LOOSE LIPS

Clandestine affairs in Fellow Travelers.”

- INKOO KANG

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.