by hanz enyeart
Having failed to find evidence of Communist ties in local civil-rights organizations, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, an ultra-conservative coalition led by Sen. Charley Johns, knew they were in jeopardy of losing their funding. To stay afloat, they’d have to pivot their witch hunt to a new target, and quickly.
One of the main focuses of their investigation was the rise of anti-gay sentiments in the community.
The Rise of Anti-gay Sentiments in the 1950s
They put their heads together and set their sights on a new mark — those dastardly homosexuals. In the midst of the anti-Communist Red Scare of the 1950s and 1960s, the lesser-known Lavender Scare targeted suspected homosexuals, believing them to be a threat to both national security and American youth. Going after them would be shooting fish in a barrel, the committee thought.
They began wreaking havoc in Florida public schools, universities and state government agencies. The committee believed that the presence of homosexuals in these institutions was part of the Communist strategy to “subvert the American way of life” via academia and “corrupt the nation’s moral fiber.”
By 1963, the committee was responsible for the firing of more than 100 professors, deans and public school teachers, on top of interrogating and expelling dozens of students from public colleges across the state. One University of Florida student would later recount his repeated harassment at the committee’s hands:
“I was called in to be interrogated three or four times [over the span of two years]. Each time I was unceremoniously marched out of class, in front of the instructor and all my classmates, by a uniformed policeman.”
“Each time I was amazed that, while I was truly terrified by their tactics and threats, I was able to stonewall their questions and refuse to give them the answers they were so desperate for. I came to realize that they, as a group, were really a very dumb bunch of redneck, illiterate people, clumsily wielding a vast amount of power over others.”
To paraphrase the wisdom of the great Mo’Nique, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was doing clownery, and you can bet that clown would be coming back to bite — but not before the committee would bulldoze just a little further ahead in their puritanical, fear-mongering agenda.
Not content with simply ridding learning institutions of homosexuals, the committee began a deep dive investigation into state academia, pulling out syllabus items they found to be “obscene” or “intellectual garbage.”
They determined that state college curriculums were corrupting students through the implementation of “trashy and pornographic” works such as The Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye and Brave New World, and that biology professors introducing evolution to their classes were “not qualified to teach.”
Believing they were unsinkable, the committee boldly declared the final move of their hat trick. They would summarize and publicly release the findings of their years of research on homosexuals, confident it would persuade the state legislature to enact comprehensive anti-gay laws and “shock Floridians into accepting their program.”
Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida was published in 1964, painting a lurid and inflammatory picture of gay men as predatory deviants — constantly on the hunt for anonymous sex, recruiting unsuspecting youth and spreading venereal diseases.
The pamphlet didn’t just stigmatize; it mobilized, issuing united calls to action like: “We must do everything in our power to create one thing in the minds of every homosexual — to keep their hands off our children.” With thousands of copies in print, the committee expected readers to eat up every word. The reaction was quite the opposite.
Shock the people of Florida, they did. The pamphlet was chock-full of explicit photos of gay men in sexual situations. The report opened with an image of two naked men kissing passionately. Further in, readers were treated to a boudoir photo of a handsome, rope-bound man in a G-string and an action shot of a restroom glory hole.
The backlash was immediate. The Florida Attorney General demanded that the committee cease the distribution of this “obscene and pornographic” material. A Dade County official threatened legal action for what the media was calling “state-sponsored pornography.” Every cent of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee’s funding was pulled, and the committee disbanded shortly after.
Despite its hysterical warnings, the pamphlet didn’t exactly spark the moral panic its authors hoped for. Instead, it enjoyed an ironic afterlife. The pamphlet was hawked as porn in New York City and reprinted by a gay book club in Washington, D.C. where it was sold for $2 a pop (more than four times what the committee had sold it for).
The state’s official screed against homosexuality ended up being filed somewhere between satire and softcore, a cautionary tale turned collector’s item, a beautiful middle finger to its original authors.
Hanz Enyeart is a queer Jewish educator and storyteller living in Hillcrest in San Diego, California.