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In Bed With The Right

Episode 71 -- Roy Cohn with Matt Sitman (Part 1)

In Bed With The Right

Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Sexuality

4.8662 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Moira and Adrian are joined by Matt Sitman of Know Your Enemy to discuss the life of Roy Cohn -- lawyer, closet case and ratfucker extraordinaire. This first part deals with Cohn's childhood, the Rosenberg trial, and his time with Sen. McCarthy.

Here are the books and documentaries we discuss in this first half:

-- Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (1988)

-- Ivy Meeropol (dir.), Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn (2019)

-- Matt Tyrnauer (dir.), Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019)

-- Christopher M. Elias, Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (2021)

-- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Boy, are you feeling?

0:02.0

Unethical?

0:04.0

You're trying to embarrass me in front of my family?

0:07.0

Well, it is unethical. I can't.

0:09.0

Oh, boy, you are really something. What the fuck do you think this is Sunday school?

0:12.0

No, Roy, but this is...

0:13.0

This is gastric juices churning. This is enzymes and acids.

0:18.0

This is intestinal is what this is. Boul movement and bloodes. This is intestinal is what this is.

0:25.4

Boul movement and blood red meat.

0:28.5

This is politics, Joe.

0:31.7

This is the game of being alive.

0:35.0

And you think you're above that?

0:43.0

I think because he did have this kind of oppositional personality, he did like to challenge the establishment, kind of like take people on.

0:48.2

There was almost this daring quality to the flimsyness of Cohn's closet.

0:48.6

Yeah. I mean, we're talking to 1950s.

0:50.9

This Roman holiday with David Schein, this beautiful, tall, blonde man who kind of did seem

0:57.3

to be cones type. I mean, my jaw just dropped, right? Because it did seem like if you wanted to be

1:03.5

discreet, as you're persecuting, communists and homosexuals, like, if you didn't want this to come back

1:09.7

to you in a certain way, you just want to

1:11.5

behave that way. And it is kind of just a bit shocking how much Kohn almost dared people

1:18.1

to call him out, which they did when the fallout from this gallivanting with shine crashed

1:25.0

down upon him.

...

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