Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

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. (May)