J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson
Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America's Most Famous Men and Women
Darwin Porter
This book examines the hidden sexual secrets of long-time companions, FBI Directors J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, and their decades-long obsession with the darkest indiscretions of famous Americans.
This is history's first exposure of J. Edgar's obsession with voyeuristic sex and its links to the priorities of his law enforcement agency. It's the most detailed and most shocking insight into J. Edgar Hoover ever published, an unprecedented overview of a life devoted to unveiling other people's darkest secrets while rigorously concealing his own. Award-winning celebrity biographer Darwin Porter answers the questions you've always wanted to know. But if you'd asked them during Hoover's heyday, he'd probably have had you investigated and punished.
"The book," according to Blood Moon's president, Danforth Prince, "goes much farther than the Clint Eastwood/Leonardo DiCaprio film, J. Edgar. Hoover enforced his status as a kingmaker through eight presidential administrations, shrewdly manipulating social unrest, wars, and political rivalries to make his 'dictatorship' of the FBI indispensible. He developed a talent for blackmail that terrorized presidents, senators, journalists, congressmen, and public advocates who included both Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. He secretly delivered or deliberately withheld information about issues related to national security as a means of reinforcing his personal power, and he manipulated public anxieties in ways that allowed Red-baiter Joseph McCarthy to destroy some of the most creative people in Hollywood. He collaborated with the darkest factions within American society, including the Mafia, and eventually evolved into one of the most widely loathed people in America, often assuming that no one would dare to publish an exposé of how his shocking sexual values and priorities survived, and flourished, within the FBI.
"But eventually, as the book reveals, many of Hoover's victims inaugurated investigations of their own. Anecdotes were bruited throughout Washington, New York, and Los Angeles and mockingly discussed, in front of witnesses, by key figures in law enforcement, the military, the entertainment community, and the porn industry. And the more famous Hoover became, the more recognizable he was to the male hustlers and everyday, run-of-the-mill gay men he encountered at the private parties and orgies he attended with or without Clyde. This book reveals many of these dynamics in ways never before exposed."
"You can expect a lot from this book, and it richly delivers. It presents stories from both within the FBI and tales from its victims. Compiled from decades of meticulous research, dozens of first-hand interviews, and information recently released through the Freedom of Information Act, Darwin Porter distills J. Edgar's 50-year obsession with communists, 'sexual perverts,' and dissenters of any ilk into a spellbinding read."
"EVERYONE's dredging up J. Edgar Hoover. Leonardo DiCaprio just immortalized him, and now comes Darwin Porter's paperback, J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America's Most Famous Men and Women. It shovels Hoover's darkest secrets dragged kicking and screaming from the closet. It's filth on every VIP who's safely dead and some who are still above ground." —Cindy Adams, The New York Post
"This book is important, because it destroys what's left of Hoover's reputation. Did you know he had intel on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but he sat on it, making him more or less responsible for thousands of deaths? Or that he had almost nothing to do with the arrests or killings of any of the 1930s gangsters that he took credit for catching?
A lot of people are angry with its author, Darwin Porter. They say that his outing of celebrities is just cheap gossip about dead people who can't defend themselves. I suppose it's because Porter is destroying carefully constructed myths that are comforting to most people. As gay men, we benefit the most from Porter's work, because we know that except for AIDS, the closet was the most terrible thing about the 20th century. If the closet never existed, neither would Hoover. The fact that he got away with such duplicity under eight presidents makes you think that every one of them was a complete fool for tolerating it." —Paul Bellini, FAB Magazine (Toronto)
Paperback 1-936003-26-0 / 978-1-936003-26-6 Trim size 6¼ x 9 Page Count 576 Temporarily out of inventories, available for e-readers only.
Details
Paperback 1-936003-30-9 / 978-1-936003-30-3
Trim size 6x9 Ppg 480
Video links for J. Edgar Hoover
About the Author:
“Darwin Porter is the master of guilty pleasures. There is nothing like reading him for passing the hours. He is the Nietzsche of Naughtiness, the Goethe of Gossip, the Proust of Pop Culture. Porter knows all the nasty buzz anyone has ever heard whispered in dark bars, dim alleys, and confessional booths. And lovingly, precisely, and in as straightforward a manner as an oncoming train, his prose whacks you between the eyes with the greatest gossip since Kenneth Anger. Some would say better than Anger.” (as quoted from Alan W. Petrucelli’s THE ENTERTAINMENT REPORT at Examiner.com).
Porter began his career writing about politics and the entertainment industry for Knight Newspapers and The Miami Herald. Today, he’s one of the most prolific biographers in the world. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Howard Hughes, John and Jackie Kennedy, Paul Newman, Merv Griffin, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Michael Jackson have generated widespread reviews and animated radio and blogsite commentaries worldwide. Some of his biographies have been serialized to millions of readers in The Sunday Times of London and The Mail on Sunday.
Porter is also the well-known original author of many editions of The Frommer Guides, a respected travel guidebook series that’s among the most prominent and well-respected in the world.
