About this item
"Not since Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history." -- George StephanopoulosWashington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick's Secret City.For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" held enormous, terrifying power.
About the Author
James Kirchick is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. A widely published journalist, he has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Spectator, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications. His first book, "The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age," was published by Yale University Press in 2017.Kirchick is presently a Nonresident Senior Fellow for the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council. From 2017 to 2021, he was a visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. Prior to Brookings, he was a fellow at the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington, DC, and a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow in Berlin. In 2010, he became writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, where he covered the politics and cultures of the twenty-one countries in the news company's broadcast region. He covered major events including the First Libyan Civil War, a fraudulent presidential election in Belarus, and revolution and ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan.Kirchick began his professional journalism career at The New Republic, where he covered domestic politics, lobbying, intelligence, and American foreign policy. Recognized for his voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, he is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association's Journalist of the Year Award. He is a professional member of the PEN American Center.
