James Kirchick discusses SECRET CITY: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

B&N Georgetown Author Talk and Signing in Celebration of National Coming Out Day and LGBTQ History Month!

Join us to celebrate National Coming Out Day with DC's own James Kirchick, the journalist and historian whose history of LGBTQ Washington was an instant New York Times bestseller and about which Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, said: "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 storytelling."

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About the Book

• 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: The Hidden History of Gay DC.

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 #LGBTQ and American history.

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About the Author

James Kirchick is a journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of Secret City and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, a writer at large for AIR MAIL, and a contributor to the Axel Springer Global Reporters Project, he has reported from over 40 countries, and his writing has appeared in many publications including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Recognized as a leading voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, Kirchick is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award. He is a member of PEN America and the Author’s Guild, is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and sits on the advisory boards of the Vandenberg Coalition and the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. Kirchick is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, and he has previously held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Robert Bosch Foundation in Berlin.

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Special Instructions

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Please note, seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis, so please arrive early, purchase books on the first floor, and proceed to the third floor to grab a seat!

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