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bassproshopspyramid · 1 year

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bestie can you explain why ray cohn's panel said that please i'm so curious

of course! warnings for 1950s–1980s period typical homophobia, and also: you’ll fucking hate this guy.

roy cohn was an american lawyer, and he first became famous for two things: the rosenberg trial, and mccarthyism (also known as the second red scare).

julius and ethel rosenberg were an american couple who were both executed for espionage after providing military secrets to the ussr. i’m not super familiar with the case, but as i understand it: the consensus today is that julius was guilty, ethel probably wasn’t, but the trial was so full of garbage that, legally, they never should have been executed. "guilty but framed" is a phrase i’ve heard about it a couple times.

roy cohn was super proud about the rosenberg trial, claiming that he was responsible for getting the judge and the assistant u.s. attorney appointed to the case, and that the judge gave them the death penalty based on cohn’s personal recommendation.

because of cohn’s prominence in the rosenberg trial, senator joseph mccarthy chose cohn as his chief counsel. cohn worked for the "permanent subcommittee on investigations" (which mccarthy was the head of), and was known for his "aggressive" questioning of suspected communists in american government — basically, they interrogated hundreds of people working for the military and other parts of the government, and drummed up as much anti-communist sentiment as america as possible (that sentiment is why everyone in america is so Like That about unions).

one of the tactics that mccarthy and cohn used was weaponizing americans’ homophobia. they said that communists were convincing closeted gay people in the government to share top secret information in return for not being outed. this is the start of the lavender scare. homosexuals, they said, were a danger to national security. this eventually made then-president eisenhower sign an executive order to ban homosexuals from working for the federal government. we’ll come back to this.

eventually, mccarthy’s claiming that the department of defence was full of communists and also threatening the army when they drafted one of his consultants, g. david schine, led to senate hearings in 1954 that ruined mccarthy’s public image, and cohn was asked to resign.

he went into private practice in new york, where his clients included a bunch of mafia dudes and the star of home alone 2: donald trump. (other famous assholes that were cohn’s clients/friends include alan dershowitz, rupert murdoch, and roger stone. none of those dudes are dead but they all really should be.) he also befriended archbishop francis spellman of new york city, and represented the archdiocese of new york in court. during the debate over the passage of new york’s first gay rights bill, he shared the archdiocese’s opinion and said "homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children"

cohn was known for being fiercely loyal, and also being accused of a ton of crimes himself (his section on his wikipedia page lists theft, obstruction, extortion, tax evasion, bribery, blackmail, fraud, perjury, and witness tampering. none of which are particularly cool crimes, because he’s a coward.)

he eventually wormed his ass back into politics, becoming an informal advisor to presidents tricky dick nixon and ronald reagan, two guys who are currently burning in hell, competing to figure out which of them is more racist. he was a very good friend to first lady nancy reagan and former cia director william casey, as well as a ton of lobbyists and some morally corrupt "journalists", but he said his very best friend was donald trump. cohn got charged with a few crimes on account of him committing a metric fuckton of crimes, and he ended up being disbarred shortly before his death.

(speaking of those crimes that got him disbarred, one of the things that is mentioned a couple times is that cohn entered the hospital room of one of his clients, a dude who was in a coma and dying, and attempted to make himself a beneficiary of the man’s will. to quote wikipedia, "the resulting marks were determined in court to be indecipherable and in no way a valid signature.")

now, the thing i have done my best to not mention in this post? is that roy cohn himself was infamously gay. he denied it until his dying breath, of course, but he was really bad at hiding it. it was one of those things that everybody knew and nobody spoke about.

we know some of the men he dated and slept with — his assistant russell eldridge, who died from aids in 1984, was one of his boyfriends. the chauffeur of that mccarthy consultant that got drafted, g. david schine, said that schine and cohn did the dirty in the back of his limo, which is just really rude to the chauffeur no matter what your sexuality is. this came up during hearings, and cohn said he and schine were not "closer than to the ordinary friend". that archbishop i mentioned, francis spellman, was rumoured to be gay, which was a big controversy in the church at the time. and cohn’s partner for the last two years of his life was a man named peter fraser.

again, cohn’s sexuality was the kind of thing that was known, you just couldn’t say in public. the lawyer for the army in the hearings asked if a photograph "came from a pixie", and then he defined "pixie" as "a close relative of a fairy". ("pixie" was a type of camera, and "fairy" is a somewhat outdated insult for gay men). cohn’s associate roger stone said of him: "roy was not gay. he was a man who liked having sex with men."

in 1984, roy cohn was diagnosed with aids. he kept the condition a secret and received experimental treatment — he was part of clinical trials for azt, the first anti-hiv drug. he died of complications from aids on august 2, 1986, insisting to his dying day that the cause was liver cancer. when he died, the irs (internal revenue service/basically the tax cops) seized nearly everything he owned. one of the things they didn’t take was a pair of diamond cufflinks, which were a gift from donald trump. roger stone said that cohn’s "absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the irs. he succeeded in that."

michael kruse wrote for politico: "he was preening and combative, look-at-me lavish and loud. it was an act. the truth was he hated what he was—a lawyer who hated lawyers, a jewish person who hated jewish people, and a gay person, fiercely closeted if haphazardly hidden, who hated gay people".

cohn is a character in a couple of tony kushner’s plays — most famously angels in america, where he is "a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite haunted by the ghost of ethel rosenberg as he denies dying of aids.", but he also appears in g. david schine in hell (where, from a brief look at the show’s wikipedia page, i think he might be in drag?). kushner actually said that seeing his description on the aids quilt is what inspired him to look into cohn.

roy cohn:

lawyer and patriot

bully, coward, victim.

#alt text included #long post #i am not an expert but i am a nerd and i did my best #there’s actually another section for him that has a communist flag but the bully coward victim one came first #roy cohn #aids crisis #aids quilt #icarus #ask #asks #do i have an ask tag

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