Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)
"Not since Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history."
—George Stephanopoulos
Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick's Secret City.
For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" held enormous, terrifying power.
Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of "the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States," James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a "homosexual ring" controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory.
Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
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James Kirchick. (2022). Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Unabridged Macmillan Audio.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)James Kirchick. 2022. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Macmillan Audio.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Macmillan Audio, 2022.
MLA Citation (style guide)James Kirchick. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Unabridged Macmillan Audio, 2022.
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- bioText: James Kirchick has written about human rights, politics, and culture from around the world. A columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, he is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. A graduate of Yale with degrees in history and political science, he resides in Washington, DC.
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"Not since Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history."
—George Stephanopoulos
Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick's Secret City.
For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" held enormous, terrifying power.
Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of "the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States," James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a "homosexual ring" controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory.
Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company- reviews
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February 28, 2022
From the 1940s to the 1990s, “America’s global preeminence transformed what had been a private vice into a public obsession as homosexuality assumed an ideological cast and treacherous, world-historical significance,” according to this ambitious history. Tablet columnist Kirchick (The End of Europe) examines the forced closeting of LGBTQ government officials from the FDR administration through the Bill Clinton era, detailing how rumors that State Department official Sumner Welles (whom Winston Churchill credited with coining the phrase “No comment” in the 1940s) propositioned male train porters when drunk sowed the seeds for the Lavender Scare, which resulted in government employees losing their jobs due to belief that they could be easy targets for blackmail and coercion by foreign enemies. The official exclusion of gay people from national security access lasted until Bill Clinton overturned an Eisenhower-era executive order in 1995, Kirchick notes. Extensive research, including original interviews, delves into rumors that Alger Hiss was falsely accused of espionage because he rejected Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers’s sexual advances and reveals that the Iran-Contra affair was facilitated by a conservative “gay network.” Despite losing momentum and depth in its coverage of the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, this is a valuable and often fascinating revision of U.S. political history.
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"Not since Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history."
—George Stephanopoulos
Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick's Secret City.
For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" held enormous, terrifying power.
Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from...- sortTitle
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- tableOfContents
Dramatis Personae
Introduction: Comrades
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1: "No Comment"
2: "Worse Than a Murderer"
3: Senator X
4: Patriotic Homosexuals
5: "The Greatest National Scandal Since the Existence of the United States"
Harry Truman
6: The Concealed Enemy
7: "This Moral Leper"
8: Lavender Lists
9: "A Government Within a Government"
10: The Homintern
Dwight Eisenhower
11: "No More Bohlens!"
12: The Heterosexual Dictatorship
13: Pixies on the Potomac
14: "We Accuse . . ."
15: The Hunted
John F. Kennedy
16: First Friends
17: The Group of the Intrepid
18: "That Old Black Fairy"
Lyndon B. Johnson
19: A Long Way from Arp
20: "A Quite Serious Situation"
21: "Gone and Forgotten"
22: The Fruit Loop
23: Scandal in Sacramento
24: The Thrill of Treason
Richard Nixon
25: "Destroy Your Opponent"
26: Fags
27: "We Are Impatient"
28: The City of Conversation
Gerald Ford
29: The Ultimate Democracy
30: "Too Good an Opportunity"
Jimmy Carter
31: Out of the Closets, into the White House
32: Code Breakers
Ronald Reagan
33: "The Homosexual Thing"
34: The Manchurian Candidate
35: An Enclosed and Enchanted Garden
36: Sodom-on-the-Potomac
37: "I Don't Have It. Do You?"
38: "Them" Is "Us"
39: "Our Sebastian"
40: Mr. Green
41: The Wonderful, the Creative, and the Brave
George H. W. Bush
42: Naming Names
Bill Clinton
43: A Profoundly Important Strength
Conclusion: The Gay Century
Acknowledgments
Photography Credits
Sources
Notes
Index
About the Author- bisacCodes
- code: HIS036060
- description: History / United States / 20th Century
- code: HIS036080
- description: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA)
- code: SOC012000
- description: Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies / Gay Studies
