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And I knew that the David Walsh story would have to factor in. Kirchick: What I did was make a timeline and I would read all the general literature on the subject, so I knew FDR, that was going to be the Sumner Welles story. How did you figure out where to go? I mean the unpublished diaries, for instance, how did you track those down? A lot of records have been destroyed.Įlliott: Since you bring up the records, you cast a really wide net with this project. It’s impossible to know because a lot of them quit before they could be found out, pressured to quit, or never applied. The estimates vary from 5,000 to 15,000 people. What kicked off the Lavender Scare was this admission because no one knew that there was this problem. Kirchick: The 91 figure came in 1950 from Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy made the first kind of admission that gays had been fired. Ninety-one is the first public accounting of people being fired for being gay. There was no example of a gay person who was a traitor or who turned over information because they were blackmailed for being gay.Įlliott: But it still was a number of people. With homosexuals, there really was a witch hunt. government, just not in the numbers that Joe McCarthy was claiming. The difference here is that there were no witches in Salem. Kirchick: There was a moral panic in the same way that like the Salem Witch Trials, that was used most famously by Arthur Miller with The Crucible. Was that something you sought to illustrate, or is that just a bankshot that I’m picking up by accident? Kirchick: Being a homosexual also implied, at this point in history, that you were a communist, whereas it wasn’t necessarily the reverse.Įlliott: I don’t know if you did this on purpose, but you really emphasized the puritanical roots of this country. You have a number of examples of just being even in the same orbit costs people their lives and livelihoods. Kirchick: I’m sure there were some people who were accused of communism that led to suicide and whatnot, but I would expect it was much higher among gay people.Įlliott: You also have the adjacents to those accused. So he was the first person to come out, whereas leading up to him, there were untold hundreds or maybe thousands of gay people who lost their jobs, who just sort of melted away back into obscurity. I saw it also with the person of Frank Kameny. There was none of that during the early years of the Lavender Scare. People who were named as communists, they would come out publicly and defend themselves from being communist. That’s an evangelical thing that happens in the ‘70s. The notion of ‘conversion therapy’ had not taken hold yet. Some of the most prominent figures in the early American conservative movements were former communists. Kirchick: A reformed communist, which is possible. Kirchick: I cite specifically the Whittaker Chambers case, where we see this man who comes out as a communist or former communist. The interview has been lightly edited.Įlliott: Admittedly, I was skeptical of the premise that it was more dangerous to be gay than a communist during the Cold War, but you convinced me. The book is set to be published on Tuesday, on the eve of Pride Month. (Spoiler alert: It’s mostly white men, regardless of their sexual partners.) as it is a history of Washington as experienced by its gay power players-figures who were working alongside their straight colleagues to put the country on a post-World War II footing, address the rising Civil Rights Movement, and contend with a Cold War that left everyone paranoid. Smartly written with a flexible aperture for capturing the big picture of a moment and narrowing in on the tiniest of details, the book pulls together far-flung original source documents from archives, memoirs, and a shrewd sense of political history and its corresponding tragedies. from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration into the Bill Clinton years. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington is a sweeping tour of D.C. In his new book, James Kirchick breaks those patterns and tells a robust and meaningful history of his town. history barely makes its way to the Korean War and most certainly not into Vietnam or even the Gulf War. That reliance on narrative is also why, for so many students, U.S. history teacher can spend weeks on World War II, part of the mythology that this newsroom’s founder, Henry Luce, dubbed “The American Century” in a 1941 Life editorial. Stories and arguments matter in history, and for most Americans, it’s why many a U.S.