TG History — TG Legends Part 1: J. Edgar Hoover, CD?

“My friends, you have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen?” – Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space

George Washington chopped down the cherry tree. Betsy Ross created the American flag. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. Jesus was born on December 25th. Numerous myths have been woven into history as fact. Now with today’s Internet spreading rumors at warp speed debunking them has become a sort of cottage industry. But while it’s comforting to learn the Titanic wasn’t really hijacked by Albanian pirates (Albania has pirates?) or that KFC isn’t secretly breeding giant mutant chickens, that’s not the whole story. It comes as no surprise that the transgendered, having lived on the outer fringes of history, have been subject to many myths and rumors as well. Let’s look at a few.

“A discovery has lately been made on this continent that will astonish the whole world. Our great and excellent General Washington is actually discovered to be of the female sex.”
– London Daily Advertiser, January 25, 1783

WAS J. EDGAR HOOVER A CROSSDRESSER?

Unlike most rumors this one has a traceable source. In 1993, Anthony Summers wrote Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of I. Edgar Hoover, alleging among other things that Hoover was really a gay crossdresser. Summers’ lone source of information was one Susan Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel claimed that in 1958 she attended a party at the Plaza Hotel where Hoover engaged in crossdressing in front of her ex-husband and the infamous Roy Cohn.

“He 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 legs crossed. Roy introduced him to me as ‘Mary’ and he replied ‘Good evening,’ brusque, like the first time I’d met him. It was obvious he wasn’t a woman; you could see where he shaved. It was Hoover. You’ve never seen anything like it. I couldn’t believe it, that I should see the head of the FBI dressed as a woman.”

Rosenstiel said she saw Hoover go into a bedroom, take off his skirt, where “young blond boys” worked on him in bed. Rosenstiel claimed she saw Hoover again at the Plaza a year later, this time wearing a red dress with a black feather boa around his neck. He was holding a Bible and asked one boy to read a passage while another masturbated him. Summers claims Rosenstiel’s story was backed up by two unnamed male prostitutes and declared the Mafia held Hoover’s crossdressing over his head.

“Mafia bosses obtained information about Hoover’s sex life and used it for decades to keep the FBI at bay,” the book jacket declares. “Without this, the Mafia as we know it might never have gained its hold on America.”

Let’s look at the parties involved in spreading the Hoover crossdressing story. Author Anthony Summers was previously known for his 1980 book Conspiracy which alleged the CIA assassinated President Kennedy and accused CIA official David Atlee Phillips of being a contact for Lee Harvey Oswald. Phillips then sued Summers for libel. Courts in Britain and America both ruled against Summers, directing him to pay substantial damage claims and forcing Summers’ publishers to issue public retractions. Yet after Phillips died Summers appeared on Ted Koppel’s Nightline and repeated as fact the same accusations he’d previously admitted to a British Court were false. But this time Phillips (like Hoover) was dead and Summers was safe from legal action since the dead cannot be libeled. Still as one major metropolitan newspaper noted: “Irresponsibility isn’t quite the word we would use to describe Mr. Summers’ conduct. Another word better fits him: he is a coward who slandered a man who can no longer defend himself.”

But it was Susan Rosenstiel who was Summers’ source for the crossdressing story and she wasn’t exactly a reliable witness herself, having previously served time in the Rikers Island slammer on a 1971 perjury conviction. Her ex-husband, former Prohibition bootlegger Lewis Rosenstiel, was personally acquainted with Hoover through a large endowment to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation. After a bitter divorce left the 77 year-old Susan Rosenstiel with little income, Summers paid off Rosenstiel for the rights to her Hoover crossdressing story. But Summers wasn’t the first person Rosenstiel approached. Convinced Hoover had somehow conspired with her husband against her during the divorce proceedings, Rosenstiel had long tried to interest anybody who’d listen that Hoover was a crossdresser. She took her allegations to United States Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, a man with no love for Hoover. “She used to call me after 5:30 P.M. when my secretary had left, so I wound up having to listen to her”, Morgenthau remembered. Morgenthau said he found her claims “baseless” but dutifully passed them on to William Hundley, who had a Justice Department attorney look into Rosenstiel’s allegations. They led nowhere.

Hoover presents a complex image to history. During his lifetime he was almost revered as an American icon, the man who almost single-handedly transformed a small, ineffectual federal agency into a world-class law enforcement unit. But after Hoover’s death a series of tell-all books revealed his hidden, darker side — an almost paranoid man who kept secret files and committed appalling abuses of power. Probably the best way to promote any rumor is to mix it up with other allegations. When so many previously unknown stories about Hoover proved accurate it became easier for Summers to sell this rumor, however far-fetched, about Hoover’s alleged crossdressing. Historically accusations of crossdressing have always been a favorite means for discrediting unpopular men from Jefferson Davis to Osama bin Laden. The idea of Hoover as a homosexual crossdresser also holds a certain perverse appeal. It serves a double humiliation to his many enemies in portraying the ultra conservative Hoover not just as homosexual also thoroughly emasculating him as an effeminate crossdresser.

Was Hoover gay? Well, that’s a separate issue since being a crossdresser and being gay isn’t the same thing.  But there were also other episodes in Hoover’s life, separate from this rumor, that certainly lead one to think he wasn’t as straight as he portrayed himself. Today historians have largely concluded that Hoover might well have been gay, although they also note there hasn’t been real definitive proof. But as to the Hoover crossdressing story, historians have overwhelming concluded not only that it’s false — but that it’s an unbelievably preposterous piece of gossip.

The first rule in judging rumors definitely applies here: “Consider the source.”

Next month — Part 2 brings you more TG Legends.

Category: Transgender History