The Worst Public Servant In History? Inside The Life Of J. Edgar Hoover

He Had A Male Companion

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Photo credit: Bettmann / Contributor, Getty Images

Hoover had what most people believe was a boyfriend named Clyde Tolson. The pair ate meals and took vacations together. In the late 1930s, model Luisa Stuart recalled seeing them in a limousine: “I noticed they were holding hands all the way, just sitting there talking and holding hands with each other… I was so young and those were different times. But I’d never seen two men holding hands.”

Former Washington police inspector Joseph Shimon witnessed the pair kissing and groping in a taxi cab. Harry Hay, who started America’s first gay rights group, saw them on vacation in California, in “a circle in which they didn’t have people who weren’t gay… They were nodded together as lovers.”