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 Research for a film led a director to explore repression and persecution in the US, Britain and Russia.
DELVING into millions of unclassified FBI and CIA documents and recordings covering six decades or more, one realises conventional history is a bit of a farce, since everything said by governments at the time is undercut by millions of secret documents revealing an alternative universe.
Metaphorically, but sometimes in fact, real history is in the closet. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, last century's greatest professional voyeur and adept keeper of secrets for 48 years, had great interest in homosexuality, as reflected in his files. This went beyond gossip on stars such as Rock Hudson but reflected events on which history has turned.
Tracking the subject of homosexuality in these formerly "Eyes Only" secret documents, reveals an often malicious national security and political obsession with homosexuality at the highest levels of the US and British governments, including among US presidents Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. On the surface, the obsession had understandable origins with the revelation that some of Britain's great spies and traitors - Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and, later, Anthony Blunt - were homosexual Soviet agents. Burgess, with British (heterosexual) master spy Kim Philby, had helped advise on the structure of the CIA. Unclassified FBI files reveal a US intelligence frenzy of activity around these events with top secret memos to director Hoover regularly noting that Burgess was "homosexual", Maclean "reportedly homosexual" and Blunt "notoriously homosexual".
Homosexuality was now tied to treason and it was open season. Repression on suspected gays under arcane 1941 "sex psychopath" laws continued at least until 1971 and included - horrifyingly and incredibly - castration, incarceration in mental hospitals and lobotomies in at least seven US states.
The American Psychiatric Association finally rebuked "reparative" or "conversion" therapy for homosexuals in 1998.
In Britain similar inhumane persecution occurred. In 1952, Alan Turing, 41, a mathematical genius, master decoder of Nazi ciphers and arguably an inventor of the modern computer, was arrested on homosexuality charges and sentenced to a year of "conversion" hormone treatment. Also accused of subversion, he committed suicide in 1954, apparently by eating a cyanide-laced apple.
On the other hand, Soviet intelligence - analysed in an unclassified CIA study by defector Alexander Orlov on Theory and Practice of Soviet Intelligence - was "amazed at the mutual consideration and loyalty which prevailed among homosexuals". Prejudice in the West proved dangerous to its own survival. The Soviet use of homosexual spies and recruiters in the West was to result in possibly the espionage coup of the 20th century with the penetration and devastation of Western intelligence by the Cambridge University spy ring, initiated in the 1930s.
More at Souce: http://www.optuszoo.com.au/news/144440//gay-files-history-s-grim-closet.html
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