Or is it possible this is more of an embellishment and rumor, and that the late director did not actually participate in these behaviors.
I was having a discussion with some friends about politics a couple weeks back and someone brought up this point to me. Maybe this isn't the best sub to post to, because this is more of a theory than anything else. But in a time where homosexuality and transsexualism was very culturally taboo, for someone in a position of power like himself, couldn't this easily have gotten him blackmailed, or even thrown out of his position completely?
It just seems unlikely that he would be able to conceal this secret so well, in a time where something like this would be such a social "intolerable" that I have a hard time believing this actually was the case, but ore of a rumor that's been passed down through the years that's gotten embellished.
I am curious what history has to say about this.
Thanks all for the responses ahead of time.
Edit for clarity of my questions: I feel like this behavior would be so out of the norm, that even blackmailers would have leaked this information and he would have been "found out." Maybe not though! It seems like it would be a very hard secret for anyone to have kept.
This is one of those pieces of bad history which pop culture hasn't yet realized historians have repeatedly debunked. The whole idea stems from the 1993 biography of J Edgar Hoover Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. by Anthony Summers. I like how another Hoover biographist, Anton Theoharis, puts it
"Summers's sources, if undeniably imaginative, provide no credible documentation for what amounts to no more than gossipy character assassination"
It's not an embellishment, it's malarkey. Basically that 1993 biography made these claims relying only Susan Rosenstiel (a disreputable source with a history of perjury who also had an axe to grind with Hoover and the Bureau who was also being paid for her content by the biographer). It nonetheless exploded into popular culture.
blackmail
This actually provides some of the strongest evidence debunking Rosenstiel's claims.The 1993 book by Summers also alleges the mob was blackmailing Hoover (This "fact" was pretty strongly debunked in the 2002 book by Ronald Kessler FBI, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. The book in general does a good job summarizing the entire story). Its been a while since i picked it up but the criminal group in question was was already being wiretapped (thus that information wouldn't even have to have been leaked) and there's strong evidence of Hoover continuing to press strongly against the mob despite some internal pushback after the alleged incidents had taken place. In addition there's strong evidence that if this had happened specific other people at the FBI (who were physically around Hoover all the time) would have known and that information should have come up.
tl;dr it's badhistory. No current credible scholar of Hoover or the FBI supports the claim and even Summers has backed off of this a bit.