I haven’t seen J. Edgar, the Hollywood movie about J. Edgar Hoover, and I don’t plan to, even though I have loved all of Clint Eastwood’s films, especially those he’s directed. Yet J. Edgar does not do it for me, as they say. It’s based on a lie, and a monstrous one at that: Hoover being in the closet and dressing up as a woman while keeping busy chasing communists and bank robbers and bad guys in general. Let’s face it. There’s nothing wrong with being gay, except when one is long dead and some publicity-seeking woman decides to become famous by inventing a story that the FBI director was.
Hoover died in 1972, and his enemies have had a field day since. Mind you, he had many enemies. Hoover was openly homophobic, didn’t trust Jews, and was accused of being a racist during the civil-rights troubles of the late 50’s and early 60’s. Twenty years or so after he died, the rumor was started about his cross-dressing in gay orgies by a woman who was known even among her radical circle for her fabrications and Baron Münchhausen-like tales. Trendy lefty media went wild. Here at last they had the bum nailed. Münchhausen’s word became the Sermon on the Mount. Rex Reed, a grab-ass queen, as I like to call him, is a longtime movie critic in New York, and when the Eastwood film came out he gave it his all. But he hardly mentioned the movie—just what a hypocrite and all-round monster Hoover was.
Here’s William Branon, an FBI veteran, on Hoover and the movie: “I wrote Mr. Eastwood a letter saying please don’t do this. Mr. Hoover wasn’t a homosexual, nor did he have a homosexual relationship or engage in cross-dressing or any of that stuff.” Branon worked in the bureau for 32 years. He is the chairman of the board of the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, which might make it seem like he has a reason to say what he does about his old boss, but here’s his reasoning behind it:
The bureau was and is full of nosy investigative types. Hoover would never have been able to keep a secret like that. If he were gay, it would have been all over the bureau. They’ve got naturally inquisitive minds. For 20 years Hoover was under 24-hour surveillance for his own protection. They called it the Hoover Watch. They would follow him from home to the office, to the Mayflower Hotel where he would eat lunch, to work, to home.
Even if I weren’t an unabashed fan of Hoover’s, which I am, this makes so much sense that it’s silly even to even discuss it.
Forty years later, all this controversy shows is to what appalling lengths the left will go to smear a perceived enemy. That clapped-out old bag Maureen Dowd, writing in the clapped-out New York Times, could not conceal her joy at the Eastwood movie. Hoover was everything Dowd and Times-types loathe. These cretinous lefty automatons furiously praise anything and anyone who smacks of perversion, yet in Hoover’s case, the perversion is not his alleged homosexuality but his hypocrisy. No matter how statistically impossible it may be, it is autistically pandered to. It is a monomaniacal pursuit of their wishes over fact or truth.
Just as I sat down to write this, the Times offered a full two-page spread in its art section on an exhibition centering on 20th-century portraits of or by gay artists. It included a four-minute excerpt from a video from someone who died of AIDS back in 1992. The video shows ants crawling frantically over a crucifix, something that offended some people in Congress—but their offense, in turn, truly outraged the Times critic, one Roberta Smith. How dare they be offended! Now, I have no idea if Roberta is a woman or a man—it could be either—but all I know is that anything that insults the Christian religion is fine with trendy art and theater and movie critics, and anyone denouncing a lie that doesn’t suit the same types is not. What I really would like to see is the same brave types like Dowd and Smith and Reed make some jokey remarks about Islam, or to go as far as to point out that Muhammad may or may not have been homosexual, and that he was definitely a pedophile. But they wouldn’t do that, would they? These talent-free culture vultures tremble in front of Islam because they know full well their ghastly little lives would not be worth a piastra if they wrote about Islam what they have written about Christianity.
Long live Hoover!
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