For the upcoming movie J. Edgar, a dramatized biography of founding FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and award-winning screen writer Dustin Lance Black visited pioneering LGBT activist Frank Kameny. The two visited with the LGBT icon at Kameny’s Washington home to talk about the FBI. They sought Kameny’s insight into the chilling atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s in Washington for gays and others who were often targets of Hoover’s FBI.
Kameny told the Washington Blade that the one-hour visit was arranged by Richard Socarides, the gay former Clinton administration official who later worked for a Hollywood film studio. Socarides is head of the new LGBT advocacy group Equality Matters.
“The two arrived in a limousine and were not accompanied by anyone else other than the driver, who did not come into the house. They had been over at the Justice Department prior to coming to my place,” said Kameny.
In 1961, Kameny founded D.C.’s first gay organization, the Mattachine Society of Washington. He told the Washington Blade in interviews that the FBI and the D.C. police closely monitored the group and sent “plants” and undercover investigators to attend its meetings.
As head of the Mattachine Society, Kameny told DiCaprio and Black of how an FBI agent contacted him by phone and requested a meeting with him to discuss an important matter. Not knowing whether he would be arrested for some unspecified charge related to homosexuality, Kameny said he agreed to the meeting with great trepidation.
When Kameny arrived at FBI headquarters, located in the Justice Department building, he and another Mattachine Society member were greeted politely by two FBI agents. Kameny recalled, “To our amazement, one of the agents informed us that Hoover would very much like to be removed from the Mattachine Society’s mailing list.” The group’s newsletter was being regularly mailed to Hoover at FBI headquarters in Washington.
Kameny said, “The group sent the newsletter to many high-level public officials in Washington, including members of Congress, the White House, Pentagon, Justice Department and other federal officials and agencies.”
Kameny told the agents that he could not remove Hoover from the list without first consulting with the Mattachine board of directors. After conferring with the group, Kameny told Hoover he would remove him if he agreed to certain conditions. The major condition was that Hoover needed to designate another high-level FBI official to receive the newsletter, and it would still occasionally be sent to Hoover to inform him of important developments.
Kameny said that the group never received a response to that request and that they continued sending Hoover the newsletter for as long as the group published it.
Kameny said DiCaprio and Black did not say whether they would consider incorporating the Mattachine newsletter incident into the J. Edgar script.
DiCaprio has been selected to star as Hoover in J. Edgar, which is being directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Warner Brothers. Black, nationally acclaimed for writing the script for Milk, the film about San Francisco gay rights leader Harvey Milk, wrote the script for J. Edgar. Its release is projected for 2012.
