He deeply alienated the city's African-American community with a caustic comment that "Jews would be crazy" to vote for Jesse Jackson — whom Koch accused of anti-Semitism — when Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1988. He earned the emnity of the mostly black Harlem community when he shut down the city-owned Sydenham Hospital in 1985. And just as the Koch administration was beginning to make headway in reducing violent crime in the city, the crack cocaine wars exploded, turning the city's black neighborhoods into deadly battlegrounds.

Also during Koch's watch, New York's LGBT community became as deeply polarized along racial lines as the rest of the city — a polarization that reached a boiling point in 1981 when a black church pastor, whose son came out to him as gay, went on a shooting rampage in the city's mostly gay West Village, killing six people, all of them white gay men.

By the fall of 1981, I couldn't take it anymore and left New York for good.

I don't give a damn whether Koch was gay, straight or bi. You can call him a "closet case" if you want, but there's no way anybody will be able to prove it either way, for Koch was never romantically involved with anyone, male or female, at any time in his life. Frankly, he was simply too brash for anyone to put up with him.