And that’s just by of a book that stretches to over 800. Teboe, affable accounting clerk at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs: stabbed in an alleyway with a stiletto knife. Hunt, Army Reserve major and a governor of Wyoming turned senator: shot in the head while on a leather swivel chair in his office. “Denny” Hansen, champion swimmer at Yale, Rhodes scholar, National Security Council appointee and professor: asphyxiated in a friend’s garage. Montgomery, a Princeton graduate and the Finnish desk chief at the State Department: hanged in the nude by his bathrobe belt from a third-floor banister.
How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means? But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. “Secret City,” by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights.
SECRET CITY The Hidden History of Gay Washington By James Kirchick 826 pages.
