Pink herring & the fourth persona: J. Edgar Hoover's sex crime panic

Abstract

During the 1930s, sexuality significantly shaped J. Edgar Hoover's public discourse. In response to a homosexual panic that plagued the nation's men and endangered his public persona, Hoover engaged in a passing performance. His masking rhetoric employed the pink herring, a tactic that manipulated a moral panic about sex crime to stabilize gender and sexual norms, divert attention from his private life, and silence an invisible audience that I term the fourth persona.