GAY OR NAY: Was J. Edgar Hoover A Cross-Dressing Queen?

We return to an important question: was this historical figure gay...or nay? This time, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover goes to gay court. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oh, Filthheads hits that time again for the fan favorite
filthy topic, gay or Nay, where we take one historical
figure to gay court and see if they are guilty
guilty of first degree homosexuality. Today's subject none other than

(00:42):
the Big Bad Daddy himself, the man who ushered in
the FBI, j Edgar Hoover. I asked on a poll
on Instagram at American filth Pod if you all thought
if he was gay or nay? An eighty eight percent
of you said gay, And as we'll see in this episode,

(01:03):
I think there is an eighty eight percent chance you
are right, because when I look at him, my gaydar
is already singing show tunes. In fact, did you know
that the Jay and j Edgar Hoover is short for geez,
I'm homosexual and Hoover is short for hoovering up some hogs. Anyway,

(01:28):
the sexuality of j. Edgar Hoover has been a debate
amongst historians for decades, also amongst Hoover's contemporaries when he
was alive. While there's unfortunately no official evidence at the
same time to prove if someone's gay, what kind of
official evidence would you need like a video of Hoover

(01:48):
in a sequence suit saying, matter of factly to the camera, me,
I'm a big queen slay. So let's ask the important
questions here on American Filth. Was j Edgar Hoover straight?
Was he asexual? Was he gay? Was he an FBI
sexual that's like bisexual, but.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
You put the FBI in it, you get it?

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Or did he just have some really close friends. So
this is American filth, and stay tuned as we try
to do some rigorous research into this topic. Cue the
theme song. This is American Filth and I'm Gabby Watts.

(02:35):
Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history.
This week's episode, Gay Ornay was Jay Edgar Hoover a
cross dressing queen. Oh do you guys like this sultry

(03:04):
jazz for this episode today? I don't know if it
really fits because j Edgar Hoover was a little bit
of a bitch, so I feel like there should be
more of a bite. But at the same time, maybe
it cuts the edge of him a little bit. He's
quite unfortunate, not because he's gay, but because of his
other personality traits. Okay, Jay Edgar Hoover did a lot

(03:28):
of stuff. He was in power for forty eight years
as the head of the Bureau of Investigation and then
the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But all
that work he did in law enforcement and national security,
we're not really concerned with all of that right now. Well,
we are concerned about our rumors and hot gossip about

(03:49):
his personal life. So let's look at some very circumstantial
evidence and have fun by jumping to conclusions about his sexuality.
I love to have fun in this way. First piece
of evidence that he might have been gay, Well, Jay
Edgar Hoover loved his mommy. He lived with her in Washington,

(04:11):
d c. Until her death when he was forty three.
He was a big mama's boy, which, in my opinion,
a man relating to his mom and spending a lot
of time with a woman, I'm gonna say that's gay. Also,
people said that Hoover was a brutal narcissist. I'm not

(04:34):
saying something because usually just being a narcissist is bad enough.
But he was nitpicky type, a extremely anal retentive, which,
if he was gay, poor guy, because having a tightly
wound anus that's not very helpful. In the Sack, several
of Hoover's contemporaries observed that he had next to nothing

(04:55):
of a sex life. Outwardly, he didn't seem to be
interested at all in women and in sexuality in general.
He wasn't even trying to fit into the ste ands
of the day where a serious man would have a
wife and kids. He was like, I do not need
to conform to those gender stereotypes. I'm Hoover. But was

(05:17):
Hoover being like this because he thought women were stupid
and ichy? Or was he being like this because he
wanted to get down and dirty with some dudes in
a time when that was a big no no. Hoover

(05:37):
was living in time when homosexuality was not good. People
didn't like it. It was criminalized. It wasn't until the
nineteen sixties when states started decriminalizing same sex activity. And
you guys know this, people weren't out like that. So
instead of being a homosexual, it was much more socially

(05:59):
acceptable to be like, I don't like women and sex
iw in general. Hoover, it does seem like he'd be
weird about sex, like he didn't seem like the type
of person who would enjoy engaging in straight or gay
fluid exchange. Because he was a major hypochondriac. He was

(06:20):
so against being touched that he told his coworkers to
never step on his shadow. Also, anytime a NWD disease dropped,
Hoover would immediately go to the doctor and be like,
I have it. He hated germs, He compulsively washed his hands.
He freaked out if he ever saw a fly. He
even had an air filtration system at his house that

(06:42):
allegedly electrocuted poisons in the air. I mean electrocuting poisons
in the air. If I'm being honest. It's a little freaky,
a little kinky, even like a little BDS emmy. So
perhaps Hoover wasn't weird about sex. He was just a

(07:04):
bit of a sadistic talk. Yes, this is what I'm positing.
He's the sadistic top because he electrocuted poisons. He did
some pretty kinky stuff in general, though, Like over the
decades as the head of the FBI, he amassed a
lot of power, and one way he did that was

(07:25):
through the art of blackmail. He generated all these secret
files with sensitive documents and photographs of powerful people and
compromising positions, and many of those photos were pornographic in nature,
and apparently Hoover would look at these photos a lot,

(07:45):
being like, Wow, I am so powerful, this is so
embarrassing for them that I have these, but also I
like to look at them. So God, I'm gonna say
that Hoover seemed prone to engage in very alternative sexuality
and what was super alternative for the time being gay. God,

(08:13):
this is such a robust historical analysis. Now, this next
thing I'm gonna say might be a stretch even for
you philth listeners, But I think a piece of evidence
that suggests that Hoover wanted to smash Peen was that he,

(08:34):
on the surface, hated gay people and he did everything
in his power to make their lives awful. At the FBI,
he hunted down gay activist groups and labeled them terrorists.
He tried to eradicate all gay employees from the federal government,

(08:57):
and during the McCarthy era, one of the mandates of
the FBI was to track down alleged homosexuals and arrest
them because if your homosexual, you're probably also a communist.
So Hoober was going through a lot of effort to
find all these homosexuals, and so I ask why did

(09:18):
he want to know where they all were so that
they could hang. Also, he was so homophobic, it was
like he was compensating for something. You guys maybe agree
with this. Homophobes are notoriously gay. Yeah, that comes from
some mostly vibes based research. But where there are a

(09:41):
large gathering of homophobic people, gay stuff is usually happening.
Like last year at the Republican National Convention, Grinder usage skyrocketed.
The gay dating app and I say dating in quotes
was blowing up, and I mean blowing uh. Unfortunately, this

(10:06):
logic doesn't really work with Hoover because while he was homophobic,
he also hated mostly everybody else too. He hated people
of color, Jews. He especially hated women, like when he
was hired as the director of the Bureau of Investigation,

(10:27):
he fired every single female agent and was like, we're
not going to hire any more women. But maybe he
fired all of these ladies because he wanted to surround
himself with sexy young men. Back to the jazz music.

(10:50):
One of Hoover's big legacies was that he ushered in
a new type of law enforcement. He introduced fingerprinting, created
a database of people who'd been arrested or convicted. He
also set standards for forensic laboratory, and he started hiring
a new type of agent. Before there was a centralized

(11:12):
law enforcement agency, rural communities often relied on investigators who
followed their gun are stuck to the areas they knew
real gumshoe style of investigation. But Hoover wanted something else.
He wanted college educated young men emphysis on young who

(11:33):
treated investigations like math problems, highly standardized aloof from the
communities they were investigating, and he wanted these young men
to be clean cut, handsome, and white as porcelain, because
I think that might have been his type. And then

(11:54):
there's been a bunch of rumors over the decades that
j Edgar Hoover liked to dress in women's clothing. One
of these said that after his mother died, he got
dulled up in her dresses and pearls and danced around
her room. And then fashion man extraordinaire Tim Gunn told

(12:17):
a weird story in one of his books. His dad
worked at the FBI, and when he was a kid,
a gun visited the office. The same day as I
Love Lucy's star Vivian Vance. Gun loved I Love Lucy,
and his dad was like, you want to meet her?
Gun was like absolutely, So they had a quick.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Meet and greet.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
But years later he was like, that day doesn't make
any sense because Hoover wasn't in his office and Hoover
was a notorious workaholic. So Gun's publishers did some research
and they discovered there was no record of Vance ever
visiting the office. So Gun was like, who did I
talk to? Maybe it was Hoover dressed in a wig,

(13:02):
pretending he was Vivian Vance. Now this one seems like
a big leap. A lot of assumptions are being made. Also,
it seems really insulting to Vivian Vance because Hoover was
ugly af But at the same time, people thought it
was believable because there were all these other rumors about

(13:22):
Hoover dressing up in women's clothing. And then there's an
even more salacious rumor that not only did Hoover like
to dress up as a woman, he'd liked to dress
up as a woman and have homosexual orgies cuckoo bananas. Now,

(13:45):
this story about homosexual orgies came from a biography about Hoover,
and in it, the author quoted a woman who claimed
that her husband saw Hoover dressed up in women's clothing
in the nineteen fifties, and he was at a hotel
with some male prostitutes, and it seemed like they were
about to engage in some gay groups. Now, I don't

(14:07):
know if you heard that. That was a lot of
like she said, he said, they said, somebody said something.
If you can believe it, This story in the biography
caused a lot of angst among historians. They were like
that sources unverified. This is a lot of like, I

(14:27):
don't know, hearsay, this is just some hot goss. And
the woman who told this story was quickly discredited because
at one point she had pled guilty to perjury. So
all the historians were like, this, lady's a liar. Clearly
she's lying about that. Also, how dare you say that
our beloved Hoover was cross dressing and having orgies. Well,

(14:52):
the thing is that is far from the only gay
rumor about Hoover. A rumor of Hoover A few people
claim that they saw Hoover going to a gay club
called the Stork Club in New York on several occasions.
Another woman who was familiar with Hoover said, Yeah, everybody
knew about his homosexuality, but he was the best chief

(15:12):
for the FBI ever had. Yeah, look at that, even
though he was gay, he was doing a good job.
Imagine that. Some people also thought that j Edgar Hoover
didn't go after the mafia that much because they had
photos of him with another man. So they're like, look,
he's not going after the mob even though it's a
huge problem right now because they have evidence against him.

(15:33):
You know, they're doing the whole blackmail thing that he
likes to do. And Hoover, of course, he hated all
these rumors they were circulating. Even when he was alive.
He was like, anyone who says I'm gay, I'm gonna
come get your ass. So obviously, if Hoover was gay,
he was extremely closeted. But the thing is, if you

(15:54):
got something flaming in your closet, you got to take
it out from time to time so it doesn't burn
the whole house down. And perhaps the most compelling piece
of evidence about who being gay was his relationship with
his direct subordinate, his deputy, his second in command, who
he had meals with sometimes twice a day, who he

(16:15):
went on vacation with, who he was buried a few
feet away from me. Things. I smell a whiff of
homosexuality here, but you guys know it. We'll be right
back after these soothing advertisements have fun. Welcome back filth listeners.

(16:41):
So now we're gonna ask the question that we've been
asking for decades, for centuries about gay men. Are these
guys gay? Are just really good friends? Clyde Tolsen served
as Hoover's number two of the FBI from nineteen thirty

(17:02):
until Hoover's death in nineteen seventy two. Hoover was always
the boss, the top, if you will. Tulson always right
below him, bottoming, and these two men, well, for decades
they did just about everything together. They ate meals together
twice a day. Toulson was Hoover's de facto plus one

(17:24):
to events on the job and socially. If Hoover ever
got an invite to something, so did Tulson. Like in
the nineteen fifties, Hoover and Toulson would have secretive dinner
parties with the McCarthy's isn't that fun? They'd dined together
promptly at seven pm, Hoover and Toulson arriving together with

(17:45):
a bottle of wine that sounds straight as hell. Toulson
and Hoover also went on vacation together most years. For
the holidays, they'd go to Miami, and you know, nothing
weird happens in Miami, So they're spending a lot of
quality and quantity time together, and over the years, various

(18:07):
people said that they saw some pretty gay stuff happening
between them. One person saw Toulson and Hoover at a
beach in Malibu and said that Hoover was painting Toulson's toenails.
Another person saw Hoover and Toulsen holding hands when they
were in the back of a limo. A taxi driver
one time picked up Hoover and Toulson from the airport

(18:29):
and said he'd never seen so much kissing and ass
grabbing in the back of the cab in his life.
Truman Capodi allegedly told the magazine editor that they were gay,
and Kapodi was gay, so he would know. Also, in
his private collection of photographs, Hoover had a butt ton
of pictures of Toulson, of Tulsen asleep, of him in

(18:53):
a bathrobe, of him by the pool. I mean, I
like my friends, but I have rarely felt the urge
to photograph them while they're sleeping. Even at the FBI,
it seemed people thought they were a little homosexual. Agents
started calling them Jay Edna and Mother Toulson, honestly iconic

(19:15):
drag names. So was this a beautiful love story between
two men? I mean not really. Hoover was still a
huge piece of shit who liked to lie and deceive
and do treacherous, horrible things and all that sadism. Remember

(19:36):
he was a freakish, brutal narcissist with weird compulsions and ideas.
So let's get back to some dirty, dirty rumors. One
biographer of j Edgar Hoover is Anthony Summers, and in
his book he said he talked to a source named

(19:58):
Charles Krebs. Summers said that he wasn't able to corroborate
this story. He we're an American filth we love a
little goss, so let's get into it. According to this
guy Krebs, he was an acquaintance of Hoover and Toulsen,
and he told summers. This it was accepted in our

(20:19):
circle that Hoover and Toulson were homosexuals. The impression I
had was that Hoover and Tulson had had a sexual
relationship with each other when they were younger, but not anymore.
They were just two old aunties together, two queens. Okay,
that's fine, two queens. But this is where it starts

(20:41):
getting messed up. Creb said, on three occasions that I
knew about, perhaps four boys were driven down to La
Joya at Hoover's request. Okay, Lahoya is in California, and
it's known for its resorts and hotels where American elite

(21:02):
would go and do their dirty, dirty business, and here,
according to Krebs, Hoover and Toulsen were soliciting sex from
teen boys. He said, I went down to La Joya
with a group a couple of times, and we spent
a good deal of time at a bar. This is
where the Hoover rendezvous were. We went to the bar

(21:25):
with the boys, the fifteen year old and another youngster.
Hoover and Toulsen would be driven there in a limo,
always at night. I'd be left behind and they'd go
off in two cars. Hoover's and the one carrying the boys.
The way I heard it, they drive up to a
reservoir in the hills, the two cars parked headlight to headlight,

(21:47):
and the boys would go and get in Hoover's car,
and that's where they would do their business. Yahs. So
this guy's claiming that not only was Hoover a gay man,
he was also a pedophile. And as I said, this

(22:08):
story was never corroborated. Also, during Hoover's time, a lot
of times people would spread rumors about people being gay
to hurt their reputation, to hurt their careers. And also
back then, a lot of people automatically assumed if you're
a homosexual, you are a pedophile. At the same time, though,

(22:29):
according to Summers, in nineteen seventy three, an LAPD detective
interviewed some men who said that when they were younger,
they had been solicited by elite people from Hollywood and
the government. And they did say the names of Hoover
and Toulsen. Obviously, this is not a fun rumor. It's

(22:56):
absolutely horrendous. And that friend of Hoover's Krebs, or Krebs
who claimed to be Hoover's friend was obviously very upset
about all of it, not just because of the pedophilia,
but also because Jaegar Hoover had persecuted so many gay
people and yet he himself was gay. Creb said, here

(23:17):
was j Edgar Hoover himself a homosexual. Any law they
ever brought up to help homosexuals, he shot down. Anyone
they thought was homosexual who tried to get a job,
he shot them down. He bullies them and would have
people follow them around. Anyone who is gay, he hated them,

(23:38):
yet he was doing the same thing. There are also
other rumors about pedophilia. A filmmaker who had spoken to
several people about Hoover said that sometimes he would go
to the Delmar racetrack and have sex with boys there.
This filmmaker claimed that one time Hoover was caught in

(24:00):
the bathroom by a journalist, and they made sure that
this journalist didn't say anything. Quote. Nobody dared say anything
because he was so powerful. As Tulsen Hoover were getting

(24:24):
up there in age, they started making plans. One day,
Hoover sent Toulson to a cemetery to get them plots
side by side. Hoover complained about the price, saying it
was way too expensive because he'd only need his for
three days. Yeah, he was comparing himself to Jesus, he

(24:45):
too would be resurrected. When Hoover died in nineteen seventy two,
Tulson attended the funeral, and it was Tulsen who accepted
the flag that had been draped over Hoover's coffin, usually
a role of the wife of a fallen soldier. Tulson
also inherited Hoover's estate. Tolson was briefly instated as the

(25:09):
head of the FBI, but after Hoover died, he never returned.
He himself died a few years later of heart failure.
Maybe he died of a broken heart. I mean probably not.
Because they are both such evil men. I don't know
if they truly knew how to love. Truly, someone go

(25:29):
piss on their graves. It'll be easy to do, because
they're buried right next to each other, side by side.
Every episode of American filth we learn a lesson, and
I think the lesson we learn here is that j
Edgar Hoover was gay as hell and also a wretched
human being. But I think we already knew that, but

(25:51):
I'll talk to you guys next time. Cue the credits.
American Filth is a production of School of Humans and
iHeart Podcasts. This episode was written and hosted by me
Gabby Watts. Our exquisite theme song is by Jesse Niswanger.

(26:13):
Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr.
You can follow along with the show on Instagram at
American Filth pod, or you can follow me on Instagram
at g A H H H B B I E
W A T T S. Please like and subscribe to
the show, and make sure you send it over to
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(26:34):
subscribe as well.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Target you next time. School of Humans