Joseph McCarthy, whose pursuit of national purity exposed his own moral degradation, wasn’t the sort to grant dignity to his enemies. “If you want to be against McCarthy,” he reportedly told the press, “you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” The Wisconsin senator’s right hand during his Red-baiting years was his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who in turn recruited a pretty-boy hotel heir named David Schine. That the threesome spearheaded the Red Scare of the nineteen-fifties, as well as the accompanying Lavender Scare— which sought to rout gay men and lesbians from government service—didn’t stop rumors from circulating about their own sexual inclinations; the playwright Lillian Hellman dubbed the trio of bachelors “Bonnie, Bonnie, and Clyde.” By the time Cohn died, from complications of AIDS, in 1986, he was nearly as infamous for denying his own queerness as he was for his prosecutorial viciousness. McCarthy, too, was the subject of whispers—he was no stranger, allegedly, to Milwaukee’s gay bars. They wouldn’t be the last men to persecute their peers to deflect from their own apparent proximity to the closet, but they may have been the only ones to do so in such flamboyant fashion.
Esta historia es de la edición November 06, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 06, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
