The 1950s witnessed a severe uptick in official homophobia as Executive Order 10450, signed by President Dwight D. Kirchick emphasizes that “it was Ernst and his liberal allies who used the accusation of homosexuality to destroy Walsh.” Come the mid-1950s, the ACLU remained expressly disinterested in gay freedom, proclaiming that it is “not within the province of the Union to evaluate the social validity of laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals.” A year later, however, saw “the first ‘outing’ in American politics” when a liberal New York newspaper, abetted by American Civil Liberties Union doyen Morris Ernst, outed isolationist Massachusetts senator David Walsh as a patron of a gay bordello. “Exposing homosexuals… was something that just wasn’t done in 1941,” when Roosevelt’s undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, caused a major scandal by drunkenly propositioning black attendants on the president’s own special train. Journalistic convention played a decisive role in the survival, and gradual expansion, of gay Washington.
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Roosevelt’s presidency through that of Bill Clinton.
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Kirchick understandably confesses how viewing “‘gay history’ as a subject separate and distinct from American history” is “erroneous and constrictive.” In Secret City he addresses “the wide-ranging influence of homosexuals on the nation’s capital” from Franklin D. Historians such as the late John Boswell, George Chauncey, John D’Emilio and Martin Duberman fundamentally altered our understanding of the past and established, as Kirchick writes, that “homosexuality - both for the bonds it created and the fear it engendered - was a major historical phenomenon worthy of serious intellectual inquiry.” Similarly, gay studies emerged as a top-quality field of scholarly endeavor. In the ensuing four decades, as “an evolving ethic of sexual freedom” took root, that percentage undoubtedly increased. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of gay sexuality, but only post-Bowers did the push for gay equality, and eventually same-sex marriage, rapidly become what he rightly calls “the most successful social movement in American history.” In 1992, a Gallup poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans said they knew a gay person - double the figure from just seven years earlier - and across all of America it was that growing knowledge of the presence of gay people that allowed such a dramatic political transformation to take place.īut sexual complexity had long been “hiding in plain sight.” As far back as 1948, the famous Kinsey report detailed how no less than 37 percent of American men had had at least one homosexual experience. James Kirchick’s incredibly rich and impressively thorough Secret City does not mention Bowers v. Anyone under fifty may be unaware of how largely invisible gay Americans were until at least the 1980s.