Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime

CRUISING FOR CONSPIRATORS

BOUNDLESS SOUTH

Karen L. Cox and Françoise N. Hamlin, editors

Boundless South publishes books that are regional, readable, and deeply researched while capturing the stories of people, places, and culture. Connecting audiences to real southerners, Boundless South presents the diversity of southernness and reflects the extent of the southern diaspora with nuance and broad appeal.

CRUISING FOR CONSPIRATORS

HOW A NEW ORLEANS DA PROSECUTED THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AS A SEX CRIME

ALECIA P. LONG

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the FRED W. MORRISON FUND of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2021 Alecia P. Long

All rights reserved

Set in Utopia, Klavika, and Smokler types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Front cover: Jim Garrison in 1967 (top); Clay Shaw in 1968 (bottom).

Photos courtesy New Orleans Times-Picayune / The Advocate.

Back cover: John F. Kennedy in 1963. National Archives and Records Administration, Cecil Stoughton White House Photographs, photo ID 194238.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Long, Alecia P., 1966– author.

Title: Cruising for conspirators : how a New Orleans DA prosecuted the Kennedy assassination as a sex crime / Alecia P. Long.

Other titles: Boundless South.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2021] | Series: The boundless South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021007906 | ISBN 9781469662732 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469662749 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Shaw, Clay, 1913–1974—Trials, litigation, etc. | Trials (Conspiracy)—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. | Trials (Assassination)—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. | Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Assassination. | Garrison, Jim, 1921–1992. | Gays—Legal status, laws, etc.—Louisiana—New Orleans. | Conspiracy theories—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC KF224.S45 L66 2021 | DDC 345.763/02524—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007906

For my siblings, Anwhitney Culpepper, Aundria O’Neill, and Andrew Long

And for my New Orleans brothers and sisters, Katy Coyle, Todd Fletcher, Cathy Rogers Franklin, Shannon McGuire, and Arthur R. Severio

Even at the outer limits of absurdity and contradiction people will make up anything. Then they will believe and build on this anything.

—ANNA BURNS, Milkman

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Dramatis Personae

Introduction

1 Murder in the Gaslight Lounge

Jim Garrison, Pershing Gervais, and Weaponized Homophobia

2 You Know Them by Sight Mostly

Assassination, Conspiracy, and Homosexuality

3 The Commission Has Investigated Rumors That Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald Were Both Homosexuals

Sexuality and Conspiracy in the Warren Report

4 Those Areas of My Private Life I Would Like to Keep Private

The Outing of Clay Shaw

5 Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

Hiding Homosexuality in Plain Sight

6 Dr. Jekyll—or Mr. Hyde—or Both?

State v. Clay L. Shaw, 1969

7 Death Delights to Serve the Living

Reconsidering the Legal Legacy of Clay L. Shaw

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Jim Garrison and Pershing Gervais, 1963

Jack S. Martin/Edward Stuart Suggs mug shot, 1952

David Ferrie mug shot, 1962

Dean Adams Andrews, 1967

Clay Shaw perp walk, March 1967

Perry Raymond Russo, James Alcock, and Andrew Sciambra, March 1967

Judge Edward Haggerty with Dealey Plaza exhibits, 1969

Clay Shaw victory party, March 1, 1969

Clay Shaw perjury arrest, March 3, 1969

Garrison and Shaw pass in the foyer of federal court, 1971

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

In order of appearance

Jim Garrison

New Orleans district attorney 1962–1974. Brought the only prosecution ever tried in a courtroom related to an alleged conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Lee Harvey Oswald

New Orleans native and alleged assassin of JFK. His 1963 spring and summer sojourn in the city led to questions about the possibility of a New Orleans–based conspiracy in the assassination.

David Ferrie

Pilot with a blemished background, including charges related to allegations of sex with teenage males. Identified as a person of interest in Garrison’s investigation. Died February 22, 1967.

Dr. Nicholas Chetta

Orleans Parish coroner who declared that Ferrie died of natural causes.

Dean Adams Andrews

Attorney who told FBI, Secret Service, and Warren Commission investigators that he had interacted with Oswald in the summer of 1963. Also claimed to have received a call from Clay Bertrand, who asked Andrews to go to Dallas and assist in Oswald’s legal defense.

Clay Bertrand

The man Dean Andrews alleged was associated with Oswald in the summer of 1963 and requested that Andrews assist Oswald after his arrest in Dallas.

Clay Shaw

Retired business executive and French Quarter preservationist. Closeted gay man who Jim Garrison alleged had used the alias Clay Bertrand and conspired with Oswald and Ferrie in the assassination.

Louis Ivon

New Orleans Police Department officer assigned to the district attorney’s office as an investigator.

Jack Ruby

Dallas nightclub owner. Shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963. Convicted of Oswald’s killing in 1964. Died in prison in January 1967.

Pershing Gervais

Disgraced police detective whom Garrison named his chief investigator in 1962. At the time, Gervais was operating a gay-friendly French Quarter bar, the Gaslight Lounge.

William Robert Livesay

A confidential informant to Gervais, who ordered Livesay to participate in a sex sting that led to the arrest of bail bondsman Hardy Davis. Found guilty in 1963 of a murder in the Gaslight Lounge.

F. Irvin Dymond

Attorney who led Shaw’s defense in 1969.

Jack S. Martin

Edward Stuart Suggs moved to New Orleans in the late 1950s and changed his name to Jack S. Martin. Sometime private investigator. Associate of Garrison and Gervais.

Hardy Davis

Bail bondsman entrapped in a 1962 sex sting ordered by Garrison and Gervais.

Aaron Kohn

Former FBI agent who became the longtime director of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission. Ultimately became an avowed political opponent of Garrison.

Eugene Davis

French Quarter figure who worked in bars and restaurants before purchasing the gay-friendly Wanda’s Bar. Andrews eventually testified that he had used the name Clay Bertrand as an alias for Davis. Davis denied it.

James Phelan

Veteran reporter who wrote two prominent articles about Garrison. Skeptical about Garrison’s conspiracy case. Testified for the defense at Shaw’s 1969 conspiracy trial.

Judge Edward A. Haggerty

Criminal Court judge who oversaw Shaw’s 1969 conspiracy trial.

Perry Raymond Russo

Friend of Ferrie’s who came forward after his death and gave several interviews to media outlets. Key witness in the conspiracy Garrison alleged.

Mark Lane

Well-known Warren Commission critic. Praised Andrews’s testimony and worked to support Garrison’s investigation.

Harold Weisberg

Well-known Warren Commission critic. Wrote an overtly homophobic 1967 book, Oswald in New Orleans. Garrison wrote the book’s preface.

David Chandler

Local reporter and stringer for Life. First to convey information about Garrison’s investigation to Life’s home office.

Richard Billings

Life reporter who came to New Orleans and received insider access to the Garrison investigation in the early months of 1967.

Hugh Aynesworth

Dallas reporter who wrote extensively about the assassination and its aftermath. Wrote May 1967 article critical of Garrison’s investigation.

Lester Otillio

New Orleans Police Department officer assigned to the district attorney’s office as an investigator. Took over management of the Gaslight Lounge from Gervais.

Andrew Sciambra

Assistant district attorney and investigator in the Garrison investigation. Worked closely with Russo to develop his testimony about a conspiracy involving Ferrie, Oswald, and Bertrand.

Edward Wegmann

Civil attorney to Shaw. Supported and defended Shaw throughout the conspiracy prosecution. Also pressed Shaw’s civil case for damages until its conclusion in 1978.

William Wegmann

Civil attorney and brother to Edward. Member of Shaw’s defense team.

Sal Panzeca

Attorney and associate of William Wegmann. The first lawyer to arrive at the district attorney’s office on March 1, 1967, to represent Shaw after he was threatened with arrest.

Dr. Esmond Fatter

Family physician who performed hypnotic sessions with Russo.

Vernon Bundy

Testified at Shaw’s preliminary hearing and trial that he had seen Shaw and Oswald together in 1963.

James Alcock

Assistant district attorney who argued most of the state’s case against Clay Shaw.

James Kirkwood

Journalist and author who wrote an unapologetically pro-Shaw account of the conspiracy trial.

Joseph Rault, Willard Robertson, and Cecil Shilstone

New Orleans businessmen who formed Truth and Consequences in 1967 to support Garrison’s investigation. Robertson later estimated that the group raised approximately $100,000, which was made available to Garrison to use however he saw fit. Shaw named the three men as defendants in his $5 million civil suit.

CRUISING FOR CONSPIRATORS

INTRODUCTION

Books devoted to exploring John F. Kennedy’s assassination number in the thousands. Hundreds of them argue for complex conspiracies involving dozens of actors who encouraged, planned, participated in, or sought to cover up the events that took place in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. With that sprawling literature as context, it is easy to forget that only one person was ever brought into a court of law and tried on charges of having participated in one of those conspiracies. On March 1, 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison ordered the arrest of retired businessman Clay Shaw. Over the next two years, Garrison’s case against Shaw remained in the courts, the media, and at the center of the assassination conspiracy zeitgeist.¹

Most of the authors who have written about these events have focused deeply on a relatively narrow set of binary questions: Was President Kennedy murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, or was there a larger conspiracy? If there was a conspiracy, was some part of it hatched in New Orleans while Oswald lived there in the summer of 1963? Did Garrison have a viable case or simply a set of evocative theories? Was Shaw an assassination conspirator or a vulnerable victim whose prosecution and trial provided a forum for questioning the lone-gunman conclusion of the Warren Commission Report? These are important questions, but their repeated and often heated adjudication has made it difficult to think about the roots and realities of the Shaw prosecution in innovative ways.²

This book shifts the focus to sexuality and explains how widespread beliefs about the criminality of homosexual men laid the foundation for Shaw’s identification as a suspect and, once he was outed, helped to shape his prosecution both culturally and in court. This perspective makes clear that Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw was birthed in a preoccupation with homosexuality—the nineteenth-century term used to name, pathologize, and sanction men who had sex with other men. Even as late as the 1960s, many Americans implicitly connected men deemed homosexual with deviant criminal behavior more generally. This way of thinking helps to explain why, shortly after Shaw’s arrest, Garrison described the alleged assassination conspiracy as a homosexual thrill killing.³ That turn of phrase drew attention precisely because it drew on deeper wells of distrust directed toward all men who had sex with other men.

The homosexual thrill killing theory of the assassination was just one of many definitive and spectacular assertions Garrison made after his investigation was made public by the New Orleans States-Item. On February 17, 1967, its page 1 banner headline read, DA Here Launches JFK Death ‘Plot’ Probe. The dramatic scoop was facilitated by courthouse scuttlebutt and the discovery that Garrison’s staff had spent more than $8,000 on unexplained travel and investigative expenses in recent months. The article clarified that the possibility of a well-organized assassination plot in which New Orleans and New Orleans residents were somehow directly involved is said to be at the center of the investigation.⁴

Garrison initially evinced irritation with the local press for exposing his investigation. Yet within days he grew friendlier to the baying pack of multilingual media hounds who descended on the city in the wake of the investigation’s disclosure. At six feet six inches tall, Garrison towered over the unruly press cavalcade that began to dog him day and night, his slightly bowed head bobbing above the roiling sea of reporters who swarmed the loquacious and combative DA. When he stopped and stooped to respond to their questions, he insisted to ever-growing ranks of reporters and cameras that he and his staff had solved the Kennedy assassination. They had, he insisted, uncovered and could prove that there had been a well-organized assassination plot conceived in New Orleans during Oswald’s spring and summer 1963 sojourn in the city of his birth. Two days after the investigation became public knowledge, Garrison asserted, We already have the names of the people in the initial planning. We are not wasting our time. … Arrests will be made, charges will be filed, and convictions will be obtained.⁵

The media firestorm was only just getting started, and Garrison continually stoked the conflagration by making ever-more-spectacular claims. On February 24 he refused to comment when a reporter asked if Oswald had played any role at all in the president’s death. Garrison could not deny, however, that David Ferrie, an eccentric pilot with a blemished legal background, including charges of committing crimes against nature with male teenagers, was one of the New Orleanians believed to have been involved in a conspiracy that culminated in the murder of JFK.⁶

Ferrie did not take this speculation lying down. In response to the States-Item’s revelations, Ferrie called local reporters to respond and in the process identified himself as a key suspect. He called Garrison’s investigation a big joke and repeatedly and unequivocally denied having conspired with anyone to kill the late president. Ferrie’s legal history, his alleged homosexuality, and some oddities of his appearance drew considerable comment: he wore a strangely textured and slightly askew toupee that he often paired with eyebrows that were variously described as being penciled on or glued to his face. His time in the media spotlight, though intense, was brief.⁷

Ferrie died sometime in the predawn hours of Wednesday, February 22. Three days later, New Orleans coroner Dr. Nicholas Chetta ruled that a ruptured artery in Ferrie’s brain had been the cause of death. That finding was confirmed by a pathologist from Louisiana State University’s medical school. Yet conspiracy advocates did not wait for the coroner to begin—much less finish—his work before proclaiming Ferrie’s death either suspicious or a suicide. Garrison called a press conference before the autopsy had even commenced during which he proclaimed that the apparent suicide of David Ferrie ends the life of a man who in my judgment was one of history’s most important individuals.⁸ Whether opportunism or conviction underlay his claims, the fact that his only publicly known suspect was now deceased made the identification of any other living conspirators a critical matter and one of no small consequence to retaining the interest of an increasingly restive press corps.

By Saturday, February 25, the search for one of those potential coconspirators, Clay Bertrand, seemed to have reached a dead end. Three days after the assassination, a local lawyer, Dean Adams Andrews, had called the FBI to report what he claimed to know about Oswald and some of his associates during the summer of 1963. In subsequent interviews, Andrews provided vivid though incomplete descriptions of at least five men but could offer a name for only one of them; it was, he told FBI and Secret Service agents, a man he knew as Clay Bertrand. Andrews provided at least three different physical descriptions for Bertrand but was never able—or particularly willing—to help any law enforcement agency actually locate the man.

As of 1967, everyone who had undertaken the task had also failed to locate, much less question, a corporeal Bertrand. As early as December 1966, Garrison had suggested privately to two reporters that Bertrand was an alias used by Clay Shaw. But evidence to confirm this hunch had been lacking. By late February, even Garrison’s most dogged investigator, Louis Ivon, a policeman who had been assigned to the DA’s office since 1962, had given up on finding Bertrand.⁹

On February 25, Garrison received a memo from Ivon, who reported that he had put out numerous inquiries and made contact with several sources in the French Quarter who he was almost positive … would have known or heard of Clay Bertrand. None of them did. The memo also included a summary of Ivon’s earlier conversation with an unnamed informant to whom Dean Andrews had admitted that Clay Bertrand never existed. Garrison scribbled a note at the bottom of the page: Andrews’s own private investigator had advised that Bertrand apparently did not exist [and] that Andrews really made no effort to locate him. Despite what seemed firm conclusions on that Saturday, by the middle of the following week Garrison had shifted course dramatically, alleging publicly that Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand were one and the same and that as Bertrand, Shaw had been a coconspirator with Oswald and Ferrie—both now deceased—in the assassination of President Kennedy.¹⁰

Shaw, still fit at fifty-three, was strikingly handsome, barrel-chested, preternaturally tanned, and graced with wavy silver hair and piercing, light blue eyes. At six feet five inches, he was also nearly as tall and physically imposing as the man who became his accuser. Shaw’s good looks, charm, and polished manners had made the confirmed bachelor an escort of choice for many socially prominent women around town. His elevated social profile was matched by what had been an equally prominent business career, during which his name and image appeared in the New Orleans press on a regular basis, particularly before his 1965 retirement as managing director of the city’s much-admired International Trade Mart.

Yet within a matter of days, this unlikely suspect would move to the center of the media firestorm. Shaw was subpoenaed to the DA’s office for questioning on Wednesday morning, March 1. By the time the sun went down, he had been arrested on suspicion of helping to plan and facilitate Kennedy’s assassination. If Shaw had any inkling that his own arrest might be imminent, his actions the weekend before do not suggest he was a man who thought he might be under surveillance.

Though he was well known in the French Quarter and widely recognized in the community at large, Shaw did have at least one thing to hide. Shaw’s sexual liaisons and long-term intimate relationships had been with other men and thus were, by definition, illegal. If caught in a sex act with another man—or even soliciting one—Shaw could be charged under Louisiana’s draconian statute pertaining to crimes against nature. If convicted, he could pay a hefty fine and serve as much as five years of hard labor at the notorious Angola penitentiary.

Despite the risks his sexual pursuits entailed, Shaw left home to go cruising on the Saturday before his arrest. He met a willing partner three decades his junior, and the two returned to Shaw’s small but elegant French Quarter residence. Though the precise details of the encounter went unspecified, Shaw’s lawyers were apparently concerned enough about the liaison that they noted it in an internal memo generated about two weeks after their client’s arrest:

Re: Clay Shaw

In re: Johnny or Frank—last name unknown

This is a negro male—six feet tall or better. Attends Southern University. He was with Shaw on Saturday, February 25, 1967, at his home, this being the Saturday immediately prior to the day on which Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1. In all probability, Shaw was under surveillance by the District Attorney’s office at this time.¹¹

Whether or not Shaw was under surveillance, he was among a large number of homosexual men Garrison’s investigators had already questioned. But if there was any substantive evidence to confirm that Shaw had participated in the conspiracy Garrison alleged, it remained elusive, even among the DA’s staff. In fact, Shaw’s arrest on March 1, 1967, came as a surprise to many members of Garrison’s investigative team, most of whom counseled him against proceeding with it.¹² Whatever Garrison’s immediate motivations, choosing to arrest and charge Shaw would have enormous consequences and shape the lives and legacies of both men in the years that followed.

Garrison’s use of Shaw’s sexuality as an investigative and prosecutorial tool undergirded the conspiratorial terroir he cultivated in New Orleans. It then served as a subterranean root system that shaped the work of subsequent authors and auteurs and fueled popular belief in an assassination conspiracy. The related belief that homosexuals were clannish, secretive, interconnected, and liable to commit all manner of crimes up to and including murder is a critical factor to consider when assessing events in New Orleans in the late 1960s.

The only way to fundamentally understand Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw is by understanding the ways in which men who had sex with men were legally defined, socially constructed, intensively policed, and culturally pathologized in the United States in the decades following World War II. This history of the Shaw-Garrison affair illuminates how ideas about sexuality initially took hold and still lurk in popular beliefs about the assassination and its causes. Though sexuality does not provide a complete explanation for why Americans believe, in overwhelming numbers, that a conspiracy and conspirators were behind President Kennedy’s murder, ideas about sexuality provided much of the foundation on which the reputations of and judgments about many of the principals in the assassination and its aftermath were constructed.

Suspicion of men alleged to be homosexual played a central role in the two original accounts of a New Orleans–based conspiracy, both of which were offered over the weekend after the assassination. Those stories were then merged and massaged in ways that laid the groundwork for Garrison’s case against Shaw. A number of other explanations emerged in the course of Garrison’s legal and then cultural campaign to prove that a New Orleans–based conspiracy lay behind the assassination, but all were supported by the belief that it had been planned and organized by homosexual men with murky connections to American intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA. If Americans had not believed that sexual deviance made people inherently suspicious and that homosexuals were likely to commit all manner of crimes, Garrison’s case would have been much harder to undertake and then prosecute. Explaining how conspiracy theorizing as practiced by Garrison was fed by anxieties about sexual deviance generally and the growing visibility of homosexuality specifically is key to unlocking a new way of thinking about Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw, how and why those events unfolded in New Orleans in the late 1960s, and why they still matter.

The chapters that follow reconstruct and broadly contextualize events before, during, and after Shaw’s prosecution. While many parts of this story have never been told in precisely this way, it is particularly important and timely to make clear the overlooked significance of Shaw’s ordeal not only on its own terms but also to the history of gay, lesbian, and transgender people who remain embroiled in struggles to gain full legal equality both as Americans and as citizens of various states. At present, Shaw’s ordeal is not accorded a place in the core narrative of LGBT American history. Part of the reason has to do with the proximity of Shaw’s story to the assassination of JFK and the often-bizarre accusations and theories that developed in the wake of those horrific and then outlandish events in Dallas.

In order to understand what happened in New Orleans in the late 1960s, we first have to set the scene. During the 1950s, an emerging community of men who we now recognize as gay had become visible enough in the French Quarter to create a backlash among reformers, politicians, and some law enforcement officials. By the time Garrison was elected district attorney in 1962, many of these men occupied a precarious place in the city’s social order, experiencing both de facto and de jure harassment. Understanding how Jim Garrison and Clay Shaw fit into that emerging environment provides a useful context for evaluating many of the events that followed.

1 : MURDER IN THE GASLIGHT LOUNGE

JIM GARRISON, PERSHING GERVAIS, AND WEAPONIZED HOMOPHOBIA

On the morning of Friday, May 4, 1962, President John F. Kennedy rode in the presidential limousine through New Orleans with the top down. Lining the route, flags and people waved as the smiling, relaxed commander in chief made his way to the new Nashville Avenue Wharf to preside over a dedication ceremony. Newspapers later reported that more than 100,000 people had gathered to catch a glimpse of the attractive, intriguing president, and by midmorning he was speaking before a crowded warehouse full of local officials, dignitaries, and curious New Orleanians.

The wharf dedication was not without problems. The sound system was faulty, and the bus bringing local dignitaries from the airport was running behind schedule. As a result, many members of the presidential reception committee, including Clay Shaw, were among the last to arrive. Shaw was surely disappointed to be relegated to the back of the warehouse while the president spoke, but it also wasn’t his first presidential meeting. Nearing the end of a celebrated career as managing director of the New Orleans International Trade Mart (ITM), Shaw regularly crossed paths with influential people, among them presidents and district attorneys. As Shaw later recalled, the reception committee for Kennedy’s visit that morning included another rising political star, Jim Garrison, who just a few days later would be sworn in to his first term as district attorney, a job that would give him outsize power over Shaw’s future.

Seven years after that apparently unremarkable day, witnesses at Shaw’s conspiracy trial held forth on his behavior and wardrobe at the wharf. A key bit of testimony suggested that Shaw had been wearing tight pants that morning, like a lot of queers in the French Quarter wear. The witness also claimed that Shaw was cruising other men during the president’s remarks, ignoring the speech and instead looking at other men below the belt.¹

Strange as this claim may seem, being publicly accused of homosexuality was a damning allegation in the 1960s. By that time, homophobic New Orleans reformers aided by state legislators had succeeded in creating a legal regime designed to engage in unrelenting harassment of alleged homosexuals with the aim of driving them out of the city for good or, if that were not possible, limiting their visibility, especially in the French Quarter.² The edifice of homophobia that New Orleans prosecutors and police assembled would ultimately provide all of the tools necessary for Garrison to construct a conspiracy that offered a new explanation for the assassination of President Kennedy.

■ The materials for that conspiratorial web were already being spun in the early 1950s. In 1951, civic activist Richard Foster complained, It almost seems as if youngsters who develop homosexual tendencies in other Southern cities are put on a train and sent to New Orleans. As the perception spread that queer and gender nonconforming people were becoming too visible in the city, especially in the French Quarter, Foster headed a specially appointed mayoral committee that sought to counter the perception that the French Quarter was a safe space for homosexuals. When that effort failed, the committee turned its attention toward amending local ordinances to discourage gays’ presence and visibility in public places. Foster asserted that committee members had good reason to do so since criminologists and psychologists in America state that every sexual deviate is a potential murderer and the more of this type we can drive out of New Orleans the better it will be.³

Though such an assertion now seems extreme, by 1951, when Foster wrote that line, such ideas had been in circulation for more than half a century. As early as 1886, the sexologist Richard von Kraft-Ebbing had explored the link between homosexuality and other forms of criminal deviancy in Psychopathia Sexualis. In the 1930s, Kraft-Ebbing’s book was still being used to train physicians in the United States and far beyond. By that time, historian Estelle Freedman argues, the social scientific study of sexuality had become respectable and in turn provided an intellectual base for a sexual theory of crime.⁴

Sensing an opportunity, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover seized on national fears of a linkage between homosexuality and crime to increase surveillance. In 1937, acting on this purported link, the FBI began systematically collecting information about Americans it knew or believed to be homosexual, eventually creating an extensive archive. A decade into that process, Hoover asserted that the most rapidly increasing type of crime is that perpetrated by degenerate sex offenders.⁵

These ideas were also popularized in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The 1948 technicolor set piece was inspired by the 1924 murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks by the precociously intelligent Chicago teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The media frenzy surrounding their arrest and trial repeatedly referred to the sexual connection between the two murderers. As the chief prosecutor pursued the case, he not only made much of their sexual behaviors but also suggested that a connection existed between their so-called sexual deviance and the most gruesome aspects of their crime, including the decision to pour acid not only on their victim’s face but also on his genitals in an attempt to obscure his identity.

In the same year Rope premiered, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Though very few Americans read all of its 800 pages, the finding that 37 percent of the men his team interviewed had engaged in at least one homosexual act to the point of orgasm since the onset of adolescence was one of the book’s most surprising and controversial. Although Kinsey’s research showed that men having sex with other men was