Selection from The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.
In 1933, a few months after the attorney general appointed him director of the new Division of Investigation in the Department of Justice, J. Edgar Hoover read an appalling description of himself in Collier’s magazine. Hoover, the leader of America’s “secret federal police system,” was “short, fat, businesslike,” and walked with a “rather mincing step, almost feminine.” It marked the first time anyone had put the rumors in print. The thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried Hoover still lived with his mother, and he had never been seen with a woman. The Bureau responded quickly, planting a story in Liberty magazine—the same publication delivered by a young Franklin Kameny in Queens—that described him as “170 pounds of live, virile masculinity.”
Despite the rumors, America’s growing preoccupation with sexual deviance helped Hoover grow his personal empire of surveillance, which would ultimately last forty-eight years and eight presidents. In 1935, the division became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its director began throwing fuel onto America’s concern about sex crimes. The “sex fiend, most loathsome of all the vast army of crime, has become a sinister threat to the safety of American childhood and Womanhood,” warned Hoover in 1937. His Bureau opened a Sex Offenders file, and across the country, police roundups of sexual deviants became the norm. The director’s “War on the Sex Criminal,” meanwhile, helped him justify a larger, better-funded Federal Bureau of Investigation.
On April 10, 1950, two months after Senator McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, a special messenger arrived at the White House to deliver a confidential letter to one of President Truman’s top advisors. The FBI, wrote Hoover, had obtained a list of 393 federal employees who had been arrested on charges of “sexual irregularities.” Within days, the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” program came into being. From then on, when the Metropolitan Police made a homosexual arrest, the department automatically forwarded the deviant’s fingerprints to the Bureau, which checked them against its files. The FBI then forwarded its information to the Civil Service Commission or the employee’s federal agency, which promptly purged the homosexual from its ranks.
Hoover’s Sex Deviates program grew from a simple clearinghouse of arrest information to a mammoth apparatus of homosexual surveillance. In June 1951, the director ordered his subordinates to begin forwarding not only arrests, but also mere allegations of homosexuality to the CSC. If federal employees had suspicions about a coworker’s sexuality, they could simply inform the FBI. The suspected homosexual would be in an interrogation room—and often without a job—within days.
The Bureau kept track of Washington’s homosexuals through a simple, elegant system. If a Bureau supervisor noticed an allegation of homosexuality in a file, the director held him “personally responsible” for underlining the deviant’s name with a green pencil. The Records section, when it saw the green underline, indexed the name accordingly, and Hoover gained one more homosexual for his vast collection of secrets.
Hoover also used the purges to strengthen his reign. To ensure that the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election, he leaked allegations—that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson had twice been arrested for homosexual activity—to Nixon, McCarthy, and the press. Sometimes, if the Bureau learned that a public official was closeted, the FBI refrained from telling that official’s agency. Instead, the Bureau stayed quiet if the official agreed to become a “listening post” for Hoover, giving the director one more set of ears to spy on political adversaries within the government. By maintaining this regime of blackmail, Hoover did not need further proof that homosexuals threatened national security. Indeed, if it was so easy for him to blackmail homosexuals, why would the Soviets not blackmail them, too?
When Hoover learned of the Mattachine Society in 1953, he ordered an investigation of the homosexual organization. The investigation yielded an extensive report, which relied upon twenty-one different informants and ultimately concluded that Communists did not control the Mattachine. But the Bureau’s list of homosexuals grew. After the Society organized its blood drive to demonstrate the upstanding nature of homosexuals, the FBI easily acquired the names of those who had donated. Over the next five years, the Bureau forwarded its fifty-three-page Mattachine report—and the names contained within—to at least ten federal agencies, which could then appropriately administer their own purges.
On July 28, 1961, two FBI agents appeared at the offices of the San Francisco Mattachine to speak with Hal Call, the organization’s chairman. Call had dissolved the Society’s national structure only weeks earlier, partially because of the rumormongering Mattachine chapter in New York. He had been in the Mattachine since the days of the Fifth Order, and he had joined Marilyn Rieger’s openness faction in 1953.
Call agreed to hand over information about other homophile activists if it would be of interest to the police. He agreed to add the Bureau to the Mattachine Review’s mailing list. And yes, Call told the special agents, the San Francisco Mattachine “would be willing to cooperate with the FBI in assisting and locating homosexuals whether they are members of the Society or not.”
