From the 1930s through the 1990s, America fought World War II and the Cold War. Though gay men and women have shaped Washington since its founding-among them Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the military engineer who planned the city-Kirchick focuses his account on 70 or so years of the 20th century. “You cannot write a story about Augustine of Hippo and not note that he became a Christian,” Dolan wrote, just as “you cannot write an account of Whittaker Chambers and leave out the part about his crusade for Western values and freedom.”
In his diatribe against the Post, Tony Dolan cited one of those names-Whittaker Chambers, an ex-socialist and “reformed” homosexual who famously accused the diplomat Alger Hiss of participating in a Communist cell-as he attacked the paper for failing to mention his brother’s deathbed sexual conversion. The witch hunt continued over generations, producing a grim lineage of ruined names-Walsh, Welles, Offie, Kameny, Chambers, Hiss-that the Dolans had no wish to join. Edgar Hoover’s investigations into the State Department, the CIA, and the White House ended thousands of careers, marriages, and lives. As James Kirchick describes in devastating detail in Secret City, the “American Century” was one of terrible oppression in the nation’s capital, where gays and lesbians were hunted by the FBI and treated as security threats equal to, if not greater than, America’s fascist and Communist enemies abroad.
Why were the Dolans so desperate to contain Terry’s secret, even as gays and lesbians were coming out of the closet, either encouraged by the gay liberation movement or forced out by AIDS? Their Catholic faith had something to do with it, as did their conservative allegiances. Head-spinningly, Tony charged the Post with succumbing to “homosexual intrigue” in service of “a special interest who wanted to claim my brother as well as other prominent people as one of their own.” When Tony’s efforts to kill the story failed, he published a 29-page essay excoriating the Post for being “disrespectful of the public’s right to know incapable of self-examination or introspection self-righteous arrogant and heartless in the relentless pursuit of those on its own enemy’s list.” He claimed that his brother had experienced a “religious conversion” before death and had renounced homosexuality.
Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Post, had a gay brother-one whom he accepted-and he believed the public should know that such a prominent conservative activist, an ally of the “Moral Majority,” had died of AIDS, the disease that President Ronald Reagan refused to name. As The Washington Post prepared to report on Terry’s hidden sexuality and death in 1986, Tony pulled every string to stop it. After the funerals, his brother Tony, a White House speechwriter, took over the task of guarding his secret. Like so many gay Washingtonians, Dolan led a double life, one that persisted even in death. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington