The 88-year-old former mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, has said he’s ‘shocked’ at a claim in a new documentary, Neil Barsky’s Koch, that he is gay.
Gay rights activist Ethan Geto makes the claim while talking about the fact Koch was mayor during the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s (he served between 1978 and 1989). Geto says, “So many people, particularly in the gay community, thought Koch was gay and that because he was a closeted gay man he wouldn’t do anything on AIDS. It would have been so incredibly invaluable for a popular mayor of New York to declare he was gay.”
The New York Post reached out to Koch for comment about the comments, who responded “I was shocked, frankly. Why would he do that?” He claimed to be particularly surprised as he’d previously thought of Geto as a friend.
It’s not the first time questions about Koch’s sexuality have been raised, as even back during his run for office in 1977, anonymous posters appeared bearing the slogan, “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.”
Normal Heart playwright Larry Kramer has also previously taken Koch to task for his stance during the AIDS crisis and said he was gay, writing in NYMag, “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. I was introduced to Koch at a party in 1982, specifically to talk about what was happening. And the minute he knew what I wanted to talk about, I was pulled away by police. He was a closeted gay man, and he did not want in any way to be associated with this.”
Koch has always refused to be drawn on his sexuality, using the rather nebulous excuse that it would ‘legitimise the question’.
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