, such details bump up against momentous historical events: Kirchick traces how homosexuality affected the Alger Hiss trial and the Iran-Contra affair, while making the case that Washingtonians were in the vanguard of organizing for equal rights.
Beginning in the 1950s, Washington was ground zero of the Lavender Scare, during which tens of thousands of federal employees were fired for being gay. But DC was also the site of many groundbreaking moments in gay history., for instance, was a victim of the scare, but getting fired led him to become one of America’s first gay-rights activists.
Can you talk more about this stylistic difference between the Mattachine Society and more radical activists? I would say they were attracted to the more libertarian side of it—gay men, mostly, we’re talking about. If you’re a gay person in the ’50s, the federal government is not your potential friend. African American civil-rights activists rightly saw the federal government as their ally against racist state governments. But if you’re gay, the government, period—state, local, federal—is your enemy.