Hoovers war on gays

FBI redactions made it appear there were no references, but in fact there were.

I had recently acquired from Princeton’s archives a letter Huggins had written to the ACLU. As insightful as those conclusions are, and as capably as Charles conveys them, they do not necessarily need to be repeated again.

Such relatively minor quibbles do not, however, detract from the overall quality of Hoover’s War on Gays.

Some were documents not released to me, but that clearly should have been released to me (exemplifying problems dealing with the FBI & FOIA). It discusses the FBI’s unintentional lead in ending federal gay employment discrimination in the 1990s. My only recourse was to research the recently opened Kameny papers at the Library of Congress, and I traveled there in May of 2014.

The Kameny papers contain a wealth of information.

I expected a letter detailing the size of the file and what it would cost me, at 10 cents per page after the first free 100 pages. That was a simpler fingerprint and arrest record program (see image 6), markedly different from the June 1951 Sex Deviates Program reconfiguration.

The document detailed the policy and procedures of the Sex Deviates Program, including what to index and how.

While a name might be redacted in an FBI file, the contextual information appearing around the redacted name (and the number of type-written letters in the redaction) can often but not always reveal it.

With the help of a brilliant undergraduate research assistant, we compiled dossiers full of detailed information about gay rights activists and we uncovered many names which revealed the history of FBI surveillance.

But the gargantuan size of the Mattson file revealed that I had hit the mother lode: there was no FBI interest in “Sex Offenders” prior to Mattson, and then boom!

I next researched the FBI’s surveillance of the East Coast homophile movement, including Frank Kameny’s Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), the New York Mattachine, Donald Webster Cory, and several others.

It was not only a subject deserving comprehensive treatment, it was also a subject of great personal interest. Instead, here it was! I couldn’t believe it. The FBI released to me only Huggins’ correspondence with the Bureau, a couple of internal FBI documents listing his various Washington jobs in the 1950s, and some previously unknown facts about him in bureau notes attached to his correspondence (see image 7).

Rather, Charles maintains that the FBI regularly responded to changes in the social construction of homophobia, which “was/is something influenced by shifts in US society and culture” (xv). It’s a vast, complex, and varied history, with multiple causal factors, spanning more than 50 years.

The Author
Douglas M.

Charles is Associate Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny Campus. Thus my second book, The FBI’s Obscene File (2012), briefly delayed my research on the FBI and gays.

FBI and Gays
During my first book’s editing, I starting writing an article on my early FBI and gays research.

In this case that meant compiling biographical information about as many Mattachine and ONE members as possible. I experienced one of those ah-ha moments, and remember exclaiming “This is Huggins!” Fairly quickly, then, his story came together, helped by a FOIA request on Huggins. If public attitudes provide strong incentives for not just the FBI, but government at large to operate in limited contours and if public attitudes are as malleable as the changing tide on gay rights suggests, then ultimate authority resides precisely where it is supposed to: with the people.