“On 20 June, 1951, then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched the “Sex Deviates” program
“On 20 June, 1951, then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched the “Sex Deviates” programme. This ensured that LGBTQ+ people, when identified, would have their information passed across the government and that they would be made unemployed.”Tweet SourceJ. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the “Sex Deviates” Program“For nearly four decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation used the so-called Sex Deviates Program to investigate and badger gay men and women in the United States. That harassment was justified by the belief that homosexuals posed a security risk in two ways: their behavior was thought to be an indication of immorality and it supposedly made them susceptible to blackmail. Douglas Charles’s Hoover’s War on Gays (University Press of Kansas, 2015) is the first monograph to trace the history of that program. In it, Charles demonstrates that the Bureau was driven by “an overarching and intense fear and loathing of gays.”Part of what makes Charles’s study noteworthy is the level and type of research it involved. The Bureau’s Sex Deviates File once included nearly 350,000 pages of information, but most of it was intentionally destroyed in the late 1970s.”Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” program -- source link
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