book review secret city

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Secret City,’ an Epic Narrative History of the Closet in the Capital

James Kirchick’s new book tallies the cost of homophobia on lives and careers in Washington, D.C., from the days of F.D.R. to the Clinton presidency.

• Share full article

By Alexandra Jacobs

SECRET CITY The Hidden History of Gay Washington By James Kirchick 826 pages. Henry Holt. $38.

“Secret City,” by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights. But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means?

John C. Montgomery, a Princeton graduate and the Finnish desk chief at the State Department: hanged in the nude by his bathrobe belt from a third-floor banister. Roger D. “Denny” Hansen , champion swimmer at Yale, Rhodes scholar, National Security Council appointee and professor: asphyxiated in a friend’s garage. Lester C. Hunt, Army Reserve major and a governor of Wyoming turned senator: shot in the head while on a leather swivel chair in his office. Louis J. Teboe, affable accounting clerk at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs: stabbed in an alleyway with a stiletto knife. And that’s just by Page 226 of a book that stretches to over 800. We’ve yet to reach the tuxedoed lobbyist overdosing at the Ritz to the tune of “A Little Night Music.”

Excepting Teboe, who was lured and attacked by malevolent teenagers intending to rob him, the above cases were all suicides. But Kirchick reveals copious blood on the hands of the powerful, who for decades regarded alternative desires or any association with them as a “contagious sexual aberrancy,” and cause for immediate banishment from mainstream society — a Lavender Menace inextricably linked with the Red one. (Hunt’s fatal shame proved the power of association: His son, Buddy, had been charged once with solicitation at age 25.)

And yet the very skills gay people had to develop to survive — studiousness, compartmentalization, discretion, itinerancy — made them uniquely skilled, Kirchick points out, to sensitive tasks like espionage or high-level advising. For a long time, everyone in D.C. seemed to be looking over his shoulder, seeking signals, codes and clues — a “slight mince”; a “jelly hand shake”; a “limp wrist” or just overzealous grooming. These must have been harrowing existences, but their retelling makes for very good and suspenseful, if occasionally ponderous, reading.

Sifting methodically through F.B.I. files, correspondence, interview transcripts and press clippings — you can almost hear the old microfiche sheets ticking by — Kirchick holds the most dedicated persecutors, some of whom were themselves in the closet, to scathing account.

“Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” he writes. “A Communist could break with the party. A homosexual was forever tainted.” Later, as tolerance grew (thanks in part to the efforts of the Mattachine Society, the gay rights organization whose evolution is traced here), some confirmed bachelors took the important seat once occupied by Perle Mesta, the city’s famed “hostess with the mostess.” But even then their acceptance was often transactional, contingent and fleeting; their complete potential unrealized. Kirchick rightly mourns “the possibilities thwarted.”

“Secret City” is organized by presidencies, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s to Bill Clinton’s. There’s vital material in each section, and even the trivia seems resonant. How many journalists know, for example, that the phrase “no comment” was credited by Winston Churchill to Sumner Welles, F.D.R.’s onetime under secretary of state, who was drummed out of public service for trying to buy oral sex from two Pullman porters? (A lesser sin: He received a gift of delphinium seeds in the diplomatic pouch, a container for official business papers whose very name evokes the romance of an analog era.) Who remembers that long before Will Smith slapped his way to Oscar headlines, Sen. Joe McCarthy did the same to the political gossip columnist Drew Pearson in the coat room after dinner at a ladies’ club?

Kirchick’s chapters on the Kennedy and Reagan years are disproportionately dynamic. These were charismatic, popular leaders in prosperous times, whose ties to Hollywood made them both objects of glamour and subject to innuendo. (“Look at that ass,” Tennessee Williams commented to Gore Vidal as Kennedy, who himself led a double life of rampant infidelity, sauntered past during a Palm Beach visit. “You can’t cruise our next president,” Vidal chided jokingly, as he relates in his memoir, “Palimpsest.”)

Kennedy’s and Reagan’s 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 administration’s message that it was morning again in America. One of the starker documents in “Secret City” is a draft of the president’s 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 Vidal’s “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.

It’s also a Baedeker of important places (map included): the rollicking Chicken Hut bar where Teboe met his murderers; the “Fruit Loop” of the Dupont 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, there’s 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.

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

A history of gay Washington that lets homophobia steal the spotlight

For those who study Washington’s past, “secret city” is a familiar phrase. In 1932, for instance, W.E.B. Du Bois explained that outsiders often knew nothing of the District’s large Black population, “ a Secret City, of which the capital itself is acutely conscious .” Three decades later, historian Constance McLaughlin Green misapplied Du Bois’s metaphor, arguing in “ The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital ” that Black Washington had long been “ a secret city all but unknown ” to D.C.’s White population. With his new book, “ Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington ,” James Kirchick tries to retrofit the trope to a very specific subset of the District’s famously diverse LGBTQ community, ultimately covering a bewildering amount of old ground without offering the reader much that can be called new.

Kirchick’s “Secret City” runs chronologically, spanning from approximately 1940 to 1999; more specifically, the narrative is organized by presidential administrations, with each of the 11 sections bearing the name of a corresponding White House occupant, from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Apart from notable appearances by a handful of otherwise underexplored gay and lesbian politicos — scrappy CIA officer Carmel Offie, Office of Strategic Services trailblazer Cora Du Bois and Kennedy confidant Lem Billings, among others — “Secret City” largely focuses on the pain experienced by, and at the hands of, familiar gay men like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (who Kirchick curiously avoids identifying as homosexual), McCarthyite and Trump mentor Roy Cohn, and infamous New Right lobbyist Terry Dolan. Most gay voices, however, are drowned out by, even treated as less credible than, those of homophobic straight people: Gossip columnists, yellow journalists, embattled presidents, conniving senators, obsequious FBI agents and a rotating cast of aides all are relied upon as primary sources in a history that is not primarily theirs to tell. Kirchick promises to show us “the wide-ranging influence of homosexuality on the nation’s capital, on the people who dwelled within it, and on the weighty matters of state they conducted.” But “Secret City” might more accurately be described as a surface-level glimpse at the prominence of homophobia in the federal government and the D.C. press corps, how such homophobia has long manifested as rumor and innuendo (pages and pages of which are here reproduced), the influence of such homophobia on an enormous cast of almost exclusively White gay men, and how more than a few of those men played not-insignificant roles in the GOP’s long march to the far right.

These are not unimportant topics. Gay history, after all, is older and bigger than one riot, one protest or one ideology, and we should always welcome stories that unsettle popular narratives. At the same time, however, those seeking to unsettle such narratives should strive for the transparency and accountability so often lacking in older histories. And it’s here where “Secret City” falters. In 43 chapters and more than 650 pages of text, Kirchick rarely ventures beyond the federal government’s highest echelons, all but ignoring the fact that both the government and the District of Columbia are much bigger than whichever administration happens to be in town. Following the example of many of those featured in its pages, “Secret City” falls back on policies of the past to justify the exclusion of those harmed by such policies. That is, because “weighty matters of state” have historically been conducted in rooms filled almost entirely by White men, Kirchick seems content not to ask questions about those waiting outside.

Unlike earlier “secret cities,” Kirchick’s says next to nothing about Black Washington. (Two Black people, Odessa Madre and Bayard Rustin, are given a combined total of 17 pages.) And yet, despite the lack of attention, the author doesn’t hesitate to make sweeping assertions. At one point, for example, Kirchick attributes a “lack of Black participation” in an early gay rights organization, at least in part, “to the fact that Washington’s Black residents were mostly locals … and associating with a gay organization was significantly harder while living in the city where one’s family resided.” This claim, however, flies in the face of even the quickest glance at Black gay life, to say nothing of the many D.C.-specific histories that demonstrate how queerness rarely disrupted Black Washington’s powerful family ties. Similarly, while “Secret City” has little to say about lesbians, the author attempts to explain the silence away with questionable, and ultimately unsustainable, declarations of how “persecution generally targeted male homosexuals more severely than female ones, a consequence, in part, of patriarchal attitudes privileging men over women.” Because society places less value on women, the argument goes, it is therefore more difficult to be a man.

Many of the book’s weaknesses are attributable to Kirchick’s apparent aversion to common-sense conventions of language. Readers might struggle to stay invested in a narrative weighted down by laborious vocabulary such as “hirsute” (hairy), “farrago” (hodgepodge) and “bromidic” (trite). Likewise, many undoubtedly will wonder how and why the author never uses the word “transgender” yet still manages to include the most vile of racial slurs multiple times, albeit under cover of quotation marks. (Elsewhere, the quotation marks and any corresponding citations disappear, giving the impression that Kirchick himself is describing disabled Founding Father Gouverneur Morris as “peg-legged,” a (fictional) character as “Negro-loving” or Black activists as “uppity.”) There are other mystifying descriptions, like that of Whitaker Chambers, who, Kirchick writes, “was (at least for a time) a homosexual.” This, of course, is not how homosexuality works. Equally troubling is the book’s uneven approach to the complicated politics of “the closet,” lurching without warning from requisite portrayals of survival-by-secrecy to describing, in language both hackneyed and harmful, the nine gay victims of D.C.’s Cinema Follies fire as having been “trapped inside their self-imposed chambers of deceit.”

For many of us who study the queer past, there’s an always-present need to articulate the joys found amid the difficult realities of those who came before, those who made life possible. But there’s no reality in conflating homophobia with homosexuality, there’s no joy in confusing the difficult with the tragic, the ignored with the secret. In a 1967 review of Constance Green’s “The Secret City,” Professor George R. Woolfolk drew a conclusion that applies with equal force to Kirchick’s book. Green’s work, Woolfolk wrote, “called for as much creative sociology as it did definitive history. Unfortunately it is short on both.”

Matthew L. Riemer is a co-author of “ We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation ” and a co-creator of the online resource @lgbt_history.

Secret City

The Hidden History of Gay Washington

By James Kirchick

Henry Holt. 826 pp. $38

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Secret City: behind the untold gay history of DC politics

James Kirchick’s decade-in-the-making new book examines the queer people who have been demonised or erased in the making of America

L GBTQ+ people have always existed, although they have largely been erased from historical narratives and even forced to participate in their own erasure. This is true of American politics, where the 20th century saw numerous gay and lesbian individuals participating at the highest levels of power, yet almost wholly effaced from the telling of our nation’s history. In the new book Secret City, historian James Kirchick attempts to inscribe into the historical record the homosexual men and women who have served and contributed to their country in Washington DC , throughout the 20th century.

“I want to intertwine these two threads – the mainstream thread of history that we all read about, and this gay history that’s been sidelined and sequestered,” he said. “I wanted to bring them together to show they’re connected stories, that they interact and complement each other. It’s not overturning this established narrative, it’s adding to it and complicating it.”

Kirchick first became intrigued by the idea of a gay history of American power politics in 2007, when he moved to DC and realized that it was suffused with a vivid gay cultural life and history. In fact, census data shows that DC has the highest proportion of gay people anywhere in the US. As he began working on the massive project, Kirchick started to believe that, as a gay man, he was uniquely equipped to write Secret City. “It needed a gay person to do this,” he said. “Even liberal straight historians would feel uncomfortable about writing this kind of a book. It’s important that we have these stories. My being gay informs my ability to say that.”

Starting with the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and continuing up through Bill Clinton’s presidency, Kirchick has spent a decade uncovering long-hidden stories that have been lost from history. At 800 pages, including well over 100 just for notes and sources, the scope of Secret City feels momentous. Although Kirchick found that writing the book could be overwhelming as he worked to piece together all of the information he discovered, and while at times he became angry at the historical wrongs he found, his dominant emotion while working on the project was gratitude. “I feel enormous gratitude for the people who came before. For the people who went through this suffering so I wouldn’t have to.”

Kirchick astutely points out that the fear of homosexuality has been a driver of presidential politics, functioning similarly to other historically recognized forms of prejudice like antisemitism and purges of so-called communists. This prejudice got kickstarted with the revelations of the Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953, when people suddenly realized that the gay population was far larger than anyone had guessed. Even more frightening, they could be anyone. This fear of “the gay next door” fueled stereotypes of gays being disloyal to the United States, as well as the belief that they were inherently conspiratorial – “if you have three homosexuals in the room, it’s automatically a conspiracy,” said Kirchick.

A good example of this point is the bizarre story of Bob Livingston. Best-known for being forced to resign amid a sex scandal while on the brink of succeeding Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Livingston in 1980 became convinced that the gay men legitimately working for Ronald Reagan were in fact a sinister cabal secretly controlling him. Kirchick entwines this lurid tale, which fueled an effort to scuttle Reagan’s 1980 presidential nomination, with a number of gay conspiracy theories attached to the Reagan administration (including one that Reagan himself had sex with another man). Although these allegations are absurd excess based on little more than rumor, Kirchick argues that they had the potential to have turned Jimmy Carter’s landslide loss in the 1980 election to a win.

Regardless of all the intrigue, Kirchick also reports that Reagan’s administration proved to be “the gayest of any presidential administration yet”, demonstrating two points central to Secret City: the growing acceptance of gays throughout the 20th century and their great value in government, even a macho, hard-right one like Reagan’s. It is an irony common to stories of LGBTQ+ resilience that the very things that oppressed gay and lesbian individuals – such as the need to lead a double-life, or the isolation that came from not being permitted to marry – were made advantageous both to the pursuit of their liberation and their political careers. “In the period documented in this book,” Kirchick said, “closets were good at producing gay people with skills that made them preternaturally equipped to function in Washington – they were good at keeping secrets, had no family life to distract them, and they were more loyal to people in power. This is the perverse set of skills that the closet could breed.”

Throughout Secret City, Kirchick does a masterful job of conveying the flavor of homophobia in each historical era, while using impeccable research to vividly characterize the dozens of various individuals at play in these stories. This is a book not just about how political power was brought to bear on the lives of gay men and women; even more, it conveys the texture of an ever-evolving world that constantly kept gay people in check. It shows how social forces shaped gay lives through constant implicit and explicit threats, the very language that homosexuals had to describe their identity and experience, and stern control over the ways they could access the sexual practices that were made so central to their identity as human beings.

Because of this rich attention to detail, Secret City also offers a vivid chronicle of the waves of liberation and backlash that characterized the growing acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights in the 20th century. As Kirchick shows, the second world war became a national coming out of sorts, with gay people meeting in the armed forces in unprecedented numbers. This was followed by a wave of repression in the 1950s, then liberation in the sex-positive ’60s, followed by more repression in the eras of Nixon and Reagan, followed by more freedom during the Bill Clinton presidency. Across the sweep of Secret City, we see homosexuality transform from an absolute career-ender to something politicians can be carefully open about.

These waves continue today in Republican efforts to slander LGBTQ+ people as “groomers” and erase the gains trans people have made in access to medical care and social inclusion. Although Kirchick is well aware of the ugly politics of the present, as well as the fragility of the gains LGBTQ+ people have made in society, he ends Secret City on a note of triumph, celebrating the transformative acceptance of gay people as a “massive accomplishment of the liberal society”, and a quintessentially American success story. “I can point to a Gallup poll that self-reported LGBT people have doubled,” Kirchick said. “And obviously there’s been this explosion in visibility. I can’t predict the future, you can never say never. But in my limited experience I’m fairly sure that there’s never been a better time to be gay in this country.”

Secret City is out now

• Washington DC
• LGBTQ+ rights
• Politics books

Most viewed

Find anything you save across the site in your account

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

What Made Washington, D.C., the “Gayest and Most Antigay City in America”

By Michael Waters

In March, 1950, Roy Blick, a lieutenant of the Washington, D.C., police force and the director of its Morals Division, appeared before a two-person subcommittee for what was then considered one of the most secretive testimonies in Senate history. Only two transcripts of Blick’s testimony were to be printed, and both would be sealed in a vault. Blick arrived to share intelligence about a new threat, one that, he suggested, could destabilize American national security from within: the existence of gay staffers at the highest levels of government.

Blick began by explaining that “a well-known espionage tactic” entailed luring female government staffers “into the communist underground by involving them in lesbian practices.” Then, he said, foreign governments—by which he meant, principally, the Soviet Union—filmed the women engaged in sexual acts and used the tapes to blackmail them into becoming spies. Blick said that he had identified forty to fifty female government employees who had participated in these “sex orgies,” and that many more were likely to surface: five thousand homosexuals lived in D.C., Blick said, including nearly four thousand who worked for the federal government. They were all at risk of Soviet blackmail and infiltration. To protect the government, Blick had been compiling a list of names of homosexuals in the Washington, D.C., area. Blick kept the list locked in a metal safe at police headquarters.

Blick’s gay list quickly took on mythic status, a now largely forgotten corollary to Joseph McCarthy ’s famous “list of names” of Communists in the State Department. In the following years, it helped fuel a backlash to queer people in government, as investigators expelled queer workers—many of whom had experienced tacit tolerance for decades—in droves.

Blick’s list also gave rise to a new motif in U.S. politics, one that subsequently reëmerged, cicada-like, every four to eight years: the fear that a coterie of queer people had seized too much power in the White House. In 1960, the U.S. Attorney General, William Rogers, said that “the Soviets seem to have a list of homosexuals” who worked in the upper echelons of federal bureaucracy. In 1969, the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, following a baseless tip from a begrudged strategist, began investigating Richard Nixon for allowing a “ring of homosexualists” to operate at the “the highest levels of the White House.” In 1976, a group of high-profile G.O.P. congresspeople, eager to stop Ronald Reagan from winning the Republican Presidential nomination, gathered to discuss whether a “homosexual ring” controlled the candidate.

In “ Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington ” (Henry Holt & Co.), the journalist James Kirchick chronicles these and other panics over gay influence, sometimes with a knowing wink. (Relaying the fear expressed by the Republican senator Bob Livingston in 1980 that a “cabal of right-wing gay hitmen” was on its way to assassinate him, for instance, Kirchick notes that this “may seem far-fetched” to the contemporary reader.) “Secret City,” which clocks in at more than six hundred and fifty pages, has an encyclopedic quality, but focusses on a specific slice of U.S. history, from the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt to that of William Jefferson Clinton. (The book is arranged, chronologically, according to Presidential Administrations.) During these years, Kirchick writes, Washington, D.C., was “simultaneously the gayest and most antigay city in America,” a place in which queer people were omnipresent—but so, too, was the risk of discovery.

If you went looking for the prototypical queer staffer among the book’s cast of characters—Kirchick helpfully lists the dramatis personae at the front of the book—you might settle on Carmel Offie, who, despite a modest background, got a job with the Ambassador to Honduras when he was just twenty-two, in the early nineteen-thirties. As he rose through the ranks, brushing shoulders with Roosevelt and a young John F. Kennedy, his homosexuality became an open secret. A colleague of Offie’s once called him “as homosexual as you can get,” and Kirchick recounts rumors that Offie, who reportedly described his bedroom as “the playing fields of Eton,” had a romantic relationship with William Bullitt, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union, for whom he eventually went to work. Among the tasks he performed for Bullitt, Kirchick says, was acquiring “specialty perfumes and foie gras to send via diplomatic pouch” to “FDR’s private secretary, with whom Bullitt had initiated a romance years earlier.” The legendary Cold War diplomat George Kennan described Offie as “a renaissance type” with “endless joie de vivre .” As Kirchick explains, the U.S. Foreign Service, dating back to the First World War, had especially large numbers of queer people because of the freedoms offered by the diplomatic life style.

Kirchick is, in some respects, less interested in examining how the spectre of queerness haunted each Presidential Administration than he is in considering the extent to which queer cabals did, to a modest degree, exist. Though not quite to the level of a “homosexual ring,” a notable contingent of high-level gay friends and staffers worked for Reagan, for instance, and queer people made up a significant share of other Administrations throughout the middle and latter parts of the twentieth century. Kennedy’s best friend, Lem Billings, whom he met in prep school, was gay, and Kennedy accepted many queer people into his social circle. Roosevelt vociferously defended his friend and the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, following revelations that Welles was a homosexual, asking for Welles’s resignation only under mounting pressure from his Republican rivals. Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted the resignation of his right-hand man, Arthur Vandenberg, Jr., after Hoover told him of rumors about Vandenberg’s sexuality; Eisenhower wrote Vandenberg to say that he felt “in some respects guilty” about what had happened.

As those latter two cases suggest, tacit tolerance went only so far. During most of the period that Kirchick examines, staffers such as Offie could serve in the upper echelons of power so long as they didn’t make their sexual identities a matter of public discussion, and so long as others didn’t do that for them. For years, the press went along with this discretion, but that mutually assured silence began to unravel during Roosevelt’s third term, when a New York Post article that accused the Massachusetts senator David Walsh of visiting a “house of degradation”—the Post never used the word “homosexual”—inaugurated outing as a political weapon. The need to shield those identities from attention meant that such staffers were indeed susceptible to pressure, if not from foreign agents, usually, then from canny domestic operators. The quiet campaign against Welles was waged in part by Bullitt, evidently envious of Welles’s proximity to Roosevelt. Bullitt enlisted the help of Offie.

“If conspiring in the destruction of a fellow homosexual offended Offie’s values, there was little he could do, short of quitting, to express it,” Kirchick writes. Offie went along. Less than a month after Welles resigned, in September, 1943, Offie was arrested for soliciting a man for sex. When his bosses at the State Department found out, they defended him—the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, wrote a letter, calling Offie “a highly effective and loyal servant of the United States,” and claimed, dubiously, that Offie had been working on “official business” during his arrest. Offie never faced trial, and he continued to work in the federal government throughout the forties, taking a job in the covert-operations wing of the C.I.A. Then, in April, 1950, a month after Blick testified before Congress, McCarthy criticized the C.I.A. for employing “a homosexual” who “spent his time hanging around the men’s room,” describing Offie in all but name. Offie resigned less than half an hour after McCarthy was done speaking.

Kirchick positions “Secret City” as a lightly revisionist work, noting that “most narratives of the movement for gay equality” emphasize the Stonewall uprising, the assassination of Harvey Milk , and the campaign against the antigay activist Anita Bryant before insisting that “the spark for the revolution was lit, and its flame was tended, in Washington, DC.” The key figure in this argument is Frank Kameny , an astronomer who was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service for homosexuality and responded by filing the first known civil-rights lawsuit contesting discrimination according to sexual orientation. Kameny subsequently built up the city’s first sustained gay organization and is rightly regarded as a pioneer for equal rights.

But the truth most clearly revealed by Kirchick’s focus on Washington is one that queer historians have emphasized for years: that change was prompted not by those in the halls of power but by activists working well outside of them. Kameny, after all, did not begin his fight until he’d been pushed out of government employment. And almost no one in “Secret City” who had a job in a Presidential Administration pushed for equal rights, quietly or otherwise, while still employed—even after activists had succeeded in making gay rights a national story. Perhaps the lone exception is Midge Costanza, who used her position as a public liaison for Jimmy Carter to broker a White House meeting with gay activists, Kameny among them. After she did so, others in the Administration called her too far left, and one aide told Newsweek , “Everyone wishes she would disappear.” A little more than a year and a half into the job, Costanza resigned.

The more typical story in “Secret City” is of the quietly queer politico who looks the other way when it comes to policies that devastated fellow queer people. These figures engender varying degrees of sympathy when they navigate the shadows and silences of the nineteen-forties and fifties, the era of Senator Walsh’s outing and Blick’s gay list. As the twentieth century progresses, such betrayals grow more damning. Kirchick devotes a significant portion of his chapters on the Reagan years to Terry Dolan, the co-founder of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which spent two million dollars assuring Reagan’s election in 1980. Dolan once told the gay activist Larry Kramer , “You have more to gain by letting me fight for you from the inside.” Dolan’s career suggests the opposite was true. The high point of his inside fighting seems to have arrived in 1982, when Dolan wrote to the Administration to criticize the Family Protection Act, which banned any organization that cast homosexuality as an “acceptable life style” from receiving federal funding, and a month later, when he apologized for using antigay language in his N.C.P.A.C. pamphlets. But, when his conservative members pushed back, Dolan made his stance clear: “I do not, nor have I ever, endorsed gay rights.”

A less powerful figure from the period, and one of Kirchick’s most intriguing finds, is John Ford, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. (That position was one of the highest a person could have in the federal government without needing to face an F.B.I. background check, Kirchick points out.) As the AIDS epidemic claimed the lives of the people around Ford—he once lost three friends in one day—he was able to witness up close just how complicit the Reagan Administration had become in its spread, and, in December, 1985, Ford resigned in protest. It’s not apparent that the Administration—which, in the following months, withheld payments to the World Health Organization, even as the epidemic raged on—particularly noticed. Reagan didn’t give his first public speech on AIDS until April, 1987.

By then, AIDS had claimed the life of Dolan, at the age of thirty-six. A few months after his death, the Washington Post published a story about Dolan titled “The Cautious Closet of the Gay Conservative.” Dolan’s brother Tony, an influential Reagan speechwriter, was infuriated and wrote in the Washington Times that the Post was “promoting an anti-conservative, pro-gay agenda.” At more or less this very moment, the radical activist group ACT UP was forming in New York. Later that year, ACT UP took over the F.D.A.’s headquarters, in Rockville, Maryland, to protest the Reagan Administration’s failure to make experimental drugs more widely available, the beginning of a long string of protests that the group organized to force AIDS onto the federal agenda.

So many of those whom Kirchick chronicles seem more compromised by their proximity to power than emboldened by it. That is also a part of the story of gay life in the United States, and Kirchick tells it well. Still, reading “Secret City,” one sometimes feels, perhaps inevitably, that queer history is elsewhere.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the state that Senator David Walsh represented.

New Yorker Favorites

Why facts don’t change our minds .

How an Ivy League school turned against a student .

What was it about Frank Sinatra that no one else could touch ? 

The secret formula for resilience .

A young Kennedy, in Kushnerland, turned whistle-blower .

The biggest potential water disaster in the United States.

Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri: “ Gogol .”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Jane Mayer

By Adam Gopnik

By David D. Kirkpatrick

By Margaret Talbot

Secret City

The Hidden History of Gay Washington

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 Named one of Vanity Fair’s  Best Books of 2022

Washington, 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.

Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory.

Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.

• Format: Hardback
• Publication date: 31 May 2022
• ISBN: 9781627792325
• Imprint: Henry Holt and Co.
• Dimensions: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Order now in print and ebook

Praise for secret city.

“Secret City by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights…A luxurious, slow-rolling Cadillac of a book, not to be mastered in one sitting. As an epic of a dark age, complex and shaded, Secret City is rewarding in the extreme.”

Scrupulously researched and novelistic in style, Secret City is an extraordinary achievement. Shedding new light on figures we thought we knew, James Kirchick introduces us to compelling individuals we will never forget. 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 Stephanopoulos

A remarkable, hugely impressive accomplishment — exhaustively researched, skillfully told, erudite, heartfelt — that speaks not only to the impact of double lives on our nation’s life but also to the individual toll of veiling your soul. It makes me sad. But more than that, it makes me grateful, for all that has changed since those days of lies and whispers.

Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer, The New York Times

In Secret City , James Kirchick tells a Washington D.C. Cold War story that few have heard: how the political obsession with secrecy, together with the fear of communist influence, distorted perceptions not only of gay people, but of reality itself. Weaving together political, social, and cultural history, Secret City offers an unexpected corrective to the historical record.

Anne Applebaum

Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain

Now and then a new book about American politics comes along for which ‘revelation’ seems too tame a word, so profoundly does it alter our understanding of almost everything we thought we knew. James Kirchick’s remarkable history of the “secret” life of Washington is just such a book–a triumph of investigation and story-telling.

Sam Tanenhaus

author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography and former editor of The New York Times Book Review

Kirchick takes us from the FDR administration to Bill Clinton with a thoroughness and eye for detail that astonish. Lovers of Washington lore will enjoy the depiction of gay life in the nation’s capital when it was entirely underground, and lovers of justice will take pleasure in the fact that some of the most repulsive characters in modern political history who ruined so many lives and careers are brought to justice in the only way they can be now: the historical record.

Andrew Holleran

author of Dancer from the Dance

Kirchick has written a mesmerizing and moving account of gay proximity to power, and the shocking resistance to it, in America’s capital city long before the modern gay-rights movement began. Thanks to Kirchick, this important history will be overlooked no more.

Dale Carpenter

author of Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas

James Kirchick

James Kirchick is a writer at large for Air Mail  and author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age . He has reported from over 40 countries and his writing has appeared in many publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal , and the Atlantic .

Sign up for articles by email

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

March 28, 2024

• On the  dinner party that launched the Harlem Renaissance
•   In defense of imagination
• Esmat Elhalaby explores the intellectual history of genocide in Gaza

‘Secret City,’ an epic narrative history of the…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)

e-Pilot Evening Edition

• Things to do

Things To Do Entertainment

‘secret city,’ an epic narrative history of the closet in the capital.

Theater | Movie based on Pharrell Williams’ Virginia Beach childhood will be filmed in Richmond, reports say

Recipe: Here’s why you should serve a turkey dinner in the spring

City Politics | Owners of Dollywood, Ripley’s are interested in Virginia Aquarium, but foundation not on board

Recipe: Chorizo and potato empanadas make a handheld spring meal

Trending nationally.

• ‘This is heinous, heinous conduct’: Feds say Chicago-area dog show judge deleted child porn evidence in shower during FBI raid
• OC bookie at center of gambling scandal thought link to Ohtani would help business
• How long will it take to rebuild Baltimore's Key Bridge following its collapse?
• Duluth takes billionaire Kathy Cargill’s profane Cheerios remark, and runs with it
• Political leaders mourn Connecticut’s Joseph Lieberman

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

SECRET CITY

The hidden history of gay washington.

by James Kirchick ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2022

Not without flaws but an important addition to American history nonetheless.

A comprehensive history of key political power struggles and controversies of the past century, focused on those Americans “whose obscurity was the consequence of their being forced to hide.”

In this absorbing and well-documented book, Kirchick, author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age , engagingly draws attention to a variety of gay histories that have been largely lost to mainstream history. At the same time, he shows how Americans’ deep-seated fear of homosexuality was often amplified by political leaders. “Nothing posed a more potent threat to a political career, or exerted a more fearsome grip on the nation’s collective psyche, than the love expressed between people of the same sex,” writes the author. “While America fought fascism, political and cultural leaders associated [homosexuality] with the nation’s Nazi enemies. During the Cold War, voices from across the political spectrum linked it with communism.” Kirchick diligently tracks each presidential administration from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton. The author discusses the sexual scandal that would force Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state, out of office; the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic during the Reagan and Bush administrations; and the policies of the Clinton administration, which were more open-minded despite the ill-advised “don’t-ask, don’t-tell” policy. Throughout, Kirchick sheds light on the stories of several individuals whose efforts bravely contributed to gradual acceptance and an expansion of opportunities for gay Americans, including civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin and John Ford, Reagan’s deputy assistant agriculture secretary. While ambitious and convincing, the narrative goes slack in certain areas; some readers may get the sense that the book would have been better presented as a multivolume history, affording Kirchick the opportunity to examine specific elements without losing momentum. In particular, the early chapters—about how the fear of homosexuality became entangled with the fear of communist influence—are worth further study. Though overlong, the book offers countless illuminating stories that have been grossly underserved in past political histories. The author also includes a “historical map of gay Washington” and a cast of characters.

Pub Date: May 31, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-62779-232-5

Page Count: 816

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | LGBTQ

Share your opinion of this book

More by James Kirchick

BOOK REVIEW

by James Kirchick

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

More by David Grann

by David Grann

More About This Book

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Shopping Cart

Advanced Search

• Browse Our Shelves
• Best Sellers
• Digital Audiobooks
• Featured Titles
• New This Week
• Staff Recommended
• Suggestions for Kids
• Fiction Suggestions
• Nonfiction Suggestions
• Reading Lists
• Upcoming Events
• Ticketed Events
• Science Book Talks
• Past Events
• Video Archive
• Online Gift Codes
• University Clothing
• Goods & Gifts from Harvard Book Store
• Hours & Directions
• Newsletter Archive
• Frequent Buyer Program
• Signed First Edition Club
• Signed New Voices in Fiction Club
• Harvard Square Book Circle
• Off-Site Book Sales
• Corporate & Special Sales
• Print on Demand

• All Our Shelves
• Academic New Arrivals
• New Hardcover - Biography
• New Hardcover - Fiction
• New Hardcover - Nonfiction
• New Titles - Paperback
• African American Studies
• Anthologies
• Anthropology / Archaeology
• Architecture
• Asia & The Pacific
• Astronomy / Geology
• Boston / Cambridge / New England
• Business & Management
• Career Guides
• Child Care / Childbirth / Adoption
• Children's Board Books
• Children's Picture Books
• Children's Activity Books
• Children's Beginning Readers
• Children's Middle Grade
• Children's Gift Books
• Children's Nonfiction
• Children's/Teen Graphic Novels
• Teen Nonfiction
• Young Adult
• Classical Studies
• Cognitive Science / Linguistics
• College Guides
• Cultural & Critical Theory
• Education - Higher Ed
• Environment / Sustainablity
• European History
• Exam Preps / Outlines
• Games & Hobbies
• Gender Studies / Gay & Lesbian
• Gift / Seasonal Books
• Globalization
• Graphic Novels
• Hardcover Classics
• Health / Fitness / Med Ref
• Islamic Studies
• Large Print
• Latin America / Caribbean
• Law & Legal Issues
• Literary Crit & Biography
• Local Economy
• Mathematics
• Media Studies
• Middle East
• Myths / Tales / Legends
• Native American
• Paperback Favorites
• Performing Arts / Acting
• Personal Finance
• Personal Growth
• Photography
• Physics / Chemistry
• Poetry Criticism
• Ref / English Lang Dict & Thes
• Ref / Foreign Lang Dict / Phrase
• Reference - General
• Religion - Christianity
• Religion - Comparative
• Religion - Eastern
• Romance & Erotica
• Science Fiction
• Short Introductions
• Technology, Culture & Media
• Theology / Religious Studies
• Travel Atlases & Maps
• Travel Lit / Adventure
• Urban Studies
• Wines And Spirits
• Women's Studies
• World History
• Writing Style And Publishing

Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

"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 Stephanopoulos

Washington, 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. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country,  Secret City  is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory. Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail,  Secret City  will forever transform our understanding of American history.

There are no customer reviews for this item yet.

Classic Totes

Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more!

Shipping & Pickup

We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail!

Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club!

Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly.

Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore

© 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved

Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138

Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected]

View our current hours »

Join our bookselling team »

We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily.

Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm

Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual.

Map Find Harvard Book Store »

Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy »

Harvard University harvard.edu »

• Clubs & Services

Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

James kirchick. holt, $29.99 (816p) isbn 978-1-62779-232-5.

Reviewed on: 02/11/2022

Genre: Nonfiction

Other - 978-1-62779-233-2

Paperback - 864 pages - 978-1-250-87146-6

• Apple Books
• Barnes & Noble

Featured Nonfiction Reviews

Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington › Customer reviews

Customer reviews.

Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Top positive review

Top critical review

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later., from the united states, there was a problem loading comments right now. please try again later..

• ← Previous page
• Next page →
• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Cast & crew

Someone Like You

Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young archit... Read all Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister. Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister.

• Tyler Russell
• Karen Kingsbury
• Sarah Fisher
• Lynn Collins
• 1 Critic review

• London Quinn …

• Dawson Gage

• Louise Quinn

• Dr. Jenny Allen

• Dr. Jim Allen

• Larry Quinn

• Hannah Smith
• See all cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Robin Lively and Bart Johnson play a married couple in this movie, and they are married in real life.
• How long will Someone Like You be? Powered by Alexa
• April 2, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• Karen Kingsbury Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 58 minutes

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed