Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn were both closeted gays? According to...

Cohn at least. I think that is pretty widely known.

I know there are rumors J. Edgar Hoover was gay. Anyone know the nature of the evidence on that?

The latest revisionist history is: everyone was gay. It's freaking amazing we were all born, because everyone who did anything was gay. I don't care what your views on the subject are, but believing all these rumors is naive, to say the least.

See the excerpt from Wikipedia below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

By the way, none of this qualifies as history. It is gossip pure and simply. All history, however, is revisionist. Historians develop new interpretations all the time. If they didn't, we would still believe African-Americans liked being enslaved.

Roy Cohn

"Cohn's homosexuality was an open secret during most of his career. His public response to all questions on this subject was sometimes evasive and sometimes a flat denial; he encouraged rumors of a relationship with his long-time friend Barbara Walters, who publicly stated that she thought he was heterosexual.

Though his closeted sexuality was far from unusual at the time, it was in extreme contradiction with his public life in right-wing politics. Cohn and McCarthy targeted many government officials and cultural figures not only for communist sympathies but for homosexual tendencies, sometimes using sexual secrets as a blackmail tool to gain informants. McCarthy may not have known Cohn was gay, but it was widely believed that his aide Schine was Cohn's lover—a rumor alluded to in the Army-McCarthy hearings by Army attorney Joseph Welch: when Cohn produced a photo of Schine as evidence, Welch joked that the photo came from "a pixie ... a close relative of a fairy."

In the 1970s, no longer a national figure, Cohn frequented gay bars semi-openly, but still denied all rumors and lent his support to anti-gay political campaigns. During debates over New York City's first gay rights law, he said homosexuals should not be allowed to be schoolteachers.

In 1984, he was diagnosed with AIDS, and attempted to keep his condition secret while receiving aggressive drug treatment. He insisted to his dying day that his disease was liver cancer. His denial not only of his sexual identity but of the disease that killed him made Cohn an emblem of conservative hypocrisy to some AIDS activists, such as journalist Randy Shilts and playwright Tony Kushner. Cohn never spoke publicly about AIDS but, according to his friends, he claimed to have used his political influence to increase the government's investment in AIDS research.

He died on August 2, 1986 of complications from AIDS."

Roy Cohn was a self-loathing homosexual and if you want to know, get ANY bio on the man. He and J. Edgar Hoover were buddies like *this*. Of course, I'm sure Roy looked better in a dress than Hoover ...

to have provoked our newest member's first response.

this is the random spot my browsing took me to, and I decided to reply. But congratulations :)

WEREN'T gay. Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the truth.

With Cohn it's not a matter of rumor. Nor is it a matter of rumor that the woman who wrote one of our finest patriotic songs was a lesbian.

There are more. We gay Americans contribute to (and yes, in Cohn's case, hurt) this country just as much as straight Americans.

We're more alike than we are different. Frankly, the only difference between my household and a "straight household" is that there are two different sizes of similar undergarments in the drawers, instead of two different types of undergarments. :shrug:

Wikipedia says it's not substantiated. Who knows. Stranger things have happened.

She stated categorically that McCarthy was gay, as well as alcoholic.

Apparently a newspaper in Las Vegas published some stories to that effect while McCarthy was alive. I don't remember the details, but something about having sex with a teenage boy at a Wisconsin Republican event. While McCarthy had silenced other newspapers while threatening to sue when his sexuality was hinted at, he never brought suit against the Las Vegas paper (but was aware of the story).

McCarthy did get married, but it was late in his career and he married his longtime secretary. The marriage also occurred as rumors were beginning to surface about him. As far as I know, no one has ever proven McCarthy was gay, but he was linked to Cohn and Cohn's passionate desire to keep a co-worker out of the military and by his side on McCarthy's committee. This led to the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings and some of the most vitriolic testimony. At one point a witness was asked if he thought a "pixie" had produced a piece of evidence. McCarthy tried to deflect the questioning by asking for a definition of "pixie" and was told it is "a relative to a fairy" which produced a visibly angry McCarthy.

As for Hoover, the biography "Secret and Confidential" included eye-witness testimony from people who had seen Hoover dressed in drag, cavorting with young male prostitutes in a hotel suite and engaging in public behavior such as holding hands with his second-in-command at the FBI (and lifelong companion) Clyde Tolson. The book suggests organized crime effectively neutralized Hoover because of photos of Hoover having sex with men and information on a hushed up vice arrest in New Orleans in his younger years (which may explain why Hoover denied the existence of the Mafia for years and stonewalled the FBI's attempts to investigate organized crime).

yick--I've come to accept Cohn as being on my team but not McCarthy

My college roommate, would come to me every week saying "I heard that (fill in celebrity name) is gay..." He often varied it by saying (celebrity) was seen at a gay bar or was caught in a compromising situation with a member of the same sex. One day, I'd had enough and said "Why don't we work off of the assumption that EVERYONE is gay and work backwards?" That shut him up on the subject for good.

Roy Cohn's homosexuality is well-documented, but Joseph McCarthy's isn't. It is possible, but there isn't the amount of proof as in Cohn's case. Same goes for Hoover. It's getting to be a revisionist-history trend to read into the past of an historical figure to "out" them. I feel it's of dubious value unless it's irrefutable.

I know you didn't mean it seriously. But just as a thought experiment,

"Why don't we work off of the assumption that EVERYONE is gay and work backwards?"

Sometimes in a discussion like this it really is helpful to "reverse the terms".

"Is heterosexuality a choice?"
"What causes heterosexuality?"
"Was Jesus heterosexual?"

See what I mean? "Reversing the terms" can ventillate a discussion in healthy ways. So just as a mental execercise, go ahead and pick a few historical figures and assume they are gay. Then go looking for "irrefutable" evidence that actually they were heterosexual.

Despite what I said, I find myself doing that mentally quite a bit. I think of statements like "Straight people are ok as long as they don't do it in public." I saw that one on a bumper sticker once. It's great for throwing back into the face of ignorant "friends."

I meant to say "straight people are ok as long as they don't show off in public."