The horror of the closet
Still being reprinted by Victor Gollancz is the 576-page book of Anthony Summers called Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. This book blasts into smithereens the façade that the former, unlamented FBI director called his life.
Together with Joseph McCarthy, Mr. Hoover plunged the United States into a dark pit of persecution: anybody, especially artists, tarred with having Red sympathies was blacklisted and persecuted. Mr. Hoover also abetted the “Cold War,” that adult game show. And he consistently refused to throw the book at the Mafia, because the mob allegedly possessed photographs that showed Mr. Hoover, well, “administering a languorous blowjob.” To map the life of Mr. Hoover is to track the Great White Whale of the American empire in the 20th century. While still in high school, he proposed — and won — a motion in the debating society that “Cuba should be annexed to the United States.” Later, he would use the Bible to argue against giving equal rights to women and for capital punishment.
But the joyride of Mr. Hoover had just begun. He was the regnant White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the WASP, who regarded otherness (foreigners, immigrants, ideas that went against the capitalist grain) as “un-American.” He hit his full stride when he began working for the Bureau of Information, the predecessor of the FBI.
What does the private life hide?
Susan Rosensteil, wife of Lewis Rosensteil, one of Mr. Hoover’s connections to the glitz of high-organized crime, alleged that in 1958, she met Mr. Hoover at the Plaza Hotel. The FBI director was “wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig. He had makeup on, and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt, and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with his leg crossed. Roy (Cohn) introduced him to me as ‘Mary’ and he replied, ‘Good evening,’ like (it was) the first time I’d met him.”
The tough macho Mr. Hoover was in the mood for cross-dressing that night. He was trying to camp it up, but he was alone. Later, Ms. Rosensteil would meet “Mary” in another private party, again at the Plaza Hotel. But this time, the outfit was more daring: “He had a red dress on, and black feather boa around his neck . . . “I can imagine a Pinoy gay popping in and saying, “O ano,lalaban ka?” (“Oh what, you want a contest?”)
A year before this, well, pagrarampa (walking down the fashion ramp), Mr. Hoover was appearing on national media and, in cathedral tones, declaring an all-out war against pornography. He also shared his antiseptic vision of a “new generation of young people with clean minds and healthy bodies living in a better, cleaner America.” “Better,” of course, is relative, but “cleaner” uncannily reminds you of the “ethnic cleansing” (ugly phrase, too) that some people in the majority foist on the ethnic minorities of their country.
On his own turf, Mr. Hoover defined what “clean” meant. His fiat: all FBI recruits should be young, have blond hair, blue eyes, and a slender waist. It makes you wonder whether this was the FBI or the search for Ms. Gay America. Thus, the following were out: Blacks (niggers), Jewish (kikes), females (wops), Hispanics (spics), and most especially, open homosexuals (fags). Simply, they were outsiders, and deserved to be kept on the other side of the fence.
Why such narrow-mindedness, such hatred for the different?
The denial/double clichés prevail: Mr. Hoover abhorred the different because he knew he himself was. At an early age, he went to a therapist so he could be “cured” of his homosexuality, as if it were a migraine that could be cured with an aspirin. He led such a miserable life, lonely and bitter and prone to the Mafia’s threat of blackmail because he loathed his sexual orientation. In the process, he hated himself. He tried to fool himself, and failed. It’s called internalized homophobia.
But he did succeed, though, in fooling generations of Americans, six presidents, and both houses of Congress, the entire media machine, with his campaigns for political orthodoxy and against cultural pluralism. Ironically, this potent brew was mixed with his incessant drive (no pun intended) for sexual continence. Thus, while he was tangling with the ghosts in his closet, he was also running on parallel tracks: in a position of power and privilege, he lost no time in destroying those who were different, like him. The most homophobic people I know are closet homosexuals themselves. Loudly they proclaim order, an adherence to what is natural (however they construct the notion of “natural”), the true and straight path. When your TV host, government official or even religious leader (especially of the Fundamentalist variety) begins babbling against homosexuality, watch out. He just wants to throw stones at mirrors, not knowing that glass shards can still reflect hidden images.
Mr. Summers’ book drives home for us what we already know, that “repression” can indeed be dangerous to one’s (mental) health. It makes you stiff. It makes you feel everybody is watching you. It stunts you so. It limits the horizons of your dreams. As the British writer Angela Carter said, the horror of the closet is one of the worst things you can wish on somebody.
Perhaps if Mr. Hoover had come out, he would have had less of his, hmmm, missionary zeal, and he would have been happier. The ugliness and contempt in the closet would never have leaked out in his life, and in our memory of him.
And perhaps he would have had a gaggle of friends to camp it up with — and they would have taught him finally what it meant to have taste.
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