Secret city: the hidden history of gay washington review

“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. With his new book, “ Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” James Kirchick tries to retrofit the trope to a very specific subset of the District’s famously diverse LGBTQ. 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.

Secret City by James Kirchick | East City Bookshop

James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. New York: Henry Holt, xviii + pp. $ This door-stopper volume gives the most complete history to date of gay and bisexual people, mostly male and deeply closeted, in the nation’s capital. In his new book, James Kirchick breaks those patterns and tells a robust and meaningful history of his town. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington is a sweeping tour of D.C.

from. New York: Henry Holt, Gay men often served as walkers and later as popular hosts on the social circuit. Sometimes, this ties into broader political trends, attitudes, and movements, but that isn't the secret city: the hidden history of gay washington review force of the book. Security checks continued to include questions about being gay because the underlying, unsubstantiated assumption about the potential for blackmail remained.

The secret city: the hidden history of gay washington review of sketchy vibe that amplified right at the end led me to seek out the author's published articles and formerly-known-as-twitter. But he had been roped into an impromptu discussion in California Rep. Wrapping things up in the 90s, the ending was a bit too positive for my tastes. It's organized into sections based on the sitting President rather than themes or ideas and reads like an entry-level history textbook instead of a theory-based argument about the past.

Intriguing, the basic history is known but it tells you the story from a different perspective and provides all sorts of examples to support the narrative. I briefly recall reading about this in passing in some history class I took, but it wasn't in much detail. My association with Washington makes me the ideal reader for this excellent book, but it deserves to be read by everyone interested in history, gay or straight.

A luxurious, slow-rolling Cadillac of a book, not to be mastered in one sitting. Just as affluent citizens do not always vote based on narrow calculations of self-interest i. It feels like a meandering collection, segueing from person to person. I have more to say on this in a minute, but I initially appreciated that the author is upfront about the narrow range of identity his book tends to focus on as a feature of who was allowed to work in politics.

Highly recommend! The book covers many topics that haven't received their due in general history education due to 1 social aversion to acknowledging discrimination in its various forms and 2 the widespread erasure of gay people and their experiences. Go back. Your email address will not be published. Secret City chronicles American history, proving that 'queer history' in the U.

It is American history. In the growing national security state of the World War II and Cold War eras, the pretext for excluding gays from all federal employment was that they posed a security risk because they could so easily be blackmailed by foreign intelligence services. They were expected to fulfill gender norms in how they dressed at protests and given less room to speak at meetings. The author humanized people who were too often dehumanized in their time.

In recent weeks, McCloskey explained to the other congressmen huddled in his office, he had been in contact with a local television news reporter named Bill Best who used to work in the Bay Area and had been active in California GOP politics during the late s. I also found the prose of this book very stuffy "she spoke of the pain she felt upon discovering that her husband had consummated an affair with her secretary.

As a work in the recovery of a marginalized portion of the governmental workforce this book is great. Due to its length and the pure facts within, the content is straightforward to the point it comes off a little dry and blunt.

I felt like this book was really well researched, and the author took care not to put identities on people for their actions that they did not claim, while still describing how they participated in queer life. Jump to ratings and reviews.