PanWashington PostKirchick 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 ... Apart from notable appearances by a handful of otherwise underexplored gay and lesbian politicos, 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 ... 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 ... Many of the book’s weaknesses are attributable to Kirchick’s apparent aversion to common-sense conventions of language.
