Hoover was a closeted gay man!

Well, there's no smoking gun that says that Hoover was gay or bisexual for sure. Unmarried adults in the aristocratic Old South were socially expected to live with parents or friends, and the Washington Hoover grew up in was an Old Southern city. That being said, apart from his mother, Tolson was the only person Hoover ever let him call "John", and old-style 20th Century FBI (this was the pre "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" era kids!) agents would have inevitably lied to protect their boss, much like in the military.

My own personal take is that Hoover was so utterly focused on his job that his private life became marginal over the decades and it consumed him as an individual. Not completely-he attended cocktail and society parties and almost certainly had a female Hollywood mistress at one point-but even compared to such workaholic contemporaries like LBJ, RFK, or Nixon, all of whom were capable of putting in 18 hour days on a regular basis, Hoover really took the crown.