MixedNew YorkerKirchick chronicles these and other panics over gay influence, sometimes with a knowing wink ... has an encyclopedic quality, but focusses on a specific slice of U.S. history ... Kirchick is, in some respects, less interested in examining how the spectre of queerness haunted each Presidential Administration than he is in considering the extent to which queer cabals did, to a modest degree, exist ... the truth most clearly revealed by Kirchick’s focus on Washington is one that queer historians have emphasized for years: that change was prompted not by those in the halls of power but by activists working well outside of them ... The more typical story in Secret City is of the quietly queer politico who looks the other way when it comes to policies that devastated fellow queer people. These figures engender varying degrees of sympathy when they navigate the shadows and silences of the nineteen-forties and fifties, the era of Senator Walsh’s outing and Blick’s gay list. As the twentieth century progresses, such betrayals grow more damning ... So many of those whom Kirchick chronicles seem more compromised by their proximity to power than emboldened by it. That is also a part of the story of gay life in the United States, and Kirchick tells it well. Still, reading Secret City, one sometimes feels, perhaps inevitably, that queer history is elsewhere.
