The truth about J. Edgar Hoover's Cross-Dressing.
American myth has a story about J. Edgar Hoover dressing in women's clothing.Do we know more about Hoover or the nature of gossip?
It has been said that the FBI director liked to dress up in women's clothing and participate in homosexual orgies.Right?A source with good reason to despise Hoover paid for a recollection of something that supposedly occurred three decades earlier.The scholar notes that the character of "Transvestite Hoover" has become a myth in the US.Potter calls it a tale of sex, lies, and political history.
The FBI's predecessor agency, the Bureau of Investigation, was headed by J. Edgar Hoover in 1924.He became the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when it was reorganized in 1935.His agenda shaped federal law enforcement for half a century.Hoover was involved in many of the nation's most notorious scandals.He dismissed the existence of organized crime and played down the investigations of civil rights violations.
The FBI was dominated by Hoover's definitions of crime, dissent, and subversion.Potter says his politics is more shameful than his sex life, and that he used the FBI to perpetuate unethical or illegal political acts.
Was he a cross-dresser?Potter believes that the cross-dressing rumor sheds light on the nature of gossip.Many hated Hoover for his abuses of power.He was attacked because of his Homophobia became a powerful tool.After his death, the witch-hunter became the hunted because perverted sex is a constant theme bordering on obsession in Hoover's own writing about criminals, Communists, and social equality movements.Notable women like Ma Barker and Emma Goldman were hated by Hoover.
The Bureau investigated gay groups.The Mattachine Society investigated Hoover's spread of gay stories about Adlai Stevenson.
This weaponizing of sexuality was not new to Hoover.Liberal gossip helped bring down Senator Joe McCarthy because of the scandals of his gay aide.According to Potter, this was part of a long-used strategy of outing, using gossip about sexual identity as a political weapon that shamed the powerful but closeted.
We don't know what Hoover's sexuality was, and Potter uses phrases like "unsexed homosexual," "life-long bachelor," and "married to the FBI."Potter states that gossip is not true or false.Its function is to fix identities that are not stable.Gossip should open, even if J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.
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