The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Jamie Kirchick

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

James Kirchick is an American reporter, foreign correspondent, author, and columnist. His most recent book, Secret City, is about the hidden history of gay Washington. It is a New York Times bestseller. 

This is Live from the Table, a Comedy Cellar-affiliated podcast. Coming at you on Sirius 99 XM Raw Dog. And the Laugh Button Podcast Network, this is Dan Natterman here with Noam Dorman, owner of the world-famous Comedy Cellar. Present. And Perry Alashian-Brand, who is our producer-slash-booker, whatever you want to call her. And of course, Nicole Lyons, behind the scenes the sound engineer second to none in the business hello everybody it is as we record the 5th of october it is yom kippur and i have been fasting since last night at approximately 6 p.m i I have about an hour and a half to go.

It hasn't been too bad, but. But, yeah, so I am hungry, but. Have you given any thought to what you're going to break the fast with? Well, I'll probably break it here at the Comedy Cellar because I happen to be here. Now the question becomes, what should I order? And I was thinking maybe a cheeseburger with no bun to try it. What's worse health wise? I've been trying to figure this out. Is red meat worse than like white bread?

I'm going to hear all kinds of horrible shit about white bread. And then red meat like people. I don't know. I've never read anything that said white bread was anything but awful red meat. There seems to be some difference of opinion on the matter. I think white bread has no countervailing nutritious benefit. Red meat, I think, actually

is a good source of a lot of things that you need. But in moderation, they're probably both fine. People go crazy about this stuff. Cheeseburger is kind of spiteful way to end. You know, you're right. For those who don't realize. Ease into it. Cheeseburger is not kosher.

But but but I don't I don't know. I'm not kosher. The only thing I do, really, the only thing I do of a Jewish nature. Sleep with chicks. The only thing I do is fast Jewish nature. You sleep with chicks. The only thing I do is fast. I don't do anything else Jewish. I don't I'm not good with money. I don't celebrate holidays.

I look Jewish and I fast on your own. You know, you kind of glaze over the not good with money. I don't think I don't think the accusation is that we're good with money. I think the accusation is that we're tight with money. And I believe you might have. You think I might have a tendency toward that? I don't know. Ask the waitstaff about my tipping.

And I think you'll find that they would agree that I'm probably one of the more generous tippers. Now, you might argue I'm only doing it to be well thought of. But that's why does anybody do anything? But I do. I tip I eat free here and I generally tip twelve dollars. On a free meal, thirty three cents, ten to twelve, depending on my moods. And then if they get me a drink, I'll give them another five. That's nice. That's a lot.

And not just to the women, but to the men as well. So it's not just a sexual thing. Impressive. So I don't know that there's there's much evidence of me being tight with a dollar anyway. Wait, do you tip like that in other places also? I tip decently in other places. Decently, but not as well. I work here.

These are my friends or at least my colleagues or at least people I see all the time. So I'm going to tip more. Plus, I eat for free, so I feel an extra reason to tip more at a normal establishment. I'll tip. Well, tipping used to be 15 percent. Somehow. Here we go. Somehow it became 18 percent, 20 as a minimum. I don't know how that happened. I will. But I do do that. I'm just wondering how 15 percent became 18 percent. And now everybody now now you have tip jars everywhere. Now, I used to work at an ice cream parlor

and there were no tip jars. We got paid, but we got paid. Now there's tip jars everywhere. And I typically will put money in those as well. It's worse than that, Dan. We're all victims of a mass psychological framing effect experiment because now anytime you pay

on some sort of LED screen, they give you three options, right? It could be 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30. I picked the middle option, right? I don't want to be the cheap. I don't want to be the guy who chooses the lower option. Whatever they put in the middle, I'm going to choose just to not make waves.

But it's ridiculous. And I notice sometimes they'll have the lowest option of 15 so that's great i can 18 you know but but if the top option is over it's right yeah yeah it's it's ingenious i like how the segue into this was i'm not that jewish who me no all of it oh no i i you know. I don't even I don't even pay attention to what I'm but the money I'm spending. I don't even know what it is. I just hit the middle. I do want to tell you that it's I don't fast, but you're supposed to break the fast with something like much lighter than that, like a broth, because you don't want to.

We don't have broth here at the Comedy Cellar. We have a lentil soup. That's sort of a thick, very thick, some broth across the street. Like, I guess I'll be free. But I go to the far place. Yeah, I play the Vietnamese. But it's spicy for a break. Usually people break the fast with with like bagels and locks.

But we don't have that here. No, the Saigon shack. I may do that. I may do it. We'll see. All things are possible. The Deer Hunter Cafe. All things are possible. It's so good there, my God. Now, is it a meaningful fast, people?

No, no, no, no. I don't even think the logic behind it is sound. You're supposed to fast not to punish yourself, which would make some sense because it's a day of atonement. From what I've read and from what I've heard, not to punish yourself, which would make some sense because it's a day of atonement. From what I've read and from what I've heard, you you fast in order to focus on prayer and and and atonement. I don't know how being hungry helps you focus. Being hungry helps you focus on your hunger.

I don't know. I mean, I don't see the logic to it. Are you atoning? Do you feel like you have something to atone for? I don't worry about the atonement. All I do't know. I mean, I don't see the logic to it. Are you atoning? Do you feel like you have something to atone for? I don't worry about the atonement. All I do is fast. I don't go to synagogue. I don't pray and I don't atone. I think you're missing the point. The point is, is if the idea to fast is, is, is the, if the logic is it helps you focus rather than be distracted, it seems to have the opposite effect because you're thinking about food.

If God were going to prioritize the things he wants you to do, I don't think fasting would be, I think it'd be like atonement, prayer. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Blah, blah, blah. So then your question is, why do I fast? I think it's a good exercise anyway, because, well, first of all, I've been intermittent fasting of late, but but that's another story. I think it's a good idea to deprive yourself in a world where so many people

are deprived in a world to deprive oneself of food gives you perhaps. Ever so slightly, a little bit of insight into what it might be to not have everything you want all the time whenever you want it, and maybe can make you a somewhat better person that way so i that that to me is is is why i do it there is also tradition you know it's um but you could say tradition would be doing the other things as well i that's what i that's how i choose to that's what i choose choose to do. Everybody chooses and picks and chooses. Noam chose to have his children converted to Judaism against their not against their will, but their children. That's without their consent, without their consent.

That's what he chose to do. He could have married a Jewish woman. He didn't do that. So everybody does. She's basically what it's owned. Everybody does what's only every day is there in all religions, I think. I didn't do that. So everybody does. She's basically what I told everybody does. What's only every day is there in all religions? I think like take our friend Nicole, who I guess was grew up Catholic or Protestant or one of those things. Yeah, Catholic, Christian. So, I mean, you probably you probably do one or two things

of a religious nature. Hmm. Not so much anymore. We used to, you know, be the kind of Christians that went to church once a year. You know, once besides the Virgin thing, what are you doing, Nicole? Yeah, I can assure you that's a that's not a problem for me. But yeah, I'm really not doing anything. I think sometimes I'll do. I can assure you. Well, take it easy, Nicole.

I don't do anything. What do you mean? You do all the holidays. I want you to do them. I grew up in a home. But you had your kids converted. So you did send your kids to Hebrew school. Yeah, I had the kids converted because I wanted them to be able to.

If they if they do connect with, essentially they're in ethnicity. I want them to have the technicality so that they don't have severe cognitive dissonance so that they can say they're Jewish. But I was raised in such an extremely Jewish conscious home and we didn't do one single religious thing. We didn't, you know, nothing, nothing.

I never I never went to shul my father one day in my entire life. So here's the thing, though. I think that when your dad was Israeli. Yes. So I think that when it's so inherent in who you are, you don't have to or you don't feel like you have to do those things because those things are self-evident when you grow up without those things. I think you try to do those things like you do all the holidays. Yeah, but we never did them in my house.

Right. But you do them in Passover sometimes. You do them now. Yeah, that was really God bless her. That was really Juanita's thing. She she went to to figure out how to do all those holidays and i'm happy we do them but we never did them in my house growing up no i'm quickly could i uh just just uh segue uh rather uh brusquely i just wanted to mention that um

i was listening to every monday night they do music here at the comedy cellar at the all the tree cafe which is the restaurant above the comedy cellar i just not everybody that's listening has been here, I guess. But every Monday, Noam and his boys play music. And I was sitting with Stephanie Spindle, who is one of our, she's just, she just hangs out here, but she does production work anyway. She's a friend of mine, whatever. But she pointed out, she goes, look at Noam.

You were playing, I forgot what song you were playing. Look how happy he is. I looked over and I saw a look of joy in your face playing guitar that your average six-year-old would be hard-pressed to obtain this level of pleasure, and certainly not a man in his sixth decade of life. You seldom see that level of unbridled joy that playing music

brings to you that that expression on your face. I am my seventh decade. Seventh decade. Well, OK. Well, yeah, OK. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. But for the mathematically unincline, that doesn't mean he's 70. That means he's 60, but he's in the 70s. Would have confused. But anyway, I think it's amazing. I mean, you seldom see that level of enthusiasm. As you get older, that childlike joy tends to leave you. I know I'm playing music.

Yeah, well, I appreciate you saying that, Dan. I mean, I guess it's a compliment. I don't know. Yeah, it hasn't left me. Not even a little bit. But I don't think that's unique to musicians. I think most musicians continue to get. Look at Paul McCartney.

He's 80. He doesn't need the money. Yeah. But the look on your face was that of a that of a child that at a eating you know at a at a at a at a county fair or something i mean it was like a yeah i'm really enjoying the uh the altria music because the level is so high the people i'm playing with is so freaking good and now uh sasha who's you know sings with the rolling stones is coming down every week, and it's amazing to be able to play with such good musicians. And that new discovery of yours, Miranda.

Miranda, yeah. Who is kind of amazing, I think. I mean, Pearl hasn't seen her. You've often pointed out that Noam doesn't bring that same enthusiasm to the podcast. That is true. Yes, I have made that observation. I think it's rather striking.

But that, you know, if anything keeps you young, I know, Noam, you're eating healthier now and you're a little bit more focused on your health and longevity than you had been and as one would imagine. Perhaps that's the key key the fountain of youth perhaps to find something you enjoy i mean there have been studies that show that if you're engaged in life that that can have a health uh effects and well i don't know i i you know knock on wood

i am pretty i am i haven't i mean i i will acknowledge it i'm that's what i'm supposed to say these things out loud so don't yeah just say that you're enjoying the podcast too. Well, I think what Norm was trying to say is his, his, his numbers are good. No, I, I, it's not just my numbers are good. I feel now, maybe this is typical of people my age. I don't know. But I feel exactly the same as I did when I was ever like, I, I don't feel any different than did when I was ever like I. I don't feel any different than I think I did in my 20s.

I just feel exactly the same. That's awesome. It's also somewhat gradual. So, for example, you might not notice that if you have a couple of drinks, you don't wake up the next morning quite as free of effects. That's probably true. But I mean, just like like if I run up with a big, steep hill in my backyard and I will run up the hill ahead of my kids. Daddy, I can't. I'm like, I'm I'm you know, I'm just running up the hill. I'm I'm I'm good. Well, I was never in shape, so so I I didn't have so I probably am in better shape than I was because I actually go to the gym regularly now, which I didn't do that age. I think we have our guest who is that is that correct?

Is Jamie here? Jamie is making, I think, his second appearance with us or maybe his third. He's an American reporter, foreign correspondent, author and columnist, and his most book Secret City is a New York Times bestseller. How do you like that? Please welcome Jamie Kerchick to the show. Hello, Jamie. That's a cool door you have on I guess that's your right side there

I don't know if the camera's flipped or not Yeah, that's beautiful Did you install that? It's like a barn door, yeah, it's very nice It can slide open I have one in my bedroom as well We're redoing my bedroom now When I say we, I mean my wife and we have she's

putting a pocket door without that would be even better oh yeah um anyway so jamie um congratulations on the book congratulations on it being a bestseller um why don't you just go ahead tell the audience what the book's about it is about what was in the 20th century, I believe, the worst and most dangerous secret you could have in American politics, which is being gay. Worse even than being a communist, because a communist could become an ex-communist, whereas a homosexual was forever tainted and your career would be over. Not just in politics, but the CIA, the State Department, working in the federal government in any capacity. And so my book begins with FDR in the New Deal in the 1930s, and it goes all the way to Bill Clinton through every presidential administration. Lots of familiar faces, you know, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Jackie Kennedy, you know, gay and straight people, obviously, telling the stories

of all these figures and how homosexuality impacted everything from World War II to the CIA, to the FBI, to McCarthyism, to the civil rights movement, to the Reagans and AIDS. And it's a real, it's an epic, epic book. Now, before you tell us some of these, some good anecdotes, how do you research a book like this? So there are multiple levels. One was I just had to read sort of any secondary sources I could get my hands on. And that means, you know, books and magazines and newspaper articles. There are hardly any books written about this, which is really why I decided to write a book myself. But when I said, you know, I was reading presidential biographies and just kind of looking for that maybe one page or two. Right. Where it mentioned like the gay friend or the gay scandal that happened in like the Roosevelt administration,

right? And that kind of gave me a broad overview of what I would need to cover. And then I would start looking at paper collections. So lots of presidential libraries, you know, the papers of various advisors or the presidents themselves. Ben Bradley's papers, I found a great story He was the editor of the Washington Post He was a Washington Post Executive editor Beginning in the late 60s through Watergate All the way to the 90s So paper collections

Classified documents I had a lot of government documents Declassified FBI State Department documents Civil Service Commission, which was basically the main body that employed federal employees. And so they were doing a lot of these background investigations, hunting down gay people and expelling them and whatnot. And then there were a lot of interviews. I interviewed a lot of folks, former government officials, employees, journalists and whatnot, congressmen.

Yeah, it took a lot of work. I mean, I was working on this book, you know, on and off for about 10 years. Wow. Well, this is a tremendous thing you've done. I mean, in a certain way, it's kind of like similar to when we talk about so much Jewish stuff, but just the first thing pops to mind. Like when when Israel began to reexamine, it's like war of independence and like Benny Morris and stuff like that, like just uncovering all this information that's been out. That's kind of out there, but nobody wants to talk about it. It's only, you know're ready for it now now we're kind of ready for all this information

and you're and you're doing the the groundbreaking uh you know archaeological work right is that the right word yeah that's a good analogy i mean because this was the most as i said this is the most terrible thing you could be you know it's called secret city this was the worst secret and i you know one of the things i discovered in writing, researching and writing this book was all the euphemisms that people would come up with to describe homosexuality, because even that word was considered, you know, it was sort of taboo to mention it in polite company. And in fact, I read about the first outing in American politics, which was in 1942. It was of a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. His name was David Walsh, and he was accused by the New York Post of frequenting a male brothel right near the

Brooklyn Navy Yard with Nazi spies, apparently, were also hanging out at this male brothel, right? It was just in the early months of World War II. And it's important to note here that the New York Post at the time, and it might be hard for your listeners to imagine this, the New York Post was actually the liberal newspaper in New York City. It wasn't until 1977, I believe, that Rupert Murdoch purchased it. And it became a conservative paper that we all know and love today. It was a very, it was kind of a highbrow, you know, it was the pro-FDR, pro-New Deal newspaper. And they outed Senator Walsh. They accused him of being at this brothel with a bunch of gay Nazi spies. And when the senators were debating this in the Senate chamber down in Washington, the Senate Majority leader, he was referring to it. And he said

that the Senator Walsh had been accused of a crime too loathsome to mention in the presence of ladies and gentlemen. So that's like how they would talk about it. Obviously, the love that dare not speak its name, you're familiar with that term. So there are all sorts of ways to describe this, which means that when you're a historian writing about something, you know, this was something that was that was covered up. It was a lot of the evidence was destroyed. Right. If someone someone was gay and they died, a lot of times their families would destroy the evidence. They destroy the diaries, the pictures. A lot of people didn't want to talk about it. So this this subject was like hovering over American politics in the 20th century. I refer to it as the specter of homosexuality. And it influenced so many things. Right. But you're right, because only the time to like write this book? And did I think that it could actually be commercially successful? If I had published this book 15 years ago, not that long ago,

I don't think it would have gotten the same sort of mainstream attention. It would have been it would have been kind of shunted to the, you know, the LGBTQ shelf in the bookstore. But now, you know, people really are interested in this. Now that now there are no bookstores. I think there's one still left on the Upper West Side. you know, people really are interested in this. Now that now there are no bookstores. Yeah. I think there's one still left on the Upper West Side. One Barnes and Noble still still holding out against against the future.

I have some related questions for you, and then we'll go back to the actual specifics. So I was having a talk with my kids the other day, and they're pretty young for this talk, 10 and 9. But I was trying to have them start thinking about what it's like to judge people in another time and place. And I had another adult there with me. And I said to her, it occurred to me, I said, you know, even in our own lifetime, if you think back on the way we refer to homosexuals, the way we the way we openly made fun of them, the the things that went on, it it almost seems impossible that we did that. And yet it was just, you know, 25 years ago. So you can so less than that. I remember I'm 38. I mean, I remember in high school, the word gay just like peppered our speech. Every other gay was basically the euphemism for bad or stupid. And everyone used

it all the time. But but could you argue that they did not mean it in a homophobic way? They just meant it as a catch all word. Sometimes they meant it as a catch all. Sometimes it was homophobic. But even if it was a catch-all, I mean, you wouldn't go around saying, you know, that's so Jew, right? Well, actually, we probably would. But you know what I mean. You know what I mean?

I'm saying people don't do that anymore. Kids don't do that. We don't do that anymore. Kids don't do that. My teacher, this was 1983, so a little bit further back than what you're discussing. I remember he said he was actually

the cheerleading coach for the girls' cheerleading squad. So he was already a little suspect. But he would say to the girls, oh, so-and-so, you look good today. And these were freshman girls, and he was a 30-something-year-old man. And they would say, Mr. Blank, you're such a perv.

And he would say, that's not perverted. If I said, Dan, you look good, that would be perverted. In other words, being gay is per perverted but this was something that he said that you would never say today no but i remember much harsher things i mean i first of all like like the comedians eddie murphy had a whole thing about faggot forgive me yeah and then but i also remember you know people i knew um who would talk about kicking the shit out of a gay guy if he looked at him the wrong way. And I even knew a story. It wasn't me.

It was a brother of a girlfriend of mine who I think beat up a gay guy in the bathroom because the gay guy approached him or whatever. And this was a story he would tell not ashamed, you know, you know, like, and I remember it horrified me at the time, but he had no sense that this was a story he should probably not want to share. Like he, he, he, he felt and probably not incredibly that most people would be like, yeah, I get that. You know, I get it, bro. You did what you had to do. So funny. One of the, one of the anecdotes I tell in the book is Jack Kennedy.

It's before he's president and he's on the beach with Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. And they're sort of strolling behind him. And Tennessee Williams makes a comment about Jack Kennedy's ass to Gore Vidal. And they start laughing. And Jack Kennedy asks, what are you laughing about? And Gore Vidal tells him. And Jack Kennedy, he's kind of flattered by it. He's sort of amused by it, which is very rare for a man of his time, right? This is 1960. And I think it says something about Jack Kennedy because we know his best friend was gay. And I write about this. His best friend from high school was gay. And Jack Kennedy was very relaxed around gay people in a way that really very few people of his generation were. And, you know, I have theories as to why this might be the case. Obviously, his gay best friend, you know, one might also speculate that he had his own secret sexual life that if the American public ever discovered it would be

horrified. And so perhaps he felt some kind of, you know, instinctual camaraderie with. Just to underline for the younger listeners, Jamie's referring to Jack Kennedy's affairs with women, not, not potentially homosexual secret life. No, no, not, not that. Of course not. So maybe, well, you're 38, you say?

Yeah. So I guess you'd be older. What was it like for a gay person to live at that time and hear being gay openly be the butt of jokes and stuff like that?

Did you just put it in some sort of context? Was it extremely painful? Did you internalize some of that self-hate in some way? What was it like? I think what it did for me is it delays your coming out. So I didn't come out in high school. I went to an all-boys high school, so that would have been a more difficult place.

So I think it just it just puts up a barrier and it and it makes you not want to confront it or talk about those things. I think I had it relatively easy. You know, I grew up in the Northeast. I had very accepting parents. I went to, you know, I went to Yale, which was a very accepting place. So, you noticed, even in my shorter life, have noticed a dramatic change, dramatic change. So much so that now when I look at the younger kids who are teenagers now, with the kind of proliferation of gender identities, it makes me a little uneasy, actually, because in some sense, I worry that homosexuality is being erased because gender nonconformity is now being conflated with sort of transgenderism. boys or masculine tomboy girls are being socialized into thinking that perhaps they are the opposite sex, as opposed to what in my generation, which is not that long ago, we would have understood as being, oh, he's probably going to grow up and be gay. And that's fine, right? That's fine.

But now there's this rush, I feel like, to kind of push people into a transgender identity. And I'm not denying transgenderism. It obviously exists, right? But I worry that the kind of differences between these, these are two totally different concepts. Homosexuality and gender identity are completely different things one is same-sex attraction the other is whether or not you identify as your sex it's very inner directed it has nothing to do with outer direction so these are two separate concepts and

i think that they've become conflated oh this is a whole nother can of worms that you've probably discussed before, but well, we discussed it carefully because, and, and that's the, I think the, the other part of this whole equation is that you're not allowed to kick these things around and be saying the wrong thing about it, which, which really makes it terrible. I just, similarly on the way in And I was listening to Laura Basel on who is, uh, you know, she'd been on the show a few times and she was being interviewed about her, um, fighting against fighting for title nine reform. And she was, she said, my heart is

pounding because I know I'm saying the wrong thing for my team. And I don't want it like it's clear. She was so worried about getting in trouble as she was merely staying, but every defense attorney would think about due process. So this is somehow similar. Like, you know, you have to be so careful about all these things. We don't know enough about I'm going to go out alone. I don't think we know enough about transgenderism. That's the right word for people to be so fucking sure of themselves in the way they say what's

wrong and what's, what's correct and what's incorrect about it. We just don't know. That's all. There's no, there's no shame. And, and, and, and the actions are permanent and, and, and serious, you know, these surgeries and never having an orgasm and things you read about. So like, and I, I, I mean, I don't want to go off too far on this, but I happen to just for some reason, I know some parents of transgender children.

I know two, two different couples, extremely loving parents of these transgender children. And they struggle with this and they struggle with the idea that they're, that they're not allowed out of love for their children to want to be cautious, to want to, you know, hear the devil's advocate position, you know, so this is, anyway, you're right. It's way off the subject, but it's very apropos of our times.

So give us some, what are, first of all, the open secrets, was Eleanor Roosevelt a lesbian? So, I mean, I didn't find anything new about that. So I just sort of report what's been written again we're based we're basing a lot of this on letters it's all based on letters that she exchanged with another woman lorena hickok who was an associated press reporter who covered her and the letters are a little you know they're quite hot and heavy in in some places but you know for me that is not enough, unless there's like an explicit mention

of kind of, you know, sexual activity, or even, you know, strong emotional writing, right? I mean, you know, women in that era, or even today, women can write very emotional, women can express themselves very emotionally to one another, and not necessarily be gay. I think with men, we should be able to be as emotional with one another as women. But obviously, the gender expectations, right, are that men are not supposed to be so affectionate with one another. Men might also have some sort of intrinsic lack of that kind of, I mean, it might partly be because of society,

but it might be that just men are just less like that. Who knows? With each other. What about Abraham Lincoln? Well, he was straight. He had less. Less men or less men. Well, Abraham Lincoln had letters,

and there's also kind of doggerel poetry that he wrote that was very kind of homoerotic. What does doggerel mean? I mean, there's an entire... What? It means what? Shitty poetry. Doggerol is just kind of like dirty, dirty, like dirty poetry.

I thought dogger was just bad poetry. I'm going to look that up. I think it means... Doggerol just means like, you know, not exquisitely rhymed or anything. Just sort of, you know, like like limericks kind of. It's like dog roll poetry that is irregular in rhythm and rhyme. So we have a bit our Zoom connection is not doing a good job of letting us both talk at the same time. Dan looked it up and said that dog roll is poetry that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect.

Oh, so it's a perfect word. So go ahead. He's moving. That sounds correct. I'm moving closer to my router so that that would probably be helpful. I'm not sure. There's an entire book written about Abraham Lincoln potentially being gay called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, he shared a bed

with another man for several years. Again, this was not unusual on the American frontier in the middle of the 19th century. But again, you read these letters and they are a little suspect. They do raise questions. But my book begins with FDR

because World War II is really a very important moment when homosexuality is transformed from being you know merely a sin and a crime and um that's right that's a sin it's a crime it is one other thing i've been doing so many of these book talks i can't it was a sin it was a crime and then it becomes a national security threat. Right. Up to that point, homosexuality might get you. Sorry, it was also a medical condition. Very important.

Gay people, gay men, usually if they were caught, they could be sent. Well, they would certainly go to see a psychiatrist. They would, in many cases, be sent to a hospital and undergo really what can only be described as torture, you know, castration in some cases, lobotomies, all sorts of kind of procedures that today we would consider barbaric. That's what you would suffer if you were gay. But World War II changes everything. And that suddenly we have this concept of national security. And secrecy becomes extremely important. And because gay people have this deep, dark, shameful secret that is the worst possible secret imaginable,

it was believed that they could not be trusted, right, with government secrets, that they would be prone to blackmail, to be turned by foreign foreign adversarial foreign powers. Is that a ridiculous idea? So it's not necessarily on its face if you're 1942 or the 1950s, right? You might think, well, you might think I'm a liberal progressive person. I would like to live in a world where gay people are accepted. That's not the world we live in. This is a liability.

And as long as we have this society where it's a liability, then we've got to clear out these homosexuals. I'd say there's two problems with this. One is if the government would have been willing at the time to, at least in the individual cases, to say, look, if a Soviet agent tries to blackmail you, come to us and tell us you're gay first, and we won't fire you, right? Don't give secrets. Come to us. We'll protect you. If they did that, then there wouldn't have been a need for this policy. And in fact, there's a case that I write about involving a journalist who did just that in 1957.

He was in Moscow. His name was Joe Alsop. He was an extremely influential, well-known newspaper columnist. And the Soviets set him up in a hotel room with an attractive young man, took photographs, and they tried to turn him right then and there. And what Alsop did was he refused. Yeah, and he actually wrote a confession for the CIA, where he described the entire experience so that they could learn from it, right, and sort of protect other people in the field. And the second retort to your concern is that there actually was not a single

case of a gay person being blackmailed because they were gay in the entire history of the United States. In the early 1990s, the Defense Department did a study of over 120 cases of espionage, American citizens convicted for espionage. Six of them were gay and not a single one of them did it because they were blackmailed. They did it for money or ideology, not because they were blackmailed. So there actually wasn't a single example of this ever happening. So it was an extremely wasteful, destructive policy that saw probably over 10 to 15,000 people lose their jobs. And I would say it's actually even worse than the Red Scare because the Red Scare was at least predicated on something legitimate, which was a legitimate fear of communism,

right? I mean, Joe McCarthy totally exaggerated it and he demagogued the issue. But there were a handful of communist spies in the US government in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There was, as I said, there was not a single example of a gay person who was a threat in this sense, right? And yet the government went to such extremes and wasted so many resources and denied the country so much talent, right? Because of this irrational fear that we can now look on as being an irrational fear. I tell a lot of the stories, you know, from my book, people laugh at them because they think they're so crazy. The things that people

used to say and think about gay people. But these were widely, widely believed, widely held. Tell us some of them. We have time. Go ahead. I mean, I write about, you know, in the 1940s, it was widely believed that the Nazis were a sort of gay cabal. You know, this wasn't just a joke from the producers. Like this was an actual belief. And it had, you know, I can explain why they thought this. Part of the reason was, is that there actually was one very well-known, high-ranking, openly gay Nazi. His name was Ernst Röhm. He was the head of the SA, the brown shirts.

Those were like the real tough guys. He was gay and quite openly gay. And it wasn't until the Nazis came to power that Hitler actually went after him right so when the Nazis were just a street thug movement Hitler was willing to tolerate the fact that his like chief thug was a was a pretty openly gay you know guy but then once you're in power you have to be respectable right and then the there's you know just a year into power is the infamous night of the Long Knives. And that's when Hitler basically murdered, had Rome murdered and all the leadership of the SA because he saw them as a threat to his power.

But afterwards he cited the fact that Rome was a homosexual and that there were other sort of, that he was kind of seeding the SA with other homosexuals. He cited that as the reason why he perpetrated the Night of the Long Knives. And then that kind of becomes the sort of accepted belief, right? Is that, oh, all these, well, and there's other reasons too, right? I mean, what is fascism? What is Nazism? It's a very masculine ideology, right? And it's a masculinist a it's a masculine worshiping ideology it's a lot of men and in you know tough men in uniforms and boots and that kind of the the uniforms were very very well

tailored yes extremely well i mean they look good hugo boss hugo boss tailored them i mean but so we joke about this but this was actually so i'll say you know know, in December, late December 1941, so just like two weeks after Pearl Harbor, I found a memo from the OSS, which is the predecessor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. It was a proposal from a researcher, a medical researcher in New York who worked for an institute that studied what they what they called sexual variants basically anyone who wasn't a heterosexual homosexuals and this man was proposing that the OSS recruits what he called patriotic homosexuals to then infiltrate the Nazi command right because they couldn't serve in the military officially although lots of gay people served in World War II in the military, that the OSS should recruit some of these gay men. And because the Nazis were just a bunch of gay men, then you could infiltrate them as, you know, lovers and spies and kind of, you know, figure out what the Nazis were doing. This was a serious

proposal. You know, the OSS didn't act on it to my knowledge, but they entertained it. And then just a couple of years later, you know, Joe McCarthy, just a couple of weeks into his reign of terror, you know, he's accusing the State Department of being riddled with homosexual communists. And the allegation is made made that there are you know lesbians performing secret like erotic sexual um performances to seduce female government workers like into their into the kind of soviet sphere i mean these are just crazy things right that you know one you know during world war ii you could accuse gay people being nazis and then just a few later, you're accusing them of being communists. And there's no cognitive dissonance here. Basically, anything anything that was terrible, anything that was terrible, you could you could pin on the gays.

And I mean, I don't know. You've probably seen the movie JFK by Oliver Stone. Yeah. I don't know if you remember, but that movie basically alleges that it was a homosexual conspiracy, a right-wing homosexual conspiracy that assassinated John F. Kennedy. And that movie is based on a real prosecution. In 1967, the only person ever prosecuted for the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a gay businessman named Clay Shaw in New Orleans. He's played by Tommy Lee Jones in that movie in a very homophobic manner. And the man who prosecuted him was a totally reckless, out of control district attorney named Jim Garrison, who's played by Kevin Costner.

And basically the crux of his theory was that there was this group of right-wing homosexuals in New Orleans who were upset with JFK because he botched the Bay of Pigs. And they wanted to assassinate, and I'm quoting him, they wanted to assassinate the most handsome man in the world in a homosexual thrill killing. Like Leopold and Loeb. You know Leopold and Loeb, the you know leopold and lobe the two the two kind of gay lovers who killed one of their cousins it was a sensational murder case in the 1920s he was basically alleging that this was what the kennedy assassination was and he said that that jack ruby and oswald were lovers i mean this was a crazy crazy thing most people don't know this or remember this but this is this is what jfk this is this is the story in the theory that oliver stone based his multiple academy award

nominated movie on i mean it's actually look in terms of filmmaking it's brilliant filmmaking i could watch that movie over and over again you know score, the acting. I mean, it's just an incredible movie. It also happens to be probably the most homophobic movie ever made. But it just kind of shows you throughout history all the ways in which homosexuality becomes. Speaking of homophobic movies, I saw on YouTube a public service announcement from, I think, the 50s, basically warning children about gay men. And it was pretty horrifying. It was like, what Johnny doesn't know is that this kind man is sick. But it's not a sickness you can see. It's a sickness of the mind. And the kid gets murdered by the guy,

implying that gay men are not just preying on kids sexually, but violent. It's called Boys Beware. You can watch it online. It was a public service announcement. They show those old PSAs that they would show telling kids to duck and cover when the nuclear holocaust happened. So that's kind of how gays were treated. Right. They were sort of the equivalent of a Soviet

nuclear bomb. Right. I mean, it was that same kind of tone that they were described as. I mean, it's a short movie, but, you know, imagine growing up in that kind of America and being gay. And I just looked up what I was just looking up on my phone was to confirm that it was in 1975 that the American Psychological Association finally took away considering

homosexuality as a mental illness, right? I think it was 73. American Psychiatric Association. Yeah, right. It's almost 50 years ago. I don't know if they meant it or they just did it for political pressure. Well, they were under pressure. They were under pressure, but it's not like they had to do it. You know, I mean,

it's not like today where everyone goes out of their way, you know, to be seen as LGBT friendly, you know, there wasn't a cost for this kind of homophobia. There was no cost. And there was everything to be gained, by the way. And in fact, I wouldn't say that that calculus really changed until very recently. I mean, I look at someone like Pete Buttigieg. I think you can fairly say that being gay helped him i think i don't

think if he was a straight white harvard educated former mckinsey consultants who's the mayor of whatever yeah like i don't think he would have been put it this way i don't think he'd be cabinet secretary right um i'm not denying his talents right And I'm not trying to take anything away from him. But I think what he I think his experience as a gay man in politics is very different from, you know, Barney Frank. I think Barney Frank could have been speaker of the House. Right. Like he's an extremely smart and witty guy. But I think being gay probably, you know, a lot handsomer than Barney Frank, if memory serves. Speaker of the House, right? Like, he's an extremely smart and witty guy. But I think being gay probably, you know.

Buttigieg is a lot handsomer than Barney Frank, if memory serves. Well, I'm not going to get into that. But I just think it's a lot easier to be gay now in politics because of people like Barney Frank. He had a scandal, right, Barney Frank? Yes, he did. He had a male prostitute living in his house and he that's not of anybody's business, actually. What accounts for this this change? I mean, is it fair to say that just that that human beings evolve once we thought black people were only fit to be slaves? Now we don't. Is it a natural evolution that now we regard LGBTQ as

our equals? I mean, is there something that happened that you can point? I think there's a few things. And one is there's an important difference with race, is that gay people are randomly and evenly distributed across the population. So everyone has a gay friend or family member at this point. We always did, by the way. It's only because gay people came out of the closet, right? That we now all suddenly realize this. But once that happened, once gay people started coming out in larger numbers and, you know,

the percentage of Americans who could say that they knew an openly gay person went from like, you know, 1% to everybody. Now it's like 94%, right? Once that happens, it becomes extremely difficult to discriminate against gay people, right? When they're in your family, when they has someone of a different race in their family. And so that it's easier to live a life where you don't encounter people of different races. And it's easier to kind of other I don't like that term as a verb. It's easier to other them. Right. Then it is when there's a potential that your son could be gay. But in order to get to that point, we had to have these people come out. So what precipitated that? small group of extremely courageous people to be the first, right? And one of the stories I tell

is of a man named Frank Kameny, who was a Harvard-trained PhD astronomer who was working for the Army Map Service, which is the predecessor to the Geospatial Intelligence Agency, basically the military wing of the space program. And he's working for them in December 1957. It's just two months after the launch of Sputnik and the space race begins. He is recalled from the observatory that he's working at in Hawaii. He's called all the way back to Washington and he's fired because the government finds evidence

that he's gay. And he becomes the first person to say, who's fired by the government to say, you know what, I'm going to challenge this. I'm going to legally challenge this. And it's an incredible moment because what he's basically doing is saying, I'm not sick. You're all sick. The society is sick. And it's incredible. I mean, he tries to get the ACLU to take his case and not even the ACLU would take his case. Now I have lots of problems with the ACLU today. And I think we've talked about them before on this podcast.

But back then, the job of the ACLU was to defend everyone, no matter how disreputable or unpopular they were. And this goes to the point I was making earlier about why it was worse to be a homosexual than a communist. The ACLU defended communists or people accused of communism, or certainly people with left-wing sympathies who were fired from their jobs. They wouldn't take Frank Kameny's case. He had to do it all by himself. He had no legal training, right? He had to kind of become an autodidact, write his own legal brief. He tries to appeal his case up to the Supreme Court. They don't take it.

But he then forms really the first substantial gay rights organization in the United States. He founds it here in Washington called the Mattachine Society. And they hold the first picket for gay rights outside the White House in 1965. So that's four years before Stonewall, the Stonewall uprising, which we've all been led to believe was kind of the first event in the history of gay rights. I actually say it didn't start in New York. It started in Washington earlier. And you can see these photographs of these men and women. They're all dressed up in suits and ties, and the women are all wearing, you know, blouses and skirts that go below the knee. Frank was insistent that he said, if you want to be employed, look employable. And they're standing outside the White House holding up these picket signs like, you know, African-American and civil rights demonstrators with very simple demands.

Right. You know, homosexuals demand equal rights. That takes so much courage. Oh, yeah. To do that in 1965. And all these people you can there's video, there's film of this and all these people looking at them like they're zoo animals, you know, like to actually declare yourself a homosexual in public. This is so crazy, right? So you have people like that who are heroes and just incredible. And it's kind of unfathomable how they had that kind of courage. And then they open the door slightly, right?

And then you have Stonewall a couple of years later. And Stonewall becomes news across the door slightly right and then you have stonewall a couple years later and stonewall is becomes news across the country right and you can imagine there are there are people living in cities in the midwest right who are reading this newspaper item maybe on page a5 or something you know homosexuals riot it's like oh like we're not just going to get beat up by the cops all the time now we're're actually going to fight back. So it's a gradual process. But at the heart of it, I really believe is the First Amendment and free speech, because the first gay rights case before the Supreme Court, it involves a gay magazine, just like a general interest magazine. It's not pornographic by any means. It was deemed obscene by the Postal Service. They wouldn't send it. They impounded it, right? They sued and they won. And they won on the First Amendment grounds. You have Frank Kameny, who I just talked about, right? He is writing letters to congressmen. He's protesting outside the State Department, the White House, the Civil Service Commission.

You have gay people, you know, writing, they're exercising their First Amendment liberties. And I think that's really at the heart of it. I mean, being gay, the whole act of coming out of the closet is an act of expression, right? So all of this freedom that gay people enjoy is bound up in the First Amendment and freedom of expression. And it's important to remember that, you know the first amendment was was designed for people like this gay people were the most despised minority in the country they were criminals they were insane they were lobotomized they were you know they could be banned from teaching in public schools they could be fired at will it seems from my point of view that there

was this gradual progress. And then with gay marriage, it just accelerated by a factor of 100 or something that that really seemed to. And I didn't see that coming. And it's, you know, I like to think I'm, you know, that I'm smart, I guess. And from time to time, I get something so wrong and it always stays with me. And that is something I did not see that coming. And boy, was I wrong about it. As soon as people started going to their friends' marriages or knowing that their friends were getting married and seeing gay people live like they, you know, just live ordinary mundane kind of lives. Right. Yeah.

This seemed to really grab people in a way that I, I think Andrew Sullivan saw it. I think some people, you know, with deep insight did understand that that could, could be what happened, what happened. I did not see that could could be what happened would happen i did not see that i don't know if you saw it coming i think they saw it as i think we saw it as an ideal i don't think we saw it arriving so quickly i mean i remember one of the first um realizations i had when i was gay was that i would never be able to get married when i was like a teenager that's like i'm not going to get married when I was like a teenager. That's like, I'm not going to get married.

And I've talked to other gay people who had that same, right. You know, feeling and how quickly that changed. Right. You know, like maybe we'd be accepted. Right. But we'd never be able to get married. Like that would just never be an option or have kids. Right. Like I don't know if I want to have kids. I mean, you can keep the straight people can have the kids. Well, no, I think there are a lot of gay people.

There are, and I respect that. Everyone should have, of course, I'm not disparaging people who do that. I'm just saying personally, it's not for me. By the way, speaking of kids, I would imagine, I try to put myself in the position of others that your parents must feel emotional almost to see how the world has changed to accept their son they you know even even more than you might be thanking for it for a parent this must be very very emotional well you know my mother listens to every podcast i do so you know too bad these these aren't live because she'd call in and probably confirm that for you. Maybe you can have her on as a guest sometime. We can call her right now.

We don't have a phone. I would love to. Go ahead. I think she would agree with you. I also think that's why Pete Buttigieg got like so many moms of gay sons supporting him. I think that was a huge constituency for him. But yeah, no, I do. I do think that for the parents of gay children,

and that's a huge part of why this change happened, by the way. It's not just the gay people who affected it. It's their relatives. It's their mothers, really. It would have been my father. who affected it. It's their relatives. It's their, it's their mothers, really. It's the Jewish mothers of gay kids. So before we have a few more minutes, let's, let's talk about the, the part of your identity that will never be accepted.

There's a lot of Jewish stuff in the news. Who would have thought it would become easier to be gay than Jewish, but did two things happened in the news recently. One is that our brother comedian, Sam Morrell, did you see this? He was doing a show. Dan, you want to describe what happened? He was doing a show in Omaha, Nebraska, at the Funny Bone. And some woman at some point in the I think he did a joke about being Jewish.

But Sam Morrill does not take a stand politically on anything. I don't think I mean, from what I know, absolutely not. And certainly not in Israel, Palestine. But there was a woman there that I guess was I think knew that he was a Jewish comedian and decided to to heckle him and said a free Palestine. And then, you know, said something else about apartheid and whatever. And Sam was just like, why? Why are you saying this is the funny bone? Well, it's really not the place to to do that, but basically just attacking him for attacking you for being Jewish, even though he's never expressed any. I mean, I can understand them doing it to me because I have

tweeted things about about Israel, Palestine, but but nobody knows who I am. So Sam's a bit more well known. So but but he hasn't he doesn't say anything about Israel, Palestine, either on Twitter or anywhere else. So so this was kind of outrageous that they. So she said, I'm taking a stance against apartheid. And Sam goes, Well, what's your stance about fucking up my show? Yeah.

And when she said apartheid, she means Israel, Israeli apartheid and Sam goes, well, what's your stance about fucking up my show? Yeah. And when she said apartheid, she means Israel, Israeli apartheid. So, so yeah, you know, and it's just, you know, this is the one my father used to say that anti-gay bigotry is the one accepted bigotry. He would complain about that, you know, that it was

the one bigotry you were openly, still openly allowed to express. But no longer, I think if he that it was it was the one a bigotry you were openly still openly allowed to express. But no longer. I think if if if a gay comedian was attacked on stage about being gay, that would be viral in this year. But a Jewish comedian attack on stage is not it's it will not get the attention that any other group would, I don't think, because they hide behind Israel. Well, also because Jews have sort of if you want to put the best possible spin on it, Jews are considered a group that's in power, basically a white adjacent. And if she had said, fuck white people, that wouldn't be considered scandalous either.

So in a way, I think that Dan's an apologist for the anti-Semites. You can hear that. I'm saying if Jews are basically considered white people, then it's open season because, you know, you can make fun of them. We're also the number one victims of violent hate crimes in America. You know, come on. But that may well be, but I think we're perceived by many people as powerful people.

Well, we are that too. Gay people can be. Anyway, so that was one thing that happened. And then the other thing is this nine different groups on uh uh at berkeley you have any comment on that nine different groups at berkeley uh campus groups said they will never have a speaker who was a zionist at any of their functions and that this is not i believe i'm correct here not to speak about israel to speak about anything you can't come and speak about physics if we know that you're a Zionist.

Well, I think that's just a further sign of the kind of the decline of American higher education. There are many other examples and ways in which this is happening. The quality of what's being taught and the quality of the students. It's just in general decline. I think American higher education is, you know, not, I think it's just not worth the money we're pouring into it. It's become corrupted. It's become politicized.

And this is just one facet of it is the antisemitism. And to harken back to, sorry to interrupt, but to harken back to something you said before, I don't think the ACLU is going to care about this case. I think they would care if somebody said somehow they could make it a gay thing. Interesting. It's changed. And let me just say, because people may roll in their eyes, I do not think that my life

as a Jew is difficult in America. I kiss the ground of this country and don't think I, I think like we Jews really have it tough. So, you know, I'm not saying that nevertheless, I do worry very much. I've said this a lot of times. So when I was in college, I took a semester abroad in Tel Aviv. And that was, it was fun. I told everybody, we were very open about it. And we had, I believe that if my kids were in college now and they wanted to take a semester in Tel Aviv,

the kind of things they would kind of keep to themselves, a lot of people will look down their nose on. And I feel like any Jew who identifies with Israel or things like that is kind of being made into an Afrikaner. Yeah. And I don't want that for my children. It bothers me very much. They'll still have a very nice life in America. But that moving backwards in terms of us being able to be, you know, proud, I guess, is the word or just not to be connected with who we are and is degrading. And I don't know what else to say, but it bothers me very deeply.

Well, one is you have to point out that the Jews who are facing the real brunt of this anti-Semitism, the violent anti-Semitism, are the Orthodox, right? The visible Jews. And you and I are not necessarily, well, Dan might be, he's got a pretty big schnoz, but you know, most of us are not, most of us are not. I didn't see that coming. Go ahead. You know, we're not necessarily visible on the street as Jews. And so I am. But go ahead. Right. So that's, you know, yes, you and I, you the four of us could say it's not tough for us. But you know what? If you're a if you're a Hassid in Brooklyn, the story is not so nice, right? I must I will say that, you know, this woman on a plane once thought I was Italian and she was blind, very

friendly. I don't believe she was blind. She was very she was we were in an exit row. She can't be blind. You know what? I would actually say yeah, you know what? You're right. Jews are maybe we make more money and we we dominate or we were more heavily represented in certain professions. You know, I think when when anti-Semitism takes on in a society and when it spreads and when it goes unacknowledged or it's not criticized,

that has really bad repercussions for the entire society and not just the Jews. It's a cancer. It'll eat that society and destroy it because it's a sign of irrationality, of conspiracy theories, of unreason of just backwardness in general right so when stuff like this is happening on the berkeley campus that's a really bad sign for berkeley as an institution not just the jews it's a bad i remember the other thing i i that escaped me it's that, and I see, and I don't want this for my children either,

I see American Jews becoming more and more embarrassed and disconnected from Israel, less and less able to defend Israel, and more and more just falling in line with this position that Israel is an apartheid state and all that stuff. So my kind of pithy thing that I said one time, when anti-Semitism comes from the right, it rallies us. Jews will stand up to that. But when it comes from the left, it rots us.

And I think that this, I'm more concerned about the rotting within the community that's going on. And it's clearly going on than I am about an America that's going to become difficult for Jews day to day. It's just that we are, that's exactly on and it's clearly going on than I am about an America that's going to become difficult for Jews day to day. It's just that we are, are, that's exactly the right word. We're, we're rotting. And we want to be accepted in polite company and among progressives and blah, blah, blah. And all these little things make,

are making that you, you, you need to be brave again. Like you talked about this man who had had this bravery to to be a pro israel person now requires bravery and i'll tell you one other thing and then i'll shut up in the front of the olive tree there's a star of david it's like a stained glass star of david you've been to the olive tree i don't know if you remember it's from an old synagogue it's been there basically my whole life. In the last three or four years. More people have commented to me about it. Wow, that's pretty brave of you. Wow. I'm impressed that you have a star, David. Then in all the rest of my life combined, tell you why that is.

This was something that nobody ever commented on before. And all of a sudden the ground is shifted and people are seeing this as an, as a defiant political act on my part. I think the star of David is, is, is, is linked to the flag of Israel. If it was a menorah or a shofar, it is, but I'm saying that this is a, that it didn't use to, nobody used to care about it. And now the climate is such that people see a star of David in my restaurant. I'm like, wow, you're, you're, you're, you know, you got an ax to grind maybe like you're, you're not afraid of anything, right? You're at, you're in,

you're in their face because it's not so socially acceptable anymore. That's terrible. That's painful to me. Do you have anything you want, you would like to say in conclusion about your children's education that you had, uh, you're talking to me last night about what they're learning in school. And no, I don't want to talk about that. I'll talk about that with Jamie.

So leave us leave us with one good anecdote that people will be amazed to hear about a prominent gay situation. The craziest story I uncovered in the book is there was a there was an attempt just a couple of weeks before Ronald Reagan was nominated by the Republican Party for president in 1980. There was an attempt by a group, a anti-communist cabal of advisers. And that Reagan himself might have been gay. They didn't really have definitive evidence of that. It was hearsay, but they were pretty certain that Reagan was being controlled by this right-wing homosexual cabal. And I found all the notes of this investigation in Ben Bradley's papers, where they'd just been sitting for years. The paper, the Post never actually published anything about it, obviously, or else, you know, you would have heard about it.

I uncovered this story, and it's a kind of wacky, it's a wacky story that we kind of laugh at when I tell you the details today, but it was considered serious enough that Ben Bradley assigned, you know, Bob Woodward among other reporters to investigate this. That's kind of how serious these accusations were, right? That a leading presidential candidate might have a couple of gay men working for him was considered legitimately scandalous. What is your take on Reagan and his moral flaws vis-a-vis reacting to the AIDS virus in real time? I'm sure you know all about that. Yeah, it's a huge part of the book, obviously.

I think what makes it, I mean, look, Ronald Reagan didn't utter the word AIDS until September 1985. AIDS was first reported on the front page of the New York Times in July 1981. So imagine going for four years of a disease that is killing people in pretty excruciating ways, right? Across the country and then around the world. And the president doesn't even mention it. That tells you a lot. Hundreds of thousands of gay men died. I do remember.

Not in that period. I mean, over time, yes. In those four years, I think by the time he mentioned it, it's in my book, it may have been like 25,000 people had died over the course. It was a lot of people. Right. And I can tell you, if they were little schoolgirls. The president would have been on it. Right. But they were homosexuals and they were intravenous drug users and they were Haitians. So these were not people who were considered part of Reagan's America. You see this as his betraying his personal anti-gay feelings? It's not necessarily actually. No, I say this in the book.

I don't think Reagan was more homophobic than men of his generation. He was born in 1911. It's Hollywood, too, so he must have had some experience. Well, so there's actually a story I tell. One of the movie he was in with Bette Davis called Dark Victory. And the director, this was 1939, and the director, who was a bisexual Englishman,

basically wanted him to play the role of Bette Davis's gay best friend. But he, you know, in so many words, and we know this because the way Reagan described it to his biographer many years later, he said, he wanted me to play the role as if he was the sort of guy who could sit in the girl's dressing room and dish with the ladies while they're getting dressed. That's a very, again, a euphemistic way of describing a homosexual, right? reagan was really kind of

put off by this he did not like the idea of playing a kind of sissy right or a fop yeah it wouldn't be good for his career obviously well maybe yes perhaps that's you're always so charitable with these with these home for you know i mean no i i understand it yeah so you're right i mean you wouldn't want to be typecast. I mean, when Will Smith finally did it, it was considered very controversial for him, right? And that was much, much later. When did he play?

Oh, oh, in Sixth Street. Sixth Street and Separation. Separation. Yeah, yeah. But so Reagan came from this, but this is another reason why that story I just told you about the crazy Reagan advisors being gay. I think it's important because Reagan had, yes, he had this Hollywood background. He had, so he was already under

suspicion from people, from the Christian right. He and Nancy had a ton of gay friends. Nancy, in particular, she was known as the first fag hag, surrounded by gay men, right? Wow. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, there's a a whole in the photo insert in my book there's an entire page and it's just photographs of nancy with all of her gay courtiers and designers and hairdressers and and it says all the first ladies men that's the caption um and when reagan when reagan was when reagan was governor there was actually a gay scandal in his office he was he fired two men who had

been accused of being gay, right? So he has all this kind of, I refer to it as kind of a homosexual aura, you know, swirling around him when he's president. And most Americans might not have seen it or known it, but I do believe that he and Nancy and his advisors in particular, were sort of like sufficiently paranoid by this, that when this disease just came out of nowhere and starts in it's like gay men whom it's killing, he did not want to be associated with it. And in fact, one of the other real dramatic finds in my book is I found the original draft of the statement that he and Nancy released upon the death of Rock Hudson.

Wow. I was just going to ask about that. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I don't know. Yeah. By the book. Right. And you can see it. I reproduced it in the book. And it's just a three or four sentence statement because Rock Hudson, by the way, famous actor, matinee idol, he becomes really the first public figure to die of AIDS and was close friends of the Reagans. The Reagans put out a statement and you can see in Ronald's handwriting, he's removing like little words and phrases that indicate their connection to Rock Hudson. So like there's an entire sentence that's deleted that says, you know, he was a close friend of ours and like, and we will miss him greatly. It's crossed out and it's changed to, he was a wonderful man and he will be missed. It's put in the passive voice. And there's other examples and it's very deliberate and it's a fascinating example of kind of how particular he was in trying to erase in the public perception this, you know, close friendship that him and his wife had.

Let me tell you what I what I kind of think about it. You tell me if this is too charitable and then we really have to go. So politicians are cowards. Right. So obviously, the fact that he had many gay friends and certainly knew that Rock Hudson was gay and was close with him, that says something about how much he cared personally about it. And I would make the analogy now to Senator Schumer, who was always very, very critical of Hamas,

but in the last Gulf War, would not say a goddamn thing about Hamas, wouldn't tweet about it. Nothing. Right. So do I think that Chuck Schumer is personally sympathetic to Hamas? No. Do I think he's just a cowardly politician and and that's its own immorality or whatever you want to say. But the politics and I and that is what I see as Reagan vis-a-vis the gay thing. And people want to add to that that he was anti-gay. And to me, I don't think Schumer's anti-Jewish. He just doesn't give a shit enough. He doesn't give a shit about anything more than getting reelected. I do see. Didn't Reagan say that's how I see it in terms of Reagan being homophobic? I seem to remember vaguely a quote of Reagan where he said something like, isn't it interesting when morality and good sense go in the same direction or something like that?

Well, no, there's actually well, there was a I didn't mention it. But in 1978, you know, just two years before he ran for president, there was a ballot initiative in the state of California to ban gay people from teaching in public schools. Anita Bryant, right? Well, she was involved and it was called the Briggs Initiative. It was a state senator, John Briggs. And it was going to pass until Reagan came out against it on very kind of libertarian, conservative grounds. He said this is a violation of individual rights. It's a violation of privacy. It's also going to just rain havoc in the public school system. You're going to have all these kids, you know, making up accusations, accusing their teachers of being gay because they're angry about, you know, bad grades. It'll be chaos. It'll, you know, the lawyers, the lawyers will make up, you know, like

what you would expect from a kind of libertarian, small government guy. And his intervention defeated that measure. You know, I found the quote that I was referring to. It said, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons? So in other words, he's saying that morality, that getting AIDS is due to immoral behavior. Well, you could make, I mean, the charitable,

I'll bet the gnome case would maybe be. I know what you're know what you're gonna say well you know maybe don't be so promiscuous or have safe sex has practiced safe sexual practices perhaps because because i mean at the same time i remember having lived with that that we were we were told over and over that this was not a gay thing that straight people could get it and i I can remember only the National Review, I remember, had an article which said, this is ridiculous. It's almost 100 percent in the gay community and heroin. And I would show it to people and they'd be like, this is some anti-gay nonsense. So I would in that context, I don't know what Reagan meant by that. I would just like to go on record since I'm sitting here and say that I think Reagan was fully aware of how insidious his position was. But I feel like you're not burdened

by any actual knowledge. Well, as I've said before, that, you know, has not hindered me in the past. Look, I'm charitable with most these politicians and most people because there's few people who are few villains, especially partisan villains who are actually as personally horrible as their detractors make them out to be. And, you know, I think that there's a lot of evidence that Reagan was a good man, also a good man of his time and also a politician and politicians make compromises. But the fact that he came out against this initiative. OK, that's one thing, though, you would think that would get him because that took some. OK, listen, courage in some way. You

would he didn't you would think that would get him a little context like, you know. OK, first of all, would that be what a guy who hated gays would have done. I don't know what his agenda is with that. And I'm not so quick to give him a skeptical. I am skeptical. And I do like that. Jamie probably doesn't know what he's talking about. No, no, no, that's not true. And I like your turn to phrase burdens by knowledge. I think that's cute. But also, if you're familiar with any of Larry Kramer's work, which I am, well, you should be before you make snarky comments. I think that Reagan, the onus really is on him and you shouldn't be so charitable. Fair enough. I don't I'm not burdened by knowledge either. Jamie, you know, you know, I love having you on the show. I'm always happy to see you in person, too. And yes, we want you in person. Thank you for your comedian

recommendations as well. That work also worked out very, very well. All right. So that's it. We got to go. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.

Buy the book, buy the book. Secret city available on everywhere. Good night, everybody. Bye-bye. Ciao.