I can recall my father's warnings in the early 70s that "they'll have you followed" just going into NYC for "social life", I thought this was dumb and irrational. Judging from this book, maybe there was something to this.
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
"Hoover's War on Gays", by Douglas Charles, is a shocking, detailed read
Author: Douglas M. Charles
Title: “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex
Deviates’ Program”
Publication: 2015, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence),
ISBN 978-0-7006-2119-4 hardcover (alsoe-book), 453 pages (plus 15 roman); 8
long chapters, with Prologue, Epilogue, endnotes, and bibliography
Amazon link.
I actually purchased this book in a Barnes and Noble store
at Tysons, VA, from the (not too conspicuous) “Current Affairs” counter.
It’s interesting that the book is published by the
University of Kansas Press. I went to
graduate school at KU and earned my MA in Math in 1968 just before being
“drafted”. That is itself an interesting
narrative. The author is a history professor at Penn State.
The book mentions Hoover’s connection to George Washington
University, where I attended and graduated “living from home” in the early
1960s after my William and Mary “expulsion” (below). Hoover’s interest in
Comstock would certainly be reflected later in his attacking gay organizations
and publications.
Of course, it is now “common knowledge” that J. Edgar
Hoover, who ran the FBI from 1935 until his death at 77 in 1972 (a special dispensation by LBJ – the
president who called homosexuality “the thing you just couldn’t tell” –
preventing from retiring at 70) was “gay” (indeed, a lifelong bachelor who
willed his house to his partner) and that his witch-hunts were nothing more
than hypocrisy to cover up his own life. But as this monumental book shows,
there really is a long, detailed and painful history for all of this. The first
chapter is “Was J. Edgar Hoover Gay? Does It Matter?”
The symptoms of the homophobia at its height are alarming
today indeed, and protracted. Sometimes
undercover agents would initiate contacts (or follow home) in men’s rooms in
order to make arrests. (Some approached
me in 1972 in a Washington hotel at a chess tournament, and I ran out fast
enough to avoid anything; the only time this has happened.) The FBI tried to ban the mailing of gay
literature (through postal regulations) and have it declared obscene, in order
to prevent the dissemination of gay “ideas”.
Numerous government employees were fired, even before Eisenhower’s XO in
1953. Homosexuality was illogically tied
to communism, leading to harassment of Hollywood and smaller film businesses,
especially of Andy Warhol. (The book
mentions “Lonesome Cowboys”, which I think I saw around Times Square in the mid
1970s.) This would lead to my own
William and Mary expulsion in the fall of 1961 and “treatment” at NIH in 1962. On
p. 230, Douglas discusses a comparable sequence with the narrative of
pre-Mattachine organizer Huggins, who was expelled from the University of
Illinois but avoided the draft with a 4F.
Douglas gives a detailed history of Frank Kameny (whom I met
numerous times before his passing, and with whom I’ve discussed my own books
over the phone). It seems Kameny was
targeted for a false arrest in San Francisco, and had he not mentioned it
equivocally on his job application, be might never have been “discovered” by
the Army Map Service.
I can recall my father's warnings in the early 70s that "they'll have you followed" just going into NYC for "social life", I thought this was dumb and irrational. Judging from this book, maybe there was something to this.
I can recall my father's warnings in the early 70s that "they'll have you followed" just going into NYC for "social life", I thought this was dumb and irrational. Judging from this book, maybe there was something to this.
Douglas gives a detailed history of “gay” FBI agent Frank
Buttino (author of “A Special Agent: Gay and Inside the FBI”, William Morrow,
1993, reviewed on my legacy “doaskdotell” site), at a time when the FBI had
evolved a “don’t ask don’t tell” culture predicting the military policy under
Clinton. In fact, Buttino had a sailor
for a lover. He doesn’t mention David
Mixner (“Stranger Among Friends”. Bantam, 1996), who was actually set up by an
FBI “sting” in 1969, according to his own book.
Douglas’s coverage is comparable in amount of historical
detail to that of Randy Shilts in his 1996 book “Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and
Lesbians in the U.S. Military”.
All of this leads us, of course, to “ask why”. It’s true that people in the US frontier
culture had developed a notion of gender “essentialism”. But for a long time, homosexuality stayed off
the radar screen as a public issue (despite a minor scandal in the Navy during
WWI, covered by Shilts). The Leopold-Loeb
case in Chicago in the1920s (dramatized in the play “Never the Sinner” by John
Logan, which I saw in Minneapolis in 2001) was viewed as more as matter of
corruption of the rich than as a sexual matter.
But another case in 1937, the kidnapping and murder of Charles Mattson,
would catch the public attention on “gays” and catalyze Hoover’s attention to
the problem. Douglas brings in the role of the Great Depression, where “essentialist”
men lost their ability to provide for their families (dependent wives and
children), as leading to the need for political scapegoats. Of course, the Depression was related to
inadequate financial regulation and arguably clumsy policies that followed, not
to sexual morality. It is true that public confusion could conflate sexual orientation with pedophilia (an idea that Russia exploits today), even though logically this makes no sense: a heterosexual of bad "character" could desire an underage partner just as easily, out of a fantasy of bearing children by younger "nubile" women (even conservative writer George Gilder has admitted this).
The connection of homosexuality with Communism also seems
obviously intellectually sloppy for a modern person. Douglas gives a lot of attention to the life
of Harry Hay, while explaining that Hay tried to keep these areas of activism
largely separate. On the surface, the idea that homosexual men are typically
less interested in their own procreative potential could seem as antithetical to
the role of the extended family (in preserving generational wealth and
inequality) could make some sense to some people. That could morph into grouping the homosexual
with “the enemy” who is likely to go on future rampages of revolutionary expropriation.
I worked for the National Bureau of Standards from 1963-1964, and recall the Civil
Service Questions about “sexual perversion” as well as membership in the
Communist Party, and most of all, “notoriously disgraceful conduct”, which
Douglas says could include membership in homophile organizations (I was not
aware of that interpretation at the time).
In modern times, since the 1990s especially, a libertarian
view of sexual orientation could connect it to the opposite – to hyper-individualism,
and to the idea that the formation of personal intimate relationships has an
expressive function relating one’s own value judgments about what matters in
other people. But even that observation helps explain the “homophobia” of
earlier generations. In closed
environments like some college dorms and the military, the presence of openly
gay men could put “heterosexual” men on notice that their “potential” was being
observed and assessed, and could make them feel uneasy about their own
heterosexual future. This is related to
the military arguments about privacy and unit cohesion in the early days of the
debate about Bill Clinton’s attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military
(the Nunn-Moskos ideas that led to “don’t ask don’t tell”). But it is also an
idea that becomes less relevant in wealthier or better-off populations. I caught a lot of this in dorm life at
William and Mary (much less so at KU a few years later). I can say that insecure heterosexual males
feel better about themselves when they witness other non-competitive men like
me scoring with women rather than watching and gawking, kibitzing, and mentally
keeping score. It’s about having your own
skin in the game, and playing if you show up.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment