Queer hoover: Sex, lies, and political history

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 355-381

  Potter, Claire Bond ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347216381     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2007.0021     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. This account is taken from Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1993), 253-55.
2. Ibid.
3. Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), 108.
4. "The Smearing Game," New York Times, 6 November 1994; Frank Rich, "Men in Uniform," New York Times, 11 April 1993.
5. For an account of the origins of and controversies surrounding outing see Michelangelo Signorile, "Gossip Watch," Outweek, 29 May 1991.
6. For political deployment of outing against allegedly closeted gays and lesbians in the Bush and Clinton administrations see Signorile, "Making a List, Checking It Twice," Advocate, 30 June 1992,
7. and "Outing Born Again," Advocate, 9 February 1993.
8. For reports on the FBI in the gay press see Christopher Street, 7 December 1983;
9. Scott P. Anderson, "ACLU Seeks Data about FBI Spying on Gays since 1950," Advocate, 6 March 1984;
10. Matthew Stadler, New York Native, 24 September 1984;
11. Advocate, 30 October 1984;
12. Michael Balter, "Decades of FBI Surveillance Unveiled," Advocate, 11 December 1984. It is possible that the first published allegation of Hoover's homosexuality appeared in the late 1960s in Al Goldstein's sex tabloid, Screw;
13. see Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 229.
14. George Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 40-51.
15. Martha Vicinus, "Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?" Radical History Review 60 (1994): 58.
16. Marc Stein, "Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: The Making of U.S. LGBT Historiography," GLQ 11, no. 4 (2005): 605-25;
17. Henry Abelove, Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
18. For the power of gossip in the nineteenth century see Norma Basch, "Marriage, Morals and Politics in the Election of 1828," Journal of American History 80, no. 3 (1993): 890-918;
19. and Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
20. For the importance of rumor to economic life see Richard White, "Information, Markets and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age," Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (2003): 19-43.
21. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
22. and "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-16;
23. Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000);
24. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
25. Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000);
26. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine and Homosexuality in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
27. and Allan Bérubé, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990).
28. Chauncey, Why Marriage, 24-27;
29. Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 108-47;
30. and David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
31. For Hoover's use of gossip that Stevenson was well known by other prominent gay men in Illinois as "Adeline" see Athan Theoharis, Nation, 7 May 1990.
32. For liberals' use of the gay smear see Andrea Friedman, "The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip and Cold War Politics," American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2005): 1105-29, at 1107.
33. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 22;
34. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997);
35. and Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996).
36. Martha Umphrey addresses a similar problem in "The Trouble with Harry Thaw," Radical History Review 62 (1995): 8-23.
37. Spacks, 59.
38. Claire Bond Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998);
39. Richard Gid Powers, "One G-Man's Family: Popular Entertainment Formulas and J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I.," American Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1978): 471-92;
40. and Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).
41. As Deborah Nelson argues, postwar U.S. political history is characterized by a central paradox: the collapse of privacy and insistent assertions of its desirability; see Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
42. For an overview of this period that makes this point specifically in relation to McCarthyism see Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).
43. Nelson Blackstock, The FBI's War on Political Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1976);
44. James Kirkpatrick Davis, Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Anti-War Movement (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997);
45. David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From Solo to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991);
46. Fred J. Cooke, The FBI Nobody Knows (New York: Macmillan, 1964);
47. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991),
48. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987);
49. and Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
50. Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
51. Summers, 13; quotations from the A&E special are from my own transcriptions. The blackmail theory has been widely repeated; it can be found in Diarmuid Jeffreys, The Bureau: Inside the Modern FBI (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 84.
52. For the historical association of gossip with women see Spacks, 38-46.
53. Jeffreys, 67.
54. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);