By now you’ve probably heard about Clint Eastwood’s new movie, J. Edgar, which sees Leonardo DiCaprio playing FBI founder and longtime chief J. Edgar Hoover. The film also deals with rumours that he was a repressed homosexual. With the film recently released in the US, it’s now time for those who can’t stand the idea that anyone they admire might have been gay to step forward and get indignant.

The Washington Post has an interesting article about current and former FBI agents who are up in arms about the movie. Perhaps most interesting is how upset they seem, even though the film doesn’t paint Hoover as living a full-on gay life, just that he may have been a repressed homosexual, whose incredibly close but probably non-sexual relationship with Clyde Tolson may have been based in genuine love.

Former agent Gregg Schwarz apparently felt so strongly he went as far as to hire a videographer to help him make a Youtube response to the movie, filmed next to Hoover’s grave. In the video, titled ‘Dirty Harry To Filthy Harry’, he says, “Mr. Hoover was portrayed as an individual who had homosexual tendencies and was a tyrannical monster. That is simply not true.”

Most of the ire is said to come from agents who started their career when Hoover was still at the agency and who still revere him. Even so, the anger many have shown does seem extreme, as the movie doesn’t actually go all that much further than the historical record shows, with its main speculation being that Hoover and Tolson really loved one another, not that they conducted a massive, sex-filled ilicit affair..

Hoover’s admirer have put him on a pedestal and while they like to proclaim about ‘facts’, they don’t seem to realise that their interpretation of the known ‘facts’ about Hoover, is just that, an interpretation. Eastwood may not have got it 100% right, but it’s a far less sensationalistic portrayal than you might have expected from Hollywood. Either way, head over to the Washington Post as the article is quite interesting.