Episode Details

Most people have never heard of Roy Cohn. That is by design.

Roy Cohn spent his entire career making sure that the most important things about him never made it into the public record. He was Donald Trump’s mentor, his lawyer, his role model, and the architect of the political style that now runs the United States government.

He was also gay.

Deeply, desperately, dangerously closeted gay.

And the distance between those two facts is where American history gets very dark very fast.

WHO ROY COHN WAS

Roy Cohn was born in the Bronx in 1927. He graduated from Columbia Law School at 20, so young he could not yet take the bar exam. By 23 he was prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. They were executed in 1953. Many legal scholars have since questioned the fairness of that prosecution. Cohn never expressed doubt about it.

He became chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings. He was McCarthy’s attack dog. His job was to destroy people. He was extraordinarily good at it.

During this same period Cohn and McCarthy orchestrated what historians call the Lavender Scare. The systematic purge of gay and lesbian employees from the federal government. They argued that gay people were security risks because their sexuality made them vulnerable to blackmail. They ruined careers. They destroyed lives. Multiple people who were exposed committed suicide.

Roy Cohn was closeted and gay the entire time he was doing this.

His cousin David Marcus confirmed it. His coauthor Sidney Zion confirmed it posthumously. Multiple people in his social circle confirmed it. He had long term male partners. He lived an openly gay private life while maintaining a furiously anti-gay public one.

Politico described him as a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe. That is not an editorial opinion. That is a documented description of a documented pattern.

THE PSYCHOLOGY

In 1936 psychoanalyst Anna Freud identified the mechanism that explains Roy Cohn completely.

She called it reaction formation.

When the brain encounters an impulse it finds shameful or threatening it does not suppress it. It converts it into the exact opposite behavior. And then performs that opposite behavior loudly, publicly, and aggressively. The more unbearable the internal conflict the more extreme the outward performance.

Roy Cohn did not crusade against gay people because he believed homosexuality was wrong. He crusaded against gay people because his brain needed the performance to survive. Every prosecution was a wall he was building between himself and what he could not face.

Reaction formation does not make the impulse disappear. It makes it louder. It just points it outward instead of inward.

The research confirms what the pattern suggests. In 1996 Henry Adams and his colleagues at the University of Georgia measured the physical arousal of self-identified heterosexual men while exposing them to gay male content. Men who scored highest on homophobia showed measurably higher physical arousal than non-homophobic men. And they significantly underestimated their own arousal when asked to report it afterward.

They were not lying to the researchers. They were lying to themselves.

Roy Cohn was lying to himself for 59 years.

HOW HE DIED

Roy Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984. He told everyone it was liver cancer.

He bullied Ronald and Nancy Reagan into getting him access to experimental AIDS treatment that was not available to the general public. The Reagans helped him. They denied the same favor to their friend Rock Hudson.

He continued to publicly deny being gay while dying of a disease that at the time was devastating the gay community he had spent his career persecuting.

He was disbarred three weeks before he died for dishonesty, frau