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Shermer and Kirchick discuss: archives and secret sources of secret histories \\u2022 the cause of homophobia, and how and why homosexuality was thought of as a \\u201ccontagious sexual aberrancy\\u201d \\u2022 why there is no lesbian history of Washington \\u2022 J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson and gay mythmaking \\u2022 FDR and Sumner Welles \\u2022 why at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual \\u2022 Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss \\u2022 the McCarthy hearings and how the Lavender Menace became inextricably linked with the Red Menace \\u2022 astronomer Franklin Kameny and the Mattachine Society \\u2022 JFK and his tolerance of homosexuality \\u2022 Richard Nixon\\u2019s notorious homophobia \\u2022 Ronald Reagan\\u2019s conflicting attitudes toward homosexuality \\u2022 George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and real progress in acceptance of homosexuality \\u2022 the trans movement and its homophobic consequences.

James Kirchick has written about human rights, politics, and culture from around the world. A columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, he is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick\\u2019s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. A graduate of Yale with degrees in history and political science, he resides in Washington, DC.

This episode is also sponsored by Wondrium.\\xa0