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A Special Agent: Gay and Inside the FBI
A Special Agent: Gay and Inside the FBI
by Frank Buttino with Lou Buttino
William Morrow and Company
351 pages
$23.00
a review by Mari W. Taylor
If you truly want to get the low-down on how
the FBI treats suspected gay employees, Frank
Buttino’s book, A Special Agent: Gay and Inside the
FBI is the gay man’s uncensored who-done-it. 1
carefully read over two hundred and eight pages
before getting to the good part, but some books
wouldn’t have a good part were it not for the
preamble.
Overall, Francis Buttino (or his editor) has a
murder-mystery style of non-fiction writing with a
terseness that took some getting used to. There
were occasional metaphors whose conclusions
you could see long‘before you finished the sen
tence, such as, “The two worlds I had kept apart for
so long were now interweaving and in some places
colliding. These were uncharted waters, and the
ocean seemed uncharacteristically wind-tossed and
uneasy that day.” Luckily, one or two such sen
tences appear for every other chapter, not every
other paragraph, so it’s not so prevalent that I
refused to finish the book.
Buttino spends the first 23 pages examining
the denial of his own feelings, and clearly shows an
employee-oppressive FBI invading every aspect of
his personal life. On the twenty-fourth page, he
immediately intimatesj. Edgar Hoover, long-stand
ing head of the FBI, was homosexual: “Hoover held
on to my hand longer than seemed appropriate. He
also kept staring into my eyes in a way that made
me uncomfortable. It was, I later learned, a way
gays made contact with one another.” Not news,
of course.
But I got hooked. It took eighty-something
pages, but after wading through the tedious de
scription of his career (shown positively and whole
somely as a role-model for closeted gays and thank
you Mr. Buttino for including it but could we get
back to the matter at hand?) Buttino’s life story
finally becomes interesting. How could the myste
rious person known only to Frank Buttino as W.J.,
manage to send one of Buttino’s own letters to a gay
ad to the address of Buttino’s parents, unless W.J.
is actually someone Buttino knows well enough to
know the address of Buttino’s parents?
Why had the mysterious W.J. mailed evi
dence first to Buttino’s parents, exposing Buttino to
them, and then, later, to the FBI, which led to
Buttino’s ouster from his position and the end of his
career? To be outed to ones parents in the manner
of Frank Buttino, as he describes it on page 84 of his
book, is painfully rendered word by word; you can
feel his anguish, his parent’s anguish, and Buttino’s
denial, and his parent’s acceptance of his denial—
knowing their son was an FBI agent, knowing that
his work was dangerous, his parents’ concern upon
receiving a letter addressed to their home con
cerned them, too, for the mysterious W.J. had their
address,leavingthem vulnerable. And thenButtino
describes ten pages later that the FBI’s media
coorc .nator learns of Buttino’s homosexuality after
a brilliant FBI carreer of more than a decade, again,
thanks to correspondence by W.J..
The hunt is on! For Buttino’s butt, of course.
The FBI doesn’t give a flip about W.J.
Buttino lies under oath — something this
writer has done as well, having once signed a litany
of right-wing must-not-have-dones. And it is pain
ful, 1 assure you; when Buttino describes his oppor
tunity to make amends and tell the truth when
asked to sign a two-page statement denying such,
he admits in his book — without preamble — “I
had lied under oath.” Balls, folks.
People, if you want your government em
ployees who are gay to be honest in their profes-
siorai lives, don’t screw with their sexuality; let
them be what they’re going to be: “They’ll fire me
for e ther being gay or lying to them about it the first
tin e. Besides, they could use all this against me.
They could say it’s a reflection of me, the kind of
don’t want gay people in the bureau. No matter
how much I try to expalin, I’m going to look bad.
No, I can’t tell them [the FBI].”
But on to the stereotypes! Before placing
Buttino on administrative leave (admirably, with
pay), the FBI interviews Buttino. Their questions
arrive at their own logic, bubbling up from the
FBI’s equivocation of gay orientation and the
unediicatedperson’s stereotypical conception of
low-life homosexual settings (which often happen
to be heterosexual, too): “Have you engaged in sex
in rest rooms, parks, on beaches, and in other
public places?”
Does the question become how gay are you or
does it become how sleazy are you or do both
apply? Why know? Why care? The man is gay, they
learn that much, and yet the questions persist “We
need to know the kind of sex you engage in with
other men."
The most shocking thing I found while read
ing this book, which is, of course, a summary of his
attempt to save his job, was Buttino’s naive sense of
hope—his outrage at learning, finally, that the FBI
had taken the last steps necessary to fire him.
Anyone reading the description of events leading
up to “The past year and a half had been a sham!”
won’t even blink; of course it had been a sham; the
evidence grows for nearly six chapters. Frank
Buttino’s hubris, sadly, is to be expected. It’s a side-
dish to the naivete: “..there are agents in the bureau
who are lazy and incompetent...and the bureau is
going to fire me?”
But the passage which saves him from him
self, clearly his greatest demonstration of newly-
found wisdom, lies layered in meaning for not only
himself, but for the rest of us, straight and gay alike:
“While I would stand up for African-Americans, I
would not stand up for me. I did not see that all
prejudice is rooted in the need to judge but not be
judged.”
He describes a young Francis Buttino’s lack of
self-dignity which fails to spur him to moral self-
defense against his attackers; he acknowledges his
own prejudices; and certainly, it is an older, wiser
Buttino who reveals our own, deep-rooted predis
position to judge, and the folly therein. Buttino
also rises above hate and the attending glee in the
popularly unforgiving and unrelentless trouncing
of Hoover: “Mr. Hoover’s personal life was a matter
of personal privacy, and the main point of my
lawsuit was that my personal life had nothing to do
with my professional life.” If only the rest of us,
includingthis writer, met hatred withasmuchgrace.Y
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