A mass hysteria hit Boise, Idaho, in fall 1955: almost 10 percent of the male population—bank vice presidents, high school teachers, shoe repairmen—were accused of having seduced young boys.1 It was symptomatic of bogeyman fears all over America. An article in the popular Coronet magazine titled “New Moral Menace to Our Youth” warned, “No degenerate can indulge in his unnatural practices alone. Each year thousands of youngsters of high school and college age are introduced to these unnatural practices by inveterate seducers.”2 Professors and teachers whose jobs threw them into regular contact with “youngsters” were suddenly being scrutinized for degeneracy. After E. K. Johnston’s arrest, the witch hunts at the University of Missouri expanded even to students—dozens were kicked out to prevent “contagion.”3 Witch hunts spread to colleges and universities across America: UCLA,4 the University of Michigan,5 the University of Wisconsin,6 Smith College,7 the University of Massachusetts,8 the University of Texas.9 The über–witch hunt, which targeted Florida educators and students, was carried out from 1958 to 1965 at the cost of millions of dollars to state taxpayers.10
Florida state senator Charley Johns billed himself as a populist, a supporter of the much put-upon “little man.” Johns’s father was a sheriff who’d been killed in the line of duty,11 and one of Johns’s first proposals as a new senator in 1947 was that the state should purchase a portable electric chair that could be transported by truck, along with an electric generator. The chair could be set up in front of any jailhouse, and when a capital offender’s time had come, anyone who wished could witness his execution, just like in the days of public hangings.12 His proposal failed, but the former railroad conductor and insurance agent from the rural town of Starke (population four thousand) was not daunted. Eventually he became leader of the “Pork Chop Gang,” a group of twenty segregationist Democratic senators from north Florida. The Pork Chop Gang managed to get Johns elected president of the Senate in April 1953. Florida didn’t have a lieutenant governor; so when Governor Dan McCarty died in office five months later, Charley Johns became acting governor.
Johns ran for governor on his own the following year and lost to the less flamboyant Senator LeRoy Collins, but his rural constituency reelected him to the Senate in 1955. “Communist people are behind a lot of this Negro agitation. We’re going to stop it, and let the chips fall where they may,” the fire-eating Johns proclaimed to the voters of his district.13 The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education the year before be damned, Johns pledged; he’d fight to keep Florida schools—and all of Florida—segregated.
In 1956, in the midst of the Negro bus boycott in Tallahassee, Senator Johns announced that there were subversive organizations that were violating the laws of the state by carrying on Communist-influenced activities. He proposed that a Florida Legislative Investigation Committee be formed to investigate those organizations. His fellow politicians voted to appropriate money for salaries, per diems, office supplies, long-distance telephone charges, travel,14 even honoraria for spies. FLIC (or the Johns Committee, or “Florida’s Little McCarthy Committee,” as it came to be called by those who finally fought it15) began by investigating the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its subversive support of the bus boycott. The committee also investigated troublemaking individuals such as a black woman in Senator Johns’s hometown who’d been going out with a white man16 and a University of Florida botany professor who gave “integrated parties” in his home.17
But the Johns Committee hit a snag with the NAACP when it demanded that the head of the Miami chapter, black Episcopalian minister Theodore Gibson, and the white vice president, librarian Ruth Perry, hand over membership lists. They refused. Perry informed Senator Johns, “This committee’s demand constitutes an invasion of the rights of free speech and association of the NAACP, its members, and myself—all of which I claim and assert.”18 Johns’s committee then subpoenaed three more NAACP officials, all of them black, and accused them of having ties to the Florida Communist Party. They wouldn’t answer any of the committee’s questions either.19
“If blacks refuse to testify, they should be forced to. And if they still refuse, we should put them in jail!” Johns proclaimed.20
The NAACP fought Johns all the way to the US Supreme Court, and it won. “The NAACP could file anything, and that court would grant it!” the fuming Senator Johns told the Miami News.21 He was sitting on a pile of money earmarked for investigations, and as long as the Supreme Court was telling civil rights groups they didn’t have to answer his questions, he had nothing to investigate.22
But when a rabidly anticommunist professor at the University of South Florida alerted Johns that “known Communists” were being invited to speak on campus,23 the senator found a new focus for his committee. He and his team traveled up and down Florida interviewing students to find out if their professors had “Communist ideas.” They scrutinized reading lists and discovered that the young were being taught subversive and obscene material, such as The Grapes of Wrath, Brave New World, and Beat poetry. But faculty committees and the American Association of University Professors obstinately upheld the tenets of academic freedom and fought Johns’s attempts to censor what they taught.24 Again the senator had to look elsewhere to spend the bulk of his committee’s investigative money.
In the fall of 1958, the senator’s son, Jerome, who’d been a student at the University of Florida, told his father that he’d observed quite a few homosexual professors on campus. Coincidentally, when Johns’s chief investigator, R. J. Strickland, a former head of the Tallahassee vice squad, went to the University of Florida the following week to investigate Communist professors, he was told by his informants that there weren’t many of those, but the place was packed with homosexual professors. Strickland called Johns to relay what he’d learned.
“Well, get back there and take care of the problem!” the excited Johns ordered.25 Here was a fine use for the money the legislature had given the Johns Committee. Florida had a “crimes against nature” law, which made all homosexuals criminals. No court or professors’ union would dare tell Johns that homosexuals didn’t need investigating.26 Hundreds of homosexual professors, university students, and public school teachers were summoned by the Johns Committee to be interrogated; no one came to their defense—not even homosexuals themselves.27 They couldn’t say, as NAACP vice president Ruth Perry did, “This committee’s demand constitutes an invasion of my rights, which I claim and assert.” They knew that under Florida law, there was no “right” to be homosexual.
Remus James Strickland—R. J., or “Sergeant,” as Charley Johns called him28—had been the head of the Tallahassee vice squad and had a lot of experience in getting at the truth when a homosexual arrestee was intractable. He applied the techniques he’d perfected to the grilling of Florida educators and students at the University of Florida; the University of South Florida; Florida State University; the state’s Negro college, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University; and at junior colleges and elementary and secondary schools all over Florida. University presidents and school principals cooperated. Senator Johns, they knew, could influence state funding.29
• • •
“Have you had homosexual relationships with anybody since you’ve been on the faculty over there?” Strickland questioned a man who taught English at the University of Florida.30
“No sir, no sir!” answered the rattled professor. He was married and the father of three children, ages five, twelve, and seventeen.31 He’d been plucked out of class in the middle of teaching freshmen students how to structure a paragraph; and now he found himself sitting in a room at the Manor Motel, a modest little inn not far from the university. The room, which had been rented by the Johns Committee, was where suspected homosexual professors and students were brought to be interrogated. Before the quizzing, Johns Committee counsel Mark Hawes, a pudgy, stern-looking lawyer from Saint Petersburg, “duly cautioned” suspects about the law against perjury, and then he swore them in.32 A stenographer sat in a corner of the room. A uniformed officer, John Tileston of the University of Florida Police Department, stood at the door.33 It was Tileston who’d accompanied the English professor from his classroom.
“You have not had homosexual relations?” Strickland continued.
“No, sir. I’ve been . . . I’ve had affectionate relationships with some of my students,” the professor answered, clearly grasping to figure out why he’d been brought to this motel room.
“What do you mean by ‘affectionate’?”
“Well, I’ve given them a hug, something like that, but I don’t think that . . . there’s anything wrong with that.”
Strickland, well practiced in the language that flustered, quickly came in for the kill: “Have you ever taken another man’s penis in your mouth and given him what is commonly referred to as a blow job?”
“No, sir!”
“Did you meet a man in the urinal in the restroom on the second floor of the library, standing at the urinal, you standing there, and he standing there”—Strickland gestured proximity—“with both of you having an erection, and did you ask him if he wanted to go to your office, and did you take him to your office?” Strickland was reading now from notes the stenographer had made earlier. “And did you lock the outer door and take him into the little room in your office and lock both doors to that, and there perform a homosexual act on him?”
“No! No, sir!” The professor was vehement.
“Bring him in,” Strickland told Officer Tileston.
The man Tileston led into the room a moment later repeated the details of the on-campus encounter, and Strickland reiterated to the professor that perjury and homosexual acts were both serious crimes, offenses punishable by five to twenty years in Raiford State Prison. But he would not prosecute someone who told the truth, Strickland assured the professor: “This is not a criminal investigation, this is a civil inquiry. The legislature just wants to find out the extent of this problem out here as it affects this university.”34 However, if the subject would not cooperate, Strickland warned, he would personally make sure that he was charged with sodomy under Florida law.
It was a Hobson’s choice: go to state prison for sodomy compounded by perjury, or admit guilt (and name others) and slink away from the university. He gave them one other choice, too—equally diabolical: “If you don’t want to talk to me here in private, you don’t have to. It’s your right to demand a public trial,” he told them. Of course, if they did demand a trial, the whole world would know they’d been accused of committing shameful homosexual acts. Most of the accused chose to slink away.
• • •
There were few women on university faculties in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Those who were lesbians pretended that partners were friends and male friends were fiancés, and they glued their feet to the closet floor. Most escaped detection. Of the fourteen faculty members terminated for homosexuality at the University of Florida, for instance, only one, a library science instructor,35 was female.36 Determined to nail lesbians too, Strickland turned his attention to elementary and high school teachers. In October 1959 he wrote the Johns Committee claiming that “admitted homosexuals” had informed him that fully 30 percent of the school teachers in the Tampa, Pinellas, and Sarasota areas were homosexual.37 He got permission to expand his witch hunts to the Florida public schools.
It wasn’t easy to catch lesbian teachers.38 They hardly ever engaged in sex in public places, so Strickland’s vice squad savvy didn’t help him much. Intent on finding them but having no idea how to go about it, he quizzed lesbians who’d gotten in trouble with the law, hoping they’d drop some teachers’ names. He even went to Florida’s Lowell State Prison for Women to ask inmates if they’d known any lesbian teachers. “I want you to be truthful with me, so we might help some small child,” he told them.39 Saint Petersburg Police Department sergeant David Hooper brought him an unemployed twenty-year-old female he’d arrested, who was a habitué of gay girls’ bars. “Have you had any occasion where teachers’ names have been mentioned to you as far as homosexuality is concerned, that you remember?” Strickland asked hopefully during his interrogation of her.
“No, this is something I never heard anything of,” the puzzled young woman told him.
Strickland didn’t give up: “Would you be willing to make an effort to see what you could find out?”
What could the young woman say? In trouble already, hoping her punishment might be mitigated, she promised, “Yes. If I thought it could be of some help, I would. I don’t know how I’d go about it, but I guess I could figure out some way.”40
• • •
With the blessings of Senator Johns’s committee, Strickland paid people to be informants, such as a nineteen-year-old Tampa hustler, Dwight Evans,41 who often plied his trade at the Greyhound bus terminal. The investigators set up shop in Tampa, in a room at the Hawaiian Village, a cheap motel landscaped with tikis and bits of synthetic thatch. There they queried Evans, asking for detailed descriptions of the University of South Florida students and faculty he picked up at the terminal. They wanted specifics about the acts Evans committed with those men; and, if they took him to their homes, their addresses and the make, model, and color of their cars.
“Well, there isn’t anything I can think of now,” Evans declared after a long debriefing in which he named multiple names. “Probably later there will be, because, as I said, I do know quite a few people you’d be interested in here in Tampa. But I have talked quite a bit here, and I’m gonna have to think a little bit. I know some more.” Young Evans was a man who knew well how to tantalize his paying customers and make them come back for repeats.42
Strickland also paid female informers to help entrap lesbians. At Florida State University, an eighteen-year-old woman student, May,43 had read in the newspapers about R. J. Strickland’s homosexual hunts, and in September 1959, she phoned him. She offered her services, explaining that her close friend Cathy had become involved with lesbians and had been wooed away to West Virginia by them. Through Cathy’s suffering, May had seen up close, she claimed, “how destructive it was.” For that reason, she was “making an effort to do something about it.”44
May was full of ideas about how to help the Johns Committee investigators find lesbians on her campus: for instance, a girl she knew, Carol Lee Palmer, had been kicked out of FSU by the dean of women, Katherine Warren, for being a lesbian. Palmer was now living in West Virginia, but May could encourage her to come visit and bring her present girlfriend, and the investigators could arrest them and get Palmer to name all the lesbians at FSU.
Strickland didn’t seem to care that the eighteen-year-old’s story hinted at the vengeance of a spurned lover. He and State’s Attorney Mark Hawes cooperated completely with her on her bizarre scheme (financed, of course, by the taxpayers of Florida). She would write Carol Lee Palmer in West Virginia and say that she was herself interested in “becoming converted” to homosexuality, and that she was involved with a girl, but they were still “sitting on the fence.” Could Palmer come back to Tallahassee for a weekend with her present partner, Ruby Kelly, and “show us your side of the fence?” May and her “girlfriend” (also on the Johns Committee payroll) and Carol and Ruby could all stay for free at the Sunset Motel, May wrote Carol Lee Palmer. Her girlfriend’s mother had rented two rooms for out-of-town relatives who’d had to cancel their visit, she explained.45
That Saturday night of the visit, Attorney Hawes and Leon County sheriff William Joyce were listening at Carol and Ruby’s motel room window; when they “figured that the time was ripe, they broke through the door.” It was a bit precipitous: the two lesbians were only kissing. But that was enough. They were arrested for “crimes against nature” and taken to Leon County Jail.46
When Carol Lee Palmer was interrogated in jail, she couldn’t think of many names of lesbians to give Strickland, but she did say she’d heard a rumor that Katherine Warren, the dean of women at FSU—who’d been responsible for having her expelled—“was around some woman all the time and was living with some woman.”47
• • •
The proficiency of informants at snagging homosexuals helped to justify R. J. Strickland’s reimbursement requests for spy expenses. For example: “Enclosed you will find a voucher for informants’ fees in amount of $223.13, which includes $5.30 for confidential telephone calls for the month of July and $12.90 for the month of August,” he wrote to the chairman of the Johns Committee. He was anxious to protect his spies, and he imposed cagey secrecy on the committee: “It would be detrimental for those telephone toll tickets to become part of the public records in the Comptroller’s Office,” he warned the committee chairman in his request that the reimbursements be paid under the table.48
As much as Charley Johns and R. J. Strickland strived for secrecy and kept the public ignorant about their use of spies, word did eventually get out about the excesses of their tactics, and in 1963, moderate legislators tried to put an end to the funding for the Johns Committee. Charley Johns announced that if they had a gripe with him, he would gladly step down—but the work of the committee must not be stopped. He harangued his colleagues about the committee’s accomplishments: “Scores of homosexual school teachers and university people have already been flushed out,” he declared, and if the committee would be allowed to continue, “scores more would soon be gotten rid of.” And on top of that good work, the committee had “uncovered a ploy among homosexuals,” Johns announced. Homosexuals had planned to kidnap the eleven-year-old son of Municipal Judge John Rudd to get back at him because he’d been tough in sentencing them for their immoral acts, but their plan was nipped in the bud thanks to the committee’s chief investigator. “If R. J. Strickland never does another thing, that earned him every dime the committee has paid him,” Johns proclaimed dramatically.49
The majority of the legislature agreed. The committee was granted another $155,000 for the next two years and given an extended mandate: to ferret out homosexuals from all state-funded agencies. Charley Johns, R. J. Strickland, and Mark Hawes receded into the background, but nothing changed significantly.50
The committee, called more often by its formal name, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, after Johns’s departure, got its coup de grace the following year when an outlandish misstep revealed just how wacky its tactics were. In January 1964 the committee spent $720 to print a few thousand copies of a booklet titled Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida. It came to be called “the Purple Pamphlet” because of its contents as well as the color of its paper cover. “Although this report has been prepared . . . primarily for the benefits of state administrators and personnel officers, it can be of value to all citizens,” the Purple Pamphlet declared. “[E]very parent and every individual concerned with the moral climate of the state should be aware of the rise in homosexual activity noted here, and be possessed of the basic knowledge set forth.”51 The pamphlet’s price as stated on the front cover was 25 cents; but bulk discounts were available for orders of one hundred copies or more.
The fetching picture on the cover of the booklet was of two buff young men in a lip-lock, both naked to the pubes. Inside was a picture of a handsome blond boy, sporting nothing but a piece of black silk over his genitals, arms akimbo, and muscled chest bound loosely with a rope. There were pinup pictures of pretty young boys glancing seductively at the camera. And there were sexually graphic tales about homosexual misdoings, and a glossary of gay argot, with terms such as “69 queen” and “browning queen.” FLIC hoped to demonstrate that Florida needed to pass a Homosexual Practices Control Act because homosexuals engaged in disgusting practices, like looking at pictures such as those reproduced in the booklet.
The Dade County state attorney, Richard Gerstein, threatened to sue for obscenity if the booklet was distributed anywhere in his area.52 “State-sponsored pornography,” the media called the Purple Pamphlet. It was reprinted by a homosexual book club in Washington, DC, and became a bestseller on the homosexual streets of New York.53
In 1965, after nine years of hunting for witches (seven of those years focused especially on homosexuals), the committee disbanded because the legislature cut off its funding. But the demise of Charley Johns’s committee was not the end of the persecution of Florida homosexuals. Richard Gerstein, the state’s attorney who in June 1964 had banned the Purple Pamphlet in his county, worried that the public might think he was soft on deviates. In July 1964 he announced a drive to rid Miami of homosexuals, claiming it was because Life magazine—in an alarming article that asked, “Do the Homosexuals, Like the Communists, Intend to Bury Us?”54—had identified the city as one of six in the United States that had “established homosexual societies.”55 “Homosexuals recruit youth,” Gerstein proclaimed, echoing Charley Johns. “It’s a growing problem, and anyone who says it isn’t is ignoring the obvious.”56
Gerstein’s drive to rid Miami of homosexuals succeeded no more than did FLIC’s drive to rid education of homosexuals. Despite Gerstein, despite the Johns Committee, despite Thomas Bailey—the state superintendent for public instruction, who continued to purge homosexual teachers even after the death of FLIC—homosexuals kept flourishing in Florida. But those Floridians who wanted to get rid of them wouldn’t give up. In the next decade, they spearheaded a hysterical campaign, dubbed with the heart-tugging moniker “Save Our Children,” which spread throughout America. Its message was culled from Charley Johns’s rhetoric: the lifeblood of homosexuals depended on their seduction of innocent youngsters.