J. Edgar, Lady of the Night
When The Chiseler said it had an all-dames issue in the works, I began to think … maybe, just maybe, J. Edgar Hoover might quality.
No, I don’t believe half the cross-dressing tales (none of them, actually – way too chancy for him to be involved in something like that), but s/he’s an interesting study in the psychic bondage of old-style, iron-clad gay coverup and denial. But maybe also of something more.
Of course, gays had to hide in the closet back then (even under the carpet), but they didn’t have to hunt down their own, as did Hoover and his forever live-in and top deputy, Clyde Tolson. Going after gays was one for Hoover’s many FBI obsessions.
By any account, Hoover was an over-the-top sonofabitch. He ran the FBI and its forerunner for almost 50 years, intimidating presidents and making himself into a impregnable fortress. (LBJ’s comment, roughly remembered, on why he didn’t fire Hoover: “Better to have the bastard inside the tent pissin’ out than outside the tent pissin’ in.”)
Yet over the long haul, and especially during the McCarthy era, Hoover’s image outshone the golden calf. When I was listening to radio programs in the early ‘50s (12 hours a day while not in school), FBI dramas were near the top: “This Is Your FBI,” “The FBI in Peace and War,” “I Was a Communist for the FBI.”
As a young teen, I drank it all in, blindly accepting the idea that we had the most advanced, incorruptible and magnificent law-enforcement agency the world had ever known – one that made Scotland Yard creak like a rusty boxspring.
I didn’t get a good hold on the “evil” of American communism until I saw Communist Party USA General Secretary Gus Hall speak, around 1960. Geez, poor, schlepping absurdity with little or nothing to say and little or no following. Why the hell was anyone ever afraid of these people?
Hoover couldn’t accept anyone detracting from his own glory. In the 1930s, he shouldered agent Melvin Purvis out of the FBI, even though Purvis was the most effective lassoer of miscreants in the organization. Purvis had gotten too much press. And he kept his agents nominally incorruptible by not tackling organized crime, where the real temptations lay.
Anal to the nth degree. Hoover had his desk photographed at the end of the day before the cleaning crew came in, so they could polish its top and then rearrange every item so it would look undisturbed.
I’m quite a fan of books about serial killers. I’ve little urge to kill (most) people, but real evil in the human race is fascinating. In one of those encyclopedias of serial killers and other marauders, the author notes that of all the unindicted offenders, he’d place Hoover near the top. I tend to agree. Hoover probably did as much harm to the country as anyone over his half century, corrupting our sense of what is good, worthwhile and emblematic.
Hoover heaped special venom on those outside the sexual norm. His response to Martin Luther King seems based as much on King’s infidelities as on his political stance. Why such a moralistic concern about overstepping sexual boundaries? It seemed more than a blanket to cover his own at-home liaisons.
I’d never been much concerned with cross-gender confusion until recently. A man trapped in a woman’s body, or a woman trapped in a man’s? I couldn’t see what the real problem was – a minor annoyance at best. Then I started listening to Antony and the Johnsons.
“For Today I Am a Boy” hit me hard. Antony made me realize the true agony of a would-be woman yearning for release from the pressure of a lumbering, wombless, imposed physicality.
So now I’m wondering: Could Hoover have been a woman at heart, encumbered by and restricted to a bulldog male countenance and a half century of inescapable lies? Did his mirror insult in the morning, humiliate him all the while he was denigrating anyone who believed in freedom of mind?
Just a thought.
by Derek Davis