In a new book, the journalist jkirchick chronicles panic over gay influence during a specific slice of U.S. history—from the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt to that of Bill Clinton.
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.
’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. 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.
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.
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