A Tour of The Secret City
BOOK REVIEW: Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
by James Kirchick / Henry Holt and Company
Reviewed by Andy Dunn, former CIA Deputy Assistant Director
The Reviewer — Andy Dunn retired from the CIA in November 2021 after a 29-year career as an analyst and Agency leader. His last job was Deputy Assistant Director of the Near East Mission Center; previous assignments included serving as Chief of Analysis in the Iran Mission Center, multiple leadership jobs in the Counterterrorism Mission Center, and two war zone tours. He is the most senior openly gay officer to serve at CIA since the Agency’s founding in 1947.
REVIEW – Late in the first decade of this century, I met Frank Kameny at a party at the Kalorama home of a friend and neighbor in Washington, DC. I knew, in a superficial way, that he was one of the heroes of the early years of the fight to overturn the ban on gay men and lesbians from holding security clearances. He sat mostly quiet in a room full of much younger people, I suspect unrecognized by some and certainly under appreciated by me. If not for Mr. Kameny, and others who set about challenging the ban and helping to change our culture in the decades before I served at CIA, I would not have been able to have the career I did.
Mr. Kameny, who died at age 86 in 2011, makes repeated appearances in James Kirchick’s excellent book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which chronicles in great and mostly engaging detail, the origins and consequences of official Washington’s obsession with homosexuality as a perceived security risk and as a tool to bludgeon political opponents.
The book focuses on the era from the early 1940s—when the security clearance state was first emerging—to the end of the Reagan administration, with a light treatment of the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.
Secret City covers much familiar ground to anyone who is well read on official Washington’s fixation with gay men (and the focus of the book is mostly gay men) in high places between World War II and the 1990s. Kirchick details the origins and consequences of the so-called Lavender Scare in the 1940s and 1950s, and the belief among many politicians of that era that the State Department was a den of gay men working to undermine US security.
Many of those men, real and imagined homosexuals (and none ever shown to be an actual security threat) lost their jobs (and some took their own lives) as a result of purges at State and other agencies.
Other examples include FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s role in smearing and destroying the careers of prominent gay men into the 1970s. Kirchick at the same time, convincingly debunks the widespread belief that Hoover himself was gay; (the evidence is inconclusive) Richard Nixon’s foul-mouthed tirades against gays recorded on the Oval office tapes, and the real – but uneven – progress on LGBTQ rights during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Mr. Kirchick’s major contribution is a fresh and deep examination of the consequences for real people seeking to serve their country but who were denied the opportunity to do so openly because of their sexuality.
Secret City opens by recounting the history of the professional and personal destruction by Secretary of State Cordell Hull of Franklin Roosevelt’s protégé, Sumner Wells, because Wells was gay. Roosevelt initially resisted firing Wells out of personal loyalty, but in a theme that plays out over and over in the book, he succumbed because he feared the political damage that would result from allowing a gay man to serve in a senior government position. Eisenhower, his confidant Arthur Vandenburg and LBJ aides Bob Waldron and Walter Jenkins are other examples of presidents denying jobs to – or quickly dismissing – aides because of revelations about their sexuality.
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Secret City also covers in great detail, the professional lives and private influence of gay Washingtonians in every administration and across the ideological spectrum. One of the surprises for me was the consistent, prominent, albeit closeted role that conservative gay men played across multiple administrations and on the Hill.
Richard Nixon privately disparaged gay men, but Kirchick argues that Nixon knew that one of his closet aides—White House speech writer Ray Price—was gay and valued Price’s loyalty and intellect. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, to the consternation of leaders of the then-emerging conservative Christian political movement, had close personal and professional relationships with gay men in and out of government. But Kirchick’s revelations about the cruelty—driven by political expediency—that both displayed toward their long-time friend Rock Hudson as he succumbed to AIDS, is painful to read although not surprising given the political realities of the time.
In contrast, and an early sign of the progress to come, then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney stood by his spokesman, Pete Williams, when Williams was outed by an LGBTQ activist in 1991. Kirchick observed that “much of Washington shrugged” at the revelation, a reaction that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier.
Secret City is unsparing in its examination of—but at the same time is mostly sympathetic to—closeted gay men who perpetuated and benefited from the culture of oppression. Kirchick’s examination, for example, of Roy Cohn’s decades long career as an advocate of the view that gay men were immoral and were a threat to national security while at the same time fending off less than subtle (though accurate) insinuations from political enemies that he was gay, provides great insight into the complex world that ambitious gay men had to navigate. Cohn comes across as vindictive and thoroughly unlikeable. He was both but it is hard to read Secret City’s anecdotes about his life and death in the closet and not feel at least a tinge of sympathy for him.
At times, I was tempted to skim over particularly wordy sections of the book because of the sheer volume of details and side stories that Kirchick includes, a tendency even the author admits in his acknowledgements. But this denseness is both a feature and a bug because it reflects the complexity of the history and the thoroughness of Kirchick’s research; the sources, notes, and index alone run for 163 pages.
Gay Washington has been documented before—luridly, and scurrilously, in Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s nonfiction Washington Confidential (1951) and poignantly in Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers (2008) and Finale (2015), both novels, which brilliantly convey life in the closet during the Eisenhower years and the “homintern” under Reagan, respectively. Eric Cervini’s The Deviant’s War (2020) profiles Frank Kameny’s life in depth, but until now the big history had yet to be written. Secret City is that overdue, groundbreaking and comprehensive book, and the best—by far—of any that has tackled this history of LGBTQ life and work in our nation’s capital.
Secret City earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats. 
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