Even years after the death of iconic FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the agency continued to discriminate against gay agents.
It wasn’t all that very long ago that the FBI was almost exclusively the domain of straight white men.
That is, until an agent named Frank Buttino came along. The FBI fired him after discovering his sexual orientation, but Buttino filed a discrimination lawsuit.
And as a result, the FBI’s homophobic hiring discrimination ended.
I met him in the summer of 1993, while his lawsuit was still pending. He had written his autobiography, a book called A Special Agent .
So here now, from 1993, Frank Buttino.
Frank Buttino died in 2018. He was 73.
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