University Press of Kansas
Chapter Title: Prologue
Book Title: Hoover's War on Gays
Book Subtitle: Exposing the FBI's "Sex Deviates" Program
Book Author(s): Douglas M. Charles
Published by: University Press of Kansas
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Prologue
For decades in the United States, particularly dating from the mid-twenti-
eth century, gay men and women feared law enforcement of every stripe.
Being arrested at a private gathering or party, in a gay bar, or soliciting sex in
a seemingly remote location meant being publicly outed, losing their jobs,
and an end to life as they knew it. Being arrested on a “morals charge” meant
social stigmatization, including possible incarceration or commitment to a
mental institution, and being ostracized by family and friends. Topping the
list of law-enforcement agencies gays and lesbians feared most was the Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Unlike local police, FBI agents had not
only inexhaustible federal resources and connections but a carefully crafted
public image as scientific investigators who never failed in their efforts. To
be discovered, then outed, by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was one of the worst
possible scenarios any gay man or woman could face.
Until now, the history of the FBI investigations, monitoring, filing of
information, and deep obsession with gays and lesbians has only been doc-
umented sporadically and its origins unknown. There are reasons for this
lacuna. Sophisticated and documented histories of the FBI have existed only
since the mid-1970s, after FBI abuses became public through congressional
investigations and a newly invigorated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
permitted scholars access to FBI files as primary sources. Contemporane-
ous to this, also for the first time, historians began to develop gay and les-
bian history. Necessarily, then, it took time before an effort to reconstruct a
comprehensive history of the FBI and gays was even possible. The first FBI
histories focused, naturally, on documenting bureau investigative abuses,
civil liberties violations, and the creation of specialized files used to insulate
sensitive or illegal FBI activity. Biographies of the long-serving FBI director
then began to appear, followed by a variety of “FBI and . . . ” books covering
everything from racial minorities to student activists to anthropologists to
obscenity; the list is now extensive. Few FBI historians have touched upon
FBI interest in gays and lesbians, and those who have did so in a limited or
focused fashion.
Historians of the gay and lesbian past have not examined in detail, or
comprehensively, FBI interest in those with same-sex attraction. This is a
function of the difficulty in accessing source material on a wide range of
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xii Prologue
subjects using the FOIA. It is time-consuming and costly. Released files are
often heavily redacted, sometimes the FBI resists researchers’ efforts, and
the bureau still routinely destroys files it deems nonhistorical and will not
release anything if the subject is still living—limiting what we can know
about the FBI and more recent gay and lesbian history. Gay and lesbian
historians have also typically lacked a sophisticated understanding of both
the complicated nature of the long history of the FBI and its byzantine filing
procedures. Without an appreciation for both, any examination of FBI files
relating to gays and lesbians often will make no sense and reveal little. FBI
files are not stamped “Sex Deviates File,” for example. The FBI document
file number alone, a cryptic series of numbers—105-34074-104—reveals FBI
agents’ use of the Sex Deviates File, type of case, and size of the file. Knowing
this first is key to FBI research.
There have been occasional and episodic histories of FBI interest in
gays, lesbians, and their respective advocacy groups, however. FBI historian
Athan Theoharis offered the best when he wrote his book Chasing Spies
(2002), an examination of FBI failures to stem foreign counterintelligence
but success in promoting the politics of McCarthyism. Theoharis devoted a
chapter to the FBI and gays, “The Politics of Morality,” that detailed J. Edgar
Hoover’s promotion of both a politics of counterintelligence (gays as liable
to blackmail) and a politics of morality (gays as a moral peril). Theoharis
examined briefly, and only as part of his larger study, the 1950s congres-
sional committees investigating the gay threat; the start of the more formal
Sex Deviates Program and File; and the FBI in relation to Adlai Stevenson,
Arthur Vandenberg, and Joseph Alsop.1
Other FBI historians offered less on the FBI and gays, a function of
writing comprehensive single-volume histories of the bureau. Richard Gid
Powers restricted his coverage only to the rumors surrounding Hoover’s
sexuality in his FBI history Broken (2004). Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones briefly
touched upon FBI interest in gays at different points in The FBI: A History
(2007). Journalist Tim Weiner also only briefly touched upon the FBI and
gays as they related to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Stevenson, and
the Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations in Enemies:
A History of the FBI (2012).2
The first significant notation of the FBI in a history of the gay and les-
bian past was in John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983).
As both lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and FBI studies then
were young, D’Emilio was necessarily restricted to simply noting the varied
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Prologue xiii
FBI interest and footnoting some FBI files related to gays and lesbians. As
part of a larger study examining gender—specifically the “ideology of mas-
culinity”—and the US descent into Vietnam, Robert Dean dissected FBI
targeting of Charles Thayer, Charles Bohlen, and others in the foreign policy
establishment during the 1950s Lavender Scare in his Imperial Brotherhood
(2001). (During the 1950s the color red denoted communists, pink signified
sympathizers, and lavender was reserved for gays.) As Dean saw it, bucolic
conservatives such as J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and others found
it expedient to attack members of the elite, entrenched, foreign policy es-
tablishment who had propagated the containment policy by questioning
their sexuality (the “effete” elite), their associations with gays, and their level
of anticommunist resoluteness (being “soft” on communism). Without a
doubt, perceptions of gender were an important ingredient in FBI efforts,
but they were not the driving force. Dean’s thesis, moreover, is convincing
only when looking narrowly at the temporal confines of the 1950s public
Lavender Scare and the eastern elite. When one considers more broadly FBI
targeting of gays over five decades (dating from the mid-1930s) and well be-
yond elites, it becomes clear there were multifaceted influences at different
times driving FBI targeting of gays.3
Marcia Gallo’s otherwise excellent history of the lesbian group Daugh-
ters of Bilitis (DoB), Different Daughters (2006), only briefly noted FBI in-
terest in the group. Unsurprisingly, Gallo also mischaracterized FBI interest
as part of its illegal COINTELPRO disruption program. Her inexact and
brief treatment of FBI interest in that organization represents the typical
problem with LGBT histories: an incomplete understanding of the FBI and,
especially in the case of the DoB, the spotty nature of extant FBI records.
In his important book The Lavender Scare (2004), David K. Johnson deftly
documented the public and political Lavender Scare, in which Hoover’s FBI
played a major role, but only briefly noted Hoover’s interest in Bohlen, Ste-
venson, Thayer, and the like. The FBI itself was not indexed in the book.
As with Gallo’s study, this is an unsurprising function of the difficulty and
lengthy time it takes to access sometimes incomplete FBI files along with
Johnson’s not being a specialist in FBI history.4
Other limited scholarly examinations that have touched upon both the
FBI and gays are either those that stand alone without any broader FBI con-
textualization or those that are part of altogether different studies. These in-
clude Alexander Stephan’s book “Communazis”: FBI Surveillance of German
Émigré Writers (2000) and Adrea Weiss’s article “Communism, Perversion,
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xiv Prologue
and Other Crimes against the State: The FBI Files of Klaus and Erika Mann”
(2001). Also in this category are Lawrence R. Murphy’s article about the
gay baiting of Senator David Walsh, “The House on Pacific Street: Homo-
sexuality, Intrigue, and Politics during World War II” (1985), and Irwin F.
Gellman’s first exposé of Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s peccadil-
loes in Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles
(1995). The FBI involvement in gay baiting General Philip Faymonville was
briefly recounted in Mary Glantz’s article “An Officer and a Diplomat? The
Ambiguous Position of Philip R. Faymonville and United States–Soviet Re-
lations, 1941–1943” (2008).5 No one has ever contextualized or examined
together the FBI’s concurrent investigations of Welles, Walsh, and Faymon-
ville, however.
Hoover’s War on Gays presents the first comprehensive history of FBI
interest in, obsession with, and politics surrounding gays, lesbians, and their
respective organizations. As such, it attempts to merge FBI scholarship with
the scholarship of gay and lesbian history to reach a more comprehensive
understanding and contextualization of the broader history. This book is
therefore predominantly original research and, in part, historical synthe-
sis, revisiting different areas previously, but often separately, researched and
examined by other historians. To understand better FBI interest in some
of these once-trod subjects, I have returned to the primary sources to con-
struct my own understanding of them in light of broader FBI history and
to suss out details others have overlooked.
This book, therefore, revisits the Second World War–era FBI interest in
Welles, Walsh, and Faymonville but examines them together as part of a
greater whole. It also revisits, including with new material, FBI investiga-
tions of Thayer and Bohlen (and others), subjects of interest to Dean and
(with Bohlen) Theoharis. It further revisits and contextualizes, again with
new detail, the FBI and Stevenson, Vandenberg, Alsop, and Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge Jr., all subjects Theoharis has previous discussed. Significantly,
this study also builds on Theoharis’s discovery of the FBI Sex Deviates Pro-
gram and File. Theoharis learned about it from FBI documents that in-
directly described its general purpose and methods. This book offers, for
the first time, analysis using the previously unreleased and original FBI Sex
Deviates Program policy document. It offers previously unknown details
about the program and, with other documents, dates the program’s imple-
mentation to earlier than we had previously thought.
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Prologue xv
The pages that follow make clear that there was no single causal factor,
gender or otherwise, to explain the fifty-plus-year FBI interest in gays, lesbi-
ans, and the politics surrounding them. A confluence of forces at particular
moments—starting in 1937 and ending in the 1990s—including gender, per-
ceptions of morality, politics, bureaucracy, personality, economics, culture,
the construction and intensity of homophobia in the United States, and
changing perceptions of homosexuality helped shape the ways in which the
FBI responded to gays, lesbians, and their respective organizations. Yet even
with all this, there was always one common, persistent thread ever present
since 1937: an overarching and intense fear and loathing of gays. Although
FBI officials and others always had an official rationale for targeting gay citi-
zens—characterizing them as criminals or vulnerable to blackmail and in-
fluence, for example—always underneath it all was an irrepressible animus.
One Civil Service Commission (CSC) bureaucrat, incredibly, even admitted
as much in a policy memo in the mid-1960s. The construction and inten-
sity of homophobia changed over time and was/is something influenced by
shifts in US society and culture. The FBI responded with this homopho-
bia, influenced by contemporaneous forces and events of many types. FBI
agents, throughout, were able to marshal a seemingly inexhaustible supply
of willing informants and use their liaisons with police departments, gov-
ernment agencies, and others in targeting gays and lesbians. Their efforts
both frightened and intimidated countless gay citizens and energized still
others to organize and fight for equality. In the long run the FBI was un-
able to resist forces demanding change from it and other more conservative
institutions, yet none of those efforts in any way were easy. In fact, going up
against the FBI was singularly difficult as well as dangerous.
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Hoover’s War on Gays
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