Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

Since its establishment by an act of Congress in 1790, Washington, DC, has attracted men and women from every segment of American society. Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Democrats and Republicans, northerners and southerners, easterners and westerners, immigrants and natives, citizens and slaves—all have come to this marble metropolis to join in the perpetual endeavor to form a more perfect union. Included among their number, though scarcely recognized then or now, has been another group of Americans, one whose obscurity was the consequence of their being forced to hide.

What linked them was a sin so vile as to be virtually unspeakable. The early Christian Church condemned these descendants of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah as those who “exchanged natural relations for unnatural.” Upon discovering his fellow passengers engaging in “dishonorable passions” aboard the ship Talbot sailing from London to New England in 1629, Rev. Francis Higginson expressed revulsion for a “wickedness not to bee named.” In 1837, the state of North Carolina approved a law, copied almost directly from a statute adopted during the reign of King Henry VIII, mandating that anyone who performed “the abominable and detestable crime against nature, not to be named among Christians, with either mankind or beast, shall be adjudged guilty of a felony, and shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy.” While the threat of capital punishment was lifted in 1869, the taboo against the unsayable “abomination” remained. In 1927, the New York State Legislature passed a theatrical “padlock bill” prohibiting any production “depicting or dealing with, the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion,” and on the West Coast, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America released a list of guidelines banning depictions of profanity, drug trafficking, white slavery, “ridicule of the clergy,” miscegenation, and “any inference of sex perversion” onscreen.

Sodomites, perverts, inverts, deviants, degenerates, queers, fairies, fruits, dykes, faggots—gay men and lesbians—these Americans were morally damned, medically pathologized, their very being legally proscribed.* Consequently, the manifestations of their likeness, and the ways they signaled it to one another, had to be disguised, insinuated, and covert. The precise color of an article of clothing, the holding of another’s gaze from across a crowded room, a knowing turn of phrase, an esoteric cultural reference—such were the means by which these men and women communicated the crime of their common existence, and over time, they would develop their own vernacular, rituals, gathering places, and codes of behavior. As Washington grew both in size and significance, they would ineluctably come to populate a secret city, one hidden within the official, open one.

At first, few of those inhabiting this clandestine society understood themselves as members of a community, in the way constituents of more formal polities feel solidarity with others who speak the same language, worship the same god, or live on the same patch of land. For what united these disparate individuals, what connected them to one another as well as to generations past and future, was not a common tongue, religion, or nationality, but something that society condemned, such that what they shared was a status as pariahs. An invisible thread connecting their experiences, one of fear and fixation about same-sex desire, therefore runs through our nation’s history.

The origins of this theme can be traced at least as far back as the country’s War of Independence. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and of the exclusively male court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia when Founding Father Benjamin Franklin recruited him to the American revolutionary cause in 1778. Fleeing charges that he had “taken familiarities” with young men, von Steuben arrived at Valley Forge just sixteen days after a court-martial overseen by Gen. George Washington drummed Lt. Gen. Gotthold Frederick Enslin out of the Continental Army for the same crime. Pierre L’Enfant, the French-born architect whom Washington entrusted with designing the new nation’s capital, was a lifelong bachelor described as “sensitive in style and dress” and as having an “artistic and fragile temperament.” Though the identity connoted by these euphemisms would not be classified as a social category until the late nineteenth century, the association of sexual and gender nonconformity with moral degeneracy is a political tactic as old as the republic itself. Before Thomas Jefferson and John Adams became great friends and political allies, a newspaper publisher supporting the former accused the latter of possessing a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Claims of homosexuality have been made upon one of our worst and one of our greatest presidents. The unmarried James Buchanan spent so much time with a fellow bachelor, Alabama senator William Rufus King, that Buchanan’s critics sneered that the two must be lovers. (An academic study published in 2019 argues that they were no more than “bosom friends.”) The four years that Buchanan’s successor, Abraham Lincoln, spent as a young lawyer sharing a bed with another man, Joshua Speed, the passionate letters they exchanged, and the close relationship Lincoln formed with his presidential bodyguard have led some to conclude that the man whose liberation of others earned him renown as “the Great Emancipator” repressed his true self.

Lincoln might have been Walt Whitman’s “captain,” but Peter Doyle was his love. The self-proclaimed “bard of Democracy” was well into his fifties when he met the twenty-one-year-old horsecar conductor on the Union Line train running along Pennsylvania Avenue one wintry night in 1865. “We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood,” Doyle recalled of their initial encounter. In a crowded city whose inhabitants frequently shared rooms and often beds, the two men would seek intimacy at a hotel on Washington Avenue after the conclusion of Doyle’s shift.

Rose Cleveland, sister of President Grover Cleveland, performed the functions of first lady until her bachelor brother married two years into his administration. It was not her only unconventional relationship. “I cannot find the words to talk about it,” Cleveland wrote to divorcée Evangeline Simpson Whipple of the passionate feelings she felt for her, in a disclosure as euphoric as it was apprehensive. “The right word will not be spoken.” When Whipple married another man, Cleveland was heartbroken, declaring, “I will give up all to you if you will try once more to be satisfied with me. Could you not take six months for that experiment? We would go away from everyone.” Following the death of Whipple’s second husband, the two women reconnected and rest side by side in an Italian cemetery.

For strapping young lads passing through Progressive Era Washington, DC, the mansion at 2000 G Street shared by Archibald “Archie” Butt, President William Howard Taft’s military aide, and Francis Millet, a founding member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts who helped design the National Mall, was a welcoming retreat. “Did you know that the kilt is worn without any drawers?” Butt mischeviously wondered in a letter to a friend, marveling at one Scottish lodger’s sartorial habits, or lack thereof. In 1912, Butt and Millet sailed on the RMS Titanic, going down together with the doomed ship. The reason Butt remained a bachelor, a weeping President Taft explained, was “because of that love for” his mother. In recognition of Butt and Millet being the only U.S. government officials to perish in the maritime disaster, Congress appropriated funds for the construction of a monument in their honor. For over a century, the Butt–Millet Memorial Fountain in President’s Park, south of the White House, has consecrated a relationship whose true nature lies with its dedicatees in a watery grave.

A member of President Warren Harding’s “Ohio Gang,” Jesse “Jess” Smith was a supporting player in Teapot Dome, a bribery scandal whose name was a byword for Washington corruption until Watergate surpassed it fifty years later. Smith lived in a house on K Street with his boss, Attorney General Harry Daugherty, described by one chronicler of the era as having had a “curious dependence” upon the significantly younger Smith, who served Daugherty as “a combination of son, secretary, valet, nurse and intimate friend.” It was “noised about” that the men were a couple, but in accordance with the conventions of the day, the press never broached the subject. A “snappy dresser” who “showed no great interest in the girls,” Smith often wore a colored handkerchief and matching tie, a coded arrangement used by gay men in the 1920s to signal their shared identity. Aristocratic women greatly valued Smith’s perspective “on the cut of a skirt or the choice of a shade,” most prominently First Lady Florence Harding, whom Smith regularly accompanied to social occasions. Smith was a “walker” avant la lettre: a man (usually, and discreetly, homosexual) who escorted the wives of powerful and busy men to parties. In what Henry James, himself a confirmed bachelor, dubbed “the city of conversation,” walkers fulfilled a vital role.

An insomniac, Smith took regular evening constitutionals around the neighborhood where he and Daugherty lived, just blocks from the White House. If he ever sought company on these nocturnal rounds, he need not have traveled far. At least since the late nineteenth century, men seeking amorous connections with other men did so in Lafayette Square, the seven-acre wooded park directly north of the president’s home. “Under the very shadow of the White House,” Washington’s chief of police reported with astonishment in 1892, officers had arrested eighteen men “in flagrante delicto.” Soon thereafter, the U.S. Army chief of engineers, responsible for the upkeep of federally owned grounds, installed lights around the Washington Monument and other public places “in the interest of morality.” The diaries of Jeb Alexander, pseudonym of a gay man who lived in Washington during the first half of the twentieth century, provide rich detail about early gay life in the nation’s capital. One August evening in 1920, Alexander happened upon two “handsome, clean-looking chaps, refined and cultured,” seated near a bronze statue of Baron von Steuben, beneath whose admiring eyes they “furtively engaged” in a sensual embrace “under cover of the dimness.”

For those who preferred a degree of privacy the bushes and trees could not afford, the Riggs Turkish baths, located in the basement of the Belasco Theatre abutting the Square, offered alluring possibilities. Featuring a 22,000-gallon pool and sleeping cabins available to rent for the night, the bathhouse was reputed to be “the largest and best equipped south of New York.” In 1911, “complaints from stars, stage managers, and players” at the Belasco, “owing to the excessive heat on the stage” from the baths underneath, forced Riggs to move around the corner, into a building opposite the Treasury Department. Alas, another type of heat sparked more serious trouble. In March 1945, responding to reports of what the Washington Post described as “disorderly conduct,” officers from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Morals division, or vice squad, raided the baths and arrested some fifty patrons. Men of different nationalities, professions, political commitments, and social standing, they had one thing in common: citizenship in the secret city.

A DOUBLE LIFE WAS POSSIBLE FOR THESE SECRET CITIZENS, provided they exercised a requisite level of vigilance and discretion. Class, race, and sex heavily determined the degree of freedom they could enjoy—wealth, white skin, and manhood being important markers of privilege in a world where everyone was otherwise considered “degenerate.” As the notion of a homosexual person, as opposed to homosexual “acts,” was not widely understood until the late nineteenth century, it was unthinkable that these people might constitute a distinct identity group with its own political interests. And so, while the mainstream view held homosexuality to be sick and immoral, during the first four decades of the twentieth century, it was not considered a threat to American society, much less Western civilization.

This perception started to change with the onset of the Second World War, when the federal government began to shoulder the responsibilities of a global superpower. A culture of secrecy descended over the nation’s capital, and with it, an apprehension concerning the guardians of the nation’s secrets. About nobody was this apprehension greater than those who possessed, within themselves, the most damning secret of all. As America instituted a vast bureaucracy for managing sensitive information, a new priority verging on an obsession, “national security,” imbued homosexuality with existential dangers. America’s global preeminence transformed what had been a private vice into a public obsession as homosexuality assumed an ideological cast and treacherous, world-historical significance. In the hands of journalists and politicians, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, presidents and Pullman car porters, the accusation of what one prominent Washingtonian would call “an offense too loathsome to mention” became the deadliest weapon in the vast arsenal of American political skullduggery.

From the Second World War until the end of the Cold War that followed, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. Nothing posed a more potent threat to a political career, or exerted a more fearsome grip on the nation’s collective psyche, than the love expressed between people of the same sex. When America fought fascism, political and cultural leaders associated it with the nation’s Nazi enemies. During the Cold War, voices from across the political spectrum linked it with communism. One of the earliest executive orders signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, a man who played a central role in the struggle against both totalitarian ideologies, prohibited those guilty of “sexual perversion” from holding any job in the federal government. For most of the twentieth century, the most terrible secret one could possibly possess—more terrible, even at the height of the Cold War, than being a Communist—was being gay.

Secret City is about 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. It was an influence attributable to two factors: secrecy and universality. “Secrecy is a form of power which can be used inside government,” New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in a landmark 1997 congressional study. In America’s other major metropolises, New York and Los Angeles, wealth and celebrity, respectively, determine one’s standing. Power is the drug to which Washingtonians have always been addicted, and it is access to secrets that establishes and augments that power. As for universality, the uniqueness of homosexuality as a trait appearing among members of every social group enhanced its spellbinding effect over the capital and the nation. Recalling the controversy over the presence of homosexuals in the federal workforce that consumed Washington in the early 1950s, Stephen Spingarn, an aide to President Harry Truman, observed that they

live in a milieu of their own, a sort of separate world of their own which crosses all sorts of caste and cultural lines, a chauffeur and a Cabinet officer might have a homosexual affair, that sort of thing. In their own world there are no caste lines, and this is useful in espionage organizations because if you happened to know that an important Government official had that weakness, you could infiltrate a handsome young chauffeur …

Everywhere and nowhere, gay men and lesbians were hiding in plain sight. “The love that dare not speak its name” paradoxically assumed an awesome explanatory power as the motive force in history behind a dizzying array of complex events and phenomena. The decline and fall of ancient Rome and Greece, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, the “loss” of China, the Cuban Revolution, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the leak of the Pentagon Papers, the Iran-Contra scandal—these were just some of the things that leading Washingtonians attributed to the hidden machinations of this mysterious deviancy.

The secret city was as much a collection of intangible concepts (an all-pervasive sense of suspicion, webs of illusory connections, a catalogue of prejudices) as it was a topography of physical locations (sexual cruising grounds, darkened bars, sites of protest). To protect themselves within Washington’s institutional order, gay men and lesbians were forced to inhabit a combination of the two, a metaphorical space within which their secrets might be safe. Preventing one’s “closet” from being opened was, for many, a question of life and death. The fear of homosexuality, or even the mere accusation of it, destroyed careers, ended lives, and induced otherwise decent people to betray colleagues and friends. Yet as time wore on, a group of intrepid Washingtonians would emerge from their closets and transform the nation’s capital from a city of witch hunts and recriminations into the front line of a worldwide revolution in consciousness.

The outsized role that homosexuality once occupied in the American imagination makes it a compelling framework through which to undertake a historical reassessment of Washington politics and society during the twentieth century, when a fixation with state secrecy coincided with an increase in visibility for gay men and lesbians. As is so often the case with the subject of historical homosexuality, however, much of the source material needed to tell this story is ambiguous, remains hidden, or has been destroyed. In some cases, it is gay people themselves who are responsible for this erasure, concealing their sexual orientation while they were alive and eliminating any trace of it before their deaths. In others, relatives and historians have done the obscuring. Deciphering the many ways in which homosexuality impacted Washington forced me to search in places other scholars either chose not to look or did not know existed, and to think in ways it may never have occurred to them to think. Most of all, it required that I look carefully, reading between the lines in diaries, letters, memoirs, radio and television reports, congressional hearing transcripts, depositions, and print media accounts. Writing this book often felt like holding up a mirror—one equipped with a special power to reveal once-invisible people, stories, and relationships—to the city I call home and about which I thought I knew so much.

My interest in this subject was piqued by my living in Washington, where every day I walk past the places where the events recounted in these pages occurred, and by my own identity as a gay man. How did people like me, interested in politics and public policy, survive at a time when a core aspect of their very being was considered a mortal danger to the country? What sort of choices and sacrifices did they confront? Whom could they trust? Surveying the vast literature of American political history, it became apparent how often gay people and issues have been consigned to footnotes—that is, when not expunged from the historical record altogether. Because homosexuality was (and, in some quarters, lamentably remains) a subject considered indecent if not immoral, many of the historians and institutions that have shaped our understanding of the American past have neglected to explore whole swaths of it. Due in large part to this stigma, the study of gay people and topics in history has largely been taken up by gay people themselves. Homosexuality not being a heritable trait, however, the preservation of this history lacks the natural means of continuity available to other minority groups. Stories of gay struggle and accomplishment are not passed down over dinner tables or through family heirlooms; rarely are they taught in schools. This knowledge deficit harms not only gay people, deprived of a common past and a way of understanding their place in the world, but all Americans, whose awareness of their country’s history is made poorer by the large parts left unexplored.

By documenting the evolution of American politics and government secrecy through the lives of people compelled to keep a core part of themselves hidden, I hope to offer a new interpretation of our country’s past. The tendency to view “gay history” as a subject separate and distinct from American history has always struck me as erroneous and constrictive. Since conceiving the idea for Secret City over a decade ago, my overriding ambition has been to integrate these two histories, to weave the invisible and visible threads together into a coherent whole, to put the central events, influential ideas, and prominent figures of an era into greater context by opening the many little (and several not-so-little) closet doors behind which so much has been secreted away. Though their stories may sometimes be hard to find, gay people have always been here, shaping the country at every level, from the lowliest of clerks to the loftiest of White House aides. In illuminating the lives of these men and women, it is my hope that this book will help them attain the place they have long been denied yet belatedly deserve in the history of the great experiment that is America.