James Kirchick’s new book tallies the cost of homophobia on lives and careers in Washington, D.C., from the days of F.D.R. to the Clinton presidency.
SECRET CITY
The Hidden History of Gay Washington
By James Kirchick
826 pages. Henry Holt. $38.
“Secret City,” by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights. But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means?
John C. Montgomery, a Princeton graduate and the Finnish desk chief at the State Department: hanged in the nude by his bathrobe belt from a third-floor banister. Roger D. “Denny” Hansen, champion swimmer at Yale, Rhodes scholar, National Security Council appointee and professor: asphyxiated in a friend’s garage. Lester C. Hunt, Army Reserve major and a governor of Wyoming turned senator: shot in the head while on a leather swivel chair in his office. Louis J. Teboe, affable accounting clerk at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs: stabbed in an alleyway with a stiletto knife. And that’s just by Page 226 of a book that stretches to over 800. We’ve yet to reach the tuxedoed lobbyist overdosing at the Ritz to the tune of “A Little Night Music.”
Excepting Teboe, who was lured and attacked by malevolent teenagers intending to rob him, the above cases were all suicides. But Kirchick reveals copious blood on the hands of the powerful, who for decades regarded alternative desires or any association with them as a “contagious sexual aberrancy,” and cause for immediate banishment from mainstream society — a Lavender Menace inextricably linked with the Red one. (Hunt’s fatal shame proved the power of association: His son, Buddy, had been charged once with solicitation at age 25.)
And yet the very skills gay people had to develop to survive — studiousness, compartmentalization, discretion, itinerancy — made them uniquely skilled, Kirchick points out, to sensitive tasks like espionage or high-level advising. For a long time, everyone in D.C. seemed to be looking over his shoulder, seeking signals, codes and clues — a “slight mince”; a “jelly hand shake”; a “limp wrist” or just overzealous grooming. These must have been harrowing existences, but their retelling makes for very good and suspenseful, if occasionally ponderous, reading.