Hoover's War on Gays
Exposing the fbi's "Sex Deviates" Program
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3173859 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edward Alwood (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 819.1-819 |
| Publication date | 2016-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaw448 |
| OpenAlex | W2801932290 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Hoover's War on Gays fills an important gap in the history of the gay rights movement by providing a comprehensive account of the five-decade campaign of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) to intimidate and harass gay men, lesbians, and organizations that sought to advance their rights. Douglas M. Charles, an associate professor at Penn State University–Greater Allegheny, describes how fbi director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with homosexuals began in 1937 with the kidnapping and murder of a young boy in Tacoma, Washington. As the fbi became involved in the hunt for a “sexual pervert,” the investigation triggered a “sex panic” that fueled public prejudice and intolerance of homosexuals. The topics of two sections of the book have garnered little attention from historians. Charles draws from fbi documents to describe Buell Dwight Huggins, who was expelled from the University of Illinois in 1940 after he was accused of soliciting a fellow student. Huggins later worked for the federal government and formed the predecessor organization of the Washington Mattachine Society in 1954. We also learn that the controversial homophile activist Edward Sagarin, under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory, formed the short-lived Homosexuals Anonymous, which led to the formation of the Mattachine Society of New York in 1955
Criminology · Gay rights · Government (linguistics · Homosexuality · Lesbian · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term · Pseudonym · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2022 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |