Gay hoover
The Essay
Introduction
Hoover’s War on Gays was, among my three books, my largest, most laborious, yet, without a doubt, the most enjoyable and satisfying research proposal of my academic career. It was not only a subject deserving comprehensive treatment, it was also a subject of great personal interest.
I started researching it in 2003, a few months after completing my dissertation. It was a slow process, as I was concurrently busy converting my doctoral thesis into my first book.
The easiest and most obvious starting point was collecting the extant FBI files I knew existed — such as relevant parts of Hoover’s private office files, and those on Sumner Welles, David Walsh, and other odd targets — and compiling everything I knew was written on the subject.
In the process of reading everything in any way associated to the topic, I began to identify subjects for Freedom of Communication Act requests. Researching the FBI is necessarily based on FOIA requests, a time consuming, often expensive, and sometimes frustrating process.
Obscene File
Besides the obvious FOIA requests on homosexual rights activists and groups, I decided the FBI’s Obscene File must enclose gay-related
Hoover is a conflicted, flawed human in new biography
‘G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century’
By Beverly Gage
c.2022, Viking
$45/837 pages
“We’re sorry we can’t be in the front row to hiss — no embrace you,” two fans wrote in a telegram to Ethel Merman in the 1930s when they couldn’t make the opening of one of her shows.
The Merman friends were J. Edgar Hoover and his “right-hand man” Clyde Tolson.
“G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” by Yale historian Beverly Gage is the first biography of Hoover to appear in 30 years. Gage has done the unimaginable. She makes you want to read about J. Edgar Hoover. “G-Man” won’t build you wish you were one of Hoover’s BFFs. It’ll oblige you to see Hoover, not as a villainous caricature, but as a conflicted, flawed human being.
“G-Man” is not only a fascinating bio of Hoover, who directed the FBI from 1924 until the day he died on May 2, 1972 at age 77. It’s a page-turning history of the United States in the 20th century.
Hoover, who played a key role in the “lavender scare” of the 1950s, hated and harassed Martin Luther King, Jr. and engaged in an anti-Communist crusade, has “emer
Hoover's war on gays : exposing the FBI's "sex deviates" program / Douglas M. Charles.
"At the FBI, the "Sex Deviates" program covered a lot of ground, literally; at its peak, J. Edgar Hoover's notorious "Sex Deviates" file encompassed nearly 99 cubic feet or more than 330,000 pages of data. In 1977-1978 these files were destroyed--and it would seem that four decades of the FBI's soiled secrets went up in smoke. But in a remarkable feat of investigative research, synthesis, and scholarly detective work, Douglas M. Charles manages to pack in the yawning blanks in the bureau's history of systematic (some would say obsessive) interest in the lives of homosexual and lesbian Americans in the twentieth century. His book, Hoover's War on Gays, is the first to fully expose the extraordinary invasion of US citizens' privacy perpetrated on a historic scale by an institution tasked with protecting American life. For much of the twentieth century, when exposure might mean nothing short of ruin, gay American men and women had much to fear from commandment enforcement of every kind--but none so much as the FBI, with its inexhaustible federal resources, connections, and its carefully fashioned reputat
J. Edgar Hoover: Male lover or Just a Man Who Has Sex With Men?
Nov. 16, 2011— -- J. Edgar Hoover led a deeply repressed sexual animation, living with his mother until he was 40, awkwardly rejecting the attention of women and pouring his sentimental, and at times, physical attention on his handsome deputy at the FBI, according to the new movie, "J. Edgar," directed by Clint Eastwood.
Filmgoers never see the decades-long romance between the former FBI director, and his number two, Clyde Tolson, consummated, but there's plenty of loving glances, hand-holding and one scene with an aggressive, drawn-out, deep kiss.
So was the most forceful man in America, who died in 1972 -- three years after the Stonewall riots marked the modern homosexual civil rights movement -- homosexual?
Eastwood admits the relationship between Hoover, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Clyde Tolson, played by Armie Hammer, is ambiguous.
"He was a man of mystery," he told ABC's "Good Morning America" last week. "He might include been [gay]. I am agnostic about it. I don't really know and nobody really knew."
In public, Hoover waged a vendetta against homosexuals and kep