American History Hit - The Lavender Scare: Being Gay in Washington DC

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Why were gay federal employees seen as a national security threat during the 20th century? How might they in fact have been more of an asset? And how did some of them fight against their dismissals?In this episode, Don is joined by James Kirchick, author of 'Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington'.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's the middle of the night in Fairfax, Virginia, nine miles from the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Yesterday's clear blue skies have turned to midnight blue. The stars shine bright.

Pulling past the portico of the new as-yet-unnamed headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, you park your car and rub the sleep from your eyes. It's late, but this is the kind of job where slumber is often disturbed. You walk towards security and head for your office. It's just another night in 1962, and what you do in this building is secret. Your whole job relies on secrecy, and your life is led with compartmentalized discretion. Except for one thing. A lie you live with every day, as dangerous to your career in government as any national security concern. It is the secret of your sexuality.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Washington, D.C. has so. many tales to tell of lawmaking, of warmaking, of political intrigue, the whole civic management of a massive nation. But for all its architectural grandeur, its monuments of granite and limestone, D.C. is, after all, through every administration and Congress, a teeming high of human activity. It is people who make that capital work in their lives, political and private, give the place an actual pulse. This more intimate side of our capital city is the subject of an accomplished book released last year, just now available in paperback, entitled Secret City,

the Hidden History of Gay Washington, which documents the culture of homosexuality in Washington, D.C. that has always existed, indeed thrived, despite decades and centuries of prejudice, threat, and rampant hypocrisy. The author of this book is journalist and historian James Kirchick, and he joins us today. Hello, Jamie. Great to have you on American History Hit. Thank you for having me. When we talk about homosexuality in America, It was difficult everywhere until the gay rights movement finally changes everything. But over the decades of fear and loathing of gay people across America, Washington was unique. What made D.C. such a difficult and even dangerous place to be gay?

So around World War II, I would say homosexuality changes in the public imagination. Prior to that, it had been a sin, obviously condemned in the Bible. It was a medical condition, and many gay people were sent to mental institutions where they were lobotomized or castrated and subject to all sorts of medical torture and psychological torture. And it was also a crime in every state in the country. You could go to jail for gay sex or, you know, holding a partner's hand in public. What happens around World War II is that homosexuality becomes a national security threat. And the reason for this is because there's a belief that gay people, because of this deep, dark, awful secret that they have, would go to any land.

to protect that secret, including divulge confidential secret government information to a hostile foreign power. You know, it's prior to World War II. The United States doesn't have a CIA. It doesn't have national security. This whole concept of national security does not really come into being until World War II when America has to become a global superpower. And it's around that time that gays are banned from the military. and there's this secretive obsession with national security and a fear that you cannot have gay people having access to government secrets. How ironic that's such an international shift in our identity should have such an impact domestically. Yeah, absolutely. The book starts with FDR's presidency. Why is that?

It's because of this reason, and it's because of the growing role of the United States in the world. And in fact, the first sort of gay political scandal, gay political scandals in general, happen during the Roosevelt's administration precisely because of the war. And so the first one I write about involves his Undersecretary of State, a man named Sumner Wells, who was exposed as being gay to FDR, didn't become public information. But he found out about this in 1940. So it was before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And it's before World War II. And FDR is able to protect Wells, who's a very trusted confidant, and he wants to keep him in his job, even though he's exposed as being gay. But after the war begins, you then get senators who start threatening to expose this because they claim Wells is a national security threat. And by 1943, FDR is forced to ask for his resignation.

Similarly, there's a scandal involving a senator, David Walsh, of Massachusetts, who's exposed as having or alleged to have been, frequenting a male brothel in Brooklyn near the Navy Yard. And that allegation comes out in 1942, just a couple months after Pearl Harbor. So you have these two scandals that might not have happened otherwise, right? The justification for removing these men from office would not have been as strong, were it not for the fact that America was involved in this very important global conflict. But even before World War II, right, you have the New Deal, which is expanding the federal government. There's just more people in D.C. Absolutely. And lots of young people, lots of single people coming in from all over the country. This has created a whole new kind of society in D.C. in all spheres. But certainly a flourishing gay community takes hold that was already there, but it gets even bigger. Plus World War II, of course, you know, everybody goes around the world and starts seeing how other people live and how moralitys are different elsewhere. It's a whole change that's happening that's certainly felt in that community.

Yeah, I mean, it creates this paradox, right? Because you have, for many gay people, World War II, it's been referred to as a national coming out moment. Because you have all these gay people from rural parts of America. And keep in mind, America was a much more rural country around this time, right? So you have all these people who are growing up gay in small towns and villages and farms. And they think that they're the only person in the world like that, right? And then they're thrust into this mass mobilization and they meet other people like them. And so you have this group consciousness really for the first time among gay people begins to grow during World War II and after World War II you see some gay literature

you see the growth of gay subcultures in cities yet at the same time and I would say it contributes to this societal fear after the war of homosexuality because Americans are looking around and they're seeing

oh there's these gay neighborhoods there's these gay bars there are these young men coming back from the war who they realize that they're attracted to people of the same sex. Plus, you have the Kinsey report that comes out in 1948, which is a major development, which reports that around one in ten American men are homosexual.

And that is, that terrifies the country. Because no longer, you know, are homosexuals, just these rare specimens who are sick and depraved and hanging around in public parks, right? It could be the milkman. Sure. It could be your brother. It could be the school teacher.

So it contributes to this sense of paranoia. Paranoia is still festering today, as a matter of fact. We call it the lavender scare. That's the general term for that backlash against all that new freedom that gay and lesbian people were feeling in America after the war. This starts to kick in, you know, roughly speaking, around 1950 with the Cold War paranoia with the Soviet Union. So how was homosexuality viewed in the context of that conflict?

So homosexuals were seen as both a national security threat for the reason I mentioned earlier and that they were seen as being liable to blackmail. But they're also seen as being potential communists because like communists, homosexuals are revolutionary. They despise bourgeois mainstream American values. They live in secret, just like communists do. You can't necessarily spot them. You can't tell who they are.

They can disguise themselves. They are loyal, not to their own country, but to an international secret fraternity. And in fact, there's this term that some people developed It's called the Homanturn, the Homosexual International, which was sort of a play on the common turn, the communist international, the alliance of international communist parties. So homosexuals are seen as being part of this far left-wing radical, decadent group, and they become conflated with communists. So Joe McCarthy, in 1950, he's accusing communists and queers of infesting the State Department. Right. And so also, you know, male homosexuals are often stereotypes of being effeminate and weak. And the State Department is accused of being effeminate and weak. And it's the diplomats in the State Department who surrendered Eastern Europe to Joe Stalin, right? It's the communists and queers in the State Department to allow or even conspired to help Mao win the Chinese Civil War. So all of these defeats in the early years of the Cold War are laid at the feet of this next year.

of, you know, weak-kneed, lily-livered, effeminate lavender lads in the State Department. And yet they're everywhere. I mean, it's very common for gay people to be working in this federal government at the time. Yeah. They're fairly amazing to me, given the danger, you know, that anyone would risk it. All the background checks for one thing. I mean, you'd be sure to be found out, I would think, right? Yes, although many people were able to hide.

And many people had to lead very secret lives. In fact, I read about some very high-level senior individuals. who were gay and worked for the federal government. And the first national security advisor to the president of the United States who worked for Dwight Eisenhower, a man named Robert Cutler, Bobby Cutler, was a deeply closeted gay man.

And we didn't really find that out until long after he died when his diaries were discovered. And he wrote about his love for a young man on the National Security Council staff. Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's chief counsel during the infamous Roy Cohn, right? Yeah.

Was also a gay man, was able to protect himself. So you did have people who were able to protect themselves. And by the way, there were also, you know, there were straight people who got swept up in the lavender scare and accused of being gay. This accusation was incredibly dangerous. And it could be used against anyone. It can be used by anyone, too, by the way. It wasn't just conservatives and right-wingers who were flinging this around in the 1940s and 50s.

It was, you know, liberals would use it as well. Describe what was unique about your process of researching this book. I would imagine it involved a lot of personal. journals and diaries and such? Yes. It involved, well, interviewing people, I would say. Although most of the people who were still alive were telling me stories about the 1960s and onwards. I mean, going further back, yes, personal diaries, journals, personal archives, but also a lot of declassifying was involved, which is a years-long process.

I had to get lots of FBI files declassified, Civil Service Commission, which was the federal government bureaucracy that was involved in a lot of these investigations. So there's a of declassification involved as well. Was it a lever being pulled? I mean, was it about political power to out these people, or was there an actual goal and perceived as a doable goal to actually rid the federal government of these people? I think it was actually primarily the second one in the early years of this campaign, and that you had people who genuinely believed, and by the way, it was not a small number.

It was the majority of Americans genuinely believed that gay people were a national security threat. This was a widely held belief. There wasn't much debate about this in Congress. You know, there was very little debate about it. There was more agreement, by the way, on the issue of homosexuals in the federal government than on the question of communists in the federal government. Because there you had more liberal pushback against McCarthy saying, hey, you know, some of these people that you're accusing of being communists are not communist. They might be liberals or left wing. They're not members of the Communist Party. There was nobody defending the right of gay people to hold a job in the federal government in the 1950s. Gay people had no friends, no allies in this fight, unfortunately.

We've mentioned Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. How did he go about his business and how did he hide the fact that he was gay through all those years? You know, it was sort of an open secret. And in fact, in my chapters on the Army McCarthy hearings, which was the real end of Joe McCarthy when he was accusing the Army of being infiltrated by communists, I mean, that whole episode was basically provoked by Roy Cohn's lust for another man, right? There was a staffer on the committee named David Schein who had been called up to serve in the military. And Roy Cohn very obviously had a crush on this guy. And he went to the wall to get him out of the military or to get him a special commission so he wouldn't have to serve. And it was this compulsion to protect

David Schein that basically prompted this entire investigation and these entire hearings. And I write in the book, you know, throughout the hearings, it was never explicitly said that Cohn was a homosexual. Let's keep in mind, this was a term and this was a concept that you really couldn't even explicitly talk about. It was always dressed up in euphemism and whatnot. But it was frequently alluded to throughout the committee hearings. And I quote some of the testimony and some of the back and forth between the senators and various witnesses, where there are moments where they are hinting, strong. that Roy Cohn has a crush on David Shine. So they dance around it a lot, but again, they don't have exact evidence of it, right?

It's not like they have pictures of it. It's not like they have a letter. It's all sort of assumed and it's all sort of strongly hinted at. More of American history hit after this short break. Describe the community, the gay community in those days. I mean, there were clubs. There were all sorts of societies, I imagine, right? There were a handful of bars.

A lot of the gay socializing you have to remember, certainly among men, because homosexuality was illegal. It happened in public parks. It happened in Lafayette Square, which is the park directly across the street from the White House, which I think is if you had to pick one sort of physical location that encapsulates what my book is about, it's this, right? It's the fact that like the number one cruising ground for gay men in Cold War Washington and even earlier was the park directly across the street from where the most important. important and powerful man in the world lives. That kind of encapsulates what this book is about. But men would be arrested. You know, every weekend, the cops would come in, and they would print the men's names and their occupations in the newspaper the next day.

But there were a number of gay bars, you know, and there's one sort of cute story that I tell. There was one bar that catered to both gay men and lesbians. And, you know, the men would dance with men and the lesbians would dance with women. And then when there might be a knock on the door by the vice squad, all the gay men and lesbians would switch partners, right, so that you'd have lesbians dancing with gay men and vice versa. Excellent. So that when the cops would come in, they wouldn't see any evidence of homosexuality. So people had sort of creative ways of avoiding authority.

You make the point, which I found fascinating, especially in the intelligence community, the defense and intelligence community, gay men, and to be clear, we are speaking mostly of gay men because in that era, of course, men had all the jobs. But those men were particularly well suited for those jobs, weren't they? Because they had to live their lives that way with this sort of double. identity. So this was the irony, right, that while the government is purging gay men in the State Department and in the CIA and other fields is the fact that gay men were better suited to be spies than anyone else, right? Because to be a gay man in mid-century America and earlier was to live a lie.

It was to pretend to be someone else. It was to be able to pick up signals from across a room, to be able to talk to someone just with your eyes, right? To be able to speak a kind of coded language. And I write about a number of gay men who were actually spies in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor to the CIA. And they were actually sort of able to get away with it, you know, because during the war, everyone was needed, right? And so the actual, even though gay people were formerly banned from serving in the military beginning at World War II, there were actually very few gay people who were expelled from the military. It's not until later that you get gay people being expelled in large numbers, because frankly, the government needed every warm body. You know, they couldn't afford to kick out tens of thousands of homosexuals, right? So there are a number of gay people who contributed in some fascinating ways, and I detail one sort of espionage operation that was led by a gay man in Washington where they were spying on the neutral embassies of Vichy France and Francoist Spain in Washington.

And he was recruiting all these handsome young guys to go in and seduce the secretaries so they could get the codes to break into these buildings. But that would obviously change after the war. The name Frank Kameney is interesting to me. There were those who stood up and spoke out. He was one of those brave souls, wasn't he? Yeah, Frank was the first federal government employee fired because he was gay to actually fight back, right? So in 1957, he's a young astronomer working for the Army Map Service.

He's Harvard trained. He has a Ph.D. He's a very smart guy. And it's just two months after the launch of Sputnik, the start. Soviets launched Sputnik. So we're right at the height of the space race. And he's called back to Washington. He's working at an observatory in Hawaii. He's summoned all the way back across the country, and he's fired on the spot because they have evidence that he's gay, right? And this shows you, by the way, just the obsession with getting rid of gay people, right? That even at the

height of the space race, the federal government would rather fire a Harvard-trained PhD astronomer than use his talents in fighting the Soviets, right? And up until this point, thousands of gay people had been fired, but none of them had challenged it, right? Because to challenge something like this, you have to put your name out there. You have to file a legal complaint. You have to publicly identify yourself as a homosexual. And to do that in the 1950s in America was social and professional death. And Frank had the courage to say, you know what, this is wrong. I am no less competent than anyone else because of my sexual orientation. I'm going to fight this. And unfortunately, he didn't win. I mean, he appealed it. He tried to get his case before the Supreme Court. But I

would say over the long haul he won because he founded the first real sustained gay rights organization in America. Oh, wow. The Madachine Society of Washington, D.C. He launches the first protest outside the White House for civil rights for gay civil rights in 1965. So that's four years before the Stonewall uprising in New York. He's organizing protests outside the Defense Department, the State Department, the White House. And he's instrumental in getting the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in 1973. Wow. He is instrumental in getting the federal government to remove the ban on gay people serving in the federal civil service in 1975.

And he's really, I mean, it's been said of him that he was the Rosa Parks, the Martin Luther King, and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement, all rolled into one person. Amazing. So his story is one that I tell in the book. And yet I have never heard of that man's name. That's incredible. Yeah. The book basically moves through the chronology of all this from era to era, the story of gay Washington against the backdrop of all these Washington events. We finally get to the 80s with Ronald Reagan, who I was gobsmacked to find out people had suspected it was gay.

I had no idea. Yeah, I mean, it all dates back to his involvement in Hollywood, you know, as an actor. Yeah. And there were a lot of gay people in Hollywood, dating back to the beginnings of the film business. And in fact, there's an anecdote in his memoir that he wrote when he was. was running for governor about a movie he was starring in with Betty Davis in the 1930s. And the director of the film, who was gay, basically wanted him to play this role as if he were Betty Davis' gay best friend. The way Ronald Reagan described it in his memoir was he wanted

me to play this fellow as if he was the sort of guy who could hang out in the ladies' dressing room and dish with the girls while they got dressed, right? Which is a very kind of long euphemism for describing a gay role. So he was very sensitive about this. His campaign aides were very sensitive about it. And then, you know, soon after becoming governor of California, in 1967, there's a gay scandal in the Reagan administration where it's alleged that there was a kind of gay cabal working in the governor's office, and he fires two of his aides who are accused of homosexuality. So there's a real kind of sensitivity about this, I think coming from California,

it's a more kind of liberal environment. The Reagan's had a lot of gay friends, by the way. In Hollywood. I mean, Nancy in particular. In fact, there's a page in my book in the photo insert. It's just Nancy and all of her gay friends. And it's called all the first lady's men. And she was surrounded by gay men, right? So when he's running for president in 1980, there's this scandal that I uncovered that was never written about before where the Washington Post investigated these allegations that Ronald Reagan was being controlled by a right wing, a right wing network of homosexual. And there was a potential thread in this story that maybe Reagan himself was a homosexual. It was unclear, but the Post was presented with some allegations by a group of liberal to moderate Republican congressmen who wanted to stop Reagan from getting the nomination, the Republican nomination in the summer of 1980. And Ben Bradley, the legendary editor of the Washington Post, assigned a team of his crack investigative reporters, including Bob Woodward, to track down these rumors and, investigate it. And they ultimately found that while, yes, there were a number of gay men who worked for Reagan to say that they were part of some kind of nefarious cabal. There was no evidence of this. And it was also unclear whether or not any of these men would have had jobs in a potential Reagan administration where they would have a security clearance. So the Post ended up not publishing

this story, but I found the notes from the investigation in Ben Bradley's personal paper collection. Amazing, yeah. We're lucky now. to look back on this with some whimsy. I mean, but the gravitas of this is undeniable. I mean, these were really, really serious times and really good people were treated very badly. There are stories of many suicides. I mean, it's rather heartbreaking, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one story I tell, which I also discovered, a very heartbreaking story was of a man named Robert Waldron, who was an aide to Lyndon Johnson, a very close aide. He's what they call in political terms the body man.

And he's the guy that you see behind every politician who's like carrying his bag and, you know, making sure he shows up to the meeting on time. That's what he was for LBJ, beginning from his time as Senate Majority Leader. And I discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request, I got his FBI file declassified. And I tell the story in the book of how when Johnson was trying to get Waldron to come on to his staff as vice president in the, you know, in the war. White House formerly, that required a background check, a security background check. And literally, as Johnson was moving into the White House to become president after the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Service Commission discovered by interviewing many people who knew Waldron, they interviewed one man whom Waldron had made a pass at a couple years earlier. And then they had the evidence

that he was gay. They presented it to LBJ's staff, ironically, to a man named Walter Jenkins. who was also gay and would be exposed in his own very public scandal a year later. But this information led to Waldron being kicked out of the White House. His White House pass was revoked. His political career was over. And it's a very tragic story. And there's so many more like that. I tell this one in detail because it had never been told before.

And it involves someone who was very close to a very powerful man to the president of the United States. Yeah. It's such wiggly stuff. I was watching an appearance of viewers on YouTube, and you took note of the whole possibly apocryphal story of Jay Edgar Hoover's cross-dressing and all of that stuff. Indeed, I was interviewing not too many episodes ago,

Beverly Gage, about her book. We got through the entire episode without even mentioning it, which was, like, astonishing to me, given the fact that I, you know, grew up in a time when everyone was talking about that. It's really died off, but that's how the smears happen, isn't it?

I mean, you don't know who is or who isn't, and it's all sort of, that's what I meant about, levers being pulled and using this as just yet another tool in a toolbox to get what you want. Well, that's the thing, right? Is that the evidentiary standard for this

was very low. And you could just put out a rumor and it could destroy someone's reputation. You didn't need evidence, right? It could just be, oh, well, we heard he had a thing for boys, or he walks with a slight mince in his step, or he's a bachelor, right?

And it's not like other crimes, like murder or theft, where there's an evidentiary record, like there's an arrest record, right? With the accusation of homosexuality, it just has to be in the ether. And it could really damage someone. I mean, I talk about Jack Kemp, you know, who was a well-known congressman and ran to be vice president with Bob Dole. He was implicated in that scandal I mentioned among the Reagan staffers in 1967.

He was alleged to have been present at an orgy at a timeshare house in Lake Tahoe. Now, the evidence for this is very thin. In fact, there's no evidence for it, but it was just out there, and it prevented Reagan from choosing him as his running mate or considering him in 1980. Really? And it really impacted. I mean, this rumor stuck with Jack Kemp until his death. No kidding. There was no evidence for it, but it was always there.

It was always there. There's so much to know about this. It's a great book. The title of this book is Secret City, the Hidden History of Gay Washington. It's been about out for a year, but you can get it in paperback now. and I really encourage people to get into this. It takes you through all the avenues, but a particular lens that shows in high relief

the potential for hypocrisy in our country. It's really important to read. Thank you so much, Jamie, for joining me. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.