B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022Washington Post
H ardcover Bestsellers
COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN
BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATIONFICTION1 THIS TIME TOMORROW (Riverhead, $28).
By Emma Straub. A woman falls asleep on
the eve of her 40th birthday and wakes to
find herself 16 again.2 SEA OF TRANQUILITY (Knopf, $25). By
Emily St. John Mandel. The author of
“Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel”
explores the psychological implications of
time travel for characters from different
centuries.3 SPARRING PARTNERS (Doubleday,
$28.95). By John Grisham. A collection of
three novellas includes the story of a death
row inmate awaiting his imminent execution.4 EITHER/OR (Penguin Press, $27). By Elif
Batuman. An Ivy League student is
determined to find life experiences to write
about.5 THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By
Matt Haig. A regretful woman lands in a
library where she gets to play out her life had
she made different choices.6 THE PARIS APARTMENT (Morrow, $28.99).
By Lucy Foley. A woman investigating her
brother’s disappearance suspects that his
neighbors might have been involved.7 LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY (Doubleday, $29).
By Bonnie Garmus. A mid-century scientist
becomes a sensation while hosting a
feminist cooking show.8 TIME IS A MOTHER (Penguin Press, $24). By
Ocean Vuong. Poems about living through
grief from the award-winning poet and
novelist.9 THE CANDY HOUSE (Scribner, $28). By
Jennifer Egan. A sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-
winning “A Visit Fr om the Goon Squad”
continues the story of tech mogul Bix
Bouton.10 REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES (Ecco,
$27.99). By Shelby Van Pelt. A woman
develops a friendship with an octopus living
in an aquarium.NONFICTION1 HAPPY-GO-LUCKY (Little, Brown, $29). By
David Sedaris. Essays from the best-selling
author detail his experiences during the
pandemic.2 CRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By
Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-
rock star chronicles her relationship with her
late mother and their shared culture.3 ATLAS OF THE HEART (Random House,
$30). By Brené Brown. An exploration of 87
emotions to help people make more
meaningful connections.4 THE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE
HORSE (HarperOne, $22.99). By Charlie
Mackesy. The British illustrator brings to life
fables about unlikely friendships.5 RIVER OF THE GODS (Doubleday, $32.50).
By Candice Millard. A chronicle of the search
for the head of the Nile by two 19th-century
British explorers and their African guide.6 ATOMIC HABITS (Avery, $27). By James
Clear. How to make small changes that have
a big impact.7 TASTE (Gallery Books, $28). By Stanley
Tu cci. The actor and cookbook author shares
the stories behind his recipes.8 THE 1619 PROJECT (One World, $38). By
Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York
Times Magazine. Essays contextualize the
history of slavery as part of the founding of
the United States.9 FREEZING ORDER (Simon & Schuster,
$28.99). By Bill Browder. A former financial
executive uncovers a $230 million tax
refund conspiracy benefitting Vladimir Putin.10 EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING
WORLD (Random House, $28). By Barry
Lopez. A posthumous collection of essays by
the National Book Award–winning nature
writer.Rankings reflect sales for the week ended June 5. The charts may
not be reproduced without permission from the American
Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent
bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright
2022 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists
alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) Bestsellers at washingtonpost.com/books12 SUNDAY | 3 P.M. Katharine Schellman presents
and signs “Last Call at the Nightingale” at Bards Alley,
110 Church St. NW, Vienna, Va. 5 71-459-2653.
13 MONDAY | 8 P.M. Mark Kurlansky discusses “The
Importance of Not Being Ernest,” streamed through
Politics and Prose Live at politics-prose.com/events.
8 P.M. Tracy Dawson discusses “Let Me Be Fr ank” with
Amber Tamblyn , streamed through Politics and Prose
Live.14 TUESDAY | 6 P.M. Jason Reynolds discusses the re-
release of “The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection,”
streamed through Politics and Prose Live.
6:30 P.M. Andie J. Christopher discusses “Thank You,
Next” with author Tracey Livesay at East City
Bookshop, 645 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. 202-290-1636.
15 WEDNESDAY | 8 P.M. Kaitlyn Tiffany discusses
“Everything I Need I Get Fr om You: How Fangirls
Created the Internet as We Know It,” streamed through
Politics and Prose Live.16 THURSDAY | 7 P.M. Ada Calhoun discusses “A lso a
Poet” at Solid State Books, 600 H St. NE. 2 02-897-
4201.
7:30 P.M. Christopher Goodrich , Paul Jaskunas , Fiona
Mackintosh , Amy Freeman , Hayes Davis , Pam
McFarland and Julia Tagliere discuss their literary
works at Sandy Spring Museum, 17901 Bentley Rd.,
Sandy Spring, Md. 301-774-0022.
17 FRIDAY | 7 P.M. Louis Bayard discusses “J ackie &
Me” at East City Bookshop.7 P.M. James Patterson discusses “J ames Patterson by
James Patterson: The Stories of My Life” at George
Washington University’s Betts Theatre, 800 21st St.
NW. 202-994-6800. $29.99-$38.
8 P.M. Amy Brady and Tajja Isen discuss “The World as
We Knew It,” streamed through Politics and Prose Live.
For more literary events, go to wapo.st/literaryca l.LITERARY CALENDARJune 12 - 17Book WorldSECRET CITY
The Hidden
History of Gay
Washington
By James
Kirchick
Henry Holt.
826 pp. $38say nothing of the many D.C.-specific histories
that demonstrate how queerness rarely dis-
rupted Black Washington’s powerful family
ties. Similarly, while “Secret City” has little to
say about lesbians, the author attempts to
explain the silence away with questionable,
and ultimately unsustainable, declarations of
how “persecution generally targeted male
homosexuals more severely than female ones,
a consequence, in part, of patriarchal attitudes
privileging men over women.” Because society
places less value on women, the argument
goes, it is therefore more difficult to be a man.
Many of the book’s weaknesses are attribut-
able to Kirchick’s apparent aversion to com-
mon-sense conventions of language. Readers
might struggle to stay invested in a narrative
weighted down by laborious vocabulary such
as “hirsute” (hairy), “farrago” (hodgepodge)
and “bromidic” (trite). Likewise, many un-
doubtedly will wonder how and why the
author never uses the word “transgender” yet
still manages to include the most vile of racial
slurs multiple times, albeit under cover of
quotation marks. (Elsewhere, the quotation
marks and any corresponding citations disap-
pear, giving the impression that Kirchick
himself is describing disabled Founding Fa-
ther Gouverneur Morris as “peg-legged,” a
(fictional) character as “Negro-loving” or
Black activists as “uppity.”) There are other
mystifying descriptions, like that of Whitaker
Chambers, who, Kirchick writes, “was (at least
for a time) a homosexual.” This, of course, is
not how homosexuality works. Equally trou-
bling is the book’s uneven approach to the
complicated politics of “the closet,” lurching
without warning from requisite portrayals of
survival-by-secrecy to describing, in language
both hackneyed and harmful, the nine gay
victims of D.C.’s Cinema Follies fire as having
been “trapped inside their self-imposed cham-
bers of deceit.”
For many of us who study the queer past,
there’s an always-present need to articulate
the joys found amid the difficult realities of
those who came before, those who made life
possible. But there’s no reality in conflating
homophobia with homosexuality, there’s no
joy in confusing the difficult with the tragic,
the ignored with the secret. In a 1967 review of
Constance Green’s “ The Secret City,” Professor
George R. Woolfolk drew a conclusion that
applies with equal force to Kirchick’s book.
Green’s work, Woolfolk wrote, “called for as
much creative sociology as it did definitive
history. Unfortunately it is short on both.”City” might more accurately be described as a
surface-level glimpse at the prominence of
homophobia in the federal government and
the D.C. press corps, how such homophobia
has long manifested as rumor and innuendo
(pages and pages of which are here repro-
duced), the influence of such homophobia on
an enormous cast of almost exclusively White
gay men, and how more than a few of those
men played not-insignificant roles in the
GOP’s long march to the far right.
These are not unimportant topics. Gay
history, after all, is older and bigger than one
riot, one protest or one ideology, and we
should always welcome stories that unsettle
popular narratives. At the same time, howev-
er, those seeking to unsettle such narratives
should strive for the transparency and ac-
countability so often lacking in older histories.
And it’s here where “Secret City” falters. In 43
chapters and more than 650 pages of text,
Kirchick rarely ventures beyond the federal
government’s highest echelons, all but ignor-
ing the fact that both the government and the
District of Columbia are much bigger than
whichever administration happens to be in
town. Following the example of many of those
featured in its pages, “Secret City” f alls back on
policies of the past to justify the exclusion of
those harmed by such policies. That is, be-
cause “weighty matters of state” have histori-
cally been conducted in rooms filled almost
entirely by White men, Kirchick seems con-
tent not to ask questions about those waiting
outside.
Unlike earlier “secret cities,” Kirchick’s says
next to nothing about Black Washington. (Two
Black people, Odessa Madre and Bayard Rus-
tin, are given a combined total of 17 pages.)
And yet, despite the lack of attention, the
author doesn’t hesitate to make sweeping
assertions. At one point, for example, Kirchick
attributes a “lack of Black participation” in an
early gay rights organization, at least in part,
“to the fact that Washington’s Black residents
were mostly locals ... and associating with a
gay organization was significantly harder
while living in the city where one’s family
resided.” This claim, however, flies in the face
of even the quickest glance at Black gay life, toF
or those who study Washington’s past,
“secret city” is a familiar phrase. In 1932,
for instance, W.E.B. Du Bois explained
that outsiders often knew nothing of the
District’s large Black population, “a Secret
City, of which the capital itself is acutely
conscious.” Three decades later, historian
Constance McLaughlin Green misapplied Du
Bois’s metaphor, arguing in “The Secret City: A
History of Race Relations in the Nation’s
Capital” that Black Washington had long been
“a secret city all but unknown” to D.C.’s White
population. With his new book, “Secret City:
The Hidden History of Gay Washington,”
James Kirchick tries to retrofit the trope to a
very specific subset of the District’s famously
diverse LGBTQ community, ultimately cover-
ing a bewildering amount of old ground
without offering the reader much that can be
called new.
Kirchick’s “Secret City” runs chronological-
ly, spanning from approximately 1940 to 1999;
more specifically, the narrative is organized by
presidential administrations, with each of the
11 sections bearing the name of a correspond-
ing White House occupant, from Franklin
Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Apart from notable
appearances by a handful of otherwise under-
explored gay and lesbian politicos — scrappy
CIA officer Carmel Offie, Office of Strategic
Services trailblazer Cora Du Bois and Kennedy
confidant Lem Billings, among others — “Se-
cret City” largely focuses on the pain experi-
enced by, and at t he hands of, familiar gay men
like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (who Kirch-
ick curiously avoids identifying as homosex-
ual), McCarthyite and Trump mentor Roy
Cohn, and infamous New Right lobbyist Terry
Dolan. Most gay voices, however, are drowned
out by, even treated as less credible than, those
of homophobic straight people: Gossip colum-
nists, yellow journalists, embattled presi-
dents, conniving senators, obsequious FBI
agents and a rotating cast of aides all are relied
upon as primary sources in a history that is not
primarily theirs to tell. Kirchick promises to
show us “the wide-ranging influence of homo-
sexuality on the nation’s capital, on the people
who dwelled within it, and on the weighty
matters of state they conducted.” But “SecretHomophobia steals thespotlight in this superficialhistory of gay WashingtonHISTORY REVIEW BY MATTHEW L. RIEMERHENRY BURROUGHS/ASSOCIATED PRESSFBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover,
pictured in 1967,
is among the
well-known gay
figures featured
in James
Kirchick’s book
— though it
doesn’t identify
him as gay.Matthew L. Riemer is a co-author of “We Are
Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the
History of Queer Liberation” and a co-creator of the
online resource @lgbt_history.