response. Koch probably recalled the Lavender Scare of the 50s when evil Senator Joe McCarthy and his evil buttboy Roy Cohn saw to it that tons of gay and lesbian government workers were forced out of their jobs for being gay and lesbian and therefore security risks.(Btw, if you’re interested in Roy Cohn’s hateful story, I did a two part episode on him awhile back AND a Patreon one. The Cohn saga is one of my most popular eps.)
Anyway, Ed knew his history and knew that being openly gay was political suicide.
So Ed runs for mayor in 77, and knowing that the voters want to make sure he’s about vagine, he starts going around with a vivacious photogenic lady named Bess Myerson on his arm. Bess was a former Miss America who loved being Ed’s beard, probably because she knew she’d end up with a cabinet position if he won, and she did.
Ed really pushed Bess into the spotlight like he was sleeping with her but it was sorta obvious they were just best girlies, despite him referring to her as his “first lady” to reporters. Bess later on garnered the nickname Bess the Mess, which would also be a fitting name for a drag queen or WWE wrestler. She earned this title ecause she got involved in a corruption scandal which would make Ed look bad, and later on after that she was revealed as a five finger discount queen when she got pinched for shoplighting. Bess was a mess.
In the years since, the Bess the Mess gambit has also been seen as an attempt at putting out a major fire in Queens. Koch’s toughest opponent in the mayoral race was future governor Mario Cuomo, who hailed from Queens along with his family — including his son Andrew, another future governor. And in Queens, flyers started appearing on cars and doorsteps reading vote for Cuomo not the homo, it rhymes, oh and there was another version that read dont be a koch sucker. Talk about your lowest common denominator.
Years later, Koch said he went and confronted Cuomo who denied the whole thing, but Koch thought he was lying and Mario must have at least known who did it. He also referred to Cuomo as a “prick” for whatever role he had in it. And, fair. In a sort of verification of Koch’s suspicions, a Cuomo campaign worker later admitted that the Cuomos assigned minions to investigate if the rumors were true that Koch had a boyfriend.
But behind the scenes, Ed’s closet case study was already doing some harm. Particularly to one Mr. Richard Nathan.
Richard Nathan was a Harvard-educated health care consultant in his 30s who was in what the NYT calls a “sustained romantic relationship” with Ed Koch during the 1977 mayoral race. He was Ed Koch’s closet’s first victim. I don’t mean victim as in that Ed was leaving cryptograms for the police at murder scenes, I mean his not being out hurting someone.
Richard Nathan would later tell friends that he remembered the thrill of being courted by a powerful older man — never knowing when Koch might call from Washington DC to promise he’d be back by private plane to squeeze in a dinner date.
But once the campaign heated up, the talk about his sexuality kept coming up and Koch did his damndest to keep his distance from the rumors. Just days before the vote, he told WNEW, “I don’t happen to be homosexual — but if I were, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. God makes you whatever you are.” Thanks for throwing us a bone, sis.
And as the race tightened, Koch pulled back from Richard Nathan, even dismissing talk of giving him a health commissioner-type role in the new administration: “I can’t do that,” is what he reportedly told a friend who suggested it.
And then he made his choice. It’s not known just how serious Ed and Richard were, although it does read like Richard Nathan might have been more serious about Koch than vice versa. Ed Koch’s first love was politics, it seemed. Loving anything or anyone else must have seemed impossible for him, I'm guessing, considering how he handled his sexuality.
On Election Day, November 8, 1977, Koch won. And almost immediately, Nathan was persona non grata and nowhere near to being First Gentleman in Gracie Mansion. Richard’s friends remember that people close to the new mayor urged Richard, not so subtly, to leave New York.
At the inauguration party, Richard Nathan was sad. His boyfriend, the new mayor, showed up with what would prove to be a corrupt kleptomaniacal beauty queen on his arm. Richard told a fellow guest that he planned to start over in California, rather than stay in New York and be blackballed in his own city. “The gauntlet has been drawn for me,” he said, hinting that something was really amiss.Which others later claimed definitely was.
Years later, a friend of Richard’s recalled how devastating the break had been for him. And claimed that Ed Koch had done some shady shit or let some shady shit happen.
“Over the course of a couple of years, he had been lovers with Ed Koch, and after they broke up, Ed had made it impossible for him to work in New York,” this guy claimed.”No instance of homophobia hurt him more than the treatment by the man he was in love with … Dick was worried about his safety. And Dick did feel that if he went public, he would suffer.”
Koch was asked about Richard Nathan at one point in an interview,, and it got cringe-y. It was in his later years, long after he left office. His response? He referred to his ex as “a fine guy” but denied any romantic link. And as he had been asked ad nauseum in his lifetime, he was asked if he was gay and he deflected by asking: “Are you married? When was the last time you committed oral sex on your spouse? Don’t answer that. It’s no one’s business.” Ok, “commited” makes going down on your spouse sound like a sex crime, which - no. Transactional maybe, sure.
Richard Nathan almost immediately moved to the West Coast after Koch became mayor, where he resided for the rest of his life. He died of AIDS in 1996, which is sadly ironic, considering how his ex-boyfriend the mayor handled it in his city. Sources say Richard remained angry at Ed Koch right up to the end. And prior to his death, he let slip to a very special someone at a party that he and Ed had been a thing. He told the very LAST person Ed Koch would want to learn this. But we’ll get to it.
Before I nail Ed Koch to the wall as a semi-treacherous gay for not making a plague that was killing huge swaths of men like him a huge priority because reasons, I should point out that he did some good at first when it came to the community he wanted no part of..
For instance,
Early in his first term, Koch issued an order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation within city agencies—the first policy of its kind in New York City. In 1986, after years of pressure from LGBTQ+ advocates, he signed landmark legislation extending those protections to employment, housing, and public accommodations. He was also the first NYC mayor to march in the Pride parade—something seen as groundbreaking then, though today, in more liberal cities like Boston, it would be shocking if a mayor didn’t show up.
And then came AIDS.
To break it down, The first NYC AIDS case was reported in July of 1981. It took the gay Men’s health crisis, the first AIDS activism group formed in response to the crisis, until April of 1983, to land their one and only face to face meeting with Mayor Koch.
AIDS was killing hundreds, then thousands, including in his own neighborhood of Greenwich Village, yet the popular mayor—re-elected in 1985 by a landslide—seemed to hesitate to risk political capital on the issue.
When activists approached the mayor’s cabinet desperate for some help, his advisers warned them that, because voters already suspected Koch’s sexual orientation wasn’t hetero, his unspoken approach was going to be to tread carefully very carefully around AIDS and gay stuff. Don’t want to give the Cuomo family cause to break out the clever flyers again, right?
City Hall’s mid-1980s AIDS point person, Victor Botnick, a loyal Koch aide, was useless and insisted that the rumors about Ed’s sexuality prevented them from helping more..
“We can’t get out front on this,” he told activists, which is sort of jaw dropping, literally people dying and he’s saying it’s because it would make Ed look like a queer
Another example was this quote - “Come on, you get it,”one of Koch’s aides told a GMHC board member. “This is a difficult issue, given the rumors.” Meaning because people already kinda sorta suspected that ole Bachelor Ed likes the D and Ed and didn’t want to confirm suspicions. Come on, you get it. You get how politics works - we don’t want to offend the normies and risk our jobs.
I’m sure Larry Kramer was telling Molly his wheaten terrier not to lick the hand of whichever Koch employee said C'mon you get it. The audacity of courting ignorant voters in the face of innocent people dying horribly. Larry shoulda sicced Molly on these people!
I mean the Koch administration seemed to be moving in the opposing direction at times. For instance, initially resisting needle exchange programs for drug users, which might have helped prevent THOUSANDS of infections.
Even across the pond, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain had needle exchange programs. And that old buzzard was a notorious homophobe, she of section 28 which was basically the don’t say gay bill of the UK.
The gay community started to get pissed off. Demonstrations from guerilla AIDS activist groups like ACT UP began to accuse him of straight up murder, one of its founders being Koch’s chief nemesis and rageball hero Larry Kramer, of course.
Here’s how New York magazine put it:
Koch stood silent through years of headlines, obituaries, and deaths. He refused meetings with community members, Larry Kramer among them.. Administratively, he created inter-departmental committees and appointed liaisons, but he gave them neither power nor resources to do anything real. By January 1984, in the epicenter of a ballooning epidemic when tens of thousands of New Yorkers were infected and 864 were already gone, Koch’s New York had spent a total of $24,500 in response.
The city didn’t release its first comprehensive AIDS plan until 1988. Advocates grew frustrated as pleas for funding and public attention went largely ignored, despite Koch’s proven ability to spotlight causes he cared about. “In a city at the epicenter of this disease, one would expect regular statements from you,” Richard Dunne of GMHC wrote him in July 1987. “Indeed, one would expect AIDS to be on your agenda every day. Yet in your most recent State of the City address, AIDS wasn’t even mentioned.” By year’s end, nearly 10,000 New Yorkers had died of AIDS.
Then things eventually started to kinda fall off for him. First his “first lady” Mess the bess, whom he had given an administration post, she got caught in a bribery scandal which made his administration look shady.
Then, during Ed’s third and last term, a series of racially motivated murders—white attackers killing Black victims—shook the city. Already unpopular with many Black and brown New Yorkers, Koch seemed as slow to act on racial violence as he had been with AIDS. He also stirred outrage by publicly declaring that Jewish voters would be “crazy” to support Jesse Jackson in the 1988 presidential race, and closed a hospital in Harlem that had been a landmark and vitally important to the black community. (He would later publicly regret that decision.)
Oh, and Richard Nathan over on the west coast was still feeling scorned by Ed for the way he dumped him to be mayor and ran him out of town, and he had some sort of friendship or contact with Larry Kramer, to whom he told the whole relationship story to. Imagine Larry’s reaction?
Larry put Molly in a kennel because he was going to be too busy with his shovel burying Ed Koch’s career with this info (he didn't really put Molly in a kennel).
“I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick,” Larry said.
So, Larry, who frequently and quite openly, called Ed and his administration murderers, began a campaign to out Ed, telling reporters about what Richard Nathan told him and urging them to write about it.
None seemed to have taken Larry’s bait, you didn’t have New York Times exposes about people’s sexual preference back then. Either because it was seen as unseemly or the press was covering for the mayor. But Larry’s attempts to out him got back to City Hall, and Ed was reportedly terrified of finally being outed for real.
In August 1987, just before an AIDS forum, Koch admitted he couldn’t sleep the night before. He was finally starting to take steps on AIDS, but he worried Larry Kramer might show up in the audience with a megaphone and start shouting about Ed’s sexuality.
Nothing happened at the forum but tellingly Koch had a stroke right after, and it was considered to be at least partially stress-related. Although he was back doing Mayor things a week later. Tough old closet case bird huh?
Ed Koch ran for a fourth term in 1989 and really went on his Im basically a ruler Im so straight press tour.
“It happens that I’m heterosexual,” he said in a radio interview that March. He also called a meeting of his cabinet and said the very same thing. He was basically Jodie Foster-ing it by then, his cabinet knew, but they played along with him because they wanted to keep their jobs and because they felt sorry for him because he was clearly tortured over the matter.
But The gays had had just about ENUFF of this closet queen. Look, you watch your friends die and in many cases that's a literal statement, and Ed Koch would have you all riled up too.
So two weeks after the IT HAPPENS IM A HETEROSEXUAL interview , a couple 1000 AIDS activists rolled up on City Hall, some with signs mocking the mayor. “And I’m Marilyn Monroe,” one sign read in response to Ed’s pronouncement, a sign carried by a burly man who was obviously not Marilyn Monroe.
Oh and my favorite chant from that day was “AIDS care’s ineffectual. Thanks to Koch, the heterosexual.” And, I don’t know if this had a lot or some or anything to do with it, but Koch lost his fourth mayoral race and David Dinkins became the city’s first black mayor.
And a sobering figure: By 1989, the year Koch left office, nearly 30,000 New Yorkers had been diagnosed with AIDS.
In 2009, Ed Koch blasted the documentary Outrage for portraying his AIDS record as “virtually nonexistent” and alleging he had a “well-established affair” with Richard Nathan and then had pushed him out of NYC when he became mayor. He called the documentary's claims “a [bleep]ing outrage.” By that time, whenever someone in the press would ask him in public about his sexuality, he was known for barking FUCK YOU at them.
In his final years, friends urged Ed to come out, seeing it as a chance to cement his legacy and reflect the city’s progress. He even told friends he was lonely and looking for a relationship, heartbreakingly noting that old age wasn’t as bad as long as you had someone and that almost made me tear up and I’m not a giant fan of this guy.
Friends believed Koch’s refusal to come out, even after it was no longer politically risky, stemmed from pride and grudges—he didn’t want to give activists like Larry Kramer the satisfaction after their push to out him. And maybe also from that lifelong fear of rejection and being othered that a lot of gay people have.
Ed Koch died on February 1, 2013, at the age of 88, from congestive heart failure That same day, city and state officials announced that the Queensboro Bridge would be renamed the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge in his honor. And there is currently an ongoing protest from NYC gay activists who want to reverse that decision due to his spotty AIDS record.
If we think about it, WOULD a quicker response with funding and education have saved lives?. And DID Koch shy away from tackling AIDS head on because it was a gay issue and he was loath to be associated with gay issues because of the controversy over his hidden sexuality?
Which, if true, and if you connect the dots, means he might bear some responsibility when it comes to the virus’ horrifyingly steady progression in his city and all of the deaths it caused.
And that was the Ed Koch story. Personally, if your silence isn’t killing people, I think outing is ridic and people deserve privacy and do what you want on your own time. My only exception to that is when closeted gay politicians are actively working against the community, those people should be outed on live television. During the Superbowl. Or the Season 3 premiere of Severance.
Thank you for joining me this evening. As always, I live to entertain you. Good night.
You’ve been listening to Wicked Gay, a true crime podcast about gay people sometimes doing semi-awful things because they’re deeply in the closet.
