That's Andrew O'Hehir's spin on the new biopic of J. Edgar Hoover. Beverly Gage sees the FBI founder's ambiguously gay relationship with his aide Clyde Tolson as evidence of complicated social views with respect to homosexuality:
It is easy to write off the more open aspects of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship as proof of old-fashioned naiveté—to assume that folks in the 1950s were unaware. But this gives the people of the past far too little credit and flattens out an intriguing social history. If Hoover’s story tells us anything, it’s that today’s binaries—gay vs. straight, closeted vs. out—map uneasily onto the sexual past.
Kenneth Ackerman is skeptical that the two were involved. Peter Suderman thinks the film just isn't very good, regardless. David Denby's believes Hoover's professional zeal was a reflection of his personal self-denial:
Hoover, we realize, is obsessed with keeping America safe because he feels unsafe himself. Internal subversion is a personal, not just a political, threat to him.
The Dish 