Secret City, an Epic Narrative History of the Closet in the Capital – The New York Times

Kennedys and Reagans first ladies were both tightly encircled by gay courtiers, though loyalty in both directions could easily waver. Kirchick writes of Nancy Reagan: Her own persona is inescapably, irrepressibly gay, embodied by the retinue that designed, dressed, escorted, entertained, flattered, housed, humored, pampered, styled and titillated her.

The grimness of AIDS, though, was simply incompatible with the administrations message that it was morning again in America. One of the starker documents in Secret City is a draft of the presidents statement when his prominent friend Rock Hudson died of the disease, the word profoundly scribbled out before saddened, along with the line we will miss him greatly. Kirchick also reproduces in full a long, poignant letter from Bob Waldron, loyal aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, to the friend who betrayed his confidences about his sexuality and ruined his career.

Secret City is a luxurious, slow-rolling Cadillac of a book, not to be mastered in one sitting. It would be best read at the violet hour with a snifter of brandy in a wood-paneled library, one of those with a rolling ladder to bring down some of the faded midcentury best-sellers resurfaced in these pages, like Vidals The City and the Pillar the narrative perks up considerably whenever this contentious, urbane writer arrives on the premises Washington Confidential, by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer (1951), with its fabled Garden of Pansies; and Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury (1959), which won a Pulitzer and was made into a movie by Otto Preminger.

Its also a Baedeker of important places (map included): the rollicking Chicken Hut bar where Teboe met his murderers; the Fruit Loop of theDupont Circle pickup scene that developed in the 1960s; the Cinema Follies, the pornographic theater where nine men died in a 1977 fire; the gay corner of the Congressional Cemetery; and, more hopefully, the Lambda Rising bookstore.

This is overwhelmingly a gallery of the white male gaytriarchy, with lesbians and people of color mostly on the sidelines. And Kirchick seems to run out of gas toward the end, as the gay situation improves. Though he addressed the defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act in a triumphalist essay for The Atlantic in 2019 that drew ire from some on the left, theres only the briefest mention of it here; nothing about the presidential candidacy and subsequent cabinet appointment of Pete Buttigieg; little about the rise of the L.G.B.T.Q. rainbow. But as an epic of a dark age, complex and shaded, Secret City is rewarding in the extreme.

Read more from the original source:

Secret City, an Epic Narrative History of the Closet in the Capital - The New York Times