Last edited: January 23, 2005


Dark Moment for Gays Revisited in Documentary

The Republican, January 22, 2005
1860 Main Street, Springfield, MA 01101

By Ronni Gordon, rgordon@repub.com

ON THE AIR
Event: The Great Pink Scare
When: Thursday, 9 p.m.
Channel: WGBY-TV, Channel 57
Running time: 60 minutes

The three professors were forced out of their jobs at Smith in 1960 after postal inspectors charged with rooting out smut discovered naked photos of men in a package addressed to Arvin, a distinguished English scholar. Under pressure from police, he turned in Dorius, Spofford and two others.

Tug Yourgrau remembers a fundraising event for a bald little man in a dark gray suit. “He had done something that revealed a human frailty and was being punished for it. He had been stomped on hard by the police.”

Yourgrau, now a writer, director and producer in the Boston area, was between 10 and 13 at the time. He lived in Northampton where his father, Wolfgang, taught philosophy at Smith College. His father was raising money at their house for his colleague, Newton Arvin.

Several years ago, Yourgrau read an article in The New Yorker magazine about Arvin and two other Smith professors prosecuted in the 1960s for possession of pornographic material. In the article and in his book “The Scarlet Professor,” Northampton author Barry Werth wrote that the professors’ civil liberties were trampled and their careers ruined because they were homosexuals at a time when many considered homosexuality an abomination.

Yourgrau wanted to tell the story on film.

The result is “The Great Pink Scare,” a one-hour documentary scheduled to air at 9 p.m. Thursday on WGBY, Springfield’s public television station. Yourgrau is executive producer, director and writer.

He contacted Werth, who became senior adviser to the project. The film features interviews with Werth and with the two surviving professors, Joel Dorius and Ned Spofford, and with people who knew them, such as Hatfield author Jane Yolen, a Smith student at the time.

The three professors were forced out of their jobs at Smith in 1960 after postal inspectors charged with rooting out smut discovered naked photos of men in a package addressed to Arvin, a distinguished English scholar. Under pressure from police, he turned in Dorius, Spofford and two others.

Newspaper headlines screamed, “Police Break Up Major Homosexual Smut Ring!” Arvin pleaded guilty to charges of lewdness and possession of obscene pictures. He died in 1963. Dorius and Spofford were also found guilty but acquitted on appeal three years later after the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled against illegal searches and redefined obscenity.

The stigma remained. Dorius and Spofford went into and out of mental hospitals for years.

“The papers went wild, blowing up

minor acts into a lascivious circle of professors leering over photographs,” Dorius says in the film. He says he internalized the newspaper images of himself. “It made it impossible for me to live any kind of normal life,” he continues later. “And I skulked about town mainly at night, avoiding people I thought might be able to recognize or see me. It was a criminal feeling.”

As for Spofford, “I felt perfectly innocent and I felt that I had been abused,” he says.

The documentary also includes historic footage and impressionistic recreations from the period. With its moody music, it was intended to have the effect of a modern film noir, according to production notes.

“That period of American history is pretty unknown,” Yourgrau said from his office in Somerville, where he is vice president and co-founder of Powderhouse Productions, a documentary film and video production company.

He said that pornography was considered to be a cancer in the country’s soul. And the Northampton case had added shock value because it involved homosexuals.

“There was this remarkable spasm of sexual McCarthyism. ... It was more troubling to be declared a homosexual than a communist,” he said.

“Homosexuality back then was considered to be something you never discussed in polite society. It was a mental disease, a sin and a criminal activity,” he said. “I hope the film raises discussions about the way people think about difference and privacy.”

According to Yourgrau, the invasion of the professors’ privacy has “troubling echoes” in today’s laws such as the USA Patriot Act, which grants the Justice Department sweeping powers to monitor the lives of suspected terrorists.

“The post office was given the right to snoop in your mail to see if it was obscene. It became a felony to sit in your house and leaf through Playboy with another person,” he said.

Dorius and Spofford now both live in different parts of California. “Both of them have come to a more accepting place,” Yourgrau said. “But they are not wealthy guys. That was hard to see.”

He said they agreed to be filmed only after a two-year courtship.

“When you say ‘camera’ to people, they either jump to you or away from you. They said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They finally changed their minds. It was so painful to talk about these things and they talked extremely intimately,” he said. “To me it’s just riveting.”


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