Wednesday, October 21, 2026 at 8:00 PMEastern Daylight Time UTC -04:00
Walter Jenkins was Lyndon Baines Johnson’s longest-tenured and most trusted advisor, working for LBJ in Congress, the Vice President’s office, and ultimately the White House, where he served as de facto chief of staff. Jenkins also sought anonymous sex with men — a secret he kept as a married father of six. In October 1964, a few weeks before the presidential election, Jenkins was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom two blocks from the White House — triggering his resignation and an avalanche of news coverage.
In his new book, Outed: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency, Rutgers University history professor Timothy Stewart-Winter ’01 writes about how Jenkins’s political downfall served as a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life and the ways in which antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.
As part of LGBTQ+ History Month, and in partnership with Swarthmore’s LGBTQ+ Alum Network, please join Stewart-Winter for a conversation with Sasha Issenberg ’02, the author of The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage, about Jenkins, LBJ, and this important chapter in political — and gay — history.