FBI to Students: Watch Out! Socialists Are TOTALLY Gay.

A footnote to Jerry Tuccille’s
item earlier today about the activists who in 1971 broke into
an FBI office, lifted a lot of files, and used them to expose
COINTELPO, a program devoted to surveilling, infiltrating, and
disrupting political groups. If you’re at all interested in this
chapter in the history of government abuses, you should spend
some time exploring those old COINTELPRO files, which the
government has now posted online. I spent a lot
of time reading them when I was writing
The United States of Paranoia, and they’re filled with
alternately frightening, stupid, and simply bizarre schemes.

Here’s a relatively mild example. In 1971, when the Young
Socialist Alliance ended a policy barring gays from the group, the
FBI’s
San Diego office responded by creating these fliers:

A second flier, featuring female names, announced that the
organization was “now accepting ‘les’ membership.”

Headquarters approved: “Bureau
feels preparation of leaflets as requested in relet has merit, and
you are authorized to duplicate sufficient copies on commercially
obtained paper to have posted on various bulletin boards where they
might be seen by majority of students at San Diego State College.
It is hopeful this action will have desired effect of dissuading
would-be new recruits from membership in YSA.” Because that,
apparently, was the FBI’s mission: to play on people’s bigotries to
dissuade them from joining a political organization.