A Queer History Indeed: Reviewing Jamie Kirchick's Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
The greatest sin in Washington D.C. wasn't homosexuality but espionage. It remains so today.
America has changed quite a lot since the so-called “lavender scare” but the revolution that brought about its end wasn’t so much a “civil rights” project but a slow, gradual opening brought about by technology.
It’s not a coincidence that the iPhone came out, so to speak, just as the gay marriage fight was well underway. Nor is it coincidental that the company is headed up by arguably the most powerful gay man in tech (and therefore America)—Tim Cook.
Meanwhile the science of homosexuality came increasingly into view, especially the genetics surrounding it, and people’s personal experiences of gays in their lives made it much easier to empathize. “Everyone has at least one gay cousin,” says Chris Rock.
An increased toleration toward homosexuality was cultural and, of course, it was also technological. It’s hard to hide anything when we all carry around two-way radios in our pockets. The iPhone became a sort of personal Jeffrey Epstein snitching on us at all times to all buyers. When cameras were added to phones there was no place to hide. Some of us reveled in it. Apps like Grindr or Tinder gave away our sexual predilections. Why they might even be national security risks.
I’ve come to think that the iPhone made it hard to hide, least of all from ourselves. Whatever we want, for good or for ill, can be summoned, nearly instantly. Our selfies became a form of self-incrimination, logging everywhere we went. It’s not a coincidence that the very compromised DARPA and In-Q-Tel were backers of LifeLog (a sort of proto-Facebook).
There were moral panics — “can you believe Bob thinks these terrible things?” — and sudden revelations — “turns out Vicky really is a slut” (to quote from two memorable personal observations from Instagram) — but all in all, cameras everywhere have made us a great deal more tolerant. We judge not (at least too harshly) lest we be judged. Or, as gay blackmail operations and revenge pornographer and Internet publisher Nick Denton once put it, “The only modern sin is hypocrisy.”
And yet the sins didn’t quite go away altogether. Every era has its taboos. Every era has its blackmail over those taboos. You can tell how effective blackmail is precisely by how tailored to the times the charges are. But moral fashions change and so you can look back upon them and study the patterns. Exhibitionism and voyeurism can inoculate you if you just don’t give a damn.
What’s totally unexplored in Jamie Kirchick’s new book, Secret City, is whether or not those fears about blackmail were, in fact, substantiated, and who, in fact, was doing the blackmailing of government officials.
No, you won’t find much discussion of foreign agents actually blackmailing government officials. Kirchick could find it in the pages of the Washington Post — the paper of record of that Secret City — if he could be bothered to look.
Israeli intelligence agencies have blackmailed, bugged, wiretapped and offered bribes to U.S. government employees in an effort to gain sensitive intelligence and technical information, according to classified American documents captured when Iranian militants took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. (Scott Armstrong, Jan Austin, and Michael Meyer, “Israelis Have Spied on U.S., Secret Papers Show,” Washington Post, February 1, 1982.)
These Israeli blackmail concerns aren’t immaterial to our modern understanding of things. Governor Jim McGreevey was likely blackmailed by Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, over the gay affair McGreevey had with Israeli security consultant Golan Cipel.
Here’s how it was discussed in 2004:
Cipel is another link between McGreevey and his former top donor, Charles Kushner, who was charged last month with obstructing a federal investigation into his business dealings by hiring two prostitutes to set up videotaped encounters with potential witnesses against him.
In 2001, Kushner sponsored Cipel’s work visa, allowing him to enter the United States.
Kushner would later plead guilty to his own blackmail scheme. Michael Kempner of MWW Group — Kushner’s PR firm — found a fake job for McGreevey’s boyfriend. Kempner was recently in the Russia sanctions list.
Kushner’s son Jared never could get a security clearance, in large measure owing to his close relationship with Netanyahu, who used to visit the family when passing through New York. He did not get a clearance. That is, until Trump explicitly intervened.
I wonder why…
The science around homosexuality is seldom explored. Nor is it often explored what it actually means.
You can have the genetic predisposition to alcoholism but you don’t get points for spending your days drunk. And yes, you might be inclined to homosexuality but that’s no license to be promiscuous any more than being genetically inclined to slutty behavior is. Each of us wrestles with something or other. How we respond to it is what calls us to greatness. Our struggles with our own afflictions might even be what makes us human.
Gay marriage took homosexuality from an identity to a condition. “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person,” said gay writer Gore Vidal. (Kirchick mentions Vidal somewhat but never examines Vidal’s trenchant criticisms of Kirchick’s beloved neocons.)
I’ve more or less come to the view that Andrew Sullivan’s project of turning gays and gay marriage virtually normal was itself something of a deep state project. You can’t blackmail people if everything is out in the open for everyone to see.
What Kirchick’s Secret City, attempts is to suggest a kind of gay rewriting of DC history. It’s one of those books that is so long, so overwritten that you’ll buy it to signal that you’ve read it, and then move along. Perhaps that’s its very purpose. It’s written in code.
Jamie Kirchick and I are both from Massachusetts. We both attended elite prep schools and we both found ourselves in the same neoconservative circles though he became its darling and I, its redheaded stepchild. I left the cult; he imbibed the KoolAid totally. Alas it failed to get him and he has now opened a KoolAid stand. That’s how it goes, I suppose.
I was first introduced to Jamie Kirchick by an Israeli spy at a human rights conference in Oslo in 2011. The spy had recently paid for Kirchick’s travel in Africa, and so Kirchick gushed to Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed, itself an Israeli laundromat. (Full disclosure: I am suing the Huffington Post (purchased by BuzzFeed) in the federal court system.)
"When people at the conference ask me if I know Thor, I always tell them that he is a force of nature," said Jamie Kirchick, a journalist based in Berlin who has known Halvorssen since 2006, when a column by Kirchick in the Yale Daily News about Hugo Chávez caught Halvorssen's eye.
"He possesses a burning desire to right the countless injustices of this world and he has committed himself to this task with an intensity to match that of the dictatorships he has placed in his sights," Kirchick said. "And he does not care if those injustices are being committed by 'right-wing' or 'left-wing' regimes."
Kirchick would go on to write very neocon articles for Bari Weiss at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. At one point the late Andrew Breitbart told me he wanted Kirchick to run a site called “Big Gay.” Breitbart, like Jim Hoft, James O’Keefe (and that original, Matt Drudge), became a place for Israeli intelligence to launder their intelligence on an unsuspecting American population.
Think of what was done with Hunter Biden — hacked by Israeli intelligence under Pegasus and Netanyahu, humiliated in the New York Post. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Murdoch family later got $100 million from the Bank of China right after all this was going on?
Kirchick’s political project is a continuation of the kind of laundering we’ve seen from Steve Bannon (and enabled by the New York Times’s Maggie Habberman or Ken Vogel). I dismissed back Kirchick when I met him as a “pay to say” type that is altogether common (and therefore unremarkable) in the Washington DC — Secret City — where Kirchick makes his home.
In a just imperial capital Kirchick should have long ago been fired by Brookings. Fusion GPS taught us how billionaires and foreign interests launder their research through these kinds of ambitious young men and reporters.
Kirchick is of a type. Kirchick worked for years for the German Marshall Fund, which was founded by the West German government in 1972. Shortly thereafter Chancellor Willy Brandt was forced to resign over having an East German spy as his personal secretary. How much Brandt knew or didn’t know has been hotly contested. What is understood is that the GMF isn’t on team with America.
In a recent extract for Politico, Kirchick discusses the gay rumors around Ronald Reagan.
To the extent that the Louisiana Republican is remembered today, it’s for the brief but sensational role he played in America’s most infamous political sex scandal. On the same day in December 1998 that Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about his affair with a White House intern, Livingston, then the House speaker-designate, shocked the nation with his own admission of adultery. Preempting a journalistic exposé that had dredged up evidence of his past relationships with women not his wife, he not only refused the speakership but announced his resignation from Congress altogether.
In fact Livingston was laid low by the late Larry Flynt, who was a fluent breakfast companion of yours truly back when I lived in LA. Flynt’s FBI file, newly published upon his death, simply has to be seen to be believed. Like Gawker or the National Enquirer, Flynt built a private intelligence network to further his business interests. He once offered to sell me his file on Congressman Darrell Issa. I demurred though given that Issa was recently named in a lawsuit involving a divorce with lobbyist — and Issa suspected paramour — Majida Mourad perhaps that file would have become handy, especially now that Congressman Mike Turner, her now ex husband, is slated to be head of House Intelligence should the Republicans take Congress.)
This latest piece promoting Kirchick was published in Politico, which, along with Business Insider, was recently purchased by Axel Springer. More recently Kirchick has written a piece praising Axel Springer. Axel Springer is owned by Kravis Kohlberg Roberts, a private equity fund backed by Henry Kravis whose father was a mobster in business with the Kennedys. Axel Springer’s CEO, Mathias Döpfner, presented an award to Mark Zuckerberg in 2016. Peter Thiel was in attendance and delivered a speech. Döpfner’s son, Moritz, now works as Thiel’s chief of staff.
If RT rightly has to register under FARA why doesn’t Politico and Business Insider?Why, for that matter, doesn’t Twitter given its ties to foreign intelligence?
One of the reasons I’m no longer Republican is that I found the party terribly gay — not that there’s anything wrong with that! The party’s largest donor, Peter Thiel, is gay. (He announced it at the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland and got a standing ovation.) YAF is gay. Much of the Koch network is gay. Paul Singer routinely promotes gay causes when he isn’t promoting Israeli ones (or funding Jamie Kirchick). I suppose he gets a twofer with Jamie…
Depressingly Kirchick doesn’t go into the American deep state’s desire to end the potential of blackmail by promoting gay rights around the world. Secret City ends before the Bush years so we don’t get any discussion of the gay rumors that plagued both Bush and Obama.
Nor does Kirchick probe that there might still be a number of gay men in elected office who fear being outed but who nevertheless benefited from the closet in their careers — Tom Cotton, Aaron Schock, David Dreier, Madison Cawthorn, Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, and so on. Readying to run for presidency in 2024, Senator Tim Scott is in the process of being assigned a wife, much as Senator Tom Cotton was before him. It’s all casting all the time. Haven’t you wondered why so many conservative influencers got their start on Explore Talent, a website funded by an Israeli pornographer? I sure have. Statecraft is stagecraft, indeed.
You certainly won't find Speaker of the House-turned felon Dennis Hastert (and his penchant for pedophilia) mentioned. Nor is there much mention of Jack Kemp’s closeness to Roger Stone, who, after all, served as Kemp’s campaign manager in 1988. There isn’t much probing at all of the gay rumors plaguing Nixon. No, there’s not a single mention of Mafia fixer Bebe Rebezo, who vacationed with President Nixon, and was said to be his paramour.
You’ll find little that connects the very pro-Israel Roy Cohn — the flamboyant gay mafia lawyer and Trump consigliere — to Senator McCarthy’s political project. There’s nothing about Cohn’s protégé, Roger Stone, and his campaign to elect Jack Kemp, dogged as he was by gay rumors. Was Stone blackmailing Kemp (long rumored to be gay)? You won’t find it even attempted here. Of course years later, Stone would attempt to blackmail Congressman Matt Gaetz. Stone, for his part, is a case study in what we might euphemistically call open non-traditional sexuality. There’s an article to be written about how his shamelessness was an asset until such a point as it wasn’t. Mores shift in all manner of directions, don’t they?
The lavender scare and the red scare were linked and understood as such at the time. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a way of ending a lot of this blackmail by removing the issue from the discourse altogether. It was an act of political compromise.
Let’s have out with a lot of the secrets — right here and right now.
Until then, to paraphrase a great gay (okay, probably bi) president who was himself quoting Faulkner, “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
There’ll always be closets. They’ll always be skeletons. And they’ll always be made to dance when it suits the powerful.