How could I forget the first time?
I was in a class.
And there were suddenly the sounds of these very loud-sounding boots
clunking across the floor.
And there was a campus policeman standing at the head of the class,
and he just shouted out my last name.
And he just said "come with me."
And I was put in the back seat of a squad car.
And we went directly to the police station.
And the interrogation room was one table in the middle of the room,
and a tape recorder in the middle of the table.
And there was even the light bulb on a string, hanging right above the tape recorder.
I'm sorry.
This hasn't happened to me in years.
Right off the bat, they said,
"We know that you're gay."
In the 1950s, a Florida state committee
spent years terrorizing LGBTQ people.
They stalked, intimidated, and outed hundreds.
And they got away with it.
What happened in Florida can be traced to two things happening across the US at the time.
First, this was the era of the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union.
And a US Senator named Joseph McCarthy claimed to have discovered communists who had infiltrated the US government.
One of the images that we probably still have is the image of Joe McCarthy standing, making
a speech, holding up several sheets of paper and saying ‘I have here in my hand a list
of communists.’
It didn't matter whether the list was accurate or not.
But what McCarthy started did real damage.
Thousands of Americans ended up losing their jobs, and had their reputations ruined.
Around the same time, the civil rights movement was picking up steam.
In 1954, The Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, preparations were being made by the school board for compliance with the court verdict.
Southern politicians started losing their hold on a segregated society.
It was out of this that the “Florida Legislative Investigation Committee” was born.
Their mission was to preserve racial segregation.
It was informally called “the Johns Committee,”
after the influential Florida state senator Charley Johns, who had called for its creation.
Much like Joseph McCarthy, Johns made accusations.
He eventually claimed that civil rights groups were secretly backed by communists.
There is no doubt, communist people are behind a lot of this race agitation.
They had a chart where they had drawn lines between all these different organizations that they didn't like.
At the top of their list, was one of the largest American civil rights organizations.
They thought, OK, the best way to stop integration in Florida is to try to destroy the NAACP.
But that plan was short-lived.
At that time the NAACP's head lawyer was Thurgood Marshall.
Pretty good opposition.
They weren't winning lawsuits against the NAACP.
The Johns Committee’s plan to fight civil rights groups was a failure.
But the committee still had its sweeping investigative powers, that they could use to target anyone.
They just needed a target.
Back then, all of us who were gay lived deeply, deeply in the closet.
We were always concerned that someone would find out.
Well in their minds, if you were gay or lesbian you could be blackmailed by communists.
Because a communist could lure you in and say, we're gonna tell everybody you're gay or lesbian if you don't cooperate with us.
Across the US, local governments started  targeting LGBTQ employees.
And in Washington, Congress began investigating LGBTQ federal employees,
claiming that they were "unsuitable" for government jobs, and "security risks."
It was a targeted hunt that became known as the Lavender Scare.
It was in that context that the Johns Committee found its new focus:
To purge the state of LGBTQ teachers and students.
The Committee believed LGBTQ students
and teachers were endangering the state of Florida.
Their new mission was to find them.
So we’re in the state archives in Florida,
where they have all the interrogation transcripts that the Committee conducted over the years.
What we found in those files tells the story of how the Committee operated.
The Johns Committee, working with university administrations and campus police,
conducted hundreds of interrogations, often in motels, with no legal representation.
They’d ask questions like:
“Have you ever engaged in any homosexual activities?“
"Do you enjoy normal sexual relationships with your wife?”
“Did you ever give anybody a blow job?”
Some interrogations happened after entrapping people in the men’s bathroom of the county courthouse.
An investigator would “place himself in the men’s bathroom” “adjacent to their subject.”
They would “ask if he wanted homosexual activity,” wait for them to "reply yes," and conclude,
“this man is a confirmed homosexual.”
We were a very poor family.
I was able to enlist in the state university, Gainesville, University of Florida, on my 25th birthday.
I knew that this was my one chance for a decent life.
And this was threatening everything that I had planned for.
They said, we want the names of all of your friends who are gay.
And I said I don't have any gay friends.
Which of course was not true. And they wanted to know if there were any gay professors on campus.
I wouldn't tell them.
One of the tactics they used was, I came back after summer break, and I had a new roommate.
One day he came into the room appearing to be very very drunk.
And he was walking around the room, taking his clothes off around the dorm room,
and started trying to entice me into having sex with him.
I grabbed my shoes, I got up, and I got out of the room as fast as I could.
Some days or weeks later, he admitted to me that yes, he was employed by the Johns Committee,
and they had hired him to see if he could entice me into a situation.
It was a--
It was a low degree of terror.
At the University of Florida, the committee’s tactics led to the forced dismissal of at least 70 students and professors.
The Florida Education Association had requested, from the chairman of this committee,
a listing of any teachers known to be guilty of this
kind of moral deviation.
The Johns Committee destroyed many of their papers, but one undated memo revealed they had over 300 "pending investigations,"
that had spread to other Florida universities and grade schools.
Here in the past five years, we have revoked the certificates of 77 teachers.
The committee's tactics eventually began to attract attention.
And then, they published a book.
After almost a decade of their crusade,
here is what finally helped unravel the Johns Committee.
It’s known as the Purple Pamphlet.
This was a report on homosexuality in Florida that they published
for the benefit of "every individual concerned with the moral climate of the state."
In the pamphlet, they used graphic images meant to depict gay men.
And they even used sexualized images of young boys,
meant to connect homosexuality with pedophilia.
And then on the back of the pamphlet was the stamp: the state seal of Florida.
So that didn't go over too well, you might imagine, with Florida taxpayers,
when they found out their money was being used to produce
what most people considered porn.
I feel the reactivation of the committee is questionable.
The following year, lawmakers eliminated funding for the Committee, and they officially folded.
They shot themselves in the foot.
Which I think is complete poetic justice, of course.
It’s hard to know how many victims of the Johns Committee are still out there.
Many have passed away, and others were so intimidated by their tactics,
that they left the state, never to return.
Like Art Copleston.
These interrogators, the investigators, they weren't very bright people.
But they had tremendous power over others, over us.
The bottom line is, I graduated, with honors,
and I got a job.
The morning after the graduation service, I was out of town. Gone.
Over 50 years later, the state of Florida has yet to acknowledge that the Johns Committee did anything wrong.
It ruined people's lives in a way we will never truly understand.
As a white heterosexual Democrat,
I'm kind of the guy that needs to apologize for this currently in the State House.
That’s Evan Jenne, a member of the Florida House of Representatives
who's pushing a bill for a formal state apology.
Quite frankly, we still do not give equal protection under the law for the LGBTQ community.
You can still be fired in the state of Florida if you are a member of the LGBTQ community.
For now, though, the full story of the Johns Committee,
and the people’s lives it forever changed, remains largely hidden behind the redacted names...
tucked away in dozens of old boxes.
After all of these years, I still am...
pretty much a pretty closeted guy.
I still shy away from a lot of social contact with other gay people.
Because I'm so uncomfortable
being identified as a gay man.
For this piece, we were only able to scratch the surface of what was in those documents at the Florida State Archives.
So if you're interested in learning more about the interrogations or Johns Committee meeting notes,
you can check out all our scans at the link below.
Thanks so much for watching, and can't wait to share the next episode of Missing Chapter with y'all soon.
