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James Kirchick is the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

On May 20, 1942, five months after the United States entered the Second World War, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky indignantly addressed his colleagues about what Time referred to as “one of the worst scandals that ever affected a member of the Senate.” All that month, the New York Post had been publishing a series of articles accusing Democratic Sen. David Walsh of Massachusetts of patronizing a male brothel in Brooklyn frequented by Nazi spies. While the word “homosexuality” didn’t appear in any of the paper’s salacious reports, its exposure of Walsh nonetheless constituted the first outing in American politics.

So disreputable was the crime of which Walsh had been accused that Barkley described it as “an offense too loathsome to mention in the Senate or in any other group of ladies and gentlemen.” Though the FBI cleared Walsh of wrongdoing, the damage to his reputation was complete and he lost reelection in 1946.

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I was reminded of this incident by the recent disclosure of an eight-second video depicting a 24-year-old Senate staffer engaging in sexual intercourse with another man in a Senate hearing room. Within hours of being identified, the staffer was fired, and Capitol Police are investigating whether any crimes had been committed.

While today a Capitol Hill gay sex tape might be the source of voyeurism and gossip, it wasn’t so long ago that much less graphic revelations concerning homosexuality within the hallowed halls of Congress were the cause of national controversy, often entailing grave, and, in at least one case, fatal consequences.

That’s because for most of the 20th century, no secret was more threatening to a political career than homosexuality. It was a destructive power associated intimately with America’s national security state, according to which secrecy was a form of power and those harboring this most dangerous of secrets were considered moral reprobates of the highest order — and targets for blackmail.

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Washington’s decades-long hunt for homosexuals got a major boost with the onset of the Cold War Lavender Scare, a moral panic as fervid as the “red” one with which it was entwined. The third-most-popular nonfiction book of 1951, “Washington Confidential”, contemptuously described the nation’s capital as a “Garden of Pansies” awash with “fairies” who “recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately,” “are intensely gregarious,” “all know one another,” and — foreshadowing the gay group chat in which the taped tryst of current controversy was circulated — “partake of a grapevine of inter-communication as swift and sure as that in a girls’ boarding school.”

Thousands of gay and lesbian federal employees lost their jobs in the purges. In 1954, Democratic Sen. Lester Hunt of Wyoming shot himself in his Senate office after two of Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy’s allies threatened to expose Hunt’s son’s arrest for soliciting an undercover police officer in Lafayette Square.

The closest parallel to the Senate sex tape scandal is the saga of Jon Hinson. A freshman Republican congressman from Mississippi with a 92 percent voting record from the evangelical Christian Voice, Hinson was running for reelection in 1980 when he announced that he had been arrested for committing an obscene act at the Iwo Jima Memorial in 1976 and had narrowly survived a fire at a gay pornographic cinema in Southeast D.C. the following year. Despite these incidents, “I am not, never have been, and never will be a homosexual,” Hinson avowed.

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Alas, Hinson’s declaration of complete and total heterosexuality would encounter difficulty the following February, when he was arrested for administering oral sex to a Library of Congress employee in a Longworth House Office Building bathroom. He resigned, and later came out as gay.

The next summer, Washington would undergo an anti-gay panic the likes of which had not been seen since the Lavender Scare when CBS News reported that federal authorities were investigating allegations involving congressmen having sex with male House pages. (While an Ethics Committee investigation eventually refuted the charges made by the pages, it did uncover two instances of past sexual relationships, prompting Gerry Studds of Massachusetts to become the first federally elected official to come out as gay.)

Combined with an earlier report from NBC that foreign intelligence operatives were using gay prostitution rings to blackmail U.S. national security officials, Washington was earning a reputation, in the words of one right-wing newsletter, as “Sodom on the Potomac.”

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“A lot of people are downright frightened,” the manager of one gay nightclub told The Post. “Twenty years ago, to get into a place like this, you had to be screened at the door through a peephole and buzzed in. I think we’re headed back to those days.”

The last iteration of the recurring gay Washington sex panic followed the 2006 downfall of Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley, who resigned in disgrace after his lewd messages to underage male pages were exposed. The scandal put gay Republican congressional staffers in the crosshairs, with right-wing activists intent on exposing a “velvet mafia” that they claimed had protected Foley, and gay Democrats equally eager to out their brethren across the aisle as hypocritical closet cases. A story in the New Republic at the time reported on “The List,” a roster of closeted gay staffers circulating among activists and journalists and a perennial feature of the Washington gay witch hunt.

Integral to all of these scandals was not just homosexuality but the fear that exposure of a single gay person would lead to purges affecting the larger gay community. Blaming an entire group of people for the behavior of a single member is a classic example of bigotry, and in a cynical appeal to this dark history of homophobia, the young staffer at the center of the present contretemps has tried to position himself as its victim, protesting that “I have been attacked for who I love to pursue a political agenda.”

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But whereas these previous scandals resulted in drastic consequences for Washington’s “Secret City” of gay politicians, aides, bureaucrats, journalists and power brokers, what’s notable about this latest incident is how little role the sexual orientation of the subject at its center has played. Aside from a handful of far-right outlets, Washington’s chattering class has shrugged its shoulders at the scandal’s gay aspect, and one gathers that the city would be just as titillated if the copulating couple were straight. Fortunately, the denizens of gay Washington no longer live in secret, and our exhibitionist former Senate staffer is being judged not for whom he loved, but for how he behaved.

correction

An earlier version of this article misidentified the office held by Jon Hinson. He was a member of the U.S. House. This version has been updated.

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