Book Review: Shedding Light on a 1950s Antigay ‘Panic’
Boston
Globe, June 13, 2002
Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107
Fax: 617-929-2098
Email: letter@globe.com
http://www.boston.com/globe
By Jonathan Shipley, Globe Correspondent
- Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s, By Neil
Miller; Alyson, 313 pp., paperback $14.95
The 1950s were a seemingly innocent time in America. Men were home from
war, reconnecting with their families or creating new ones. Everyone was
listening to Elvis Presley’s new hit, "That’s All Right."
Studebaker Commanders and Chevy Belairs were parked in driveways. It was a
time when many neighborhoods felt safe and people felt comfortable leaving
their doors and windows unlocked.
By the mid-1950s, the Korean War was over, but other battles raged across
the country. Even while fans were cheering for black athlete Ernie Banks on
the baseball field, civil-rights issues were taking center stage, and Brown
vs. Board of Education of Topeka had to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
While people flocked to the movie "Roman Holiday," based on a story
by Dalton Trumbo, Senator Joseph McCarthy accelerated his anti-Communist witch
hunt, and Trumbo was one man he targeted, getting him blacklisted from
Hollywood. And in Sioux City, Iowa, following the brutal murders of two
children, police, to quell public hysteria, arrested 20 homosexual men as
"sexual deviates," even though the authorities never claimed they
had anything to do with the crimes. Neil Miller’s book "Sex-Crime
Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s" is a disturbing and
well-researched book of that time.
Miller, a journalist and author of "Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian
History from 1869 to the Present" and "In Search of Gay
America," focuses on the men’s ordeals and the murders that led to
their arrests. In August 1954, 8-year-old Jimmy Bremmers of Sioux City
disappeared. He was later found outside the city limits near an old rural
road. Had he been kidnapped by a "sex fiend," as a local newspaper
conjectured? Nearly a year later, 22-month-old Donna Sue Davis was abducted,
raped, and murdered. Sioux City was in an uproar. The police force was under
pressure to arrest someone, do something. So in September 1955, it rounded up
20 gay men from Sioux City and the surrounding area, window dressers and
hairdressers, retailers and clerks, residents of their town, and placed them
in a locked ward of a state mental hospital until February and March 1956,
when they were pronounced "cured" and released. As a result of
"sexual psychopath" laws that were passed and enacted in more than
20 states between 1947 and 1955, this sort of miscarriage of justice could,
and did, happen.
Interviewing the men who were incarcerated, as well as law enforcement
officials, lawyers, mental health staff, and relatives of the murder victims,
Miller pieces together their disparate stories and paints a vivid and thorough
portrait of Sioux City in the grip of antigay hysteria. As in such recent
books as Beth Loffreda’s "Losing Matt Shepard," Dina Temple-Raston’s
"A Death in Texas," and Stewart O’Nan’s "The Circus
Fire," the author constructs a taut narrative that keeps the reader
turning the pages of a story that involves the most unfortunate of
circumstances: fear, sadness, misunderstanding, death.
When one puts a name to a victim, the story becomes that much more powerful
and meaningful. Miller does just that, telling us about men such as Bernie
McMorris, who was rounded up, a beauty-shop owner who had a wife and three
children; police officer Richard Burke, who relished sting operations to catch
local homosexuals; Ernest Triplett, whose conviction for Bremmers’s murder
was overturned in 1972 when it was discovered that the police had given him
large quantities of drugs to elicit his confession; and attorney Donald O’Brien,
who petitioned the court to declare the men sexual psychopaths (a label that
lumped together gays with child molesters and murderers).
It is a story that, hopefully, won’t be repeated, but as Miller writes,
"Public fears and anxieties can lead to the enactment of bad laws, and
laws enacted in an atmosphere of fear and anxiety can lead to even worse
consequences. No one can say for sure that what happened in Sioux City in the
1950s couldn’t happen again, in a different form, perhaps to a different
group of people." Miller sheds a bright light on those dark days in Iowa—not
quite the placid time we like to think back on fondly.
[Home] [News] [Iowa]
