New Book Is a ‘Secret History’ of Gay Washington and June’s Must Read

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.

Sifting methodically through F.B.I. files, correspondence, interview transcripts and press clippings — you can almost hear the old microfiche sheets ticking by — Kirchick holds the most dedicated persecutors, some of whom were themselves in the closet, to scathing account.

“Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” he writes. “A Communist could break with the party. A homosexual was forever tainted.” Later, as tolerance grew (thanks in part to the efforts of the Mattachine Society, the gay rights organization whose evolution is traced here), some confirmed bachelors took the important seat once occupied by Perle Mesta, the city’s famed “hostess with the mostess.” But even then their acceptance was often transactional, contingent and fleeting; their complete potential unrealized. Kirchick rightly mourns “the possibilities thwarted.”

The books is ordered by presidential administrations from FDR to Bill Clinton.