Colavito unearths another interesting tale.
Most people who have studied the weirder parts of the twentieth century are aware that L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame had a longstanding antagonistic relationship with the Feds.
In my research for my new book, I discovered how Hubbard’s Dianetics intersected with a Red Scare flap that sparked federal interest in Hubbard at exactly the wrong time and set off a decades-long hostile relationship. As best I can tell, no one has previously written about the impact of the now-forgotten Reuben L. Revens scandal on the FBI’s eventual interest in Dianetics, so here is the outline of a disturbing story. I compiled it from FBI documents, Ben Bradlee’s memoir, and a year’s worth of reporting in the
Washington Evening Star. I’ll caution you here that some of the details about sexual exploitation are upsetting.
In the summer of 1950, one of the first students who paid $500 for an auditing course from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics Research Foundation, an attorney from Kansas City, Missouri named Lamar W. Dye, grew disgruntled and contacted the FBI to report Hubbard as a potential “subversive” who was teaching communistic propaganda. The FBI filed the report and did nothing, as was common for singular denunciations from members of the public.
In the fall of 1950, a former Army expert in psychological warfare who was then working for the Library of Congress and publishing academic book reviews of psychology books took advantage of the craze for pseudo-therapy Dianetics had created in the months after Dianetics’ introduction that spring. Reuben L. Revens, a beady-eyed, stocky fellow offered his services as an unlicensed sex therapist to other men working for the government in Washington. He also organized a group of mostly government employees who met under the cover of Hubbard’s local Dianetics office. Known as “Revens’ Revellers” or “Perverts, Inc.,” the men would watch pornographic movies together and hold raucous, raunchy parties. Some of these parties involved Revens sharing obscene and nude photographs of the women he “treated” as a sex therapist. According to Irving Cahn, a government employee and a patient of Revens, one of the women in the photographs was a Hubbard employee at the D.C. Dianetics Foundation office. ... |
The resulting investigation led Washington, D.C. police to the local Dianetics club, and a particularly ambitious Sgt. Applebeck of the D.C. police suspected that Dianetics club was a front for communist sex perverts, following accusations made in the United States Senate a few weeks earlier that communists were identical with sexual deviants, particularly homosexuals. Sen. Joseph McCarthy had alleged that being a “flagrant homosexual” was one of the “mental twists” of communism, and sexual perverts of all kinds were both communists and susceptible to communist blackmail. Operating under such a theory, Applebeck reported to the FBI that Dianetics club members were a “cell” of communists and that “members of this cell make contact with perverts in Government employment who are threatened with exposure unless they furnish information.” It wasn’t true, but the FBI didn’t know that.
Revens was indicted in January 1951 on charges of assault and sexual psychopathy, under a harsh new D.C. law against sexual perversion, the toughest in the nation, passed by Congress over the objections of D.C. representatives in Congress’s role as governing authority over the District. He went on trial in March 1951, to much sensation, and after three days of testimony and several days of deliberation, he was found guilty of assault. The D.A. planned a second trial to have him declared a sexual psychopath, but a psychological evaluation found him mentally unsound, which vacated the charge of psychopathy. He was sentenced to 2 to 4 years in prison in September. He told the court that society was to blame. “Society does not want me to be unconventional,” Revens told the court before swearing to give up being a sex therapist and to stop having pervert parties. ...
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/forgotten-history-the-strange-impact-of-the-reuben-l-revens-trial#