20 years ago, this doc blew the “boys of Boise” scandal wide open

Every few decades, when straight society decides that gay people are the real problem with America, they manage to fabricate scandals that reverberate through history. Such was the story of one 1955 Boise Idaho sting that soon spiraled onto the front pages of newspapers across the country.

In 2006, documentarian Seth Randal took a deep dive into the “boys of Boise” scandal, creating an unforgettable portrait of a midwestern gay witch hunt. 20 years later, the film proves what we already knew: in American history, fear creates the social panic, not the other way around.

How about we take this to the next level?

Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Queer people had been under attack long before the Lavender Scare that defined the 1950s. But in that post-war era, with McCarthyism on the rise, middle-class “white flight” Americans who’d moved to the suburbs were facing a new, if totally fabricated, terror.

Between the 1955 release of the short subject “Boys Beware” and the boys of Boise scandal that same year, a new brand of moral panic was forming in the mainstream American mind. If in the past, queer men were seen as stereotypical “pansy” caricatures, they were now being recast as dangerous pedophiles out to harm small-town children.

Did it matter that that wasn’t actually the case? Not a jot. In 1955, one local Boise cop started looking into tips that teenage boys were receiving payment for sex acts with older men. What started as a real investigation quickly became a full-on witch hunt.

“The Idaho Statesman covered the allegations almost daily,” a recent podcast explains, “and the investigation quickly expanded to consenting adults.”

By claiming the (false) existence of a secret “sex ring,” police were able to detain dozens of queer men on the flimsiest of charges. Some of these men—including bank presidents, formerly incarcerated men, hospital workers, and interior decorators—got 15-to-life sentences simply for pleading guilty to what the law then defined as  “infamous crimes against nature.”

It was Boise’s own Cleveland Street scandal, and it changed the city forever. The panic even caused one religious group to build a giant cross as a recommitment to Christianity—a structure that stands to this day.

For filmmaker Randal,The Fall of ’55 was a chance to set the record straight. Not only was there no sex ring, there was no call for police to target the lives of private gay citizens after they’d finished going after the “handful” of people involved in the original investigation.

“The community reaction became very inflamed,” Randal recently told the Idaho Statesman. “It became what a lot of people would categorize as a witch hunt.”

Men’s lives were uprooted, families were destroyed, and the scandal cemented one of era’s most harmful anti-gay stereotypes into the public imagination. Gay people weren’t just “sick” anymore: they were actively coming for your children.

As far as we’ve come from that time in history, that deeply incorrect stereotype stubbornly remains. As we saw in the last election cycle, it’s no longer gay men but trans people who framed are coming for the children. The messaging remains sadly potent for a population terrified by what they don’t understand.

Thankfully we’re also living in a timeline when queer men no longer have to seek out lavender marriages and park assignations to get their rocks off—unless, of course, they want to. Though let’s not forget what Amtrak’s cruising crackdown last year reminded us: when the powers that be want to come for queer people, they can always find (or invent) an excuse.

Randal’s groundbreaking work exposed the manufactured panic in Boise as a homophobic lie, and has spun off into several new iterations since its release, including the musical The Show on the Roof.

Today, the film is getting a special anniversary screening in the place where it all began.

“(The documentary) shows a controversial part of our history, and it’s important for us to understand history and why things happened so we don’t repeat them,” Randal told EastIdahoNews.com last month. He hopes the film can continue to “ask questions and try to understand better what’s really going on.”

As we’ve learned from the midterms, witch hunts will always be a political tool to oppress minorities. Today, we have better tools to fight against them.

Related

The 1929 queer sex survey that shattered taboos decades before Kinsey came around
The following is an excerpt from the new book “Matters of Sex: Katharine Bement Davis and America’s First Sexual Revolution” by Anya Jabour, out now from NYU Press.

Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.