“It was the specter of homosexuality that provoked the first and only suicide by a member of Congress in his Capitol Hill office, caused Lyndon Johnson to fret that his historical lead would evaporate, and seized the paranoid mind of Richard Nixon second only to the plots of his ever-expanding enemies list,” Kirchick writes. Even being associated with a suspected homosexual could cause the country’s most powerful men to quiver. Those stories lurked in the background out of necessity: The cost of coming out as gay - or, more likely, being outed against one’s will - was enormous professionally and socially. “I realized that all these stories I was reading, and these personalities and phenomena, whether it was McCarthyism or the Reagans, FDR or JFK, that there were these gay stories lurking in the background,” Kirchick said. 'Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington' by James Kirchick. “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,' by James Kirchick, is a 654-page tome that took years of research and an exhaustive investigation into presidential archives, historical interviews and once-classified government records.
