To protect the government, Blick had been compiling a list of names of homosexuals in the Washington, D.C., area. They were all at risk of Soviet blackmail and infiltration. Blick said that he had identified forty to fifty female government employees who had participated in these “sex orgies,” and that many more were likely to surface: five thousand homosexuals lived in D.C., Blick said, including nearly four thousand who worked for the federal government. Blick arrived to share intelligence about a new threat, one that, he suggested, could destabilize American national security from within: the existence of gay staffers at the highest levels of government.īlick began by explaining that “a well-known espionage tactic” entailed luring female government staffers “into the communist underground by involving them in lesbian practices.” Then, he said, foreign governments-by which he meant, principally, the Soviet Union-filmed the women engaged in sexual acts and used the tapes to blackmail them into becoming spies. Only two transcripts of Blick’s testimony were to be printed, and both would be sealed in a vault.
In March, 1950, Roy Blick, a lieutenant of the Washington, D.C., police force and the director of its Morals Division, appeared before a two-person subcommittee for what was then considered one of the most secretive testimonies in Senate history.
