J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the "Sex Deviates" Program' - Interview Douglas Charles

For nearly four decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation used the so-called Sex Deviates Program to investigate and badger gay men and women in the United States. That harassment was justified by the belief that homosexuals posed a security risk in two ways: their behavior was thought to be an indication of immorality and it supposedly made them susceptible to blackmail. Douglas Charles's Hoover's War on Gays (University Press of Kansas, 2015) is the first monograph to trace the history of that program. In it, Charles demonstrates that the Bureau was driven by "an overarching and intense fear and loathing of gays." [...]

[Douglas Charles:] Hoover's FBI systematically collected information about gays since 1937, but when in 1950-1951, Hoover decided to create his Sex Deviates Program and file, he placed his bureau at the forefront in combating the Lavender Scare. It was Hoover's FBI that increased its collection and maintenance of information about gays, both fact and rumor, maintained a central index of gays, and widely distributed that information across (and even beyond) the government to ensure that gays were fired from their jobs, and even to influence bureaucratic appointments. While many people and groups played important roles in the Lavender Scare, none did so in such a central and far-reaching way as Hoover's FBI. Moreover, historical evidence indicates Hoover did all of this on his own authority; no one in either the Truman or Eisenhower administrations directed Hoover to undertake these activities. [...]

As an FBI historian, I knew there was a monumental research problem: the FBI destroyed its Sex Deviates file in 1977-78 and we knew very little about it. We generally knew its purpose from documents indirectly alluding to its existence and purpose; and we knew approximately how large it was from National Archives documents authorizing the FBI to incinerate it (it was 330,000 pages long). So the question was: how to research this? [...]

Hoover's War on Gays, I think, nicely compliments [Margot] Canaday's groundbreaking book. Because the FBI targeted gays starting in 1937 (in ways perfectly fitting the Canaday thesis), ended its Sex Deviates Program in 1977, and ended its anti-gay employment discrimination in 1993, the FBI reflects and embodies the "straight state."

source: Interview 'J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the "Sex Deviates" Program' by Christopher Elias; Douglas Charles is being interviewed; notchesblog.com/2016/06/21/j-edgar-hoover-the-fbi-and-the-sex-deviates-program/; NOTCHES; 21 June 2016