GLR July-August 2022

ular ditties retooled with sexualized lyrics. After a particularly ribald line, the crowd would shout “Did you hear that, Miss Blick?”—a reference to Lt. Roy Blick of the District police morals division, for years the scourge of D.C. cruising sites. In August 1961, the first meeting of the Washington chapter of the Mattachine Society, the original gay rights organization in the U.S., was held at the Hay-Adams Hotel at the northwest cor ner of Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Con vened by chapter founder Frank Kameny, a gifted astronomer fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay, the meeting was infiltrated by an officer of the police morals divi sion who was so well-known by gay men in the city that when Kameny called him out, the officer scurried out of the room. As Kirchick moves into the 1970s, when gay people began to assert themselves after the Stonewall Riots, he details the open ing of Lambda Rising, the city’s gay bookstore (now defunct); the first issues of The Blade , the city’s gay weekly newspaper, originally edited by Nancy Tucker; and the advent of openly gay bars and discos. The special grubbiness of the Reagan era is re called in Kirchick’s account of the anti-Communist gay conser vatives on the fringes of the Reagan Administration who were at the heart of the money, gun-running, and grifting that became known as Iran-Contra. For a work so focused on politics and politicians, Secret City is not a polemic, even though support for gay rights has for many decades been skewed toward Democratic politics. This resulted in some weird dissonances on the part of openly gay conservatives, and charges of hypocrisy for those still in the closet. Kirchick spares no scorn for the latter (as for the Reagan administration’s lethal negligence of the AIDS epidemic), which he casts as a feature of the decades-long shadow under which even liberal people and publications like The Washington Post had to operate. If there’s a hero in the book, it would be Frank Kameny, founder of the D.C. Mattachine and the activist most responsi ble for the repeal of the prohibition on gay people holding civil service jobs. From the very beginning, Kameny dismissed the idea that he had a “problem” (whether a mental illness or a crim inal bent) for which he needed to apologize, and he spent his life working for a cause that was initially regarded as foolish and hopeless. On the day in 1975 when the ban was repealed, Kameny called it the government’s “surrender document.” Be cause of Kameny and countless others like him, the secret city Kirchick describes no longer exists. Several years ago, a gentleman approaching his sixties found himself at D.C.’s National’s Park for a baseball game. He had been born in the D.C. area, lived in the city through many of the years chronicled in Secret City , and was recently returned. Like so many of the men and women in Kirchick’s story, he had spent too much of his life hiding from himself. Strolling the stands between innings, he happened to pass two young men in their early thirties, placidly walking through the sunlit crowd holding hands. He watched as they walked, marveling that so far as he could see no one anywhere was batting the proverbial eye lash. That night, the elder man, this reviewer, went home and recorded the sight in his diary adding, “When did this happen?” Secret City is a chronicle of when and how it happened and who made it happen, a tale told in a hundred human stories of how, after decades of darkness, the lights came on. July–August 2022

This book models powerfully alternative ways to think not only about Arenas but also about ourselves, as writers, as teachers, and as activists.” “ —Ricardo L. Ortiz, author of Latinx Literature Now: Between Evanescence and Event The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how the Cuban writer’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. This book presents Arenas’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism.

The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas

Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum SANDRO R . BARROS , RAFAEL OCASIO , AND ANGELA L . WILLIS

Discount Available through August 31 Hardcover $90.00 $40.00 | FREE SHIPPING WITHIN THE U . S . Order at upress.u fl .edu with code ARENAS

upress.u fl .edu • 800.226.3822 @ fl oridapress

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