James Kirchick explores a time when “being homosexual was the worst thing you could be in Washington.”
Much has been written about the history of American politics, and how Washington, D.C. has shaped it. Similarly, the history of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States has been explored in books, documentaries, and TV series. But few (if any) have taken the time to stitch the two narratives together — to discover what it really means to be gay while working in the political mecca of the country, Washington, D.C.
In his new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, journalist and historian James Kirchick explores homosexuality in politics, from World War II to the Cold War, and unravels the Lavender Scare, the panic surrounding and persecution of gay people in politics. “Being gay was even worse than being a communist” in 20th-century America, he tells KCM. Secret City explores the previously untold lives of queer people in positions of power, and the consequences they faced for living their truth — as Kirchick writes, “An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 federal employees lost their jobs owing to homosexuality in the 1950s alone, a figure that, extrapolated over time, is comparable to the estimated 14,700 people who were fired or resigned due to their political associations during the Red Scare.”
KCM: You said you wanted to write about the gay history of the United States, since it’s not separate from the history of the nation. How do the two intertwine?
James Kirchick: Homosexuality had to be secret for so long. It was an enforced secrecy — it was the worst possible thing you could be in American politics in the 20th century, worse than being a communist. It was condemned in major religions, was against the law in every state, and was considered a sickness by the medical establishment. In doing my research, I realized every presidency, every institution, and almost every event or phenomenon — whether we’re talking about McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, espionage, the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, or Jackie Kennedy — all these elements of our history had a secret gay part to them, and it’s never really been put together before into a single book. So that’s what I set out to do.
You write, “From the Second World War until the end of the Cold War that followed, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. Nothing posed a more potent threat to a political career, or exerted a more fearsome grip on the nation’s collective psyche than the love expressed between people of the same sex.” Can you explain how and why being gay was seen not just as a religious threat, but also a national security threat?
There are two stages. The first is World War II, when this concept of “national security” was really created; that term and notion didn’t really exist until then, because that’s when the United States really entered the world as a global superpower. There was mass military mobilization and millions of Americans were being sent to Europe, Africa, and Asia. We needed to create a bureaucracy for managing confidential information. The United States didn’t even have a civilian intelligence agency until World War II.
And the fear was that gay people, because they have this deep, dark, terrible secret, would be more liable to blackmail. That they would be more willing to give up national secrets to our enemies. This really created the securitization of homosexuality.
Then the second stage in this national security fear of homosexuality began with the Cold War and McCarthyism. In February 1950, Joe McCarthy gave a speech in West Virginia where he warned about communists in the State Department. A few weeks later, it was revealed by an Under Secretary of State on Capitol Hill that 91 homosexuals had been fired from the State Department over the preceding three years. So, there was a conflation between homosexuality and treason and espionage, and there was a fear that communists and homosexuals were believed to have several things in common. They were both living in the shadows; they were both rebels against society and mainstream values.
So there was a societal panic about the link between gay people and treason, but was there any reason to believe that?
No, there’s not a single confirmed case in the United States of a gay person turning over confidential information to an adversary due to blackmail. I cite a study that was done in the early 90s of over 100 cases of Americans convicted of espionage. I believe around six of them were gay and none of them did it because of blackmail. It was for other reasons, like money or maybe ideology. But there was no evidence that blackmail had been used. So this entire rationale is baseless. There was a factual basis to the Red Scare, but there was nothing at all to justify the Lavender Scare, and just as many people, if not more, were victimized due to it.
What was it like to be gay in Washington at the time?
Well, first of all, it’s different for men and women. I think gay men were greater threats for a variety of reasons: They held more senior jobs and had higher-level security clearances, which brought them under greater scrutiny. Women in Washington were largely administrative staff and secretaries, which is not to say that they weren’t victimized by the Lavender Scare. The other reason is that female or lesbian sexuality was not as heavily policed as gay sexuality was.
For men and women, the closest analogy that I come up with to describe what it was like to be a gay person in Washington was like being a dissident in a communist police state. You were basically under surveillance — your bars were being raided, and if you were involved in political organizing, your meetings were being surveilled by the FBI and the local D.C. police, and their phones might have been tapped by the FBI. Certainly, their mail was being censored by the U.S. postal service — there were some pretty important obscenity cases involving magazines that were of interest to gay and lesbian readers that were banned or confiscated by the postal service. Gay people were institutionalized in mental institutions, which is what the Soviet Union did to dissidents. Gay men in particular, but gay women, too, could be chemically castrated, subjected to lobotomies, and all sorts of medical torture. So, ironically, during the Cold War, when the United States was fighting the communist ideology overseas, they were basically treating gay and lesbian citizens in the same way that a communist regime might.
What was happening to the people who were in those positions of power in Washington? How was their secret guarded?
I came across several cases of very high-ranking, powerful men, advisors to presidents, who were swept up in this and victimized. I mention Sumner Welles, who was basically the de facto Secretary of State under President Roosevelt. And FDR tried to protect him for years, but it got to the point where some senators on Capitol Hill were going to threaten to open up investigations and FDR had to demand Welles’ resignation. I also wrote about Arthur Vandenberg Jr., who was President Eisenhower’s right-hand man. He was going to be his cabinet appointment secretary, which was a very important job. But J. Edgar Hoover came into possession of information that Vandenberg was gay. So, before Eisenhower became president in December 1952, Hoover presented this information to him and Vandenberg was kicked out, and his life was basically ruined because of it.
I also wrote about a man named Robert Waldron, who was like a son to President Johnson. He was literally in the closet of the hotel in Los Angeles in 1960 at the Democratic Convention when Bobby Kennedy was offering LBJ the vice presidential spot on the ticket. And Waldron was taking notes for LBJ. Just a couple of weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Waldron was helping LBJ move his things into the White House when the civil service commission investigation discovered evidence of Waldron being gay — they interviewed a man who told them that Waldron made a pass at him. And that was the end of it; LBJ couldn’t save him, not that he wanted to. Because everyone was under this spell — this belief that gay people were unfit to serve.
How did things begin to change after Stonewall?
I think it started a little earlier than that, with this man named Frank Kameny, who had a Ph.D. from Harvard, and was an astronomer with the Army Map Service in 1957. Two months after Sputnik was launched, when the space race was at its height, he was fired for being gay. Kameny became the first gay person fired from a federal government job to actually challenge it. He tried to get the ACLU to take his case and even they wouldn’t. It shows you how being gay was the worst thing you could be in Washington. Communists could become ex-communists — they could recant and denounce their past. Gays couldn’t do that.
So Kameny decided to sue the federal government. His case didn’t succeed, obviously. But he didn’t take it sitting down — he started the Mattachine Society, and they began organizing in Washington. They were writing letters to every Congressman and protesting before the civil service commission. They wrote letters to the president and held a picket outside the White House in 1965, which was four years before Stonewall. So this was building a public gay rights consciousness. In 1971, he also became the first openly gay person to run for Congress in the United States. And then in 1975, the civil service commission finally lifted its ban on gay people serving in the federal government. So that’s when gay people started serving openly in government jobs.
Stonewall’s obviously important in this story, but I think this other secret history of Washington is also very important.
Why did you choose to end the book with the Bill Clinton presidency?
Two reasons: One is that Bill Clinton was the first president and really the first major party nominee to openly appeal to gay people as a candidate. And then as president, he welcomed gay people into his administration. They were actually recruiting openly gay people to serve. Then in 1995, he signed an executive order that lifted the ban on gay people receiving security clearances. So that put a formal end to this period of the specter of homosexuality that I chart as beginning in World War II.
That is not to say that gay history ends then — I mean, Clinton also signed the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And there was a whole other spate of outings on Capitol Hill that would go on for years. But the purpose of the book was to write about this era of the specter of homosexuality, and it started with FDR, with the rise of the national security state, and it ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War.
