James Kirchick
James Kirchick is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer-at-large for Air Mail and an author. A widely published journalist, he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington is his first book.
The New York Times Bestseller / A New York Times Notable Book of 2022
Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in Kirchick’s Secret City. For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century.
He is joined in conversation with Adam Nagourney, a New York Times journalist covering West Coast cultural affairs. He was previously the Los Angeles bureau chief and served eight years as the chief national political correspondent. He is the co-author of Out for Good, a history of the modern gay rights movement.
“Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.”
—George Stephanopoulos
The first 200 attendees will receive a free copy of Secret City.
This event will be live streaming. WATCH HERE.
