Who is trumps gay cabinet member

This post originally appeared in the Washington Post. The move immediately sparked criticism as latest example of Trump choosing a political loyalist for a nonpolitical job. But amid the controversy concerning the prudence of the appointment, its historical import has been obscured.

For the first time in American history, an openly LGBT person will lead the intelligence community, a remarkable development considering that, until relatively recently, it not only denied employment to gay and lesbian Americans but thoroughly purged them from its ranks. Many gay and lesbian workers quietly resigned rather than face humiliating security interrogations, others committed suicide without leaving an explanation, and untold numbers never even applied for jobs due to the prohibition on their employment.

It was not untilwhen President Bill Clinton signed an executive order reversing the Eisenhower measure, that sexual orientation was removed from the list of conditions justifying the denial of a security clearance. The rationale for barring employment to gay people in the intelligence field at the height of the Cold War was twofold.

The first, and ostensibly more justifiable who is trumps gay cabinet member for liberal-minded individuals, was the potential for blackmail. Because homosexuality was legally proscribed in most states until the s and socially anathema, gays were considered more susceptible targets for recruitment by hostile foreign intelligence services than heterosexuals.

The genesis for this belief lay in the career of Col. Alfred Redl. A gay man and senior counterintelligence official in the Austro-Hungarian army, Redl was caught selling secrets for a hefty sum to Russia in However, hoping to downplay the embarrassment of a mole at the very top of its counterintelligence apparatus, the military leaked that Redl was gay and had been blackmailed by the Russians over it.

Over time, the tale of the traitorous, gay spy became lore, especially among intelligence professionals, dramatized onstage and in film. Fears about gay Americans being susceptible to blackmail hardened significantly during the Cold War. This openness to the potential recruitment of gay people in intelligence work was ultimately cast aside as the Cold War inspired a second, more insidious, rationale for denying security clearances to gays: that subversive sexuality inclined one to subversive politics.

A series of high-profile cases involving homosexuality and communist espionage bolstered this prejudice. InTime magazine journalist Whittaker Chambers testified that he had been a courier for the communist underground in the s and that Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was a member of his cell.

The sad irony of these fears is that neither reason for keeping gay Americans from working in intelligence was based in reality.

The historic LGBT Trump appointment that got overshadowed

Never in American history was there a recorded case of a gay person compromised by a foreign power due to fears of his or her sexual orientation being exposed. The more realistic scenario was that exemplified by anti-communist newspaper columnist Joe Alsop in When the KGB entrapped him having sex with another man in a Moscow hotel room, Alsop marched straight to the American Embassy and composed a statement acknowledging the incident and his homosexuality.

Years laterwhen incriminating photographs of the encounter were mailed anonymously across Washington, Alsop refused to desist in his harsh criticisms of the Soviet regime. Moreover, it never seemed to cross the minds of intelligence professionals like Roscoe Hillenkoetter or the senators questioning him that a gay person was by necessity someone skilled at keeping secrets in a homophobic society and therefore might actually be predisposed for espionage work.

The Stonewall uprising against police harassment at a Greenwich Village bar is widely cited as the catalyst for the gay rights movement. But a proper understanding of the struggle for equality must include the activism that began a decade earlier in Washington, D.

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