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In February , sailor Thomas Brunelle and chief machinist's mate Ervin Arnold were patients at the naval hospital at Naval Station Newport in Newport, Rhode Island. Brunelle disclosed to Arnold that both naval and civilian men who have sex with men regularly met at the Army and Navy YMCA and the Newport Art Club for companionship and sex.

Sherry Zane sheds light on a dark covert operation that targeted homosexual Navy men. On March 16, , 14 Navy recruits met secretly at the naval hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, anxiously awaiting instructions for their new assignment. But Roosevelt's record has a few blemishes, one of which had a direct impact on gay Americans. J. Edgar Hoover, who had been the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nine years.

One of the most amazing anecdotes in Hazel Rowley's crackling new biography of the Roosevelt marriage called, simply, Franklin and Eleanor, has, on the surface, nothing to do with their. A new book examines the unknown or barely known lives of gay people working and living in our nation’s capital, a city known for its mix of power and secrets.

Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages. I enjoyed watching Ken Burns' The Roosevelts: An Intimate History last week, keeping in mind that these PBS documentary series are usually a heavy bit of American myth-making, sanitizing some facts in offering a particular version of history. Still, there are a few things just too glaring to hide or treat with discretion in , though Burns arrogantly thinks he can.

How could we not hear about the scandalous anti-gay witch hunt beginning in in Newport overseen by then assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt? As detailed in historian John Loughery's book The Other Side of Silence , Navy sailors were recruited to entrap other men to have sex with them, with the undercover "operatives" engaging in sex to orgasmic completion -- oral, and yes, some anal -- with the men they entrapped, and logging all of this in their own reports.

At first, the sting focused on men in the Navy, in an attempt to clean up what was seen as "moral conditions" at the Newport base, but it soon expanded to the civilian population in Newport and resulted in the arrests and sometimes imprisonment of 17 sailors and a prominent Episcopal Navy chaplain. When the methods of the witch hunt became known there were headlines across the country, legal inquires and a hearing and denouncement from a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs.

The Senate report called FDR's behavior "reprehensible," and stated that the actions "violated the code of the American citizen and ignored the rights of every American boy who enlisted in the navy to fight for his country. And what happened to any discussion of career diplomat Sumner Welles , FDR's right-hand man and Under Secretary of State, considered one of the most influential global strategists of the 20th century?

Eventually, though, Roosevelt reluctantly accepted his resignation in after one of Welles's rivals in the state department seized upon information that Welles had solicited sex from two black men, Pullman porters on the same train that carried the from the House Speaker's funeral in Alabama, and threatened to provide the details to a GOP Senate enemy unless Roosevelt dumped him.

Surely, this downfall of a close aide and lifelong friend, and the reasons why he fell, should have a place in something described as "an intimate history.

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It's long been discussed that Eleanor Roosevelt had a close and deep relationship with the Associated Press reporter, Lorena Hickok, with whom she went on a road trip, alone, across the country, and who even had a room in the White House for a time -- and those facts are included in the series. Also included is the fact that Eleanor had friends and colleagues with whom she organized on women's issues who were lesbians, some of them in deeply committed relationships.

But the way Burns treats all of this is to discuss Eleanor and Hickok as close and intimate "friends" -- he has Doris Kearns Goodwin telling us Hickok was "in love" with Eleanor, almost as if it was one-sided -- but never using the "L" word, or even raising the possibility of sex, seeming to view that as sleazy. Burns even admitted as much, reiterating what he'd said in a talk at the Television Critics Association in July, in an answer to a question at a discussion at the Francis W.

Parker School in Chicago in September:. I assume when you say a relationship you are assuming that there was a sexual relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. We have no evidence whatsoever of that, and none of the historians and experts believe it. This is an intimate [look at the Roosevelts] not a tabloid and we just don't know We have to be very careful because sometimes we want to read into things that aren't there.

First off, why is it "tabloid" rather than "intimate" to speak of the possibility of a sexual relationship between two women? Burns, after all, had no problem discussing, quite extensively, FDR's sexual affair with Eleanor's secretary Lucy Mercer. Secondly, it's factually incorrect to state that "none of the historians and experts believe it.

Noted scholars such as Blanche Wiesen Cook -- whom Burns interviewed extensively in the documentary series, but curiously not about this issue -- as well as Leila J. Rupp, and Lillian Faderman, have discussed and documented what they concluded was a deeply passionate, physical relationship, in which Roosevelt and Hickok wrote one another about sleeping in bed together while holding one another in their arms , and kissing on the mouth.

Faderman told Carrie Maxwell at the Windy City Times , "If the documentary does deal with FDR's extramarital relationship with Lucy Mercer then it's inexcusable that he didn't deal with Eleanor's extramarital relationships particularly with Lorena Hickok. For two decades, HuffPost has been fearless, unflinching, and relentless in pursuit of the truth. Support our mission to keep us around for the next 20 — we can't do this without you.

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