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The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City (Columbia Northwest Classics), by Gerassi
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"Written in 1965 about a same-sex sexual scandal that occurred in 1955 in Boise, Idaho, John Gerassi’s classic study depicts both middle America’s traditional response to homosexuality and an era in the country’s history before the modern gay rights movement really got underway. Because much of what Gerassi wrote about persists in today’s struggles over gay and lesbian issues, his book still has much to tell us about how contemporary society reacts to, and misunderstands, homosexuality."―Peter Boag
On the morning of November 2, 1955, the people of Boise, Idaho, were stunned by a screaming headline in the Idaho Daily Statesman, THREE BOISE MEN ADMIT SEX CHARGES. Time magazine picked up the story, reporting that a "homosexual underworld" had long operated in Idaho’s staid capital city. The Statesman led the hysteria that resulted in dozens of arrests―including some highly placed members of the community―and sentences ranging from probation to life imprisonment.
Peter Boag’s Foreword places the book in historical perspective, summarizing the popular psychological theories and legal conceptions that helped to shape Gerassi’s research. He discusses advances in Idaho’s public approach to homosexuality and ways in which the provincialism chronicled by Gerassi persists to this day.
- Sales Rank: #828243 in Books
- Published on: 2001-11-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .91" w x 6.00" l, 1.20 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 360 pages
Review
"Written in 1965 about a same-sex sexual scandal that occurred in 1955 in Boise, Idaho, John Gerassi's classic study depicts both middle America's traditional response to homosexuality and an era in the country's history before the modern gay rights movement really got underway. Because much of what Gerassi wrote about persists in today's struggles over gay and lesbian issues, his book still has much to tell us about how contemporary society reacts to, and misunderstands, homosexuality." - from the new Foreword by Peter Boag
About the Author
Peter Boag's Foreword places the book in historical perspective, summarising the popular psychological theories and legal conceptions that helped to shape Gerassi's research. He discusses advances in Idaho's public approach to homosexuality and ways in which the provincialism chronicled by Gerassi persists to this day.
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
An Alternative Lifestyler's Must Read Book
By Jon Watt
The Boys of Boise is one of those books that anyone interested in understanding the issues besetting those living an alternative lifestyle must read.
John Gerassi writes an editorial history of a series of politically motivated arrests and harrassments of those in the homosexual community in Boise, Idaho in 1955. Gerassi writes from a mid-1960s perspective in the midst of the sexual revolution looking back on a different perspective when homosexuality was even less accepted than it was in the 1960s.
The book explores several issues as they impacted a prosecution of a given portion of the homosexual population: community politics, the input and influence of a religous community (in Boise - the LDS), the role of the popular local press, a grab for power by those outside the main community power structure, the role of law enforcement and the courts.
Why is this book a must read for understanding issues facing those living alternative lifestyles today? The events covered could happen in any community today - to those who are exploring poly relationships, BDSM, and Gor - as well as to those who continue to simply live within the Gay community. There are laws on our books in each state and locale that could be discriminatively enforced to bring problems to individuals or groups - in violation of protections they believe they have under the Bill of Rights.
The only possible negative in the book - and for some it is not a negative - is the amount of space devoted to reproducing the entirety of court dialogs and certain other primary sources. While I personally enjoyed having the sources there - other historians would prefer they be relegated to either appendices or simply referenced and summarized. It should be noted that when Gerassi wrote this book - he was a reporter/editor for a news periodical rather than a university professor.
The book definitely belongs in the library of scholars devoted to Urban studies, gay studies, the sociology of alternative lifestyles and the like.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Classic American journalism
By Timothy Hulsey
From 1955 to 1957, Boise, Idaho, was caught in the grip of a full-blown Gay panic that made national headlines and gave Idaho's judicial system a black eye. This study of the panic, published in 1965, is both of its time and decades ahead of it. Gerassi brilliantly dissects the (chiefly economic) motives of people involved in promoting and prosecuting the scandal. He also displays a sharp eye for character and incidental detail.
_The Boys of Boise_ is a must-read for anyone with an interest in GLBT history and a classic piece of investigative journalism in its own right. (Neil Miller covers a similar scandal in Sioux City, IA, with the somewhat inferior _Sex Crime Panic_.)
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A great read and an enduring work of journalism for many reasons
By Allen Smalling
Seemingly out of nowhere, in the late fall of 1955, Page One headlines in Boise, Idaho's afternoon newspaper screamed about three men arrested for molesting [male] minors, and the paper shrilled even louder a little later in an inflammatory editorial that implied a large homosexual menace. It paper urged the populace to demand action--although it was a little vague on exactly what kind of action. No one could have predicted the enormity of what followed. Happily for us, ten years later, in 1965, a TIME magazine reporter, John Gerassi, went to Boise and meticulously researched the background, history and fallout of that astonishing scandal. Ordinarily a 45-year-old book based on a 55-year-old scandal, with some quoted experts relying on psychoanalytic theory discredited today, would not be considered priority reading. But Gerassi's book, THE BOYS OF BOISE, while quite illuminating, is also intense and fascinating, and in this reviewer's opinion deserves to be considered a key work of American journalism. Here are some reasons why, with only a sampling of relevant examples and anecdotes:
Witch Hunt and Hysteria: The police started arresting men right and left. Boise and its suburbs went into a virtual lockdown of fear and paranoia. At the height of the hysteria, family men were afraid to ask how the high-school football team was doing, and all-male poker games were cancelled unless a tolerant woman could be found to drink and smoke along with the guys. (Even so, complained one professional, it cut way down on the swearing so the poker sessions weren't nearly as much fun.) In one instance, bizarre today but sadly common at the time, a bachelor teacher received a phone call during breakfast from a friend warning him that police were on the prowl. The young man immediately got up, got packed and got out, relocating to another state, leaving his job behind and his breakfast on the table. In retrospect, he probably did the sensible thing.
Morals, Sexology, and Ethics: Though a churchgoing community, Boise was about evenly divided between Mormons and other believers who kept out of each other's way socially. When half the middle class of a big town/small city doesn't know the other half, it makes gossip, speculation and rumor spread, since people tend to demonize those of whom they know least. Sexually speaking, Boise, though a little isolated, was not an atypical blue-collar town of its size. Following Kinsey and the experts Gerassi interviewed, "unnatural acts" and "crimes against nature" under the broadly worded law went on quite naturally and by nice, putatively law-abiding citizens. (Not to mention unlawfulness like playing poker for stakes, wink, or operating an unlicensed bar in the home.) Like any community, Boise had its share of homosexual horseplay among adolescents, circle-jerks and experimental fooling around. This may account for the fact that the male adults of Boise, while not exactly tolerant, were less likely to demand action on the issue or pass along rumors to the cops as were the women. Perhaps the men knew how unrealistic it was to maintain anything other than an image of purity in most boys of sixteen or seventeen.
Investigation: What looked like vigilant law enforcement was really the police wing of an attempted (small spoiler**) "putsch" between opposing factions of city government and administration. And, as has happened in other locales, when the dragnet was spread wide, the police started roping in upper-middle-class miscreants with access to media and lawyers as well as the more stereotypical "trash" and ne'er-do-wells. Having angered a couple of citizens with clout, arrests made during raid or entrapment schemes declined. But it was able to foster horror even before an arrest might be made.
Interrogation: The focus shifted from forensic investigation to interrogation in a house near downtown that always kept its shades pulled down. Like any community its size, Boise had its share of cash-strapped sixteen- and seventeen-years olds, some of whom weren't above the occasional hustle (or "gay for pay"), especially if he was the oral "pitcher." One police questioner in particular was skilled in making closeted gay man think of blackmail without actually saying so; and the seediest hustler could come across as a naïve teen after he spoke unknowingly into tape recorder and named names of adults. The little Jesuitries of broadly worded morals laws were exploited to the hilt; it might become crucial whether it was the 32-year-old or the 17-year-old who first mentioned oral sex but not necessarily vital whether any sex took place.
Citizenship: Immense harm to civil liberties ensued, as well as damage to the innocent, guilty or those stuck in between. Eleven years before Miranda, there were absolutely no Miranda-type rights offered or assured; and those who talked did so with a constantly-running tape recorder in the room. More than a few teens and young men fell for the line that the cops needed to set the record straight, and then unwittingly ratted out a friend or fleeting sex partner. Adults were frankly encouraged to name names under promise (seldom realized) of lenient treatment. It was indeed a kind of McCarthyism gone home, not in the least part because the lead interrogator, a man named Fairchild, had been brought in from the outside and was skilled in the ways of routing gay men and lesbians out of the armed forces, a transferable skill he exercised with almost Stalinist impunity in the Boise of 1955.
The cases finally settled on as top priority for prosecution and full jury trials involved oral sex (anal was rarely on the menu), but who was "Top" and who "Bottom" could be obscured if that might have hurt the juror's opinion of the "innocent" or "duped" one, usually a teen. In cases where the sex was clearly intentional and no gay-for-pay or prostitution took place, questioning could hinge on whether an out-of-towner offered a young man a lift or bought him a Coke. If the adult were a nobody passing through town, interrogation would take one tack; if he were an upright citizen it might take another. At the height of the terror, a young man and former Boisean living in California, the late Mel Dir, was extradited from San Francisco back to Boise (breaking Lord-knows-how-many Amendments to the U.S. Constitution) to face prosecution for participating in an act of "oral sodomy" when he was still living in Boise and under eighteen. And he went to trial.
Psychiatry and Psychology, 1965: It's quite natural to feel irritated at times in this book, when expert opinion about (male) homosexuality is surveyed and most people advised not prison (as under Idaho law), but instead acceptance and "adjustment" -- and the slim but possible hope for a "cure" -- to heterosexuality. And these were the liberals! If any licensed professional cops that attitude today, report him or her -- they're not keeping up with their field. It's important to keep in mind that Gerassi researched and wrote THE BOYS OF BOISE in 1965, four years before the landmark Stonewall riots and six years before the IPA dropped its definition of constituent homosexuality as a neurosis. It's like seeing an African-American housemaid portrayed in an old "Tom and Jerry" cartoon. You don't have to like it, but you should consider it the product of a less enlightened time. And not prejudge the book because of that, but instead consider how far gay men and lesbians have come in the intervening years. Gerassi's book was almost incredibly enlightened for its time, coming from a professional from TIME magazine with no axe to grind and no cause to apologize for. THE BOYS OF BOISE went paperback and became a hit paperback-rack bestseller in 1967.
I feel obliged to point out that Boise was not then, nor is it now, "Sin City USA." What triggered the ususual hysteria on the part of the 1955-57 investigation was probably private impetus and a compliant newspaper sounding an alarm over [largely nonexistent] moral evils. But Boise did not achieve what we'd today call "closure." Did karma bite back? The concentrated and quasi-Stalinistic aspect of the scandal helped spur John Gerassi to research and write THE BOYS OF BOISE. Then the book became a paperback bestseller in 1967. Just two years ago a summary-and-update documentary about the scandal, THE FALL OF '55, narrated by Claudia Weathermon, was released and is still available in DVD-R. (See reviews.)
There are so many more things I'd like to relate, such as manipulation of the press, the role of women in this affair, the shadowy "Queen" who was behind it all, which of these persons suffered career damage, or whether the transplanted Californian had to go to jail - but at this point I urge you to buy and read THE BOYS OF BOISE. We are fortunate to have it in an affordable trade paperback, and with generous typeface and margins.
At the very same time, two similarly paranoid roundups of local gay men took place in Sioux City, Iowa. That sad affair and its resolution is well documented by historian Neil Miller in his SEX-CRIME PANIC (Alyson Pubs., 2002).
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