Tue, Mar 17 · 6:00 PM EDT
Please register for a free ticket (only 23 seats): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/queer-justice-a-novel-about-fbi-corruption-of-the-supreme-court-tickets-1983327672458?aff=oddtdtcreator
Criminal defense attorney Charns (author of FBI Snitches, Blackmail, and Obscene Ethics at the Supreme Court) makes a persuasive case, via novel, for FBI blackmail with this slim yet action-packed volume, based on the real historical event of J. Edgar Hoover accusing Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas of engaging in “homosexual activities” with a teenage boy in the 1960s. Charns—who filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests and entered lawsuits against the FBI to uncover the truth behind those accusations—crafts a novelized sense of the historical record, beginning with a reproduced photograph of Hoover’s memo recommending Fortas’s referral to the Attorney General—a memo Charns retrieved from Hoover’s secret stash of office files.
Charns notes that the sociopolitical atmosphere during the ‘60s would have incited an uproar against Fortas—and potentially ruined his career—if Hoover’s accusations were made public, whether or not they were true. Here, Hoover uses those claims—made by the 17-year-old Black jailed teenager George Smith to his attorney Mitch Pilsudski—to keep tabs on Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy—and to “deflect attention from his surveillance excesses.” As Charns tells this well-researched story, bouncing from the 1960s to the 2000s, he depicts the evolving particulars of the discrimination and persecution gay Americans have always faced, including earlier versions of psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual classifying queerness as “sexual deviation,” pursuit by vice cops in the ‘60s, and even copies of FBI records referencing gay gatherings in the late ‘50s as “pervert part[ies].”
Charns’s storytelling tends toward reportorial directness, briskly pinning down the five Ws of each key development and then moving on, with a minimum of fuss. That makes those reproduced records serve as the most compelling part of the novel, paired with a lively retelling of Charns’s exhaustive efforts to expose the truth of the allegations against Fortas. Charns’s sharp eye for detail, combined with meticulous research and history that jolts, makes this an illuminating and persuasive story.
