FBI agents upset over movie alleging J. Edgar Hoover was gay

[alp227]

Gregg Schwarz frowned as he positioned himself, just so, in front of the wrought iron fence surrounding John Edgar Hoover’s grave, a place he has visited countless times but never before in anger.

A retired FBI agent who joined the agency in 1972, the year Hoover died, Schwarz had hired a videographer to film him for YouTube expressing his displeasure with a movie that depicted Hoover as a repressed homosexual. In a dig at Clint Eastwood, the director of “J. Edgar,” Schwarz titled his video response, “Dirty Harry to Filthy Harry.”

“Mr. Hoover was portrayed as an individual who had homosexual tendencies and was a tyrannical monster,” Schwarz said into the camera, as the sun glinted off his FBI cuff links and FBI lapel pin. “That is simply not true.”

Many former FBI agents share Schwartz’s pique with the film’s dropped hints of an abiding love between Hoover and aide Clyde Tolson, who is buried a few grave sites away. Historians agree that there is no evidence that either man was gay, and a request for comment from either Eastwood or screenwriter Dustin Lance Black was declined.

full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/fbi-agents-upset-over-movie-alleging-j-edgar-hoover-was-gay/2011/11/21/gIQAQSlJAO_singlePage.html

The J. Edgar movie has had poor critical reviews; the Post gave it 1.5 of 4 stars.

[gateley]

1. Yeah, like that's never been alleged before.

:eyes:

[Angry Dragon]

2. Herman Cain was heard to say that he knew the man and he never

made a pass at him and that he was beautiful............

[Kennah]

4. No Blitz

[villager]

3. A rightwing cryptofascist with repressed sexuality!? Why I never....!

n/t

[pennylane100]

5. I thought it was a fact, not a rumor, that he was gay.

Wasn't there some story about him dressing up in women's clothes and that he had a life long partner? I need to start googling.

[The Second Stone]

6. Hoover used his position to break and enter

violate privacy, record intimate moments of others and then blackmail them to obtain policies favorable to his own employment and personal power. That is historical fact. The additional fact that he also sometimes performed his actual job is irrelevant when compared with the patterns of his crimes. He was a racketeer who subverted our whole country. He was and is beneath contempt.

That he might have been a hypocrite at heart for loving Clyde Tolson without acting on it is entirely beside the point. If he acted on it, then it was a crime by the laws of that time that would have disqualified him from his job and small potatoes.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. I thought Hoover was a transvestite, not gay.

That came up very shortly after he died.

[HowHeThinks]

8. Hoover was a despicable man........

His abuses of power were legendary. THAT is a fact that cannot be denied. As for his sexual proclivity.......I don't really care, but for a man who deemed other people's sex lives in the "national interest" I believe his could use a little light shown on it as well. The rumors were rampant in Washington, and this guy must have been living in a vacuum if he hadn't heard them. As for the "tyrannical monster" part, I think there's enough documentation on that to sink a battleship. His "enemies list" made Nixon's look paltry in comparison.

As I said, Hoover was a despicable, power mad cretin of the first order who, if not for his "secret files" on the rich and powerful, would have been canned decades before his death.

[XanaDUer]

9. Wow, so folks visit his grave like they do Elvis' and Jim Morrison's?nt

[Sienna86]

10. These guys are retired, old-school agents.

nt