The night of October 7, 1964, was pivotal for Walter Jenkins, the hard-working and well-liked aide to President Lyndon Johnson. It was that evening, according to Out magazine's Al Weisel, that Jenkins, described as Johnson's "most trusted advisor," was arrested having sex (the exact nature of which has been lost to history) with another man in the men's locker room in the basement of the YMCA on G Street, just two blocks from the White House – all thanks to surveillance conducted by members of the D.C. vice squad, who peeped the whole thing through a hole in a locked shower room door.
The sexual revolution was still years away when Jenkins was caught, and he reportedly threatened suicide to attorney (and later Supreme Court Justice) Abe Fortas for "destroying President Johnson," to whom Jenkins was unwaveringly loyal.
Why "destroying"? Because the politically-savvy Jenkins knew that, with the presidential election just four weeks away, the report of a top Johnson aide having been caught in flagrante delicto with another man would be ready-made fodder for the Barry Goldwater publicity machine, not to mention every scandal sheet in the nation – which included plenty of mainstream tabloids as well.
But it wasn't so much the fact of a top Johnson aide being outed as gay that caused the widespread concern; it was the idea that because Jenkins was gay, many assumed that if he continued in his job, he was susceptible to being blackmailed by foreign powers into revealing state secrets.
The concept is probably laughable now to anyone in the adult industry, but in a time where the only "out" gays were entertainers, and it never dawned on many people that they could actually have closeted gay friends, that possibility was all too real to millions of Americans – even though, as Lenny Bruce pointed out, Jenkins' homosexuality was now so public, he could hardly be blackmailed for it.
Such also is the case with Brian J. Doyle, a deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who was arrested Tuesday night while chatting online with a "14-year-old girl" who was actually a Polk County, Fla. sheriff's detective. Doyle was charged with 23 counts of using his computer to seduce a child and of transmitting harmful materials to a minor. In yet another echo of Jenkins, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd "mused about the potential threat to national security of Doyle's behavior, particularly if the fictional girl had been a terrorist," reported Gabrielle Finley of The Ledger.
But as attorney and AVN columnist Clyde DeWitt points out, this is a greater problem than it might seem.
"It is, of course, delightful to see one of these conservative assholes turn out to be a pervert," DeWitt noted, "but this seems to raise two issues: (1) Just how good a job is DHS doing at screening its employees? Is it perhaps professed devout Christianity that is the most important factor in hiring? (2) How might this situation have panned out if, let's say, a terrorist had found him out before Sheriff Judd?"
It's a very real question, considering the importance the Bush administration places on the (fundamentalist) religious beliefs of its most trusted employees – and how harshly it deals with those who don't share those beliefs, or who outright publicly violate them. There's little doubt that the vast majority of staffers at federal agencies would go to great lengths to avoid being caught at a strip club, patronizing an adult bookstore or ordering adult materials over the Internet, much less chatting sexually with a minor online, or participating in online or real-world BDSM activities!
"It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility," DeWitt mused, "that the next Osama bin Laden message board may explain how to extort Republican chickenhawks at DHS in order to obtain information about leaks in border security or other issues. Perhaps the answer is to install only people that openly are gay, swingers, S/M devotees, etc. — people who, therefore, would be immune to blackmail. Our borders then actually could be more secure!"
An excellent idea – and one which the Bush administration is likely to adopt as soon as it can be reasonably ascertained that hell has frozen over.
