Every day I watch and comment on political news in the United States, but, professionally, I always do it over my shoulder. As I want to tell my students, I read and taught history because I was a news lover.
Also, the story is not static. Not only do we constantly analyze facts by presenting new hypotheses, but new facts shed different light on the level of our knowledge.
Last Friday The POLITICO Magazine Excerpts from James Kirchik’s new book entitled Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Kirschnick, a journalist and conservative columnist, continues to be interested in the theme of homosexuality and the rights of the LGBTQ community.
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Homosexuality is a “crime”
Shared areas Politics The rumors, which have been circulating in Washington for forty years, can be confirmed without the public knowing. It seemed to me yesterday that in 1980, one of the worst “crimes” a politician could commit was exposing his homosexuality.
Edwin Edwards, former governor of Louisiana, declared in 1983: “The only way I can lose this election is if I get stuck in bed with a dead woman or a living guyHe can only bow if he is trapped in bed with a murdered woman or a living young man. The worst option is the second.
During the Republican primaries of the 1980s, the Republican Party was deeply divided between its most progressive faction and its conservative faction. The star candidate in this second division is Ronald Reagan.
Reagan controlled by homosexuals
Long before Reagan was elected to fight Carter, some of his Republican opponents and members of his own staff feared that an infamous group, the “homosexual ring,” would be caught, whose candidate would have been only bisexual. Candidate.
How seriously was the fear of the influence of homosexuals taken in the 1980s? He explained that Ronald Reagan chose George HW Bush as his partner rather than former footballer and senator Jake Kempe.
The winner in 1980 expelled one of his confidants from the White House. Pete Hannaford, the most influential man in Reagan’s entourage, was secretly gay, sacrificed to save the party and the country.
Looking back, one can only imagine a presidential campaign in the 1980s marked by a scandal involving homosexuality. Admittedly, we can not rewrite history, but we may think that the conservative Ronald Reagan would have been seriously annoyed. We sometimes forget that Carter hung on for a long time before the eventual winner finally threw him out.
Forty years yesterday. Today, Pete Boutique reveals his homosexuality, he is married, he has adopted two children and he serves as transport secretary in the Biden administration.
