U.S. senator urges probe into Cold War-era antigay blackmail plot,In the deathwatch of disclosures in a Yahoo News documentary , the Justice Department is adverse new calls to investigate a Cold War-era antigay bribery artifice that led to the 1954 suicide of Wyoming Sen. Lester Hunt.
Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin — the aboriginal aboveboard lesbian affiliate of Congress — asks Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a letter to “help flash a ablaze on a aphotic affiliate in the history of the Senate” by investigating the roles that three U.S. senators played in coursing Hunt to his afterlife by base his son’s arrest for soliciting gay sex in Lafayette Park, beyond the artery from the White House.
The afterlife of Hunt has been buried in abstruseness and altercation anytime back the Wyoming Democrat went to his appointment on June 19, 1954, with a burglarize and dead himself. Although the data were covered up for years, the accident became the afflatus for the 1959 bestselling atypical “ Advise and Consent,” afterwards a accepted Hollywood cine that had a huge cultural appulse due to its aboveboard delineation of the means in which homosexuality was acclimated as a political weapon at the time.
“While decades accept anesthetized back this adverse incident, it charcoal a adverse archetype of the misdeeds of the McCarthy era and the role homophobia and bigotry has played in the history of our nation, including at the accomplished levels of federal government,” Baldwin wrote in a letter to Lynch endure week. (A Justice Department backer said admiral had not yet had a adventitious to analysis the letter and accordingly couldn’t comment.)Given that the declared culprits abaft the bribery of Hunt are continued deceased, Baldwin accustomed that she doesn’t apprehend any prosecutions arising from the decades-old case. But she said in a buzz account that she hopes a reexamination of government files could bright up the actual almanac — not alone about what happened to Hunt, but aswell about the abject approach of the era. “It’s a beauteous archetype of a actual sad affiliate in American history in agreement of the animality of gays,” she said in the interview.
Baldwin’s letter is a part of three that accept been accounting to Lynch afterward the contempo absolution of the Yahoo News documentary “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays,” which explores the affairs abaft Sen. Hunt’s death.
The blur contains the aboriginal on-camera account with Lester Hunt Jr., now 87 and active in Chicago, in which the backward senator’s son describes how he was arrested by an clandestine badge administrator afterwards authoritative a homosexual beforehand in Lafayette Park in 1953.
At first, Washington, D.C., badge chose not to accompany the case, and the accuse were dropped. But as Hunt Jr. reveals in “Uniquely Nasty,” two U.S. senators — Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Herman Welker of Idaho, abutting allies of the anti-Communist agitator Sen. Joe McCarthy — intervened with Washington prosecutors and accepted that he be brought to balloon on behavior charges. (Hunt Jr. was eventually bedevilled and fined $100.)
As Hunt Jr. relates in the film, the senators again blackmailed his father, aggressive to flood the accompaniment of Wyoming with 25,000 pamphlets about his arrest for soliciting gay sex if the agent didn’t accord up his bench afore the 1954 elections, if ascendancy of the Senate was at stake.
Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin — the aboriginal aboveboard lesbian affiliate of Congress — asks Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a letter to “help flash a ablaze on a aphotic affiliate in the history of the Senate” by investigating the roles that three U.S. senators played in coursing Hunt to his afterlife by base his son’s arrest for soliciting gay sex in Lafayette Park, beyond the artery from the White House.
The afterlife of Hunt has been buried in abstruseness and altercation anytime back the Wyoming Democrat went to his appointment on June 19, 1954, with a burglarize and dead himself. Although the data were covered up for years, the accident became the afflatus for the 1959 bestselling atypical “ Advise and Consent,” afterwards a accepted Hollywood cine that had a huge cultural appulse due to its aboveboard delineation of the means in which homosexuality was acclimated as a political weapon at the time.
“While decades accept anesthetized back this adverse incident, it charcoal a adverse archetype of the misdeeds of the McCarthy era and the role homophobia and bigotry has played in the history of our nation, including at the accomplished levels of federal government,” Baldwin wrote in a letter to Lynch endure week. (A Justice Department backer said admiral had not yet had a adventitious to analysis the letter and accordingly couldn’t comment.)Given that the declared culprits abaft the bribery of Hunt are continued deceased, Baldwin accustomed that she doesn’t apprehend any prosecutions arising from the decades-old case. But she said in a buzz account that she hopes a reexamination of government files could bright up the actual almanac — not alone about what happened to Hunt, but aswell about the abject approach of the era. “It’s a beauteous archetype of a actual sad affiliate in American history in agreement of the animality of gays,” she said in the interview.
Baldwin’s letter is a part of three that accept been accounting to Lynch afterward the contempo absolution of the Yahoo News documentary “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays,” which explores the affairs abaft Sen. Hunt’s death.
The blur contains the aboriginal on-camera account with Lester Hunt Jr., now 87 and active in Chicago, in which the backward senator’s son describes how he was arrested by an clandestine badge administrator afterwards authoritative a homosexual beforehand in Lafayette Park in 1953.
At first, Washington, D.C., badge chose not to accompany the case, and the accuse were dropped. But as Hunt Jr. reveals in “Uniquely Nasty,” two U.S. senators — Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Herman Welker of Idaho, abutting allies of the anti-Communist agitator Sen. Joe McCarthy — intervened with Washington prosecutors and accepted that he be brought to balloon on behavior charges. (Hunt Jr. was eventually bedevilled and fined $100.)
As Hunt Jr. relates in the film, the senators again blackmailed his father, aggressive to flood the accompaniment of Wyoming with 25,000 pamphlets about his arrest for soliciting gay sex if the agent didn’t accord up his bench afore the 1954 elections, if ascendancy of the Senate was at stake.
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