Kirchick’s chapters on the Kennedy and Reagan years are disproportionately dynamic. Joe McCarthy did the same to the political gossip columnist Drew Pearson in the coat room after dinner at a ladies’ club? How many journalists know, for example, that the phrase “no comment” was credited by Winston Churchill to Sumner Welles, F.D.R.’s onetime under secretary of state, who was drummed out of public service for trying to buy oral sex from two Pullman porters? (A lesser sin: He received a gift of delphinium seeds in the diplomatic pouch, a container for official business papers whose very name evokes the romance of an analog era.) Who remembers that long before Will Smith slapped his way to Oscar headlines, Sen. There’s vital material in each section, and even the trivia seems resonant. “Secret City” is organized by presidencies, from Franklin D. Kirchick rightly mourns “the possibilities thwarted.” A homosexual was forever tainted.” Later, as tolerance grew (thanks in part to the efforts of the Mattachine Society, the gay rights organization whose evolution is traced here), some confirmed bachelors took the important seat once occupied by Perle Mesta, the city’s famed “hostess with the mostess.” But even then their acceptance was often transactional, contingent and fleeting their complete potential unrealized. ![]() “Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” he writes. James Kirchick, whose new book is “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.” Credit. These must have been harrowing existences, but their retelling makes for very good and suspenseful, if occasionally ponderous, reading. seemed to be looking over his shoulder, seeking signals, codes and clues - a “slight mince” a “jelly hand shake” a “limp wrist” or just overzealous grooming. (Hunt’s fatal shame proved the power of association: His son, Buddy, had been charged once with solicitation at age 25.)Īnd yet the very skills gay people had to develop to survive - studiousness, compartmentalization, discretion, itinerancy - made them uniquely skilled, Kirchick points out, to sensitive tasks like espionage or high-level advising. But Kirchick reveals copious blood on the hands of the powerful, who for decades regarded alternative desires or any association with them as a “contagious sexual aberrancy,” and cause for immediate banishment from mainstream society - a Lavender Menace inextricably linked with the Red one. We’ve yet to reach the tuxedoed lobbyist overdosing at the Ritz to the tune of “A Little Night Music.”Įxcepting Teboe, who was lured and attacked by malevolent teenagers intending to rob him, the above cases were all suicides. And that’s just by of a book that stretches to over 800. Teboe, affable accounting clerk at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs: stabbed in an alleyway with a stiletto knife. Hunt, Army Reserve major and a governor of Wyoming turned senator: shot in the head while on a leather swivel chair in his office. “Denny” Hansen, champion swimmer at Yale, Rhodes scholar, National Security Council appointee and professor: asphyxiated in a friend’s garage. ![]() Montgomery, a Princeton graduate and the Finnish desk chief at the State Department: hanged in the nude by his bathrobe belt from a third-floor banister. How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means? ![]() But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. “Secret City,” by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights. SECRET CITY The Hidden History of Gay Washington By James Kirchick 826 pages.
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