Post by addisona on Jun 4, 2022 7:45:28 GMT
When Being Gay Was Considered a national security Threat
There’s never been a book like Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which documents nearly over a half-century of the gay political and social scenes of the U.S.’ capital city.
But James Kirchick—a columnist for Tablet, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a past Daily Beast contributor—has written an exhaustive history of the joys, torments, and political advocacy of D.C.’s gay community spanning from World War II until the end of the 20th century.
Kirchick spoke with The Daily Beast’s senior opinion editor Anthony L. Fisher about the book, the stunning scoops he uncovered through archival research, and how the First Amendment gave gay advocates their strongest weapon to fight for their civil rights.
How homophobia is like antisemitism
This book is more than just a compilation of previously reported history, you actually uncovered some pretty big scoops.
The archival research generated the best finds, and the biggest scoop was probably this sort of crazy “Reagan gay scandal” in 1980 that I uncovered.
There was a fear that Ronald Reagan was being controlled by a right-wing gay cabal, which was brought to the attention of Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post in the summer of 1980, right before the Republican convention. The Post investigated it, and Bob Woodward was one of the reporters. They did uncover the existence of several gay men who were basically Reagan’s PR managers from the end of his governorship until he was president.
The Post didn't find the existence of any sort of nefarious conspiracy, but it’s an example of how people thought at the time. If you had gay people in any sort of proximity to a politician, that automatically, was indication of a conspiracy, yeah.
It's very similar to antisemitism actually. Some people see a couple Jews and all of a sudden it's some vast conspiracy. People used to think about gays the same way.
I wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine on the long history of homophobia as a conspiracy theory, which I traced back to this scandal in Wilhelmine Germany in the early 20th century, where there was in a alleged ring of gay advisers around Kaiser Wilhelm II. There was a “camarilla of pederasts” around the Kaiser, this newspaper wrote. And the controversy went on for years.
But then it gets updated during the Cold War, and the “velvet mafia” is a more modern take on that.
Another big find in my research was the existence of this aid who worked for Lyndon Johnson, Bob Waldron, whose 1,000 page FBI file I was able to get declassified. He was a very close adviser—almost a substitute son—to LBJ, who tried to bring him on staff when he was moving into the White House. They do a background check, they find out he's gay. It's a really sad, tragic story. Not even [LBJ biographer] Robert Caro knew about this.
I got a couple seconds of Nixon tape where he's talking about various people being gay. It had been redacted while those people were still alive.
There's one line where he refers to Allen Drury [author of the seminal 1959 D.C.-set novel Advise and Consent] as a homosexual, which I'd always suspected. One thing I discovered writing this book is that Advise and Consent was a very revolutionary book in its portrayal of a gay subject. It might be the first work of mainstream American fiction to have a gay hero. And everyone around [the hero] is using homophobia to basically destroy him—and he kills himself.
But the issue of his homosexuality, while tragic, it's not seen as a character fault. Which is very unusual. The film adaptation changes that, and I write about how Drury was very unhappy with the movie version. He was on the record about that. No one really dug into why.
And you write in Secret City about a real-life D.C. tragedy that was a major inspiration for Advise and Consent.
Lester Hunt was a Democratic senator from Wyoming whose son was arrested for solicitation in Lafayette Square—which used to be the main gay cruising ground in Washington. And that tells you a lot about gay Washington, that the main hangout was right across the street from the White House.
After his arrest, two of [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy's allies in the Senate tried to use this to pressure him to resign his seat. And Hunt ends up killing himself. It's the first and only suicide in the halls of Congress. And it was one of several inspirations for Advise and Consent.
Going back to conspiracy theories about homophobia, it feels like there’s a modern day version of this happening right now with the whole “groomer” panic. And in Secret City, you cite Joe McCarthy’s quote, “If you're against me, you've got to either be a communist or a cocksucker.”
That sounds a lot like the people who rant about “cultural MARXISM” and “groomers” in schools. Do you see the parallels between the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare with what’s happening in political discourse right now?
I've become, in general, more skeptical of moral panics on the left or the right. Particularly with this age of social media, it’s easy for people to get swept up into something with very little evidence, that then gets blown out of proportion. That's ultimately what the lavender scare was. It was a complete and utter moral panic, more so than the Red Scare because that was at least based on some truth. There were some communists in the government.
www.thedailybeast.com/when-being-gay-was-considered-a-national-security-threat
There’s never been a book like Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which documents nearly over a half-century of the gay political and social scenes of the U.S.’ capital city.
But James Kirchick—a columnist for Tablet, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a past Daily Beast contributor—has written an exhaustive history of the joys, torments, and political advocacy of D.C.’s gay community spanning from World War II until the end of the 20th century.
Kirchick spoke with The Daily Beast’s senior opinion editor Anthony L. Fisher about the book, the stunning scoops he uncovered through archival research, and how the First Amendment gave gay advocates their strongest weapon to fight for their civil rights.
How homophobia is like antisemitism
This book is more than just a compilation of previously reported history, you actually uncovered some pretty big scoops.
The archival research generated the best finds, and the biggest scoop was probably this sort of crazy “Reagan gay scandal” in 1980 that I uncovered.
There was a fear that Ronald Reagan was being controlled by a right-wing gay cabal, which was brought to the attention of Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post in the summer of 1980, right before the Republican convention. The Post investigated it, and Bob Woodward was one of the reporters. They did uncover the existence of several gay men who were basically Reagan’s PR managers from the end of his governorship until he was president.
The Post didn't find the existence of any sort of nefarious conspiracy, but it’s an example of how people thought at the time. If you had gay people in any sort of proximity to a politician, that automatically, was indication of a conspiracy, yeah.
It's very similar to antisemitism actually. Some people see a couple Jews and all of a sudden it's some vast conspiracy. People used to think about gays the same way.
I wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine on the long history of homophobia as a conspiracy theory, which I traced back to this scandal in Wilhelmine Germany in the early 20th century, where there was in a alleged ring of gay advisers around Kaiser Wilhelm II. There was a “camarilla of pederasts” around the Kaiser, this newspaper wrote. And the controversy went on for years.
But then it gets updated during the Cold War, and the “velvet mafia” is a more modern take on that.
Another big find in my research was the existence of this aid who worked for Lyndon Johnson, Bob Waldron, whose 1,000 page FBI file I was able to get declassified. He was a very close adviser—almost a substitute son—to LBJ, who tried to bring him on staff when he was moving into the White House. They do a background check, they find out he's gay. It's a really sad, tragic story. Not even [LBJ biographer] Robert Caro knew about this.
I got a couple seconds of Nixon tape where he's talking about various people being gay. It had been redacted while those people were still alive.
There's one line where he refers to Allen Drury [author of the seminal 1959 D.C.-set novel Advise and Consent] as a homosexual, which I'd always suspected. One thing I discovered writing this book is that Advise and Consent was a very revolutionary book in its portrayal of a gay subject. It might be the first work of mainstream American fiction to have a gay hero. And everyone around [the hero] is using homophobia to basically destroy him—and he kills himself.
But the issue of his homosexuality, while tragic, it's not seen as a character fault. Which is very unusual. The film adaptation changes that, and I write about how Drury was very unhappy with the movie version. He was on the record about that. No one really dug into why.
And you write in Secret City about a real-life D.C. tragedy that was a major inspiration for Advise and Consent.
Lester Hunt was a Democratic senator from Wyoming whose son was arrested for solicitation in Lafayette Square—which used to be the main gay cruising ground in Washington. And that tells you a lot about gay Washington, that the main hangout was right across the street from the White House.
After his arrest, two of [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy's allies in the Senate tried to use this to pressure him to resign his seat. And Hunt ends up killing himself. It's the first and only suicide in the halls of Congress. And it was one of several inspirations for Advise and Consent.
Going back to conspiracy theories about homophobia, it feels like there’s a modern day version of this happening right now with the whole “groomer” panic. And in Secret City, you cite Joe McCarthy’s quote, “If you're against me, you've got to either be a communist or a cocksucker.”
That sounds a lot like the people who rant about “cultural MARXISM” and “groomers” in schools. Do you see the parallels between the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare with what’s happening in political discourse right now?
I've become, in general, more skeptical of moral panics on the left or the right. Particularly with this age of social media, it’s easy for people to get swept up into something with very little evidence, that then gets blown out of proportion. That's ultimately what the lavender scare was. It was a complete and utter moral panic, more so than the Red Scare because that was at least based on some truth. There were some communists in the government.
www.thedailybeast.com/when-being-gay-was-considered-a-national-security-threat