About
James Kirchick is a writer at large for Air Mail, a contributing writer to Tablet, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. A widely published journalist and historian, he has reported from over 40 countries, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, New York, Rolling Stone, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications across the United States and around the world.
Kirchick began his professional journalism career at The New Republic, where he wrote about domestic politics, lobbying, intelligence, foreign policy, and exposed former presidential candidate Ron Paul’s extremist newsletters. Subsequently, he was writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, where he wrote about the politics and cultures of the twenty-one countries in the news company’s broadcast region. Among the many events he covered were the First Libyan Civil War, a presidential election in Belarus, and revolution and ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan. His first book, based on his experiences reporting across the continent, “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age,” was published by Yale University Press in 2017.
Recognized for his voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, Kirchick is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award. He is a professional member of PEN America, sits on the advisory boards of the Vandenberg Coalition and the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, and has contributed essays to the collections Fight for Liberty: Defending Democracy in the Age of Trump and New Threats to Freedom. Kirchick is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, and he has previously held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Robert Bosch Foundation in Berlin.
Kirchick has spoken at colleges and universities across the United States and at venues including the National Security Agency, the U.S. Department of State, the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, the Stockholm Free World Forum, the American Library in Paris, the Warsaw Security Forum, the Lennart Meri Conference in Estonia, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin. He has appeared on Good Morning America, Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and NPR, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Kirchick is a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School and Yale College.
Featured Work
Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington
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.
For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power.
Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory.
Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.
