Secret City Quotes

“The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he repeatedly instructed his aides. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“loyalty toward one’s allies trumped appeasement of one’s adversaries.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“The problem with witch hunts is that you eventually run out of witches,”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“As Kennedy sauntered in front of them, Williams turned to Vidal and gaped, “Look at that ass.” “You can’t cruise our next president,” Vidal replied with mock severity. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Williams replied. “The American people will never elect those two. They’re far too attractive.” Told by a pair of homosexuals that they had been ogling his posterior, most any heterosexual American male in 1958 would have reacted with repulsion, if not violence. But Kennedy was a man whose best friend had sexually propositioned him in high school and suffered nothing worse than a curt reproach. When Vidal later revealed his exchange with Williams to the future president, Kennedy, clearly flattered, replied, “That’s very exciting.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Secrecy, Kameny understood, reinforces power.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“the three men struck some sort of arrangement,”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“code: “If I do no harm to anyone, if I am no trouble to anyone, I should not be too much troubled myself.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Harry Truman, who lacked a college degree,”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“When Harry Truman, who lacked a college degree, succeeded FDR, Alsop wrote to his cousin Eleanor that the White House had been cheapened to “the lounge of the Lions Club in Independence … where one is conscious chiefly of the odor of ten-cent cigars and the easy laughter evoked by the new smoking-room story.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Cutler’s proposal won the day, which is how a gay man helped codify the most far-reaching and destructive act of federal government discrimination against gay people in American history.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“medieval French secret society of itinerant peasant troubadours—les matassins—who performed choreographed masquerades lampooning their corrupt rulers. The plight of the modern homosexual, Hay believed, was similar: he could advocate for a better society only from behind a veil of anonymity. Along with some veterans of the suggestively named group of gay men that supported Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, “Bachelors for Wallace,” Hay launched the Mattachine Society of Los Angeles.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“epicene”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Did you hear that Ms. Blick?!” the patrons shouted whenever Hattie belted out an especially bawdy line, a reference to Lt. Roy Blick of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Morals division. Soon, this taunt to the city’s exorcist of homosexual iniquity entered the gay Washington vernacular, jocularly exclaimed among friends in response to the divulgence of something tantalizing, scandalous, or profane.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“His patience wearing thin, FDR went in for the kill. “Bill,” he said, his voice rising with anger, “if I were St. Peter and you and Sumner came before me, I would say to Sumner, ‘No matter what you may have done, you have hurt no one but yourself. I recognize human frailties. Come in.’ But to you I would say, ‘You have not only hurt another human being, but you have deprived your country of the services of a good citizen; and for that you can go straight to Hell!”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“OSS veteran, Julia Child, who worked directly under Donovan before going on to earn international fame as a culinary personality.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“The following year, Kramer would put on Just Say No, "a play about a farce" based in the fictional country of New Columbia, wherein everyone call's the president "Daddy", the First Lady is a harridan named "Mrs. Potentate" and the couple's ballet dancer son pines for his Secret Service detail”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Scratch the surface and what do you get?" asked Way Bandy, the two-thousand-dollars-a-day make up artist who "designed" Nancy's face. "More surface.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Starting with the father of the nation-depicted in the fresco that adorns the eye of the Capital Rotunda, the Apotheosis of George Washington, as an angel ascending into heaven-Americans have idealized their presidents. "People identify with a President in a way that they do not with no other public figure" wrote Ray Price..."Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that's a combination of leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of avenging Furies thrown in”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“It was 3:15 in the morning of June 26, 1980, and Congressman Bob Livingston was extraordinarily drunk, hiding in the Congressional Gym beneath the Rayburn House Office Building, petrified that a team of highly trained right-wing homosexuals working on behalf of Ronald Reagan was about to kill him.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Washington, it has been said, is Hollywood for ugly people.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“The greatest fear of the American male is that he will be homosexual. Beginning with the stern warnings he recieves as a young boy about overly friendly men in public parks, through the adolescent shaming prompted by the slightest hint of effeminacy, to the suspicion provoked by an interest in artistic pursuits, he is conditioned to believe that homosexuality is incompatible with manhood. From his family to his friends, in his church and at his workplace, from the realm of the everyday experience to the popular culture surrounding him, the message is unambigious that there is absolutely nothing worse in the world than to be a sissy, a faggot, a queer.”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

“Most narratives of the movement for gay equality exalt an uprising by the patrons at a New York City bar, the martyrdom of a San Francisco city councilor, and the activism against an orange juice spokeswoman in Miami. All of these played a significant role. But the spark for the revolution was lit, and its flame was tended, in Washington, DC, by a motley procession of once-secret people beginning with a stubborn astronomer who fought back against government discrimination by appealing to the country’s founding documents; an obese albino pornographer who won for his fellow gay men the same freedom to read that their heterosexual countrymen enjoyed; the African American civil rights leader who refused to let a powerful segregationist dictate the terms of his citizenship as a man who was both Black and gay; the lesbian presidential aide so deeply closeted that she never came out yet who organized the first meeting of gay activists at the White House; and the thousands of clerks, managers, secretaries, legislative directors, technology specialists, cryptologists, speechwriters, legal counsels, librarians, and other ordinary people who chose to live their lives honestly. Like”
― James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington