GLR July-August 2022

the Sun . And yet, she carefully kept this part of her life a secret. Shortly after the play opened on Broadway, the Daughters of Bilitis asked if she would be willing to come out publicly as a lesbian, but she politely declined, recognizing that it would only complicate her position as a Black, female playwright. For a while after the divorce, she continued to live with Nemiroff, so that even the FBI, which kept her under surveillance for her in volvement in Communist and civil rights activities, apparently had no idea she was a lesbian. Shields’ biography also examines Hansberry’s family his tory. Her father was nicknamed the “Kitchenette King of Chicago” for building and owning many low-rent, tiny apart ments in which many Black families lived. The family was upper-middle class, moving to an all-white community in the face of resistance. This experience would partly inspire the set ting and plot for her most famous play. Meanwhile, her father would be charged and fined multiple times for being a slum lord, ultimately escaping to California. Hansberry never fully resolved this tension between her progressive ideals and the source of her family’s wealth. Shields argues that Raisin in the Sun was so popular to au diences because it was an “old-fashioned” play that dealt with important social issues. Hansberry, however, felt frustrated that so many white critics and audiences missed the main point of the play, which was to challenge class oppression and capital ism. With mini-portraits of the figures and issues that shaped Hansberry’s thought, this biography sheds new light on a re markable writer and intellectual.

Survival in the Belly of the Beast

I N 1964, one Bob Waldron, a friend and admirer of Lyndon Johnson, was betrayed in the course of a background check on his application to work in the LBJ White House. Waldron was just one of countless gay men in Washington whose ambitions and talents were thwarted, their careers often destroyed, in the decades-long panic about homosexuality that ruled our nation’s capital in the postwar era.

and eleven presidential administrations, from Roosevelt to Clinton. What’s shown is an epic story with a cast of thousands—well known and forgotten, villains and victims. It’s a history of gay Washington, where the fear of blackmail and the rise of a vast na tional security apparatus during the Cold War years made being gay especially dan gerous. Furthermore, the panoramic scope of Kirchick’s narrative raises this LGBT history

M ARK M ORAN

SECRET CITY The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick Henry Holt. 848 pages, $38.

Rescued from near-obscurity by James Kirchick’s sweep ing history, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington , Waldron’s downfall was a footnote, and collateral damage, to the more momentous scandal involving Walter Jenkins, a top aide to Johnson who was arrested for having sex with a man in the basement of a Washington YMCA just weeks before the 1964 election. The casual trashing of Jenkins once the incident came to light seems emblematic of an oppressive atmosphere that weighed on the lives of gay people in Washington for more than half a century. Secret City flips a light switch on, illuminating over six decades Mark Moran, a writer based in Washington, D.C., writes about medi cine, science, health, and mental health. 38

to an American story with national significance. No one will be surprised by how sinister J. Edgar Hoover— almost certainly gay himself—was in his deployment of secrets about people’s private lives to silence or ruin them. But Kirchick offers new insights into the confrontation between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, and about the Army-McCarthy hear ings of the 1950s—both of which episodes were replete with undertones and insinuations of homosexuality. Kirchick is a good storyteller, and some of the episodes, when they are not tragic or filled with cruelty, are quite entertaining. In 1948, the Lafayette Chicken Hut opened on H Street with a restaurant on the first floor catering to straight people and a piano bar upstairs that hosted a gay clientele. The piano player, Howard (nicknamed Miss Hattie), entertained customers by singing pop

The G & LR