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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. There's a new push to remove the name of former mayor Ed Koch from the Queensboro or 59th Street Bridge. The bridge was named for Koch under Mayor Bloomberg in 2011. Koch was mayor from 1978 to 1989. The New York Post has reported that the Jim Owles LGBTQ Democratic Club has sent a questionnaire to local elected officials asking if they would support removal of Koch's name because, "Koch has been documented to have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS and was blatantly racist." The language of the questionnaire there. The Post reports that those signing on to the cause include State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, City Public Advocate and gubernatorial candidate Jumaane Williams, Congress members Carolyn Maloney, Grace Meng, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Hakeem Jeffries, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson.

Last weekend, The New York Times published a deeply reported piece about Koch remaining a closeted gay man for his whole mayoralty and then some, including avoiding too much of an identification with the AIDS issue when he was in office. The explosion of that epidemic, with New York as an epicenter, coincided with his time in office. The article also explores Koch's loneliness, especially later in his life. The article is called The Secrets Ed Koch Carried. The two writers of that article join me now, Times correspondent Matt Flegenheimer and contributor Rosa Goldensohn. Hi, Matt and Rosa. Welcome back to WNYC.

Matt Flegenheimer: Hello.

Rosa Goldensohn: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Since you co-authored the article, I'm just going to throw the questions out there and the two of you can sort out who answers. You wrote that with gay rights reemerging now as a national political tinderbox, you assembled a portrait of the life Koch lived, the secrets he carried, and the city he helped shape as he carried them. Why revisit these aspects of Ed Koch's life at this time?

Matt Flegenheimer: Well, I think as readers and listeners remember well, Ed Koch was this grand New York character who lived a grand New York life and that life had really profound implications for his city. As much as he tried to compartmentalize his public and private lives, he was fundamentally one man. I think the goal was to capture the ways in which his personal identity really shaped who he was and what the city became, and friends of his, several of them, really felt this belong to history now, that there was a value in completing the record of his life, particularly in this moment, as you mentioned, where gay rights have become this cultural battleground again nationally.

Brian Lehrer: I think that's a really important point that you just made, having read the whole article. You mentioned that some of your sources spoke extensively on the record for the first time because they say even if Koch deflected questions on this issue through most or all of his life, they think it at least belongs to the sweep of history. Why don't you pick an example, any example, of a person like that and their relationship to Koch and what they want to be remembered before nobody's left to tell the story.

Matt Flegenheimer: Sure. I think, and I'm sure we'll talk about the AIDS crisis throughout here. One example that really stuck out to us is Leonard Bloom, who was a board member. He had befriended Koch. He was an acquaintance of Koch's. He was a city health official himself. Became a board member with Gay Men's Health Crisis. As AIDS began ravaging the city, really struggled to even get on the mayor's calendar for a meeting, was shunted aside by the administration and was told in no uncertain terms by the administration officials that in their estimation, this was a gay issue from which the mayor needed to really keep a political distance.

Though it's impossible to point to a single policy decision and say this did or did not flow from Koch's personal identity, but there's no question that members of the administration were very blunt with activists about what they saw as a political vulnerability here with Koch.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to get more specific about that for the sake of history to the extent that it's known? What did he not do about AIDS that people wanted him to do because if Mr. Bloom is correct, it could be tied to him not wanting to get people talking about his own sexuality?

Rosa Goldensohn: One thing that we note in the article, there's a letter from Richard Dunne, who was then the executive director of GMHC in the mid '80s, asking the mayor to come out more strongly in public on this issue. He says, "In your 1987 State of the City address, AIDS wasn't even mentioned," which is true. I went back and looked at it. When you look at the numbers from that time, by the end of 1987, as we say in the article, deaths among people with AIDS in the city approached about 10,000. It was 98 some odd. That's a sense of just the scale of this and then when you compare it to the level of reaction that people were hoping for, you get some sense of the tension there, the difficulty.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. One of the worst things in the article, at least to my eye, is that he apparently ended a relationship with a boyfriend at the time that he was running for mayor in '77 and even got that person to leave New York. Who was that and what did you document took place between them at that time?

Matt Flegenheimer: Sure. This was a gentleman, Richard Nathan, who was a healthcare consultant, had known Koch, had been in a relationship with Koch prior to his running for mayor. We want to be careful about how we characterize this. They had been in a sustained relationship over the course of the '70s for some period and as Koch is running for mayor and trying to look forward to a potential administration, he makes clear in one remark among his team that Nathan can have no place in a future administration. Really seems to be trying to create some distance.

What Nathan told friends of his at the time and subsequently, was that associates of the mayor made clear to him in no uncertain terms that it would be best if he found work outside New York. He ends up moving to California, starting a life there, but that is really the end of that relationship as Koch becomes mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Did he ever talk about resentment or feeling like he was basically exiled from New York City by Koch or at least encouraged to exile himself to cover up their relationship?

Matt Flegenheimer: He did. There's a remark in the piece that he makes. This is after Koch has just been inaugurated. There's a little gathering for friends and supporters where Koch arrives with Bess Myerson, who was the former Miss America, who had been a key supporter and had gone around the city with him campaigning, and Nathan says to a friend, "The [unintelligible 00:07:49] has been drawn for me," and makes clear that he would have no place really in the Koch orbit if he were to stay.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a follow-up question about the public relationship with Bess Myerson because for Koch himself, you describe, this frames the whole article, an arc of early political calculation, the exhaustion of perpetual camouflage, and eventually flashes of regret on all he had missed out. On this piece of that early political calculation, you write that he coyly positioned himself during his mayoral campaign in '77 as an eligible heterosexual bachelor. So many of our listeners weren't even born then. How did he do that?

Matt Flegenheimer: Well, I think the visual of the two of them going around the city. Bess Myerson was this very glamorous supporter, was intended [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: A former Miss America.

Matt Flegenheimer: Former Miss America. The first Jewish Miss America.

Rosa Goldensohn: They were holding hands in public events.

Brian Lehrer: Holding hands?

Rosa Goldensohn: Holding hands.

Matt Flegenheimer: Holding hands.

Rosa Goldensohn: When questions came in, sort of deflecting in a way that didn't absolutely make clear that there was nothing at all going on.

Matt Flegenheimer: He referred to her as his First Lady in a very wink-wink way. He said it would be lovely to get married at Gracie Mansion. It fueled this, for the campaign, very helpful, and in reality, not particularly grounded in truth, speculation that they might be engaged soon, they might get married. There was the sense that they were the hot item in town.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you want to see Ed Koch's name removed from the Queensboro Bridge? 212-433-WNYC. We can do a few phone calls of oral history here too. Who was alive then and involved in the fight against AIDS and for gay rights in those days who's listening right now? How do you remember the life or the role of Ed Koch? 212-433- WNYC. Tell your story to younger people listening now, who have only perhaps read or heard about that era, and maybe even you learned something from this New York Times article. 212-433-WNYC.

Does the context of those times excuse Koch at all? We'll get into a little more of the context. Does it make it worse, or whatever you want to say or ask our guests? We'll get a few phone calls in here too for Rosa Goldensohn and Matt Flegenheimer who wrote that New York Times piece. 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. I want to play a clip of Koch deflecting a question on his own sexual orientation, and this is 2011. It's the same year that the bridge was named for him. I don't know if it was at that ceremony or not. I don't have that specifically, but it is that same year and just two years before he died long after he was out of office, when Ed Koch was asked about his sexual orientation.

Ed Koch: I will tell you, that's a very interesting question. I refuse to answer that question because if I answered your question, how then would you prevent every political organization in America when it rates candidates and sends questionnaires, is to put in the question, what's your sexual orientation? Do you think that that should be permissible? I don't think so.

Brian Lehrer: Koch in reply to a question from the libertarian Reason Magazine. You describe in the article how the AIDS activist Larry Kramer kept threatening to out Mayor Koch when he was in office. Why didn't Kramer ever do it?

Rosa Goldensohn: Well, our understanding is that he was trying to and trying to get some interest from the press and there was an article in LA Weekly in the '80s where he's on the record, and there was also a Village Voice piece where he's on the record talking about Richard Nathan. Richard Nathan told Larry Kramer directly about the relationship, and then Kramer went on to try to push the story out. It was a very different time, and as much as people even ask us now, are you going to do this now? It was even more unheard of then, I think, to do this kind of outing in the press.

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] Go ahead.

Matt Flegenheimer: I think it's important to add that both friends of Koch's, and very much antagonists of Koch's through the years, have referenced his sexuality, and have said in no uncertain terms that he was gay. What we've tried to do here is apply a journalistic rigor to the arc of his life and sketch out the ways in which that life really affected the city and not just Koch himself. This is certainly not the first word, by any stretch, on Koch's sexual orientation.

Brian Lehrer: Obviously. On the exhaustion of perpetual camouflage, as you put it, did Koch ever come out publicly in any context?

Matt Flegenheimer: He didn't. His deflections took different forms, and across the decades, there was something of an evolution. In 1989 when he's running for his fourth term unsuccessfully, he says that he's a heterosexual. He affirmatively says that he's straight. Generally, he didn't go there and simply deflected. That clip you played is a pretty representative sample of how he treated the question in his later years, saying he stood for a higher principle, not wanting people to come after him politically to have to deal with the same sorts of dynamics, but I think the friends we spoke to about this were really convinced that his hesitation, especially later in life when there was no political calculation to make for him, had much more to do with his pride and his grudges and ancient rivalries from his time in office, not wanting people like Kramer to have the satisfaction of seeing him out after they'd worked to see him outed.

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] Go ahead, Rosa.

Rosa Goldensohn: I was just going to say in 1999, he does a New York Magazine singles ad, where he allows them to use the ad, have belatedly concluded that everyone, straight or gay, needs a partner in life. That's about, I would say, as close as he came.

Brian Lehrer: That's pretty-- What would the word be? Vague or [chuckles] read that however you want. Alan in Queens, you are on WNYC. Hi, Alan.

Alan: How are you doing? Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Alan: Good morning. The reason why they are revisiting this Ed Koch story now is because, in order for most people to insert themselves and have their views heard and make a mark, it's much easier to cancel out everything that came before you and insert yourself rather than build on what was before. That's a very dangerous and slippery slope, because for example, Martin Luther King, he's on tape laughing at women being raped. It's known that he was a womanizer, he raped women. He wasn't such a clean person in his personal life.

Brian Lehrer: I don't think he's on tape laughing at women being raped. I'm not even going to go further with this phone call right here, because you're just going way off the rails into something that's horrible and untrue. We're going to leave that right there. We'll take more calls in a second. On the results of his policy, Larry Kramer and others blame him for a tepid city government response to AIDS, and the new push to remove his name from the bridge accuses him of causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS.

Whether that number is disputed or not, how could he have saved more lives according to your reporting, and is there a number? Is there any estimate of how many lives could have been saved through different policies, as he was trying not to be too associated?

Matt Flegenheimer: I think one thing we're really careful about-- sorry, go ahead, Rosa.

Rosa Goldensohn: Right. I think we were going to say the same thing. This is not something that there's any estimate about or any way to clearly measure.

Matt Flegenheimer: Yes, I think we're really careful on the piece not to attempt any exercise in algebra about what sorts of decisions the administration made, a, flowed directly from Koch's sexual orientation, and b, had this or that measurable outcome as far as the city definitely was concerned. I do think the macro frustration that was so maddening to so many activists at the time, and maybe we'll hear from some among the callers, is New Yorkers knew Ed Koch to be this extremely public-facing, ubiquitous, how am I doing, the notion that he was not using that relentless bully pulpit energy that he channeled in so many other ways as mayor, felt like such a disconnect from the urgency of the crisis.

I think that was really, as much as anything, the frustration that he did not project that this was an enormously consequential and [unintelligible 00:18:35] crisis. As much as any particular policy issue, and there were certainly policy issues they had around wanting more funding, wanting more public education campaigns, greater intervention in certain ways, but the notion that he just did not channel the urgency and the magnitude of this.

Brian Lehrer: A few minutes left with Matt Flegenheimer and Rosa Goldensohn, the writers of The New York Times' deep dive into Ed Koch and the secrets he carried, which is the title of their Times article, and a few more of your memories, a couple of people ready with memories. Tanya in South Amboy, you are on WNYC. Hi, Tanya.

Tanya: Hi. My husband was NYPD. He was detective, and he was one of Koch's bodyguards back in the day. He used to come home and tell me about the different people that would jump into his car. He would constantly have these people in his limousine. He called them his hangers-on. He also spoke kindly of Elizabeth Holtzman and how she was good. I basically am just looking at this and saying, I don't feel that the man's name should be stricken from the bridge because he didn't come out with the fact that he was gay and he was doing what he felt that he should do back in that time. I did have arguments with my husband because I said, "If he goes for mayor again, I'm not voting for him because I just disagree with some of his policies," but I don't feel that it's something that, oh, this was horrible and therefore his name should be taken off a bridge. Cuomo, take his name off that bridge. It should be [unintelligible 00:20:33] bridge.

Brian Lehrer: Tanya, thank you very much. In the context of those times, Matt and Rosa, you do point out there was a lot of discrimination against gay politicians, which doesn't excuse him for not having the courage to stand in solidarity with the community in that crisis by coming out himself, but you write about how a main campaign advisor for his 1977 original mayoral run poked around to make sure Koch wasn't hiding being gay. Can you tell us that part of the story?

Rosa Goldensohn: Sure. In our story, Ethan Geto, who is a New York consultant and political fixture, tells the story of being bombarded by Garth in a campaign office, actually, in a different campaign office, brought down to the basement--

Brian Lehrer: By this consultant David Garth, right?

Rosa Goldensohn: By David Garth and David Garth demanding to know if Koch was gay, demanding this information from him, and Ethan pretending, he says, that he didn't know and just saying, "I don't know." Although he says he was aware at the time and later in life--

Brian Lehrer: Because if Koch was gay, Garth wouldn't have represented him.

Matt Flegenheimer: I think we will have to be careful here too because there is a part of this that is a naked political calculation and so much of the Bess Myerson gambit that we talked about earlier was rooted in a sense that the public would have a problem with this. As much as any particular feelings anyone in the campaign might have had about Koch, there was a sense that this had to be dealt with very delicately and that any whisper campaign about a "Greenwich Village bachelor" as Koch was, was intended to really seed doubt in the minds of voters that he was someone who should represent them. As much as anything, this really is about, in Garth's case, making sure he knew what he was dealing with politically.

Rosa Goldensohn: The election day in 1977, the day Koch is elected mayor is the same day Harvey Milk is elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In other words, he would've had to have been first. He ended up being last or not last, but it ended up never happening, but it's important to recognize that he would've had to be among the first.

Brian Lehrer: Spence, in the city, you're on WNYC. Hi, Spence, thanks for calling in.

Spence: Hi. I just have to say that when I read this article, I became very emotional. I was just one of the frontline soldiers in the AIDS movement, I was not a leader. It was very well known that Koch was gay. This was no secret. Larry Kramer was very clear and very specific about it, but honestly, I don't care that he hid his homosexuality. I care that he could give a flying you know what about young men at the time, they were mainly young men dying of AIDS, and whether he was gay or straight makes no difference. How could a sitting mayor ignore the deaths of thousands of young men? Not even mentioning it in his state of the city. I don't care about that bridge, they can name anything they want after him.

Brian Lehrer: Spence, thank you very much. Were you trying to say something there, Matt?

Spence: No, it's obviously [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's still Spence.

Matt Flegenheimer: The sense people had, and clearly Spence is channeling this, is really that for all that he could summon this public performance of being mayor and project so much enthusiasm for the job, that's just not something that anyone in the city really felt for him on this issue and as it escalated, he did not meet that moment with any of that public facing energy and vitality that you would expect on something this overwhelming and on this much of a crisis.

Rosa Goldensohn: We do feel there's a difference journalistically and for history between something being widely assumed, widely rumored, and actually having the sources to more clearly connect those dots and attributing that and putting that on paper.

Brian Lehrer: The Times has come under some criticism from different sources for this article, some concerned with LGBTQ rights say The Times itself was pretty bad on the issue back then. The article doesn't hold the paper accountable for contributing to the environment in which Koch did whatever he did as mayor. On the right, the Post accuses you of outing Koch since he never acknowledged his own sexuality, seeing outing someone about their private life as bad journalism ethics under almost any circumstances. Can you address those criticisms?

Matt Flegenheimer: Sure. Obviously we stand by all the reporting in the story and I think we've talked about why we think it's important, to the Post point. On the broader point about The Times, I think that The Times has written about this itself. The record of The Times on AIDS in the 1980s is exceedingly checkered. This is a story about Ed Koch and in that particular part of the story around AIDS, we really chose to focus on his response and the administration's and felt that that was the most relevant and compelling way to tell this story. I think those were the choices we made on that front.

Brian Lehrer: On outing somebody?

Matt Flegenheimer: I think as we talked about, this is something that he dealt with as a campaign issue going back almost, what, 45 years ago now, 1977. As we said, people have written about this over the years, friends of his in stray memoir anecdotes or published essays or antagonists of his like Kramer, have said in no uncertain terms that Koch was gay. We thought there was real value for history and the friends of his who spoke to us as well, to apply a full journalistic rigor to all of this and really make clear that the ways in which Koch's personal identity shaped him and shaped the city remained resonant and had an impact that go well beyond his own life, given his position and given some of the issues he faced publicly and privately over the course of his time in office and afterwards.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, I'm just curious about if the timing was a coincidence, because just before the article came out, I was going to propose to my producers that we do a segment on the new movement to remove Koch's name from the bridge because that's happening now, it's been reported. Your article refers to the move to remove his name from the bridge, but it's certainly not about that and it doesn't really go into the politics of today in that respect. Was it a coincidence?

Rosa Goldensohn: As you might have guessed, this article was a long time coming. It's many months of investigation and so it was not in any way timed or coordinated with the bridge movement.

Brian Lehrer: Rosa Goldensohn and Matt Flegenheimer have reported the deeply reported piece about Ed Koch and his life and the context of his personal life and potential ramifications for what happened in the city at that time in the article called The Secrets he Carried. Thank you very much for joining us.

Matt Flegenheimer: Thanks, Brian.

Rosa Goldensohn: Thanks.

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