The story of the scandal in the LBJ administration that first brought queer life into the national political conversation in the 1960s.
In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. In Outed, historian Timothy Stewart-Winter reveals that the effects of antigay policing were felt not only by the men but by their colleagues, families, and, in this case, the First Family.
Walter Jenkins’s political banishment had long-ranging effects, from how Johnson conducted the remainder of his presidency to how media coverage of political and sexual scandals became more explicit and salacious. Stewart-Winter reveals Jenkins’s influence and legacy, encompassing but also looking beyond the scandal. Jenkins had a significant impact on Johnson’s career and how it is remembered, including both his signal accomplishment—the programs and laws that constituted the Great Society—and his signal failure: his catastrophic judgment, after Jenkins’s exile, regarding the Vietnam War.
Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Two Washingtons
2. The Best Man I’ve Got
3. No. 168287
4. West Wing, East Wing
5. The Columnists
6. The Mail
7. LBJ’s Loss
8. The Homosexual Citizen in the Great Society
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Archives and Collections Consulted
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Timothy Stewart-Winter is associate professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark. He is the author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which won the John Boswell Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Review :
“Timothy Stewart-Winter takes a deep dive into the arrest that nearly derailed Lyndon Johnson's presidency in 1964. At the center of the story is Walter Jenkins, a top White House aide whose scandal Stewart-Winter uses to excavate the hidden world of homosexuality in Washington during the Cold War era and to reveal how Johnson survived the fallout. But Stewart-Winter goes further, arguing that the media and public response to the Jenkins affair marked an unlikely turning point: a moment when public attitudes toward homosexuality in American public life began, slowly and quietly, to shift.”
“It was literally just a few minutes in a public bathroom. And yet, the aftermath of the arrest of President Lyndon Johnson’s top aide for engaging in sexual activity with another man in a YMCA bathroom was hugely significant: for the aide and his family, certainly; and for President Johnson as well. For straight Americans more broadly, the “Walter Jenkins affair” likely exposed an until then mostly hidden world of the sexual lives of presumably straight married men, and the police who surveilled them and sometimes completely upended their lives. Timothy Stewart-Winter has engaged in masterful detective work to bring readers a detailed account of a once well-known incident that has somehow faded from our view. Outed is an utterly novel and very important book that is simultaneously quite hard to put down.”
