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Loading ...Hoover investigated rumors Valenti was gay
02.19.2009 5:12pm EST
(Washington) Longtime Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti was among the Washington figures whose sex lives were secretly investigated by the FBI in the 1960s.
Valenti, who died in April 2007, was a special assistant and confidant to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigated rumors that he was gay, the Washington Post reported Thursday based on agency files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.The FBI records show that the Republican Party carried out a similar investigation.
Valenti had been married to Johnson’s personal secretary for two years at the time. But he was suspected of having a gay relationship with a commercial photographer friend.
When the FBI initially reported its suspicions to Johnson, the president defended his top aide as “all right.” He prevented the bureau from getting a sworn affidavit from Valenti or interviewing the photographer. But days later he relented to an investigation.
When the FBI approached the photographer, he swore that Valenti “never engaged in homosexual activities and he does not have these tendencies,” according to the records.
The investigation was apparently abandoned shortly afterward.
Valenti, a Texan who served as a consultant to Vice President Johnson and was in the Dallas motorcade the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, became Johnson’s special assistant immediately after he was sworn in as president.
He served Johnson until taking over as chief of the Motion Picture Association of America in 1966. He retired in 2004.
Can we dig J. Edgar Hoover up, put him in a silk dress and heels, and hang him?
While you’re digging, exhume “Frances (sic) you bitch” Cardinal Spellman while you’re at it.
Maybe hang them in a sixty-nine??!!
Just saying …
Homophobic closeted BASTARDS, BOTH of them!!!
on the front page of today’s Washington Post for those who live in the DC area or can get that paper locally. Might be in your own local major newspaper as well, perhaps.
Those investigations were ridiculous and honestly, who cares? Did the government honestly have nothing else to do?
So what’s the surprise? We know Bush was keeping tabs on “gay activists” (and according to Dr. Laura et al, that’s all of us).
It mattered very much in the 1960s, when I was expelled from “liberal” Oberlin College for “suspicion of homosexuality,” even though they couldn’t prove it.
It was later discovered that Oberlin routinely discriminated against African-Americans, Asians, and (perceived) homosexuals.
The late (may he roast in hell) Fenner Douglass, then head of the organ department, and a former Navy officer (!), led the anti-gay witch-hunt in the Conservatory of Music.
The mere MENTION of homosexuality back then was enough to get one blackballed, particularly in government service, Hollywood and my chosen field, church music
Yeah, another queer organist … deal with it .
My favorite Freedom of Information Act file found that “there are no Communist sympathizers in the Oberlin Early Music Group.”
But on the serious side, people committed suicide because of Hoover, McCarthy, and Roy Cohen’s witch-hunts.
Cohen, a closeted queer, later died of AIDS. I forget what his Quilt square said, exactly … “[something], bully, victim.”
Young GLBTQAI people need to KNOW how it WAS in the ’60s, and how CLOSE the Rethuglicriminals came to bringing it all BACK during the BuschReich.
Constant vigilance is the price of liberty.
I think J. Edgar Hoover was like the nosy neighbor who always has to get up in everyone’s business. What’s interesting about this story is that Valenti was President Johnson’s aide. Wasn’t there another Johnson aide busted by the FBI for having sex with another man in the bathroom at the YMCA, even though he was married (to a woman) with kids? men’s
A side issue, but Roy Cohn has two panels on the Quilt: one a Soviet flag with his name on it, the other has a pink triangle with “Bully, Coward, Victim.” Several other words that could be added….
It wasn’t so much that Cardinal Spellman was a self-hating gay man that was so troubling but he was one of the worst pedophiles the Catholic Church deified and “bent over” backwards for. His political and sexual connections to Washington, DC, Boys Town and a well-known pedophile ring that makes him such a vile criminal disquised as saint.
Why is this surprising?
It was the 60s. Everyone was in such a huge Red Scare at the time that anything that wasn’t conservative was potentially Communist.
Non-religious people; commie. Civil rights supporter; commie. Democrat; pinko if not commie. Queer; commie. Didn’t beat up queers; commie. Feminist; commie. Voted for Kennedy or Johnson; commie. Catholic; commie.
Everyone who didn’t fit the mold of white, Protestant, conservative, male, and Republican was a potential communist in Hoover’s eyes.
Gee Ross, Republicans today sound like they are stuck in the 60’s.