Hoover's War on Gays: Exposing the FBI's "Sex Deviates" Program

by 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 information. In 1977–1978 these files were destroyed—and it would seem that four decades of the FBI's dirty secrets went up in smoke. But in a remarkable feat of investigative research, synthesis, and scholarly detective work, Douglas M. Charles manages to fill in the yawning blanks in the bureau's history of systematic (some would say obsessive) interest in the lives of gay 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 law enforcement of every kind—but none so much as the FBI, with its inexhaustible federal resources, connections, and its carefully crafted reputation for ethical, by-the-book operations. What Hoover’s War on Gays reveals, rather, is the FBI’s distinctly unethical, off-the-books long-term targeting of gay men and women and their organizations under cover of "official" rationale—such as suspicion of criminal activity or vulnerability to blackmail and influence. The book offers a wide-scale view of this policy and practice, from a notorious child kidnapping and murder of the 1930s (ostensibly by a sexual predator with homosexual tendencies), educating the public about the threat of "deviates," through WWII's security concerns about homosexuals who might be compromised by the enemy, to the Cold War's "Lavender Scare" when any and all gays working for the US government shared the fate of suspected Communist sympathizers. Charles's work also details paradoxical ways in which these incursions conjured counterefforts—like the Mattachine Society; ONE, Inc.; and the Daughters of Bilitis—aimed at protecting and serving the interests of postwar gay culture.With its painstaking recovery of a dark chapter in American history and its new insights into seemingly familiar episodes of that story—involving noted journalists, politicians, and celebrities—this thorough and deeply engaging book reveals the perils of authority run amok and stands as a reminder of damage done in the name of decency.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

477 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 11, 2015

Reviews

[Rebecca Crunden]

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I'm going to be labelling the books I'm using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

[Ronald Koltnow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Douglas M. Charles researched and wrote this exhaustive study of the FBI's Sex Deviates Program , which didn't really end until the Clinton administration. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the book is Charles's asides about the difficulty of getting files or the heavy redaction of the files he received from FOIA requests. The book spans nine decades, from the WWI Newport scandal to the FBI's firing of gay agent Frank Buttino in the 90s. Focusing on higher ranking members of government, Charles follows in the footsteps of David K. Johnson, whose book THE LAVENDER SCARE gave the 50s era another name. Like McCarthyism, The Lavender Scare, and subsequent purges of government employees, involved the invasion of privacy of countless thousands of people, whether gay, closeted, or suspected; It was one of the worst abuses of power the FBI ever committed. Lead by the tireless J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI gathered information, which they wisely burned later. That was a loss for scholars, but Charles is to be congratulated on the digging that he has done.

[Aj Davenport · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had great expectations for this book but they were dashed. I finally gave up half way through the book.

The writing style reads like a collection of master's theses that were trying to reach a certain word count.

No analysis of the facts presented and retelling of the same incidents multiple times. The last third of the book was a list of footnotes with no ties to the material in the esseys.

The author needs a good editor.

[Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like many history professors, this author has the talent and intellect to take an extremely interesting subject and make it as boring as possible.

[Mills College Library]

363.25953 C4755 2015