James Kirchick

Secret City (eBook, ePUB)

The Hidden History of Gay Washington

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of 2022
Named one of Vanity Fair's "Best Books of 2022"

"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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Henry Holt and Co.
• Seitenzahl: 816
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Mai 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781627792332
• Artikelnr.: 60785961

Autorenporträt

James Kirchick

Inhaltsangabe

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