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It was but one of the reasons Leonard chose Congressional over Arlington [ as Walt Whitman fans know, Peter Doyle, his assumed great love, is also buried in the former], but he often laughed imagining the outrage of various FBI Troglodytes when, in their pilgrimage to Hoover’s and Tolson’s graves, they read Leonard’s epitaph: “A Gay Vietnam Veteran – When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

In any case, while Frank is likely only to have been able to repeat hearsay about Hoover and Tolson, it’s marvelous that a star of DiCaprio’s standing wanted to hear directly the great man’s own encounters with the FBI.

An article about the at least BFFs in a 1953 edition of “ONE” is thought to have led to the magazine’s first trouble with the US Postal Service, which in turn led to a precedent-setting Supreme Court free speech ruling. The following is an excerpt of an interview with the late Jim Kepner in “Making Gay History” by Eric Marcus:

“That article attracted the interest of the FBI. Much later, through the Freedom of Information Act, we found a note from Hoover to Tolson, which I have a copy of somewhere in storage, saying, ‘We’ve got to get these bastards’. There was also a note to the post office from Hoover urging them to check into ONE.

At the same time as the seizure, the FBI showed up at ONE’s office wanting to know who had written the article about Hoover. They also came to visit me a couple of times and visited most members of the staff. One of the FBI agents sat right there in that chair. I was nervous; it was a tense situation. They asked me if a couple of members of the staff were Communists, and I hooted and said that they were very conservative. They were. I probably shouldn’t have even told them that. I did say that I had been a member of the Communist party and that I had been kicked out for being gay. They wanted me to name people I had known in the Party and what they did. I owed no thanks to the Party for kicking me out, but I would not give information about individuals who were in the Party, whom I still respected.”