Twenty Summers

Washington, D.C. has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. James Kirchick is joined by fellow writer Andrew Sullivan to explore how the secret “too loathsome to mention”, since FDR has shaped each successive presidential administration, impacting everything from the creation of America’s earliest civilian intelligence agency to the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the struggle for African American civil rights, and the conservative movement. “Scrupulously researched and novelistic in style, Secret City is an extraordinary achievement... 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 James Kirchick is an award-winning journalist and author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. A visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, he has reported fr