'Gay' Hoover Movie Enrages FBI's Old Guard

Hundreds of former FBI agents are hopping mad about Clint Eastwood's biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, which strongly hints that the first FBI director was a repressed homosexual in love with aide Claude Tolson. In J. Edgar—which stars Leonardo DiCaprio—Hoover is portrayed as an individual "who had homosexual tendencies and was a tyrannical monster,” complains one former agent who joined the FBI in 1972, the year Hoover died at the age of 77. “That is simply not true."

A closed email list for retired agents has been swamped with complaints about the movie, but agents younger than 70 or so don't seem to understand the reverence for Hoover, the president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI tells the Washington Post. “Devotion is probably a good word for my generation and up,” he says. “The more recent people can’t understand why all the energy is being devoted to this when our benefits are at stake." (More Clint Eastwood stories.)