Polishing the Tarnished Rose: Police Sergeant Earl R. Biggs, Moral Panic, and Sexuality in Cold War Portland, Oregon Faolán M. Thompson This honors thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of the Bachelor of Arts in History Department of History May 2013 Professor Reiko Hillyer Lewis & Clark College Portland, Oregon “In order to have an understanding of the present, some knowledge of the past is considered essential.” – Sgt. Earl R. Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin Cover image: Illustration from order form for Sex, Science and Sin. Folder 8, Earl R. Biggs Papers, Ax 470, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, OR. i Acknowledgements First, I must thank my project advisor, Reiko Hillyer, for her unflinching support of my project and of me as a person. Under her guidance I was able to settle on one out of five potential thesis topics, and her advice never failed to send me in the right direction. She has taught me in more classes over four years than any other professor and encouraging my widespread interests under the umbrella of United States history. Thank you also my reading committee: Andrew Bernstein for his inspiring attention to detail and amazing enthusiasm and Elliot Young for the arts of redirection and expansion. To Maureen Healy, who has guided my interest in history from my first year of college and who taught me how to conduct historical research. And I must extend my thanks to the history department as a whole, without whose interest and expertise I would not have completed this project, for granting me the opportunity to create and pursue this piece. And to Kimberly Brodkin for her constant understanding and reassurance, as well as for helping me to capitulate my own queer-feminist praxis through the study of history. I owe a large debt to the librarians at Oregon State University's Special Collections in Eugene, Oregon for being incredibly attentive and interested in my research, as well as the staff at Watzek Library, who provided me with more books from more places than I can count. Thank you to my Fall 2012 Seminar classmates, especially Nicola Warmuth and Hannah Prince, for sharing their inspiring projects and amazing thoughts, critiques, and edits. A special thank you Lauren Lederman, Casey Newbegin, Amelia Hazen, and Kerry White, who allowed me to talk endless circles around this paper in their presence for an entire year, frequently in the least appropriate of places, whose support, reassurance, and love kept me grounded and writing. Thank you my fellow staffers of the Queer Resource Center for doing much the same. To my friends who I largely ignored for ten months and to my cats who I cuddled too hard and too frequently, go my many apologies. Endless thanks to the bands Light Bearer, Curmudgeon, and Cloud Rat for screaming me into wakefulness on my most sleepless nights. My family, whose relentless love has fueled me for twenty-two years, I can neither thank nor praise enough. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements …............................................................................................................ ii List of Figures ….................................................................................................................... iv Introduction …...................…................................................................................................. 1 Historiography ….................................................................................................................... 9 Moral Panic, Abnormal Sexuality, and Sex Crime …............................................................ 14 Vice City: Portland at Midcentury …..................................................................................... 20 Educating Parents and Protecting the Family ….................................................................... 31 Targeting Homosexuality …................................................................................................... 42 Curing the Queer Disease ….................................................................................................. 57 Conclusion ………………………...….................................................................................. 72 Bibliography …...................................................................................................................... 75 iii List of Figures Illustration from order form for Sex, Science and Sin ….................................................. cover Earl R. Biggs ….................................................................................................................. 4 Illustration of “mobile predator” …..................................................................................... 35 Advertisements for the Music Hall …................................................................................. 47 Music Hall drag queens and king ….................................................................................... 49 Police officers with “mug book” ……….…………………………………..…………….. 58 iv Introduction In an advertisement for his new book, published in 1950, Sergeant Earl R. Biggs of the Portland, Oregon Police Bureau promised “a simple, forceful and understandable explanation of the whole complex story of sex, normal and natural, abnormal and unnatural.” The flyer promised that there would be “No Punches Pulled” in this study of “all the STRANGE relationships and of the weird and unbelievable sex interests of many.”1 Sex, Science and Sin was one of Biggs’s contributions to the growing public discourse over sex and sexuality and, according to Biggs’s advertisement, “THE ONLY BOOK OF ITS KIND.”2 While sex became a topic of utter fascination in the wake of Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it also became a source of anxiety and distress: the figure of the “menacing sexual deviant” and, in particular, the “perverted” homosexual loomed over the American population. Portland-area newspapers emblazoned tales of “sex maniacs” and “sex murder” across headlines.3 Sex offenders, or “local beasts of prey... beasts abroad in [the] streets, beasts resembling men, whose unnatural appetites urge them to prey on women” as a letter to The Oregonian reviled, were, according to another letter, “nothing less than murderers,” regardless of their crime.4 These dual strands of absolute fascination and utter terror characterized debates 1 Order form for Sex, Science and Sin, folder 8, Earl R. Biggs Papers, Ax 470, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, OR (hereafter shortened to ERBP). Biggs often uses italics, bold, and all-capital letter to emphasize points he found particularly critical. 2 Earl R. Biggs, Sex Science and Sin: A Study of the Normal and Abnormal Sex Activity of Our Time in Relation to Science, the Law, Religion, and Social Customs (Portland: New Science Book Co., 1950); Order form, ERBP. 3 “Child, 5, Slain by Sex Maniac,” The Oregonian, April 24, 1945, 18; “Sex Murder Clues Sought,” The Oregonian, June 18, 1949, 16; “Sex Deviate Strikes Again,” The Oregonian, March 29, 1952, 18. These are only some of the headlines that Portland’s local newspaper The Oregonian ran between 1945 and 1958 that detailed sensationalistic sex-motivated killings across the nation. National fascination in sex crime scandals after World War II spiked with J. Edgar Hoover’s 1947 article “How Safe Is Your Daughter?” in American Magazine. For analyses of Hoover’s article, see: George Chauncey, Jr., “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” True Stories of the American Past, edited by William Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993): 160-178 and Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Conceptions of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 55-6. 4 Such exaggerated depictions of sex criminals (those who committed all types of offenses, from sodomy to scopophilia to rape) characterized the anxiety-driven cultural obsessions with sexual deviance, homosexuality, and Thompson 1 over local laws and law enforcement in Portland throughout the late 1940s and well into the 1950s. From its position as city that had been instrumental during World War II as a military production center, Portland entered the Cold War with extreme uncertainty about the city’s new social landscape. Local demographic changes and an emergent national interest in medical and psychopathological expertise converged on the question of “deviant” sexuality on the local level that focused on the allegedly rampant problem of sexual offenders and, in particular, the homosexuals. Portland, Oregon during the late 1940s and early 1950s embodied the variegated nature of what had become a national moral panic. Newspaper coverage of supposed spikes in violent, sexually-motivated crimes, propaganda films warning against the dangers of the homosexual, government-sponsored inquisitions, and an increasing interest in clinical sexuality all combined to foster a national atmosphere of anxiety over homosexuality that ranged from concern to outright terror.5 Fear and anger became regulating tactics for Portland’s new population, which, combined with widespread fascination about sex and scientific inquiry, led Portlanders to occupy multiple positions in the national debates about sex and specifically homosexuality. Portlanders sought advice from experts in both criminal and medical fields, in order not only to calm their child molestation that frequented local and national news outlets. “Local Beasts of Prey,” The Oregonian, May 21, 1947, 1; Maxine Blankevoort, letter to the editor, The Oregonian, September 8, 1952, 3M. 5 In his seminal study on British youth culture, Stanley Cohen defines moral panic as “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests,” wherein the mass media paints that condition, episode, or person “in a stylized and stereotypical fashion.” In this understanding, public figures guard “the moral barricades” while “socially accredited” experts and professionals diagnose, pathologize, and medicalize those conditions, episodes, or persons. Articles published in national magazines drew on parents’ fears about the safety of their children while creating the archetype of the queer criminal that became commonplace in local, regional, and national newspapers. Around 1950, radio broadcasts and public service films gained increasing popularity in their condemnation of sex deviates, especially homosexuals. Historian Philip Jenkins expands this definition by adding that “panic implies not only fear but fear that is wildly exaggerated and wrongly directed.” The moral panic about homosexuality that occurred in the decade immediately following World War II has been studied by scholars across many disciplines, as the period included a spike in media coverage and interest, government-sponsored inquisition, increased policing, and a widespread discourse of fear. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (London: Routledge, 2002), 1; Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic;” Jenkins, 7, 49-58. Thompson 2 nerves but sate their thirst for knowledge; Sergeant Earl R. Biggs was one such expert. By combining new medical literature with his own personal history as a police officer, Biggs hoped to redirect the local views of homosexuality and sex crime. In many ways, Biggs personifies the national and local discourses on sex, as he simultaneously invoked and dispelled the atmosphere of moral panic. Biggs worried about the negative effects of homosexuality on society while concurrently enmeshing himself in the welfare of gender and sexual minorities. At the same time, as a father of five and veteran officer of the children’s protective division, Biggs was not immune to the widespread distrust of strangers and distress over the safety of the family.6 In many ways, he incorporated the same anxious rhetoric over sexuality while also presenting himself as a voice of reason. Though this was neither the first nor the last time that Americans would fret over sexuality, the early Cold War period was marked by an array of positions on sexuality that incorporated many national anxieties. Across the nation, government officials, policymakers, law enforcement, and mass media brought to life the shadowy figure of the sex criminal. The American public, both condemnatory and curious, turned sex and sexuality into a dramatic stage where they could assign meaning to their distress about the social upheavals of the postwar United States. Although the nation had emerged triumphant, wartime policies had seemingly irrevocably altered the social and economic fabric of the country. Furthermore, the country refocused on a new enemy: the Soviet Union. Like the Soviets who loomed over the United States’ public consciousness, threatening both political infiltration and nuclear war, sex offenders threatened to subvert the nation and cause chaos from the inside. “Perversion” threatened to 6 Biggs married twice and raised his five children in Portland. Likely fatherhood converged with his occupation and various ideologies about family life to lead him to focus on teaching parents how to protect their children. Biographical information, folder 9, ERBP. Thompson 3 destroy that kernel of American patriotism, the white, middle-class, explicitly heterosexual nuclear family of the suburbs, either by targeting children or hiding within its walls. Figure 1: Portrait of Earl R. Biggs, frontispiece, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal. Earl Biggs of the Portland Police Bureau (fig. 1), born in 1897, became the City of Roses’ very own expert on sexuality and sexual deviance. His career as a “sex expert” began in 1928 when he joined the vice division, where he dealt with the city’s various sex crimes.7 The experience he garnered in his time on the force, combined with a personal interest in studying psychological and medical causes of sexual deviance, exemplified the value of expertise in an uncertain age.8 Over the course of the decade, Biggs gave over 300 presentations to area ParentTeacher Associations and civic clubs “in the interest of educating the general public concerning 7 Résumé, Folder 9, ERBP. The early Cold War period has been called by several historians the Age of Expertise. Because the United States’ military incorporated the burgeoning science of psychopathology into their screening process, psychiatry and psychology became some of the most prominent fields of the postwar era. New professionals inundated after the war, and Americans began to focus on their mental health en masse for the first time in history. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 29,174-82. See also: Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 8 Thompson 4 the ever-present menace of the sex criminal.”9 In 1950, he published two guides on sex and sexual deviance. With the first, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, Biggs established himself as the local authority on the sex crime and “deviant” sexual behavior that posed a threat to the city’s children.10 In his follow-up text, the “educational, thrilling, fascinating, and shocking” Sex, Science and Sin, Biggs attempted to delineate the varieties of “sex abnormalcy” and summarize the arguments about their causes and connotations from legal, religious, medical, and psychological perspectives.11 He intended for his guide to be accessible to police and citizens alike and advertised it as “a simple, forceful and understandable explanation of the whole complex story of sex, normal and natural, abnormal and unnatural.”12 Before 1950, the public had very little access to vernacular literature on sexuality and sexual deviance owing to the medical community’s insular nature and use of technical language. Though national publications reviewed Biggs’s works, it is difficult to determine whether or not his work reached a national audience. In other states, government commissions and local experts published similar texts that would have been available in their specific locales as well as among the community of authors of such works.13 However, because his primary audience was local, Biggs represented 9 Ochoco Grade School Parent-Teacher Association booklet, 1955-1956, Folder 7, ERBP; Dolores Gootfried Berg, “Portland Police Officer--Author,” The Portland TV Radio Entertainment Guide, folder 7, ERBP. 10 Earl R. Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal: Rules and Suggestions for the Protection of Children from Sexual Molestation, Assault and Murder (Portland, OR: New Science Book Co, 1950). One review of this booklet derided it as “a rather superficial little treatise. It defines certain sex offenses, deals very lightly with causes of sexual deviation and gives certain rules... for the protection of individual children. It adds nothing to the understanding of the deviate, or the legal and medical questions involved.” Though this review was published in 1954, it summarized the main differences between Biggs’s two publications. He would later offer a free copy of How to Protect Your Child with the purchase of Sex, Science and Sin. Benjamin Karpman, The Sexual Offender and His Offenses: Etiology, Pathology, Psychodynamics and Treatment (New York: Julian Press, 1954), 664. 11 Earl R. Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin: A Study of the Normal and Abnormal Sex Activity of Our Time, in Relation to Science, the Law, Religion and Social Customs (Portland, OR: New Science Book Co, 1950); Order form for Sex, Science, and Sin, folder 8, ERBP. 12 Order form, ERBP. 13 Some examples include New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, Report on Study of 102 Sex Offenders at Sing Sing Prison (Albany, NY: State Hospitals Press, 1950); Report of the Governor’s Study Commission on the Deviated Criminal Sex Offender (Lansing: State of Michigan, 1951); Samuel W. Hartwell, A Citizen’s Handbook of Thompson 5 the specific stresses over sexuality that affected Portlanders. By his retirement in 1957, his writing and activism had bought Biggs respect and notoriety in Multnomah County as the area’s resident expert on sex crime. Informing his understanding of medical treatment for sex offenders was Biggs’s relationship to Alfred Kinsey. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, revolutionized how Americans--specifically the white middle-class--approached sexuality by bringing to light the myriad ways in which they experienced it.14 Biggs fostered a friendship via correspondence with Kinsey, who went on to edit Biggs’s second book, Sex, Science, and Sin.15 Kinsey’s reports and the wave of scientific and psychopathological literature on sexuality that followed heavily influenced not only Biggs’s writing, but his activism as well. However, his position as a law enforcement officer and community teacher, combined with the reconfiguration of Portland-area demographics and economic structure following the war, created a significant tension within Biggs’s own works and on the local stage. Between 1948 and 1953, Biggs would posit multiple, seemingly inconsistent, stances on the moral, legal, and psychopathological views of homosexuality. Early in his career as an activist, Biggs presented homosexuality as a psychological ailment, personality disorder, and perversion, “neither [a] natural or normal” occurrence of human sexual expression. Concomitantly, he advocated for more understanding and acceptance for sexual difference, directly critiquing ideas of sinfulness related to sexuality and eventually introducing state legislation to change sex laws to address consent. Nevertheless, he strongly believed in the threat that “sexual deviance” presented to the city’s children and his Sexual Abnormalities and the Mental Hygiene Approach to their Prevention: A Report to the Committee on Education of the Governor's Study Commission on the Deviated Criminal Sex Offender (Lansing: State of Michigan, 1950). Numerous other studies on sex criminals were conducted throughout the time period (as well as some notable examples before World War II and later in the 1950s). 14 Historian Miriam Reumann describes Kinsey’s reports as “omnipresent” and a “leitmotif in postwar culture.” Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2, 14. 15 Fraternal Order of the Eagles Flyer, May 14, 1956, folder 7, ERBP. Thompson 6 determination of difference between “pedophile” and “homosexual” was often unclear.16 Between the publication of his books in 1950 and the co-authorship of a state bill, Biggs went from asserting the danger of homosexuality as a “psychotic personality” to attempting to decriminalize sodomy, though he often drew on the rhetoric of social danger than the homosexual posed. Though he was most active in a period where parents, media, and government scrambled to seek and destroy a sexually “perverse” threat to the nation, Biggs presented a variety of conflicting viewpoints not only on homosexuality and sex, but also on the atmosphere of moral panic itself. Although he occupied a position as mediator among public sentiment, law, and science, Biggs benefitted from the atmosphere of fear. His work garnered him public praise and bolstered his career as an educator and activist at the precise time when his message was most sought after. At the time, state and municipal governments around the country commissioned reports on sex criminality as deviance became more medicalized and pathologized. Often, employers and government officials investigated suspected homosexuals with the same fervor as they did alleged communists, linking the red scare to a lavender one. During Biggs’s active years, the federal government was attempting to purge Washington, D.C. of homosexuals.17 Many in the government considered gay and lesbian workers to be a threat to national security as they were prime targets for blackmail, through which Soviets could procure government secrets.18 Where 16 Oregon House Bill 208, co-authored by freshman representative Phil Roth of Multnomah County (the Portland metro area) and dubbed the Biggs-Roth Bill was proposed to the 1953 State Legislative Assembly. At the same time, Multnomah County’s other freshman representative proposed two bills that also dealt with sex crimes. The differences between the two, as will be discussed below, sparked intense public debate over who could be defined as a sex offender and how the state should deal with “psychopathic” sex crimes. 17 Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57:4 (December 2005): 1105-1129; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 18 Johnson, 6, 24, 107-118. Thompson 7 moral panic did prevail, it was employed as a tool of regulation whose rhetoric defined a good citizen, a good family, and a good use of space. In Portland specifically, Mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee (1948-1952), punctuated her single term by forming a committee with the intention to rid the city of its apparent sexual perversion problem, which she believed was intrinsically tied to the local vice industry. Lee succeeded Mayor Earl Riley, whose final term exploded in scandal: a civic club of prominent citizens along with Portland’s local newspapers published allegations that the mayor himself, along with a large portion of the police force, were profiting from the vice industry that plagued downtown Portland. Between 1948 and 1952, Lee vehemently fought to establish moral order in her city, using the law and her feminine morality to regulate the makeup of Portland. She sought to attack vice in all its guises and, after having dealt with the vice issues that Riley had allowed, turned toward the homosexual and the pedophile. The effects of the law and the air of distress about same-sex desire had far-reaching implications for the local queer community--a diverse group that comprised gay men, lesbian women, gender deviant performers, and many others with such “unsavory” proclivities. As homosexuality was largely considered immoral, criminal, deviant, and dangerous, Portland’s lesbians and gay men had to bend their social space to express their erotic desires and often ended up on the wrong side of the law. Due to wartime changes in the social and physical landscape, gay, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming Portlanders became a scapegoat for the city’s changes and a “menace” to local order. Because people like Lee viewed gay and lesbian citizens as a blemish on the social landscape and a threat to the quiet and isolated way of life to which prewar Portlanders had fashioned for themselves, police interactions with the local queer community exemplified social and legal regulations on proper citizenship. In the eyes of Thompson 8 government and law enforcement, queer sexuality evinced an un-American nature that needed to be purged from the city to keep it safe. Because of his years on the force, Biggs was able to share with his audience the ways in which the police regulated sexual practice in order to protect local families. Earl Biggs’s shifting views represent a multitude of perspectives held by Portlanders and Americans at large. He himself served as a mediator not only between the heterosexual public and the homosexual “menace,” but between public moral panic, legal statutes, and psychopathological perspectives. In attempting to bridge criminality with psychopathology and moral codes with fear of the nation’s safety during the postwar years, Biggs and his contemporaries exemplified the uncertainty of the age. Historiography While in Biggs's time period, the word “queer” was undoubtedly negative—as will be seen at several points below—its usage in the twenty-first century as a reclaimed term of selfidentification, alongside the introduction of an academic queer theory as non-normative and oftothered, has been a defining influence in this paper. In the early 1990s, “queer” became an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (itself an umbrella term), questioning, intersex, asexual, and a whole host of other specific identities as a direct offshoot of the rise of identity politics and a radical schism in the gay rights movement. In many cases in this paper, “queer” will be used not only as an analytical term, but also for its relative terseness in comparison to either LGBTQIA+ or “gender and sexual minorities.” Furthermore, at the time of Biggs's writing, there was a bevy of terms—clinical, formal, slang, or otherwise—that described a variety of sexual and gender identities, or at least desires and tendencies, many of which have Thompson 9 since fallen out of usage and can just as easily be grouped under umbrella terminology. However, because the large majority of modernly-”queer” people at midcentury identified as gay and lesbian—and were doing so for the first time—and because of the common use of “queer” as a pejorative, at most narrative moments, the terms “gay men and women,” “gay and lesbian,” and “homosexual” will be used. Most often, to distinguish between actual gay and lesbian people at the time and popular notions of same-sex desire, the phrase “the homosexual” is indicative of that monolithic and shadowy figure that so terrified the nation. Moral panic, as a term applied in retrospect, has been the subject of scholarly study since Stanley Cohen released his seminal work on British youth culture in 1972.19 Within Cold War scholarship, moral panic about sexuality has been linked to various other anxieties in both the public and private spheres. On the public side, the Cold War posed a threat of communism, not only from the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, but also from the alleged proliferation of spies, traitors, and “reds” in the United States itself.20 John Gerassi was the first author to connect sex crime panic and McCarthyism in his 1965 examination of Idaho’s moral panic; numerous historians after him have further established the connection between fear of communism and fear of sex deviance.21 Both the enemy without and the enemy within fostered the spirit of McCarthyism and a widespread need for national security, which further manifested in the criminalization of sexuality--in particular, the criminalization of same-sex desire.22 Many 19 Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twenty-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). 21 John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Patrick Brode, The Slasher Killings: A Canadian Sex Crime Panic, 1945-1946 (Detroit: University of Michigan Press, 2009). George Chauncey, Jr. also primarily situates his essay “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic” in Michigan. 22 George Chauncey, Jr., “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” True Stories of the American Past, edited 22 by William Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993): 160-178; John D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, edited by Kathy Peiss and 20 Thompson 10 historians attribute the anxiety over sexuality to a particular fear of strangers, transients, and infiltrators, a fear that manifested in a desperate need for security and the use of sexuality as a regulatory measure.23 This ideology of security extended to the private sphere of the home, where postwar Americans redefined gender roles and the structure of the family, leading to anxieties over unstable masculinities and femininities.24 Simultaneously, public fascination with sex after Kinsey bespoke a rising sexual liberalism and upheld heterosexual sex in the white nuclear family as a bulwark of love against external threats and internal strife.25 Other authors place the sex crime panic in the locus of increased interest in criminology and psychopathology.26 Many authors draw on Foucauldian analysis to discuss sexuality as a discourse that is constructed over time, thereby placing the sex crime panic in specific definitions, categories, and moments of sexuality, such as through federal law or the conditions of World War II.27 Of particular note, Miriam Reumann discusses the role that sexual discourse played in solidifying American national identity after World War II and the release of the Kinsey Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989): 226-240; Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Conceptions of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 23 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); May, Homeward Bound. 24 May, Homeward Bound; Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Reumann, American Sexual Character. 25 May, Homeward Bound; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 26 Estelle B. Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires:’ The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, edited by Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989): 199-225; Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984): 267-319. See also: Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011). 27 Canaday, The Straight State; Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Thompson 11 Reports, both through scapegoating a sexual Other and through constant public cultural discussion of an American sexual character.28 Scholarship on the postwar sex crime panic is heavily influenced not only by studies of the history of sexuality, but also by the work of queer history. While there are many accounts of the national sex crime scare of the 1950s, only few scholars focus on the phenomenon of moral panic at the local level, especially in the Pacific Northwest.29 Scholars often situate their studies in queer history, which tend towards localized projects intended to give voice to the subaltern queer communities of the area of the author’s study; many works on queer history extend to or focus on time periods before the Cold War.30 While many of these studies lay beyond the scope of this paper, they nevertheless offer a ground for understanding ways in which sexuality was regulated, constructed, and redefined over the course of the twentieth century. Queer history informs the study of how Earl Biggs, the municipal government, the local media, Portlanders, and criminalized “sexual deviants” interacted. Portland itself does not garner nearly as much attention as a locus in which to study sexuality as bigger metropoles, such as New York or San Francisco. Scholars of queer history 28 Reumann, American Sexual Character. Gerassi, The Boys of Boise. Two authors studied the issues of vice and organized crime in Portland during the era, but do not mention the apparent rise in sex crime nor the possibility of a moral panic: Phil Stanford, Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City (Portland, OR: Westwinds Press, 2004); Robert C. Donnelly, Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 30 Gary Atkins, Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A Queer History of San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); George Chauncey, Jr., Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Sandra L. FaimanSilva, The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Community in Provincetown (Champaign: University of Illinois, 2004); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon, 1993); Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: A History of Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 29 Thompson 12 have compared Portland’s homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s to other West Coast cities, but there is little literature that focuses on public anxiety and the discourse of the moral panic.31 In general, despite Portland’s twenty-first century status as one of the nation’s most gayfriendly cities, few historians have examined its history of sexual regulation and antihomosexuality beyond the 1910s.32 Even when examining Dorothy McCullough Lee, historians rarely mention her late-term goal of removing the sex criminal threat from Portland and instead focus on her campaign against gambling.33 Earl Biggs, as opposed to Lee, has never been the subject of an academic study. His two books, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal and Sex, Science, and Sin, especially when taken in context with similar reports and guides published around 1950, intertwined and sometimes offset the pervading ideologies of the day: those of morality, criminality, psychopathology.34 As a figure who was primarily active in Portland, Earl Bigg not only delineates the ways in which national moral panic emerged and was alternately wielded and countered, but also muddies the traditional scholarly picture of moral panic over sexuality. Peter Boag, “‘Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?’ Gay Culture and Activism in the Rose City Between World War II and Stonewall,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 105:1 (Spring 2004): 6-39. 32 Peter Boag, the foremost historian on gay and lesbian life in Portland, has tended to focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Nayan Shah, in his examination of sexual regulation in the American and Canadian West in the early twentieth century, does occasionally draw on examples from Oregon. See: Boag, Same-Sex Affairs; Boag, Re-dressing America’s Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Boag, “Sex & Politics in Progressive Era Portland and Eugene: The 1912 Same-Sex Vice Scandal,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 100:2 (Summer 1999): 158-181; Boag, “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History,” The Western Historical Quarterly 36:4 (Winter 2005): 477-497; Shah, Stranger Intimacy. 33 Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 156-8; Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 127-31; Jewel Lansing, Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851-2001 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 354-362. E. Kimbark MacColl, The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1915-1950 (Portland, Or: Georgian Press, 1979); Paul C. Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee: The Successes and Failures of ‘Dottie-Do-Good,’” Oregon Historical Quarterly 91:1 (Spring, 1990): 4-42. 34 See note #13. 31 Thompson 13 Moral Panic, Abnormal Sexuality, and Sex Crime During the early years of the Cold War, sexual deviance and, in particular, the images of the homosexual and the pedophile, became a perceived threat to American life that the mass media and federal and state governments perpetuated and that a frightened and anxious public quickly espoused. In an era where Americans placed more and more faith in the knowledge of medical and psychological professionals, the spikes in public anxiety over sexuality took on “hyperbolic” qualities, yet would frequently be understood at the time as “incontestable fact,” according to historian Philip Jenkins.35 Portlanders experienced a significant amount of tension over how to deal with the sex offender and, particularly, the homosexual. While these shadowy figures took over local discourse, Biggs and other Portlanders occasionally questioned the public reaction to this apparent phenomenon and even tried to quell certain fears and provoke a more rational discussion. Immediately before and during World War II, clinicians and other psychopathological experts aided a distinct shift in the perceived dangers of homosexuality, a change that accommodated the chimerical images of the malignant sexual deviant. Early forays into the study of homosexuality-as-perversion employed medical and moral issues that largely focused on same-sex desire as a fount of gender deviance. In the 1930s and earlier, most scientists viewed homosexuality as merely a “depraved sexual behavior in otherwise ordinary people,” according to historian Ellen Herman.36 By the 1940s, however, it began to develop a strictly psychological and clinical association; at the time the United States entered World War II, the U.S. military developed a standardized form of sexual questioning in an attempt to bar gay men and women from joining the service under the notion that they were not mentally sound. As historian Allan 35 36 Jenkins, 7. Herman, 108. Thompson 14 Bérubé has noted, such screening tests were “the first time they had had to think of themselves in homosexual terms.”37 It was this military standardization of psychiatric evaluation that not only introduced the concept of “homosexuality” to the American public at large, but also normalized psychiatry in American life. Because every recruit and volunteer had to pass a psychiatric evaluation in order to join the U.S. military, everyone involved in wartime mobilization became familiarized with the rising industry of psychiatry and pathology. Sex crime served as an all-encompassing term for sexual practices that were illegal, including sodomy, oral sex, and sexual acts performed between two people of the same sex. Biggs notes, “It is generally accepted that the physical act of sexual union is normal when it is performed between a male and a female, by the male member being placed in the vagina of the female, while all other acts of a sexual nature are considered abnormal.”38 In this definition, the only “normal” or acceptable sexual experience is not only strictly heterosexual, but also only includes vaginal intercourse. Other designations such as sexual “pervert,” “psychopath,” “degenerate,” “deviate,” “deviant,” and “abnormal” were used to describe not only sex criminals but also those who engaged in “abnormal sex.” Biggs used several of these designations throughout How to Protect Your Child but chose instead to use the terms “sex abnormal” and “abnormalcy” in Sex, Science, and Sin in lieu of the many monikers listed above.39 Sexual normality was a hegemonic ideology that historian George Chauncey, Jr. states “embodied a moral judgment, a statistical presumption, and a psychological goal all at once” and “failure to adhere” to the dominant framework labeled one a deviant.40 Allan Bérubé, “Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II,” Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Duberman, et al. (New York: Meridian, 1989), 387. 38 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 29-30. 39 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 29. 40 Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” 167. 37 Thompson 15 The fear of sexual deviance in the government, especially during the 1950 purge of gay and lesbian government workers known as the “lavender scare,” combined with the monstrous image of the homosexual as bloodthirsty pervert created a chimerical image of same-sex desire.41 In many cases, the public actively conflated homosexuality and pedophilia; Biggs himself was not immune to this discursive correlation. In his early work, Biggs contradicts himself several times in this distinction (or lack thereof), frequently equating homosexuality with pedophilia while insisting that the public had skewed such a correlation.42 Regardless of their target age group, queer people were marred by their sexual desires, both publicly and, according to science, mentally. Commonly, experts considered homosexuality evidence of a “psychopathic personality.” By 1954, many states had enacted “sexual psychopath laws,” including Oregon. These laws frequently doled out harsh punishments by removing any notion of consensual sodomy. Designating sex offenders as “psychopaths” in the law allowed states to keep them under the firm boot of law. Furthermore, only psychiatric professionals could designate anyone a “sexual psychopath,” as its associated behaviors indicated a personality disorder that needed to be treated by the state, not simply punished.43 By 1950, newspapers across the country cited rising numbers of sex crimes in the United State. A 1949 letter to the editor in The Oregonian lamented, “The past few days when the people all over the nation opened their newspapers, what have they found staring them in the face? Sex crimes, child murders, and child murderers.” The author begged his fellow Portlanders to “prevent little innocent children from being assaulted and murdered[.] Will we let these recent Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 215. For an analysis of the federal purge of gays and lesbians in Washington, D.C., see Johnson, The Lavender Scare. 42 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 128. 43 Freedman, “Uncontrolled Desires.” 41 Thompson 16 crimes slip into the past without doing something to prevent future ones?”44 The author was responding to a string of reports of sexually-motivated murders; a week earlier, the Oregonian published J. Edgar Hoover’s nationally-syndicated piece in which he claimed, “The depraved sex criminal has replaced the kinaper [sic] as a threat to the piece of mind of the parents of America.”45 Like the letter to the editor, Hoover claimed that an unconscionable number of sexually-based crimes against women and children had happened in quick succession over the days leading up to the article’s publication and that those incidents ought to be the impetus for change. However, the numbers of sex-related crimes had not necessarily increased in that one week in November of 1949 of Hoover’s piece. Philip Jenkins claims that this nationally publicized “handful of spectacularly brutal acts” forged “[p]erceptions that crime was out of control... thus creating an image of a systematic problem.”46 Though Biggs did not make this claim, he did assert that the media sensationalized the spike in sex crime. In Biggs’s experience, people feared that the rising rates of sexually-driven crime reflected an increase in the incidence of “sex abnormalcy.” As he stated in Sex, Science, and Sin, though “sexual offenses (crimes) have shown a tremendous increase during the past half century,” there are various reasons for such numbers “other than an increase in the percentage of sex abnormals in relation to the population.” First, noted Biggs, “it is possible that many more cases are being reported” and second, “there is greater activity on the part of law-enforcement officers in discovering and 44 Pat Nielsen, letter to the editor, The Oregonian, November 27, 1949, 33. It is worth noting that the column above Nielsen’s letter detailed the “struggle between Russia and the western powers” over Germany; the reader of the Oregonian would have then found two national crises alongside each other: the rise in sexual crime and the rise of the Soviet threat. Barnet Nover, “West Gains Upper Hand in Struggle Over Germany,” The Oregonian, November 27, 1949, 33. 45 John Edgar Hoover, “Edgar Hoover Outlines War Against Sex Crimes,” The Oregonian, November 20, 1949, 1. 46 Jenkins, 54. Thompson 17 arresting such offenders.”47 According to Biggs, between 1910 and 1947 the number of people “arrested and convicted for sex offenses, other than rape” grew from 796 to 17,878.48 He further determined that these numbers “would be much greater if all cases of sex offenses against women and children were reported.”49 As a police officer with significant experience in both the vice and the children’s divisions, Biggs had encountered numerous victims of rape and sexual assault, no doubt many of whom did not file official reports or press charges.50 The national focus on sex offenders and child molestation most likely fueled the public’s willingness to report on these crimes as they happened. The apparent crime wave then became something of a selffulfilling prophecy. Biggs noted in the introduction of How to Protect Your Child the recent string of articles by J. Edgar Hoover. According to Biggs, Hoover claimed that “sex crimes against women and children have increased over fifty percent in the past four years,” though, as previously mentioned, Biggs believed these rising numbers to reflect the concentration of people in cities during the war as well as increased numbers of reporting, especially in the face of a moral panic over sex crime.51 Notably, however, such crimes “ranged anywhere from indecent exposure before women and children to newspaper headline murder,” the latter of which notably did not Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 33-4. Philip Jenkins discusses both of these interpretations; he notes that “crime waves” such as this alleged increase in sexually violent crimes are relative and dependent on the “popular expectations of what is proper in terms of public order and safety.” Arguably, the increase in sex crime and the resulting panic arose from Americans’ increasing dependence on psychiatric expertise after World War II. The increasing reports of sex crime fed the moral panic for one main reason: police were under pressure to attack this sexual menace, and so turned to the local and well-known locations where sexual deviants--particularly queer people--gathered or “cruised.” Biggs himself conceded widespread police knowledge of such meeting places. By scapegoating the city’s gay and lesbian residents, law enforcement manufactured empirical results to bolster the public panic. Jenkins, 51-4; Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. 48 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 34. 49 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. 50 Biggs notes that many in law enforcement would double the numbers he listed if every instance of sexual violence were reported. Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. 51 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 13. 47 Thompson 18 occur within Portland city limits52. While certainly the growing numbers of sex crime and aspects of the moral panic reflected genuine fears of sexual violence, rape, incest, and molestation, such realistic threats were often either conflated with the homosexual or subsumed under the pervasive image of an implicitly queer sex offender. With both of his books, Biggs presented practical knowledge that parents in any time period might use to protect their children from actual sex criminals; however, this knowledge often got sidelined for a panic-driven focus on homosexuality and its related “perversions” even within such practical guides. Though Biggs asserted that it was “the duty and moral obligation of every citizen to strive to give” children every protection, his incredibly detailed descriptions of every notable “abnormal” sexuality veer away from that “moral obligation” towards a Lacan-inspired classification of sexual othernes. The ways in which Biggs presented homosexuality in his books illustrate the widespread conflation of the homosexual with violent sex crimes. In How to Protect Your Child, “Pedophile,” “Homosexual; Homosexuality,” and “Rapist” are all grouped together in the same subsection, with a single “illustrative case” for all three; other more specific forms of sexual “abnormalcy,” such as “Peeping-Tom” or “Necrophilia” in contrast receive their own specific sections in the book.53 However, as this work in particular was geared toward protecting children, the ties to pedophilia were largely thematic necessity. In Sex, Science and Sin, the attention which Biggs gave to homosexuality over all other types of “abnormal” sexualities evokes a sense of utmost fascination for Biggs. The book itself comprises little over 100 pages of information, divided into eleven chapters. Chapters six and seven, “Homosexuality—Male and Female” with nine pages and “Transvestites—Wearing the Clothes of One's Opposite Sex” with 52 53 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 13. Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 17-19. Thompson 19 six, concerned themselves particularly with the homosexual “affliction.”54 All other forms of sexual “abnormalcy” were grouped into chapter eight, “Forms of Sex Abnormalcy and Abnormal Sex Acts,” with its twenty-two pages, described not only pedophilia, but also expounded on necrophilia, sexual pyromania, vampirism, flagellation, and bestiality.55 The only subject to receive a comparable focus to homosexuality was his twelve-page treatise on the different manifestations of masochism—many of which had queer connotations in Biggs's phrasing.56 Furthermore, at several points throughout that chapter, Biggs reiterated certain aspects of the homosexual character, especially in relation to these other “abnormalities.” Throughout the rest of the book, Biggs concerned himself particularly with homosexuality; while through the last few chapters, he referred only obliquely to “sex abnormalcy,” when he cited specifics, they were almost always related to homosexuality and, more importantly, homosexual pedophilia. Despite the intricate definitions and explicit characterizations of a variety of sexual proclivities, no matter how obscure or seemingly bizarre, Biggs constantly returned to that time-specific threat of the homosexual. Vice City: Portland at Midcentury In their 1952 exposé of the United States’ various underworlds, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two of the nation’s most widely-read journalists and insatiable hunters of scandal, could find no redeeming qualities in Portland. “Oregon is a dizzy state,” they derided. “Its metropolis is a dizzy town.”57 By midcentury, Portland had achieved notoriety for two seemingly 54 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 61-77. Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 78-104 56 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 88-100. 57 Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, U.S.A. Confidential (New York: Crown, 1952), 128. Starting in 1950 with New York Confidential, Lait and Mortimer published a series of books that allegedly exposed the crime-ridden underbelly of various cities around the nation. U.S.A. Confidential examined cities coast to coast, exposing secret queer spots, 55 Thompson 20 disparate characterizations: first, as a guidebook suggested, the city was a “sequestered Eden” whose “independence and that penchant for isolation” made it “a place quiet and remote,” and second, corroborating Lait and Mortimer, it was a “wide-open town,” plagued by all kinds of vice.58 In this climate, the Portland police bureau’s vice units worked to break up prostitution rings, illicit gay and lesbian cruising spots, and illegal gambling. As an officer in the bureau’s sex crime division since 1928, Biggs developed extensive experience with sexual deviants. He worked similar undercover operations in the city police department, the District Attorney’s office, Multnomah County’s Juvenile Court and School District #1, and with the United States Immigration Office. The Inspector of Police and Biggs’s boss throughout the 1930s, L. V. Jenkins, lauded Biggs’s work in the vice division, where he worked “for nearly two years, at the end of which time, in the language of the underworld Portland, [he] became ‘Too hot’ for sex perverts.”59 Furthermore, Jenkins claimed, Biggs “free[d] Portland of the floating type of degenerate and [curtailed] the activities of the resident perverts who escaped arrest and prosecution.”60 The young Sergeant Biggs, before World War II, had fashioned himself as a local crime syndicates and conspiracies, and generally drawing on the kind of sensationalist rhetoric that sold books at the time. “Dizzy,” in the vernacular of the day had a variety of meanings from which Lait and Mortimer were likely drawing. It connoted madness, intoxication, and eccentricity, though the writers most likely used it to mean “startling, astonishing.” Jonathon Green, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, vol. 1 (London: Chambers, 2010), s.v. “dizzy.” 58 Terence O’Donnell and Thomas Vaughan, Portland: A Historical Sketch and Guide (Portland, OR: Oregon Historical Society, 1976), 54, 63, 64; Boag, “‘Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?’”, 11; Ellis Lucia, The Conscience of a City: Fifty Years of City Club Service in Portland, the City Club of Portland Golden Anniversary, 1916-1966 (Portland, OR: The City Club of Portland, 1966), 39, 42, 58; MacColl, The Growth of a City, 3, 7, 610. 59 The phrase “too hot” is likely related to the modern phrase “too hot to handle,” meaning unstoppable. Contemporaneous definitions of “hot” as slang that may be applicable here include, “moving very fast” (therefore, Biggs moved through the homosexual underworld quickly); “competent, skilled, talented;” “enthusiastic.” Interestingly, “hot” was also slang used to describe a stolen item or someone “wanted by the police.” Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd edition (New York: Crowell, 1975), s.v. “Hot.” 60 L.V. Jenkins, recommendation letter, Sept. 10, 1937, Folder 4, ERBP. Notably, Leon Jenkins would be caught up in a police protection and vice scandal in 1948 alongside the man who appointed him, Mayor Earl Riley. For more information on investigations into both police and Jenkins’s involvement in Portland’s vice industry, see Donnelly, Dark Rose. Thompson 21 weapon against “abnormal” sexuality. Long before he became a well-known public figure, Biggs had begun to develop the expertise and heroism that would characterize public perception of him. By 1933, he started work on a guide book entitled The Sex Criminal: Crimes, Habits and Victims, using knowledge gained from his years of experience undercover and in the vice divisions, supplemented with extensive research on the causes of and science behind the nature of sex criminality; however, he found no audience for it and it remained unpublished.61 Biggs’s experience on the force and research in criminology and sexual deviance would later lead his 1950 publisher to praise him as “one of the best informed persons in the City of Portland on this little known phase of human nature.”62 Another colleague, Dr. Cecil Ross, praised Biggs’s “practical knowledge,” which he felt “places [Biggs] unquestionably without a peer in our city.”63 Publishers and experts began showing interest in his manuscript in 1937, a year that historian Estelle Freedman argues marked the beginning of a smaller-scale, prewar moral panic that was interrupted by World War II and was reasserted in the postwar years with renewed vigor.64 Biggs himself enlisted once the United States entered the war, making him a two-time veteran. When the war ended in 1945, Biggs returned to a changed and changing Portland; the war years had altered the social, industrial, and cultural landscapes of the city and these shifts heavily influenced the political atmosphere of the postwar period. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Portland's economy depended primarily on timber and centered on the port city's position along two rivers—the Columbia, 61 Ross recommendation letter, ERBP. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 10. 63 Cecil J. Ross recommendation letter, Sept. 11, 1937, folder 4, ERBP . 64 Jenkins’s recommendation letter, ERBP; Cecil J. Ross, recommendation letter, ERBP; Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 200, 205-8. For a discussion of previous sex crime scandals in Portland, see Boag’s Same-Sex Affairs, especially pages 218-22, in which he argues that the 1912 “Vice Clique Scandal,” where nearly 60 young men were tried for homosexual acts, began Portland’s march towards the full-blown moral panic of the 1950s. 62 Thompson 22 separating Oregon and Washington, and the Willamette, which split the city in half. Though shipbuilding had been a factor of the economy since 1840, its explosion during World War II seemed to change the industrial focus of the city.65 However, after the war, Portland and Multnomah County had to return to an extractive economy, which necessitated a certain amount of transience and anonymity. Whereas during the 1930s, this economy fostered short-term homosocial relationships, in the 1950s, much of Portland's local gay and lesbian community had formed just that—an explicit community. Furthermore, such rampant transience in the early century exacerbated the rise of the vice industry in downtown Portland; for hard laborers on the outskirts of the city, a relaxing night in the downtown bars and gambling halls, or with a prostitute constituted a good end to a hard day's work. Before World War I, the city's streets were lined with roses and wood. Many observers, local and visiting, painted the city as an idyllic Stumptown, or else as what E. Kimbark MacColl called a “backwoods town.”66 Yet, as one early twentieth-century visitor noted, “Portland's biggest vice is its exaggerated virtue.”67 Portland itself had “failed to show a substantial gain in population” before 1940, according to a 1948 report on local suburbanization.68 The author notes that the western portion of the metropolitan region in the 1940s was considered “Oregon Country—the part of the Pacific Northwest that was the goal of the pioneers who moved westward over the Oregon Trail... It is an area famed for its unsurpassed timber resources, its productive agricultural lands, its deep navigable rivers, its scenic river gorges, and its perpetually snow-capped mountain peaks.”69 This painting of Oregon as pastoral, sublime, romantic, and idyllic stuck in the minds of many long-term Portland 65 Percy Maddux, City on the Willamette: The Story of Portland, Oregon (Portland: Binfords & Mort, 1952), 12. MacColl, 20. 67 MacColl, 11. 68 Vincent M. Throop, “The Suburban Zone of Metropolitan Portland, Oregon” (PhD. Diss, University of Chicago, 1948), 1. 69 Throop, 3. 66 Thompson 23 residents as an image of the city itself, therefore making the change from an extractive to a military industry particularly distressing. Vice received special attention after the war because Portlanders found it to be the most heinous and yet most manageable manifestation of the social changes during the war years. Portland’s location on the western seaboard made it a critical location for shipbuilding and other wartime industry, turning Portland into what one historian called “a great war center.”70 A flurry of workers inundated the city, causing the population to rise from 500,000 to over 660,000 during the war.71 Considering the massive jump in population during the war years, rising rates of sex crime reflected the “very marked” rise of “major crime” between 1940 and 1947 as noted by a report on the inner workings of the Portland Police Bureau.72 Many of these workers were young or unmarried men and they pumped money into both local business and local vice, especially gambling and prostitution. As historian Allan Bérubé has noted, the military and war industries segregated their workers by gender; in the cities, such segregation fostered the perfect environment for connecting with others who shared same-sex desire, allowing for a rise in self-identification.73 Further contributing to a rise in vice crime, a large portion of Portland’s police and fire departments, including Biggs, had enlisted to serve in 70 Lucia, 39. Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries, 127. 72 August Vollmer and Addison H. Fording, Police Bureau Survey, City of Portland, Oregon: Submitted to Mayor Earl Riley (Portland, OR: Bureau of Municipal Research and Service, Portland Branch, University of Oregon, 1947), vii. “Major crimes” here includes homicide, rape, and aggravated assault. August Vollmer, a retired police chief from Berkeley, California and former professor of criminology, came to Portland in 1946 to evaluate the city’s Police Bureau. Such ‘major crimes’ are federally classified as Part I offenses, separated from Part II offenses such as gambling, prostitution, vagrancy, etc., that generally comprise vice crimes. The Vollmer report indicates that the increase in major crimes was comparable to other cities “with known population increases since 1940.” Vollmer’s report, released in 1947, surveyed the issues in organization, procedure, bureaucracy, etc., in the Portland Police Bureau, conducted in 1946. Vollmer makes note of his inability to comment on the state of vice in the city due to the scope of the survey; he does hint at vice-related corruption in the department, but the lack of detail or analysis is largely what prompted the City Club of Portland to investigate the city’s underworld in 1948. Vollmer and Fording, vii; MacColl, 609-14. 73 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire. 71 Thompson 24 the military.74According to the City Club of Portland, a group of self-proclaimed upstanding citizens that formed in 1916 and regularly met downtown, “The war had caused peacetime standards to break down, laws were relaxed, and public officials looked the other way.”75 Although Mayor Earl Riley instituted what historian Carl Abbott had called “a patriotic clean-up campaign” that aimed to close brothels and illegal gambling halls after the United States entered the war, the arrest rates dropped dramatically after the first year.76 The members of the City Club, among other prominent citizens, believed that Riley’s campaign was simply paying lipservice to the heads of the armed forces stationed in Portland as well as the moral crusaders of the city.77 Because of the seemingly rampant vice conditions in the city, the military allegedly blacklisted Portland for service personnel in order to keep them in line.78 Riley and many of his contemporaries felt that, as a key city in the United States’ defense industry, Portland needed to remain clean in order to foster a sense of patriotic duty, or at least to maintain the city’s relationship with the navy. However, neither Mayor Riley nor Portland lived up to this image. Lait and Mortimer characterized Portland as “every kind of dirty town with a spotless record”; the record, however, 74 Abbott, Portland, 129-130. Lucia, 39; Donnelly, 52. The City Club of Portland, founded in 1919, fashioned itself as the moral heart of the city during World War II. Between 1920 and 1965, the Club published upwards of 3000 pages in 710 separate reports, ranging from local to federal topics, most of which were drawn from contemporaneous news items. Lucia, the Club’s historian, claims that the Club does not operate on illusions of grandeur, its members knowing that they are neither “all-wise or infallible,” but throughout his book detailing the Club’s history, he lavishes it and its research reports with praise. Lucia, 44. 76 Abbott, Portland, 129-30. Earl Riley, mayor from 1941 to 1949, has been described by historian Carl Abbott as “a fixture of local politics.” During his first campaign, Riley’s opponent accused him of working with corrupt businesses and the local crime syndicate as well as of continual backing of gambling and prostitution rings in Portland. Though these accusations died down throughout his time in office, and though he did initiate a wartime crackdown on vice, his remained tied to the Portland underworld. Allegedly, despite his anti-vice action during the war, he grumbled in private about his preference of regulating the vice industry, rather than eliminating it. Abbott, Portland, 155; Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries, 127. 77 Donnelly, 50-51. 78 Lucia, 39-40. “Mayor Schrunk Says Portland a ‘Dead City’ on Vice Basis,” Oregonian, Mar. 13, 1957, 10. 75 Thompson 25 was far from spotless.79 A report published by the City Club in 1948 “literally blew the lid off the town,” showing that “Portland was riproaring” and that “the rambling rose of Portland was tarnished,” as the Club’s historian exclaimed.80 The City Club found that both Mayor Riley and the upper echelons of police department collectively accepted $60,000 per month to turn a blind eye to vice in the city.81 On occasion, despite his position as an officer of the law, Biggs seemed to hint at the scandal in his books. He lamented, “The human traits which are a threat to the peace and happiness of society and the individual are not sexual desires and the manner of their assuagement ([excepting] the sadistic injury and killing connected with sex in some few individuals,) but the mental passions of ruthless ambition, greed, hate and envy.”82 Though Biggs was not necessarily referring to Riley or his own co-workers who may have been accepting the same protection racket money, the statement reads as an aside, a personal musing rather than the scientific fact that Biggs generally explored. The scandal thoroughly destroyed public support for Riley. In the face of a stagnating and degenerate city, Finance Commissioner Dorothy McCullough Lee announced her candidacy for mayor against the incumbent Riley. Lee, originally a lawyer by trade, ran on a platform of enforcement of existing laws more so than an explicitly moral campaign.83 After a landslide victory, Lee “was faced with the momentous task of cleaning up the mess that the City Club had 79 Lait and Mortimer, 127. Lucia, 58, 59, 39. The vice report of 1948 was not the club’s first clash with Riley; an earlier report on the state of venereal disease in the city derided Riley’s administration for allowing vice to run rampant. The Club gained local notoriety for its “controversial investigations” during the war years, and claimed national recognition for the quality of its research. Lucia, 44. For a discussion of their venereal disease report, whose authors similarly characterized Portland as a wide-open, vice-ridden town, see Lucia, 40-2 and MacColl, 610-14. 81 Lucia, 59-60. “Portland Police Protection of Vice, Gambling Charged,” The Oregonian, Feb. 15, 1948, 1. Abbott, Portland, 155-56; Lansing, 348-52; MacColl, 610-14. 82 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 134. Bold his. Notably, in this section Biggs calls for widespread acceptance of certain “abnormal” sexual behaviors, but consistently brings up the specter of the sexual psychopath in language that evokes the sexual demons reported in popular press. 83 MacColl, 647. 80 Thompson 26 unmasked among the roses,” as the club’s historian proclaimed.84 Throughout her term, Lee turned the city’s vice districts into an ideological battleground in an effort to moralize and rejuvenate the city. Because “[a]ll fairy night clubs and gathering places are illegal, and only operate through pay-offs to the authorities,” claimed Lait and Mortimer, they were under the thumb of “the Mafia which also finds unique opportunity to sell dope in such dives.”85 It is likely that those police officers involved in the 1948 scandal accepted such pay-offs to keep gay nightlife off the city’s radar, tying the queer community directly to these vice rings. However, in her attempts to scour the city’s underworld and correct its moral order, Lee effectively ended racketeering and thus the symbiotic relationship between the police and gay Portlanders.86 Mayor Lee inherited a corrupt government and a citizenry still adjusting to life after the war. Though city planners had proposed numerous public works projects to keep Portland’s thousands of new residents employed, voters continuously vetoed government programs to reinvigorate the city.87 The lack of public support hit black Portlanders especially hard, as it largely meant they had to stay in wartime housing projects that were intended to be temporary. 88 Though historian Jewel Lansing noted that “the citizenry lacked a common goal or vision for the future beyond cleaning out the stink at city hall,” causing Lee’s policies beyond her attacks on “petty” vice to stagnate, the general distrust and dislike of the city’s newest residents probably cemented the failure of the planning commission.89 Despite her attempts to reform the municipal 84 Lucia, 60. Lait and Mortimer, 45. 86 Boag, “Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?”, 18. 87 Abbott, Portland, 149. 88 Elizabeth McLagan, “Ethnic and Gender Discrimination in Portland: 1844-1980,” Oregon Regional Disparity Study, vol. 1A (Portland, OR: Metropolitan Human Rights Center, 1990), 36. 89 Lansing, 355. Lee consistently clashed with her voting public over issues of social reform that were not related to vice (though Life magazine nicknamed her “Dottie-Do-Good” because she ruthlessly attacked the Portland vice industry). She sought to pass several civil rights measures during her term and had a positive working relationship with the NAACP. Portland, however, was a heavily segregated city; the city’s white residents did not relish the near doubling of Portland’s black population during the war years. A longtime haven of white supremacist groups such as 85 Thompson 27 government, Lee could not instate lasting change and lost considerable voter support throughout her term. In 1952, the next election year, the “prissy, practical, ambitious and voluble” Lee, as one account colored her, once again leaned on her virtue as a moral reformer in order to garner votes.90 As Earl Biggs claimed in 1950, “It is only recently that anyone has dared[,] even in a ‘hush-hush’ manner, to mention the subject of abnormal sex in so-called polite society”; Lee drew on the now widely available national discourse of sexual deviance to further her political agenda.91 Though she had shut down a significant portion of illegal gambling and brothels in Portland, she invoked the figure whose inherent danger had gripped the nation over the past few years: the sexual deviant. Towards the end of her term as mayor, Dorothy Lee publicly invoked the precarious relationship between her city and sexual deviance. Having inherited the office from racketeer Riley, Lee spent most of her term rallying against illegal gambling and, perhaps most notably, outlawed pinball machines out of fear that they would induct the city’s youth into a life of gambling and other vices.92 The view that pinball machines, which were relatively harmless, acted as a gateway to a life of vice, mirrored many Portlanders’ worries that a sexual deviant would “initiate” children into a life of sexual abnormality.93 Biggs, Lee, and many other concerned citizens decried the uncertain nature of incarceration for sexual deviants: they felt there was no guarantee that the sentence would fit the crime. One of many to address the issue, a the Ku Klux Klan, Portland did not welcome Lee’s attempts to desegregate the city or ameliorate conditions in primarily black housing projects. Lansing, 359, 362; Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee,” 27. 90 Lait and Mortimer, 127. The authors also accused Mayor Lee of “setting up a local censorship” and withholding information from the public. Lait and Mortimer, 131. 91 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 14. According to John D’Emilio, the public only gained access to medical and psychological vocabularies and models of sexuality around midcentury, after the military instituted psychological evaluations of those who wished to join the war effort. This history will be further discussed later. See D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 17. 92 Stanford, Portland Confidential, 35. 93 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child, 29. Thompson 28 letter to the editor expressed outrage that “‘known sex offenders’ enjoy complete liberty to stalk about on their vile errand of terrorizing parents and their children until the day a dreadful crime is committed and a guileless, tormented child lie dead. This is civilization?”94 In 1952, Dorothy Lee decided to focus on the problem of Portland’s sex offenders, to relieve the citizens’ belief that the police force was once again not doing enough to stop the problem of sexual deviance in their city. Beginning on February 25, 1952, Dorothy Lee convened a group of law enforcement officials, social workers, and representatives from Portland-area PTAs to determine how best to deal with Portland’s purportedly rampant sex criminals.95 One article claimed that the “recent outbreak” of child molestation in Portland had prompted Lee to take action.96 Five days earlier, a meeting of “more than 30 incensed citizens” had “launched” their own “movement aimed at strengthening Oregon’s laws dealing with sex crimes” after two boys under the age of seven had been molested in Southeast Portland.97 The “crimes of violence and perversion against children” that inundated Multnomah County had, according to the Oregonian, “aroused demand for laws to help protect society against the menace of sexual deviates.”98 Lee’s mayoral opponent Lew Wallace alleged that she had been “neglecting her duty in failing to afford protection to little children from vicious sex criminals now roaming the streets of Portland.” In order to push Lee “Shocking Situation,” The Oregonian, February 1, 1952, 16. Between 1949 and 1952, The Oregonian was filled with similar lamentations from its readers. Examples include: “Curbing Sex Offenders,” The Oregonian, June 9, 1951, 6; “Sex Crime Problem,” The Oregonian, June 1, 1951, 15; “Worst Crime,” September 1, 1952, 5M. 95 In chronological order: “City Studies Act to Curb Sex Crime,” The Oregonian, February 25, 1952, 1; “City Committee Named to Recommend Action to Curb Sex Offenders,” The Oregonian, February 26, 1952, 1; “Plans Offered in Sex Cases,” The Oregonian, February 26, 1952, 13; “Group Forms in Sex Cases,” The Oregonian, February 27, 1952, 13; “Pervert Curb on Plan List,” The Oregonian, February 29, 1952, 1. The Committee would reconvene occasionally after high-profile sex crimes, such as a child abduction on March 28 of that year. “Sex Deviate Strikes Again,” The Oregonian, March 29, 1952, 18. 96 “Pervert Curb on Plan List.” 97 “Sex Crimes Stir Group Into Action,” The Oregonian, February 20, 1952, 1. 98 Al McCready, “Control of Sex Pervert Objective in Two Bills,” The Oregonian, February 8, 1953, 32. 94 Thompson 29 into action and commandeer some of her supporters, Wallace proclaimed that “his first act as mayor would be to insist on a police roundup of known sex offenders.”99 The committee formed as a direct response to the political climate. However, the government did not aim to simply alleviate fear of deviant sex practices, but rather to regulate the city and exercise control over a perceived threat. By 1952, Lee had begun her second campaign for mayor; Portland remained just as vice ridden as in 1948, but her moral stance during this campaign focused on the new source of public outrage. Whereas in 1948, the City Club gave Lee the municipal vice scandal, in 1952, Lee had to navigate the public’s anxieties over sex crime and made this new cleanup project one of her main campaign goals. By the end of the week, Lee’s committee had constructed a five-point plan. In Lee’s opinion, “all sex offenses should be considered as felonies rather than misdemeanors” and “state law should be amended to allow indeterminate sentences, so that the courts could keep jurisdiction over offenders and not have to let them loose in as little as four months.”100 The committee’s outcome on treatment for sex offenders predicted the work that Biggs and his coauthor, Multnomah County representative Phil Roth, would present to the Oregon State Legislature the following year: indeterminate sentences and a state institution specifically for medically treating sex offenders. Lee believed that “[m]inor sex crimes should also carry “City Studies Act to Curb Sex Crime.” Many scholars have argued that one of the main reasons that Lee lost the 1952 election is her gender. Kimbark MacColl says that Lee herself believed that her “womanliness” contributed to her loss, and most certainly to the lack of support from Portland’s business community (though this can also be attributed to the fact that many prominent businesses downtown had been involved in Mayor Riley’s vice racket). Carl Abbott has noted that the press “gave more space to her hats than to her legislation.” Furthermore, many Portlanders believed she had won solely on the “women’s issue of public morality.” Arguably, she could not have won without the boon of Riley’s vice scandal. She was, after all, a woman working in a traditionally male profession, and she gained a lot of power; without clinging to certain feminizing traits, she might have been characterized as a homosexual herself, especially in a time when women factory workers were forced out of their jobs and back into their homes as the primary (moral) caretakers of the family. Lee would go on to work in President Eisenhower’s administration, but she left Portland with a tarnished reputation and as the butt of a joke. Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee;” MacColl, 649; Abbott, Portland, 158. 100 “City Committee Named to Recommend Action to Curb Sex Offenders,” The Oregonian, February 26, 1952, 1. 99 Thompson 30 indeterminate sentences... so that offenders could be observed and given all available means of rehabilitation,” demonstrating that the public increasingly depended on medical professionals. 101 Each of the steps echoed the fear that even the most minor of sexually-charged crimes first posed an affront to the moral order of the community, and second, intimated at the possibility of a deeper, more dangerous pathology. As one article reminded its readers, “from most of these minor monsters presumably are graduated the greater”; even those sexual “abnormals” who posed no direct threat to the city’s children were still seen as monstrous.102 Educating Parents and Protecting the Family Though Dorothy Lee would bring the sexual deviate to the forefront of Portland politics for a few weeks during her reelection campaign, Earl Biggs had been crusading against the horror of sex crime since the 1930s. While he had taken some time to refocus his energies on the war effort, having volunteered for service a second time, he returned to his police job with a renewed fervor for researching sex crime and making the city safe for a new generation. After publishing his two books in 1950, he began an intensive education campaign that consisted of lectures to branches of the police, local Parent-Teacher Associations, and Portland’s various civic clubs. Around the country, experts conducted similar lectures to similar audiences; parents across the United States feared for the safety of their children and organized to change sex crime laws in their municipal and state governments.103 Organizations like the PTA advertised these speakers using the same scare tactics that the media had drummed up. The Portland PTA council screened the FBI-recommended film “Danger, Stranger,” one of many educational films meant “City Studies Act to Curb Sex Crime,” The Oregonian, February 25, 1952, 1. See also: “Plans Offered in Sex Cases,” The Oregonian, February 26, 1952, 13. 102 “Local Beasts of Prey,” The Oregonian, May 21, 1947, 16. 103 Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” 163. 101 Thompson 31 to teach children and their families how to avoid figures like pedophiles and homosexuals.104 Often, Portland-area experts on sex offenders, such as Biggs’s colleague Claire Argrow of the Oregon Prison Association, gave lectures following such film screenings at PTA meetings.105 Ochoco Grade School in Prineville, Oregon hosted Biggs for a lecture in their series entitled, “Will You Spare an Evening to Save a Child?”, building on parents’ fears that they were not adequately fulfilling their duties to protect their children in this time of uncertainty and change.106 Biggs was well aware of the national atmosphere of panic around the sex criminal and hoped to quell it where he could. In How to Protect Your Child, he assured his readers, “The writer realizes that many of the cases presented in this volume are quite terrifying, that even the milder cases may produce fear--that the immediate reaction on the part of the reader may be resentment and anger--just as it is all over the nation whenever a sex murder of a child is headline in the nation’s newspapers.”107 Throughout this guide, Biggs provided a thorough taxonomy of sexualities, followed by examples of each compiled either from his own professional experience or found in his research. He also outlined sixteen basic rules for parents to follow in order to keep their children safe, some as basic as warnings to always know where “City Committee Named to Recommend Action to Curb Sex Offenders,” The Oregonian, February 26, 1952, 1, 13. Other such film titles include “Boys Beware,” “The Stranger,” and “The Strange Ones.” Many of these invoked the tropes of the sexual deviant as mentally ill, but that sickness was incurable and dangerous to America’s youth. The school board did not add the film to their mandatory curriculum, stating that “the film might make children overly fearful of adults.” “City Studies Act to Curb Sex Crime,” The Oregonian, February 25, 1952, 1. 105 “Films Slated at PTA Meet,” The Oregonian, January 11, 1948, 48. 106 Ochoco Grade School PTA Booklet, ERBP. Prineville, Oregon is located about 150 miles southeast of Portland, showing how far-flung Biggs’s speaking engagements were. The Parent-Teacher Association of the United States, founded in 1897, stemmed from women’s civic clubs and efforts to reform education. It was one of the first organizations to create a national network based on popular education. As historian Christine Woyshner notes, “PTA leaders were not innovators but rather popularizers and promoters of others’ ideas,” thus explaining why these organizations drew on speakers like Biggs to educate the local parents and teachers on issues outside of the school system itself. Christine Woyshner, The National PTA, Race, and Civic Engagement, 1897-1970 (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 2009), 7. 107 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 84-5. 104 Thompson 32 one’s child was, likewise followed by examples from the field. He acknowledged that these examples were meant to instill a sense of fear into the reader, much like those headlines he mentioned. A similar guide, published in Michigan in 1950, acknowledged that “those who are not professionally trained to think about and discuss the abnormal manifestations of sex and criminal sexual behavior in an objective way” may not wish to understand and engage with sexual deviance “since feelings of confusion and emotions of disgust are almost certain to be aroused” when reading about them.108 Though Biggs and his contemporaries engaged and found success in the rhetoric of moral panic, they realized the extent to which average Americans did not understand sexual deviance. Nevertheless, Biggs’s educational bent reinforced the danger that transients, strangers, and sexual others posed to local children rather than ameliorate any sense of anxiety. Often, the authors of such guides to sexual deviance aimed to dissuade readers from taking actions that were too rooted in panic. Biggs cautioned his readers that the list of identifying traits of “sexual abnormals” were simply “general indications of the possibility of sex abnormalcy, and when discovered can be taken as a cause for suspicion, BUT THEY ARE NOT PROOF THAT ANY ONE PERSON EXHIBITING ANY OR ALL OF THE ABOVE is a sex abnormal.” He continued that these traits “should be taken as CAUTION signs indicating that some investigation should be done,” but that “[b]randing an innocent person a sex pervert can do irreparable damage.”109 Biggs’s warnings, dire as they sound, were necessary in a time of heightened fear over the specific danger of sex abnormal. Rather than stoke the fires that fueled the newspaper headlines, Biggs hoped to create an atmosphere of educated caution. At the same time, he used narrative styles evocative of newspaper exposés in many of his “illustrative cases” 108 109 Hartwell, 1. Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 31. Emphasis his. Thompson 33 and gathered examples not only from local news and police records but also cases from around the country.110 Though he understood that the atmosphere of the time lent itself to distressed conclusions and undue accusation, Biggs’s ultimate goal was to protect the city’s vulnerable children. Both his writings and his lectures focused a significant amount of energy on reminding parents to be wary of strangers. In How to Protect Your Child, he outlined a series of rules for parents, teachers, and other authority figures that would keep their children from becoming victims of sexual crime. Several of his rules iterated the specific danger that an unfamiliar adult posed to children. He suggested, “Neither girls nor boys regardless of age for maximum safety should be allowed to...spend time in the living quarters with adults whom the parent does not know to be safe company.”111 He goes on to warn that “sex abnormals seek to entice children into their living quarters or other secluded places, where they can successfully and with little fear of detection violate a child sexually.”112 Furthermore, children should be taught to never accept offers of transportation, employment, “private instruction,” or gifts from a stranger.113 Nearly all of the sixteen rules that Biggs created pertain in one way or another to a fear of strangers, or, as historians Terence O’Donnell and Thomas Vaughan remarked, “the fear that outsiders with feverish energy and contrary values will rock the Portland boat as it floats quietly down the 110 To illustrate his points in How to Protect Your Child, Biggs drew on examples both from his twenty years of experience as a police officer as well as from other police departments around the nation. Much like national and local that published scandalous, sex-driven murders and accounts of child abduction that originated in other cities across the country, to enforce the idea of sex crime as an epidemic, Biggs incorporated stories from around the country to illustrate his point and to fully convince parents to be on high alert for sex criminals. The Oregonian more often published such sensational cases from other cities than from Portland itself. Though there were occasional instances of Portland-area headlines, the media widely characterized the panic as national in scope. 111 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 34. 112 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 36. 113 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 38, 40 Thompson 34 pastoral stream.”114 Considering the massive growth of Portland’s population during the war-numbering around 147,000 workers, many of whom stayed after the war had ended--this fear of strangers fed the moral panic. In a rapidly expanding city, neighbors were suddenly untrustworthy strangers. Figure 2: The Sunday Oregonian Magazine, March 16, 1952, 8. The image of the shadowy “sex psychopath” stalking his typically young victims from the car became one of the most pervasive tropes of the era. One illustration from the Sunday Oregonian Magazine depicted an unaccompanied young girl being hailed by a sinister-looking man in a passing automobile (fig. 2). Several times over in his books, Biggs warns parents against allowing their children to accept rides from strangers. “The acceptance of rides has lead to a tremendous number of cases of sex molestation and assault of children of both sexes...and fairly frequently to murder,” Biggs reminded his audience. He went on to note, however, that his 114 O’Donnell and Vaughan, 64. Thompson 35 “reader undoubtedly can recall many cases” of such abductions, as local newspapers reported on these cases most frequently.115 One article cited a “car accoster” who had been convicted “of attempting to entice children into his car” three times.116 Another article mentioned that police Lieutenant Ernest Vincent urged parents “to be on watch for suspicious autos.”117 Because “returning G.I.’s set about making their American Dream come true by attaining a steady job, a car, and a home in the suburbs near schools and parks,” as one historian noted, Portland became a more congested city in terms of not only population but also automobile traffic.118 The “severe” traffic, according to investigator August Vollmer in 1947, was “undoubtedly having an injurious effect upon the economic welfare of the city.”119 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Portland’s government decided to drastically alter the landscape to better accommodate the increased number of cars in the city; Mayor Lee reorganized traffic patterns in downtown Portland into a series of one-way streets and the Planning Commission prepared to introduce the arterial interstate along the Willamette River.120 Cars had increasingly come to symbolize not only secluded suburbia but also the bustle of strangers in city life and, therefore, the dangers of sexual predators. While warning his audience of the dangers of sex criminals, Biggs also invoked national anxieties over the state of Cold War society. Owing to Portland’s location on the west coast of North America, many locals feared direct attack on the city. According to Multnomah County Sheriff Terry Schrunk, “Fears of an atomic bomb attack has caused ‘far too much hysteria’ in 115 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 38. Herb Penny, “Sex Criminals Escape Punishing Hand of Law as Victims Keep Silent,” The Oregonian, April 14, 1950, 21. 117 “Sex Crimes Stir Group Into Action.” 118 Laura Campos, The Portland Planning Commission: An Historical Overview (Portland, OR: Bureau of Planning, 1979), 24. 119 Vollmer and Fording, viii. Vollmer goes on to note that traffic enforcement on the part of police--both in the Traffic Division and patrol officers--was “negligible.” Vollmer and Fording, ix. 120 Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee;” Campos, 30. 116 Thompson 36 Portland,” especially as the city was “not by any means the most important target on the Pacific coast.”121 Biggs reminded his audience, “It is likely that the cave man felt no better about the sabertooth tiger than we do about the atom bomb” or “the sex criminals who stalk the land.”122 Sex, according to Lait and Mortimer, “was the subversives’ secret weapon.”123 To many of Biggs’s contemporaries, the homosexual needed to be sought and rooted out with as much gusto and patriotic zeal as the outside threat of the Communist. By deliberately drawing together the concomitant fears of sex crime and nuclear war with the Soviet Union, Biggs called attention to some of the pervasive fears of the era. Not only could your neighbors be communist spies attempting to infiltrate the United States, but they could also be homosexuals attempting to seduce and inculcate or simply rape and murder your children.124 “Through the years and through the various stages of the progress toward our modern civilization,” he continued, “other problems presented themselves: filth, diseases, epidemics, ignorance and wars. Each problem that was faced courageously in nearly every instance (except war) has been overcome or is on its way to being solved.”125 In 1950, Americans achingly remembered the devastation of the Second World War as they approached war in Korea. For a veteran like Biggs, the threat of impending war with the Soviets colored every aspect of life and could be easily connected to the more immediate fears of violence against children and the shadowy sex offender. “Sheriff Offers Cheery Note,” The Oregonian, August 15, 1950, 5. Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 85. 123 Lait and Mortimer, 52. They earlier claim that “Communism actively promotes and supports sex deviation to sap the strength of the new generation.” Lait and Mortimer, 44. 124 Biggs himself wrote, “A homosexual may be your next door neighbor (a family man), the bank teller who handles your account, the postman who delivers your mail, your [Masonic] lodge brother, etc.; or the female babysitter you employ, your hair dresser (if you are a woman), the saleslady who serves you over the counter, even your maiden aunt.” Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 70. 125 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 85. 121 122 Thompson 37 While Biggs engaged the dangers that sexual deviants posed to the fabric of the family in his books, he also used his writing as a testament to the power of familial love. If, as Michel Foucault asserted, the family is both “the interchange of sexuality and alliance” and “the crystal in the deployment of sexuality,” then positive sexual practice would engender sexually acceptable citizens for the next generation.126 A loving, heterosexual nuclear family bolstered the nation and served as a bastion against homosexual or Soviet infiltrators. To Biggs, the family served as a microcosm of the nation; so long as the family unit was secure, so too would the nation be. Though Biggs intended to reassure his readers in this conclusion, his own anxiety about the state of the nation seeped into his discussions of love and sexual character. “It is possible that some if not all of the world’s problems can be settled by love,” he proclaimed. “In order to achieve this, love within the family will have to be developed to a greater degree than it now exists.”127 Biggs deeply felt the growing anxiety over the state of the family that characterized the postwar period. Because of changes to gender roles during the war, Biggs believed that families needed to foster normal, heterosexual love, evincing historian Elaine Tyler May’s notion of “domestic” or “sexual containment.” He wrote, “sex and its relation to love will have to be thoroughly understood in that it is sensuous.”128 According to May, “Sexual satisfaction would safeguard...from within,” and American appropriated Kinsey’s revelation that they engaged in a variety of sexual activities into a national imperative.129 Proper gender roles intertwined with “normative” sex between loving heterosexual couples would serve as the basis for a healthy and safe family unit. 126 Foucault, 108, 100. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 137. 128 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 137. Bold his. 129 May, 111; See also: Reumann, American Sexual Character. 127 Thompson 38 Portland-area families in particular felt the need to relearn the gender roles of feminine homemaker and masculine breadwinner. During the war, women were often torn between industry and family, as around 40,000 women joined wartime industry in Portland; eventually, women comprised 27% of Portland and Vancouver, Washington’s shipyard workers.130 What historian Miriam Reumann dubs “gender chaos” ensued after the war as supervisors pushed women out of the labor market to accommodate the men returning from war.131 Even Dorothy Lee, as Portland’s first female mayor, received public scorn for working in a man’s field despite her qualifications. The local newspapers often criticized her hats more than her policies, while Lait and Mortimer designated her “the lady mayor” and focused on her negative “feminine” attributes.132 When she could not hide the city’s issues and her shortcomings as a politician, as the reporters alleged, she would “talk you deaf” with trivialities instead.133 What appeared to be a crisis in masculinity, some argued, evolved from women’s mass entrance into the public sphere. “Under a matriarchy,” wrote Lait and Mortimer, “men grow soft and women masculine. The self-sufficient girl who doesn’t want to become an incubator or ‘kitchen slavie’ for a man is a push-over for a predatory Lesbian.”134 Both the feminization of men and the masculinization of women would, in the eyes of many Americans, allow the homosexual to eviscerate the proper family structure. Frequently, the task of securing the family invoked common notions of masculinity. Elaine Tyler May has noted that the postwar period ushered in the reinvigorated vocation of 130 Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities, 6. Reumann, 47; Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities; May, ch 3. 132 Abbott, Portland, 158; Lait and Mortimer, 40, 131. 133 Lait and Mortimer, 131. 134 Lait and Mortimer, 44. 131 Thompson 39 fatherhood, “a new badge of masculinity and meaning.”135 Biggs likely took up this mantle himself, being a father of five.136 Any lapses in this masculine façade welcomed attack. As Sheriff Schrunk warned, a “country that shows weakness at home...invites attack from an aggressor”; while he was specifically referring to the Soviet threat of atomic warfare, the same idea applied to protection of the home where the “aggressor” was sexually deviant.137 As with national matters, the task of protection largely fell to men. Newspapers frequently evoked a sense of paternalism in articles on sex crime. Writers commonly conjured images of “every day children and women [being] placed in a situation of danger, a situation which can even lead to death.”138 By constantly iterating that sex offenders targeted women and children, reporters implicitly put the onus on fathers to protect their wives and children. The explicit gender roles that American families espoused served as a smaller-scale regulatory tactic than governmental stances against vice as described in the preceding section, but nevertheless functioned, at least theoretically, to keep white, middle-class Americans from straying off of the path of sexual citizenship. Often, however, Americans sought guidance from professionals and experts to advise them along this path. For many Portlanders, Biggs exemplified such heroic expertise on sex offenses and, particularly, deviant sexualities. One writer lauded him as “a citizen of whom we may all be proud.”139 Biggs easily stepped into the role of expert through his research not only on medical and psychopathological studies of sexual deviance, but also the laws that defined and punished sex criminals. As such an expert, Biggs wrote extensively about the different types of “sex May, 139. She discusses fatherhood as a bulwark against excessive mothering and “sissifying” of American children, pg. 138-42. 136 Biographical information, folder 9, ERBP. 137 “Sheriff Offers Cheery Note.” 138 Penny, “Sex Criminals Escape Punishing Hand of Law as Victims Keep Silent.” 139 TV/Radio Guide, ERBP. 135 Thompson 40 abnormalcy” that he had encountered so that others who might encounter them could prepare. By and large, Biggs came to the rather progressive conclusion that many abnormal sexual behaviors need not be outlawed and that certain aspects of the Western Christian morality surrounding sex were dangerous. “Classifying normal and natural sex activity as a crime, unpardonable sin or as acts of degeneracy is a grave fault of our civilization,” he philosophized. Biggs critiqued the “‘holier than thou’ attitude of pointing the finger at [another] fellow’s sex activity, in order to direct attention away from our own possibly questionable sex conduct” that pervaded Western sexual discourse and Christian morality.140 In light of the Kinsey reports, which detailed the sexual practices of American adults, Biggs begged his audience, “Let us not have the spectacle of a man or woman being tried for a sex crime of such a nature that they may be found guilty by a jury of their ‘peers,’ when a majority of the jurors have been guilty of the same offense.”141 He found much of the condemnatory behavior of his contemporaries unnecessary and divisive, though his appeals to reason most likely fell on deaf ears. Much of Biggs's rallying against traditional Christian morality stemmed from his own position as a Freemason, which he explicitly referenced a few times in his works. Despite the title Sex, Science, and Sin, he surprisingly did not focus explicitly on the “sin” of homosexuality as much as the “sin” of wrongful condemnation. Notably unlike the analytical categories of science and law, “sex abnormalcy” and religion did not constitute its own chapter, and immediately preceded the one-page section on religion with a much longer treatise on anthropology. He offered few details on Christian perspectives on homosexuality as sin beyond his note that the Catholic Church did not “recogniz[e] or permit” sexual activity outside of marriage, implicitly including homosexual acts. He followed this summation of Catholicism with 140 141 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 133. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 141. Thompson 41 a note that Jewish clergy attempted “to accept and promote that which is beneficial to the race, all races,” especially “advances of science.”142 While around the country, religious Americans and various clergy members expressed their outrage at homosexuality-run-rampant, Biggs himself did not engage in those arguments. Within the realm of discourse on the apparent sexual degeneracy of the city and nation, Portland's religious institutions appear to have been surprisingly silent. The major newspapers in the area made no discernible mention of church involvement in the efforts to clean up the city. However, given the city's strong Protestant roots, especially in the elite population that had been involved in the City Club, it would be impertinent to claim that there was no religious presence in the city's moral panic. For many Portlanders, the homosexual was an aberration in explicitly scientific, medical, or sociopolitical terms. Even public analogies between Communists and queer people made little to no mention of godlessness. By capitulating the threat in terms of mass morality and family security, the apparent absence of Church involvement is especially stark. However, at least in Biggs's case, a particular interest in the homosexual threat as a scientific phenomenon overshadowed more traditional notions of religious morality. Biggs latched onto the importance of familial love and understanding in order to recalibrate public knowledge of “normal” sex, but took issue with its associations with moral panic as a form of regulating the public. Targeting Homosexuality The public imagination almost always depicted the sex “psychopath” with homosexual connotations; he was almost always queer, whether or not reporters divulged his gender or that of his victims. Historian John D’Emilio notes that the emerging “medical models” of 142 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 122-3. Thompson 42 homosexuality from psychology and psychiatry “bore complex relation to the older perspectives of religion and the law” that allowed these models to “reinforce the cultural matrix that condemned or punished” same-sex desire. “Whether seen as sin, crime, or sickness,” he continues, “homosexuality stigmatized an individual.”143 Samuel Hartwell, one of Biggs’s contemporaries in Michigan, noted that policymakers often “consider the crime of homosexuality as a medical, moral, or religious problem,” unless young children are involved.144 Despite the fact that Biggs condemned the “assininity [sic] of certain so-called moral teachings,” he clung to the conflated images of the homosexual and the sex offender. Furthermore, Biggs consistently reiterated that a large number of homosexuals were also pedophiles.145 He cautioned his audience that “by far the greater majority of [sex abnormals] are rarely satisfied by confining their sexual activity to adults like themselves, but are constantly seeking children or adolescents to initiate into their abnormal practices.”146 To “regard the sex abnormals as harmless ‘queers, pansies, queens, Sapphists or Lesbians’ or as laboratory cases to be studied and admired, that is just what they want us to do, because we thereby are inclined either to overlook or else condone their sexual interest in and seduction of our youngsters.”147 In both his books, Biggs creates a meticulous taxonomy of sexual perversion; nevertheless, he at times forewent the distinctions D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 17-8. Hartwell, 5-6. 145 In his opinion, upwards of 35% of homosexuals were also pedophiles and that many homosexuals “seduced” youth. He also firmly believed that homosexuality was a form of sexual infantilism, most likely guided by the Freudian concept of the Oedipal complex and development of sexuality. Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 18, 19; Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 130, 135. 146 Furthermore, he claimed that sexual others were “never quite happy unless they are performing with minors. Most persons will agree that even a very few of this type would be too many, yet this is true of most of them.” That he discusses pedophilic happiness as a motivating factor for these “abnormals” creates a haunting comparison to his support of an active heterosexual sex life where he claims that “sex can rarely be completely severed from life’s happiness.” Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 128, 134. 147 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 130. Biggs mentions multiple times that women were rarely arrested for their sexual deviance, and the public did not seem to worry about sexually perverse women nearly as much as men. This perhaps stems from the fact that sexual deviant laws almost always referred explicitly to men. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 110. 143 144 Thompson 43 between his classifications of “abnormalcy.” Throughout his writing, he completely exemplifies the panicked notion that even relatively harmless homosexuals conspired to wreak havoc on the city’s youths. In these moments, he demonstrates just how connected the scientific classification of sexuality and the nation’s anxiety were during the postwar years. Involvement in the war solidified Portland as a hub of queer existence, due in part to the psychiatric evaluations that intended to screen for “perversions” such as homosexual behavior. Many gay and lesbian service-people did not realize their sexual proclivities until they had joined the cause. In the military and the war industries, workers were often separated by gender; such sequestering fostered homosocial tendencies, however discreet, on military bases. In addition, wartime mobilization was the first time many of gay and lesbian people left their homes and concentrated so much in cities. Many such urban centers, most notably New York City and San Francisco, and even Portland, already had a thriving—if not booming—nightlife that catered specifically to queer people. Bérubé described this preexisting “gay ambiance” as the instruments of sailors' and soldiers' induction into local queer culture.148 The swelling numbers of clientele also led to new businesses cropping up, viewing this growing population as a lucrative market, if a business owner was willing to withstand military and police scrutiny. After the war ended, many of these queer wartime workers and new locals stayed within their gay and lesbian communities, keeping these businesses open as prime targets in the oncoming panic. Biggs mirrored not only medical experts at the time in his views on homosexuality, but also politicians such as Dorothy Lee. Lee’s first public clash with Portland’s burgeoning gay community was in 1950. Historian Paul Pitzer claims that though her original intent was to “limit even legal games of chance by refusing liquor license renewals to establishments that would not first pledge to prohibit gambling of any kind,” Lee bristled at the thought of female 148 Bérubé, “Marching to a Different Drummer,” 387. Thompson 44 impersonators working at the local club the Music Hall.149 The mayor claimed that such acts catered to “sexually deviant” crowds, thereby compromising the moral fiber of the city.150 However, as Biggs noted, “few cities of any size are without one or more night clubs featuring ‘female impersonators.’ Most, if not all,” he added, “female impersonators are sex abnormals.”151 Lee refused to renew the Music Hall’s liquor license until the “men who acted like unladylike ladies” left.152 “San Francisco has been pretty well closed to the type of people who have been frequenting the place and we don’t want them here either,” Lee proclaimed; the drag queens had “to get out of Portland along with the undesirable people they attract.”153 Like many other cities that embraced both wartime industry and various sectors of the armed forces, Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee,” 27. The Music Hall, located at 413 SW Taylor and opened in 1937, was one of several establishments around Portland that hosted female impersonators. The nearby Rathskeller, which had achieved a reputation as a gay bar during World War II, was the only other notably queer gathering spot to be shut down in 1951. Paula Martinac, The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 309; Boag, “‘Does Portland Need A Homophile Society?’” 12. 150 The relationship between female impersonation and male homosexuality has been well-documented. Esther Newton’s groundbreaking book Mother Camp showed that many gay men used drag, or “dressing as a girl,” to express their feminine side. Thomasine Marion Bartlett expands upon this claim in her dissertation “Vintage Drag,” where she argues that drag queens in Cold War New Orleans used their performance to subvert gender norms and find acceptable ways to live as queer men. Thomas Arthur Bolze, however, argues that it was not until the midtwentieth century that female impersonation became indelibly linked to queer identity. Regardless of when exactly drag received its queer connotation, by 1950, Dorothy McCullough Lee firmly believed that female impersonation was only of interest to homosexuals and that those queer patrons of the Music Hall were not native Portlanders, but had been kicked out of other cities. Portland did not develop as intricate a drag culture as cities like Seattle or San Francisco until the late 1960s. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Thomasine Marion Bartlett, “Vintage Drag: Female Impersonators Performing Resistance in Cold War New Orleans” (PhD. diss., Tulane University, 2004); Thomas Arthur Bolze, “Female Impersonation in the United States, 1900-1970” (PhD. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1994); Boag, “‘Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?’,” 15-16; Lansing, 357; Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee,” 27. 151 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. He later notes that many transvestites, regardless of sexual preference, become professional drag queens. He goes on to say that when the person is also “androgynous, with the female secondary characteristics developed,” that is, born with an intersex condition, “they are usually perfect as female impersonators.” Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 75. Early in the twentieth century, intersex people became drag performers, often in circuses. For a firsthand account of this, originally published in 1922, see Earl Lind (Ralph Werther-Jennie June), The Female-Impersonators, (New York: Arno Press, 1922, reprint 1975). 152 “Portland of Years Past,” The Oregonian, March 16, 2000. 153 The Oregon Journal ran the story with a front-page image of five of the club’s drag queens. The Oregon Journal, March 17, 1950, 1; “Portland of Years Past,” The Oregonian, March 16, 2000. Long considered a queer haven, San Francisco underwent a turbulent period for its gender and sexual minorities during the Cold War. For a discussion of the queer community in San Francisco at the time, see Nan Alamilla Boyd’s Wide Open Town. 149 Thompson 45 Portland had housed a large number of transient workers in the war years, creating not only an anxiety over the presence of strangers but also Portland’s first queer communities. Furthermore, as gay men and women workers developed small enclaves in these cities, they formed their own nightclubs and bars.154 Lee refused to accept homosexuality in her city, preferring instead to blame other, more immoral cities for overflowing into Portland. What Lee perceived as a homosexual migration from other West Coast cities reflected Portland’s overall atmosphere of isolation and residents’ wariness of outsiders. Authors of a Portland guidebook in the 1970s proposed, “Exclusive and unwelcoming as was so often its wont, the city was alarmed that Eden might be permanently trespassed.”155 Lait and Mortimer painted this isolated quality in a more negative light, calling Portland “the Maine of the Pacific Coast, a backwash, happy in its own isolation,” where “the natives are shy, not given to publicity” and the Chamber of Commerce “gloats” when the population drops. The city was certainly “not inclined to emulate California or Washington,” especially where sexual subaltern communities were concerned.156 Boag, “‘Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?’,” 9-11. Portland’s own gay district can trace its roots to several such venues that were established during the war or right after. Boag, “‘Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?’,” 12-14; Martinac, 309. 155 O’Donnell and Vaughan, 56. As authors writing about the past for the Oregon Historical Society walking tour of Portland, O’Donnell and Vaughan’s colorful characterization stems from historian Dorothy Johansen’s observation that Portlanders preferred to “keep things as they are.” Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles M. Gates, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 564. 156 Lait and Mortimer, 128. 154 Thompson 46 Figure 3: Music Hall advertisements, The Oregonian, May 2, 1949, 19 and July 4, 1949, 11. Female impersonators, however, were not entirely new to Portland and many locals deemed cross-gender impersonation to be appropriate nightlife fare. Whether or not the Music Hall was a gay enclave, some Portlanders viewed the shows as simple entertainment. Beginning in the spring of 1949, The Oregonian ran almost daily advertisements for the Music Hall’s nightly “Glamorous Male and Female Impersonators, Direct from San Francisco” (fig. 3). Moreover, these advertisements were often nestled among suggestions for dining, dancing, and other amusements on a night out on the town. After Lee shut the Music Hall down, advertisements for drag shows did not reappear until 1954.157 The local newspapers, never fully supportive of Lee, approached her attack on the Music Hall with humor more than validation of her cause. A front page-photo in the Oregon Journal showed several of the club’s nowunemployed female impersonators with the caption, “Not in Portland, Boys... Swishy stuff shan’t sully city, says mayor” (fig. 4).158 Though the Oregonian never directly commented on the 157 The Tropics, a club located on SW 9th and Yamhill, ran their first advertisement for a revue of female impersonators, “One of America’s Most Unusual Acts!”, in The Oregonian on January 28, 1954. 158 Oregon Journal, May 17, 1950, 1. “Swish” was a term that largely meant an effeminate gay man, referencing an exaggerated “hip motion made while walking” that many attributed to gay men. The terms dates to the early 1940s. Wentworth and Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, s.v. “Swish.” Thompson 47 incident, a long-running column that infused local gossip and humor admonished, “Wife of exfemale impersonator has bitter beef. Says how come city of Portland chases her husband out of his job so he can’t support her and her two kids.”159 Even this tongue-in-cheek backlash suggests the general dislike of outsiders making the city theirs that characterized the more violent outbursts against the deviant homosexual and sex maniacs. Aside from being apparent (and sometimes actual) outsiders, female impersonators posed one of homosexuality’s most troubling aspects in the eyes of most Americans: a deliberate mutation of gender roles. The thought that “Boys Will Be Girls, Girls Will Be Boys,” in the words of the Music Hall’s advertisements, became a source of serious worry in a period when traditional gender roles and expressions seemed to be under attack in the home and on the streets.160 On the one hand, these female impersonators were identifiably “swish,” inverting acceptable gender expressions. It is this connection between the overtly effeminate gay man and professional female impersonators that rankled Lee. On the other hand, they were clearly in the minority, a fact that caused Portlanders further distress. 159 160 William Moyes, “Behind the Mike,” The Oregonian, June 19, 1950, 16. Music Hall advertisement. Thompson 48 Figure 4: The Oregon Journal, May 17, 1950, 1. The notion that gender expression and sexual desire are not intertwined caused a significant amount of anxiety for many Americans. In an age of espionage where the media and government chased down internal Communist threats--regardless of an accused Red’s actual political affiliation--the notion that a “pervert” could be hiding among Americans with “normal” Thompson 49 sexual tendencies, waiting to strike, to induct or damage the family rang especially clear in American consciousness, especially in a West Coast city. Biggs claimed that while most homosexuals were difficult to identify on sight, “about ten percent can be readily identified... They are the male homosexuals who talk, walk, and act like women simulating feminine mannerisms, etc., in other words advertising their abnormalcy.”161 Sensationalist journalists Lait and Mortimer corroborated Biggs’s characterization of gay Portlanders: “You’d hardly expect it in this supposed-to-be land of hairy chests, but Portland has a considerably homosexual population. Many aren’t mincing effeminates, either, as you soon realize when you see rugged loggers who prefer boys.”162 The idea that a gay man could be overtly masculine, and possibly even more so than a straight man, emphasized the fear of espionage. In the same vein, “The Sapphic lover, unless she goes to the extremes of wearing mannish habiliments and cutting her hair short, is seldom obvious.”163 Those who could not be so “readily identified” subverted the average American’s understanding of the homosexual menace while echoing the notion that anyone could be a secret communist. Nevertheless, the blatant disregard for proper gender norms made many Portlanders uncomfortable. Night clubs that catered to gay and lesbian patrons were not the only ones labeled deviant and subjected to negative police interaction. Between 1940 and 1950, Portland’s African American population expanded from just under 2,000 in 1940 to over 9,500 permanent residents. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 69-70; Biggs, How to Protect Your Child, 30. Biggs’s discussion of effeminacy among gay men sharply contrasts to Donald Webster Cory’s in The Homosexual in America, published in 1951. Cory, a self-identified gay man, used his book to advocate for Americans to recognize homosexual as a minority group akin to African Americans. In his discussion of effeminacy among gay men, he likewise noted that those who are “more ‘swish’ than any girl would ever be” are rare but their presence had become a pervasive stereotype used to condemn queer desire. Whereas the idea that one “displays no sign of homosexuality even to the most careful observer,” as Cory said, indicates the destructive stereotype to Cory, the same observation makes homosexuality seem deceptive to Biggs. Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (New York: Greenburg Publishers, 1951), 63-4. 162 Lait and Mortimer, 131. 163 Lait and Mortimer, 42. 161 Thompson 50 Black Portlanders, as a result of discriminatory housing regulations, were relegated to a relatively small area in North and Northeast Portland.164 As a way of managing the behavior of such “undesirables,” mirrored in the government’s relationship to homosexuality, several clubs that catered to an African American clientele were forcibly closed throughout the 1940s and 1950s.165 Historian Robert Dietsche claims, “Racially mixed party people couldn’t care less that what they were doing was on the cutting edge of integration in the city that had been called the most segregated north of the Mason-Dixon line,” something that would herald cries of moral decay from the city’s keepers.166 Although the clubs that showed female impersonators did not draw an exclusively queer crowd, they offered the most obvious doorway to Portland’s queer enclave. Unlike African Americans, sexual and gender minorities were disparate and crossed geographic, racial, and economic lines. Nevertheless, for Portland’s gay and lesbian denizens, homosocial interactions usually took place within a relatively small area immediately south of West Burnside Street that was no stranger to sexual scandal. In 1912, “accounts of a homosexual underworld” rocked Portland, as historian Peter Boag describes. The local Young Men’s Christian Association, built three years prior on the corner of SW 6th and Taylor Avenues, erupted in scandal when nearly forty men who had stayed there were arrested for lewd activity.167 The first young man arrested, who incited the police investigation, revealed to Portlanders for the first time that Portland was one part of a homosexual underground that ran up and down the West Coast. Though the revelation that gay men congregated in Portland shocked the community, few aside from the police continued to keep an eye on the city’s lavender district. 164 McLagan, 33, 36. Robert Dietsche, Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957 (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2005), 27. 166 Dietsche, 5. 167 Boag, Same-Sex Affairs; Boag, “Sex and Politics in Progressive-Era Portland and Eugene.” 165 Thompson 51 This area became such a hub of queer life by the 1960s that Walter “Darcelle” Cole, one of Portland’s most famous drag queens and owner of the country’s longest-running drag show, recalled, “[A]ll my gay friends told me they would never come over from the SW side of Burnside no matter what I had going on over on the NW side.”168 The gay scene of southwest Portland dated back to the early twentieth century with the Harbor Club on 1st and Yamhill, which gained such notoriety by World War II that the U.S. Navy officially blacklisted it—the only instance of such action in Oregon.169 Navy blacklists and government intervention marked only some of the ways in which gay and lesbian Portlanders were under surveillance. These various bars and clubs offered a homosocial atmosphere and allowed gays and lesbians to meet and interact with one another. At the same time, because police were fully aware of them, these “hang-outs” occupied an uncertain space between legality and criminality, and club owners or frequent patrons could not tell which way the police would lean on a given night. In many cases, writers sought to create distress by claiming that gay men and women infiltrated and inhabited spaces that centered around youth. Lait and Mortimer claimed that one could find a “fairy club in Lincoln High School,” where gay men congregated to find teenage lovers.170 However, because the sexual predator of the public imagination was specifically male, fewer reports focused on the dangerous lesbian. Perhaps because Kinsey’s report on female sexuality would not be released for three more years, Biggs did not comment on the statistics of 168 Walter Cole and Sharon Knorr, Just Call Me Darcelle: A Memoir (LeVergne, TN: CreateSpace, 2010), 84. By the 1970s, the gay scene in Portland had shifted to north of Burnside, following Darcelle’s and the nearby Embers-both gay bars and drag clubs founded in the mid- to late-sixties. By 1980, this section of Portland was well-known as the city’s gay hub, which chronicler of queer American life Edmund White claimed was known as “Vaseline Heights.” This area immediately north of West Burnside, however, mostly housed gay clubs and bars; unlike San Francisco, which had developed a heavily concentrated gay enclave, Portland’s sexual and gender minorities mostly did not live the neighborhood, leading to what White called “an unusual degree of integration with the straight community.” Edmund White, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980), 79. 169 Boag, “Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?”, 13; Marinac, 309; Chuck Palahniuk, Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003), 37. 170 Lait and Mortimer, 131. Thompson 52 “abnormalcy” among women and only mentioned their preying on youth in passing. Because women, even those eschewing their proper gender roles, experienced a naturally “greater secretiveness” than men, only “careful observers” could “locate and identify female sex abnormals who frequent restaurants and fountains where high school girls congregate, both seeking and making contacts.”171 However, a pair of officers investigating the Music Hall for Lee noted that it served as a starting point in the evening activities of Portland lesbians, after which they would congregate at the Buick Cafe at SW 12th and Washington Avenues.172 The report claimed that “these women were recently ousted from San Francisco for their actions and are, apparently, confirmed lesbians,” once again drawing a parallel between sexuality and transience.173 It seemed impossible to the city’s legal and moral guardians that true Portlanders could be homosexuals, let alone engage in non-normative sexualities in the open. When officers made arrests, they frequently did so for vagrancy as well as sodomy. Though by 1950 Earl Biggs no longer worked undercover on vice, his prewar arrest reports overwhelmingly pertain to homosexual activity. Early on in his career, Biggs “distinguished himself especially by clever detective work in ridding [the] city of homosexuals,” as his confidant and collaborator Cecil Ross extolled.174 One of his reports, dated November 2, 1930, notes that he arrested one man at SW 5th and Salmon for sodomy, as well as “charging Vagrancy, [and] secured a signed statement from him that he is and has been a Sexual Pervert.”175 That such arrests took place in the same general area as the homophile district of the 171 Biggs, 35. Boag, “Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?”, 13; Martinac, 309. 173 Auditor, Council Documents, Item no. 117, March 16, 1950, Stanley Parr Archives and Records Center, Portland, Oregon. Quoted in Boag, “Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?”, 13. 174 Ross, recommendation letter, ERBP. 175 Notebook, Item B1-A, Folder 6, ERBP. 172 Thompson 53 1950s suggests that this area had a long history of illicit homosexual encounters and cruising spots. For queer communities around the United States, and especially among gay men, cruising served as one of several means to covertly engage in sexual activity.176 The term and act developed along with the automobile, and it constituted a “deliberate, active, and usually mobile search for sexual partner(s)” in a park, public restroom (often called “tearoom”), bath house, or gay bar.177 Gay author and contemporary of Biggs, Donald Webster Cory, attested that rather than necessarily engaging in public sex, though many gay men did, cruising more often involved an invitation to go elsewhere in order to have sex.178 The car and the advent of highways enabled gay men to get in and out of a known cruising spot quickly.179 In his report on conditions in the police department, August Vollmer noted that traffic in downtown Portland could be alleviated with “rigid enforcement of time limit parking regulations,” which would in turn “tend to reduce ‘cruising.’”180 Because the city seemed to be overflowing with automobiles, frequenters of tearooms embraced the ease of the automobile as a means of indulging in relatively anonymous sexual activity. However, such activities were rarely anonymous enough, as police kept them under surveillance. 176 Though police were often aware of places where gay men met, noted Biggs, lesbian hang-outs were more difficult to find. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. 177 John A. Lee, “Cruising,” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 1, edited by Wayne R. Dynes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 284. “Tearoom” (sometimes stylized “tea room”) colloquially referred to a public toilet that was usually marked to alert any interested party that it was a locale for gay sex. Often, such places became subject to police surveillance, either because of the graffiti or complaints from straight patrons, and led to police entrapment and arrests. Ward Houser, “Toilet Sex,” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 2, edited by Wayne R. Dynes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 1308-9. See also: Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (New York: Aldine Publishing Co., 1975). 178 Cory, 56. 179 Laud Humphreys, “New Styles in Homosexual Manliness,” The Homosexual Dialectic, edited by Joseph A. McCaffrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 65-6; Humphreys, Tearoom Trade. 180 Vollmer and, 24. Although Vollmer does not explicitly refer to cruising as homosexual activity, there was no functional equivalent for public heterosexual flirtation or sex. Cory largely attributes this to the fact that queer people were so condemned that they had few other options in order to fulfill their sexual desires. Cory, 34-5, 56. Thompson 54 One such tearoom in Portland’s Lownsdale Square at SW 4th and Salmon, opposite the county court house, became a hub of police entrapment in the 1950s.181 Frequently, officers like Biggs went undercover to target gay men. As Donald Webster Cory noted, entrapment began with “two people talking on the street and one inviting the other to accompany him to his home or to a hotel [or] at a bar or in a park, or even in some semi-public place, such as a washroom. Then a badge is shown, and one of the persons is placed under arrest.”182 The fear of entrapment in an act that “transgress[es] no law necessary for the protection of society” pervaded gay culture, according to Cory.183 Police entrapment signified one form of sexual regulation. Openly queer sexual encounters infringed upon the white, heterosexual moral sensibility. As historian Nayan Shah writes, “the police and laws enforced the middle-class demand for comfort in public space and minimized the unexpected encounter for confrontation.”184 On the one hand, police deepened the anxieties of homosexuals in order to alleviate those of heterosexuals by using gay men to inflate arrest records. On the other hand, police activity regulated Portlanders’ believed right to inhabit space without having “perverts” impinge on their public spaces. Because of the transient nature of these tearoom encounters, Portland police found them all the more immoral. Biggs claimed that these illicit meetings evidenced the “flourishing institution” of gay male prostitutes in Portland, as such men “will be found soliciting trade in the Martinac, 309. The Oregonian reported one man’s arrest for “disorderly conduct involving morals.” The man arrested lived in SE Portland and had commuted across the Willamette to go to a known tearoom. Because the newspapers often posted news of convictions on charges of disorderly conduct involving morals, it is difficult to discern exactly what law the subject broke, which Donald Webster Cory claimed was often deliberate. However, with knowledge of historic tearooms and bars, certain arrest locations stick out as meeting places for queer Portlanders. For example, a similar article, which refers to the arresting officers’ use of entrapment, cites the arrest location as 516 SW 6th Ave, the address of the Circle Theatre, a gathering place for gay men and lesbians. Lait and Mortimer mention both by name. “Morals Count Faced,” The Oregonian, April 26, 1953, 21; Cory, 56; “Two Sentenced to Long Terms,” The Oregonian, September 23, 1955, 30; Lait and Mortimer, 131. 182 Cory, 56. 183 Cory, 56. 184 Nayan Shah, 260. 181 Thompson 55 streets, in public toilets, cheap theatres of the poorer sections, and... swank night clubs.”185 As they were already breaking one law, gay men engaging in public sex or solicitation must have been breaking another in Biggs’s view. This devaluation of sexual expression, as Cory claimed, further “impose[d] the onus of criminality upon those who, despite their moral uprightness, [found] themselves forced into conflict with the law.”186 By making queer encounters out to be ever more criminal and immoral, Biggs contributed to the violently negative public image of sexual and gender minorities. Police surveillance of queer communities became one of the most successful sources of information of sexual deviance during the period of moral panic. In Sex, Science and Sin, Biggs stated, “In practically every city in the United States today, the police know of one or more ‘hang-outs’ or meeting places for sex abnormals.”187 Furthermore, the Portland police frequently used their knowledge of these locations to inflate the numbers of arrested sex offenders. Charging for sodomy and public lewdness would have classified any covert lesbian or gay man a sex offender in the eyes of the law and therefore their arrests recorded that police were attacking the sexual “monster.”188 The public demanded police action, and when violent criminals could not be found, officers often turned to the most easily found of perverts: local gays and lesbians. The relationship between the police, and the local gay community then represented one of surveillance and specifically delineated spaces. 185 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 119-20. Cory, 53. Biggs was aware of Cory’s book and discussed it via correspondence with Alfred Kinsey. Cory, however, published his work a year later than Biggs, and so it did not influence his writing. Kinsey warned the sergeant that while The Homosexual in America “has a great deal of correct information... it is based so completely on one man’s experience that he makes some serious mistakes in attempting to give an overall picture.” Alfred Kinsey, letter to Earl Biggs, January 23, 1952, Folder 3, ERBP. 187 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. 188 Jenkins, 51-54. 186 Thompson 56 Curing the Queer Disease Surveillance meant that the police--and through them, the public--could keep tabs on all known sex offenders. The Bureau collected as much information on sex crime arrests as possible, storing mug shots and arrest records in a “mug book” that the public could peruse at will, as two police officers demonstrated in The Oregonian (fig. 5).189 “Police have large files on known sex perverts and by glancing through these books many victims are able to spot the correct man,” The Oregonian told worried parents. “But this involves a visit to the police headquarters, a thing which many persons are reluctant to do.”190 As of 1949, the book contained over 700 “photographs and descriptions” of arrested sex offenders.191 In the flurry of emotion caused by the moral panic, Portlanders frequently expressed confusion over why “known sex offenders” were even on the streets at all.192 Those merely arrested for sexual crime in the city could be easily tracked and therefore, easily hunted down. The publicly-accessible book of faces, addresses, and other information became an instrument of the lavender scare and directed witch hunts, much as was happening with alleged Communists in the American government. However, as Biggs had noted, “sex crime” ranged from rape to indecent exposure and, of course, sodomy regardless of consent.193 Multnomah County representative Dorothy Wallace worried that some such “lesser acts often bring crimes of violence if the offenders are not treated.”194 Public outcry and a fear of an exaggerated--if not imagined--sexual enemy led Portland and the State of Oregon to reevaluate its legal relationship to sex crime. Ann Sullivan, “Police Say Treatment Needed for ‘Psychos,’” The Oregonian, November 20, 1949, 21. Penny, “Sex Criminals Escape Punishing Hand of Law as Victims Keep Silent.” 191 Sullivan, “Police Say Treatment Needed for ‘Psychos.’” 192 “Shocking Situation.” 193 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal, 13. 194 Baker, “Sex Offender Problem Studied.” 189 190 Thompson 57 Figure 5: The Oregonian, November 20, 1949, 21. Due to the proliferation of medical literature that flowed from World War II, many believed that psychological maladies, even ones that caused violent behavior, could be treated and in some cases, cured. The scientific understanding that same-sex desire was a medical affliction complicated the local and national portrayals of gay men in particular as “beasts” with pedophilic designs. By 1950, Biggs advocated for rehabilitation for all sexual deviants, especially homosexuals, because at the time, the medical and psychopathological literature overwhelming advocated for psychiatric treatment over imprisonment.195 However, by and large, politicians and the public saw these sex abnormals as criminals, as a threat to their children and the wellbeing of their future. The overwhelming majority of the medical community, with the exception of Alfred Kinsey and some of his followers, claimed that homosexuality evidenced a deep-rooted disorder. As both criminally queer and mentally unsound, gays and lesbians received the most public vitriol as undesirables. 195 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 126-9. Thompson 58 Biggs also clung to the pervasive idea that same-sex desire was a mental disease.196 “The presence of homosexuality,” he claimed in defiance of Kinsey’s reports, “is a definite indication of psychopathic personality to some degree and is therefore neither quite natural or normal.”197 When viewed with the admonitions of Lait and Mortimer, who stated that “[a]side from criminality and immorality, such behavior is so contrary to normal standards that persons who engage in it are regarded as outcasts by society generally,” Biggs appears to hold the same vitriolic view of non-normative sexuality as many other Americans.198 As a similar guide to sex crime noted, homosexuality often became “not only a sexual crime but a serious menace to the safety and welfare of society.”199 To those like Biggs, homosexuality was a social ill that exceeded mere criminality. Fear of a sexual menace, characterized as a violent homosexual that preyed on Portland’s youth, led to public outcry over the measures taken against sexual perversion. As Biggs observed, “Now practically every time that a vicious sex offense is committed, especially a murder, the hue and cry is ‘Castrate the so-and-so.’”200 Though, in this context, Biggs colored a cry for castration as a somewhat hysterical response, he did not argue that it was an irrational conclusion for the public to reach. Instead, he argued that only the “commonly held belief” that castration or sterilization could “cure sex abnormalcy” was wrong. Sterilization, he said, would only “PREVENT REPRODUCTION and that is all it will do.”201 He also believed, “While castration has decreased the sex activity of some sex abnormals, it has in other cases increased 196 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 141-2. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 135. 198 Lait and Mortimer, 45. 199 Hartwell, 5. Jenkins notes (and Biggs essentially confirms) that as hysteria over sexual predation swept the country, police officers often arrested minor offenders, such as gay men, because their cruising spots were generally well-known. Jenkins, Moral Panic, 51-52; Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 35. 200 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 101. 201 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 102. 197 Thompson 59 the activity.”202 Biggs frequently added similar cautionary remarks seeming to aim to alleviate a sense of hysteria, and his objections here to such public outcry stemmed from a desire to educate the public on modern medicine. As previously mentioned, he truly believed in the power of modern science to save the world. Forced sterilization represented one such implement of modernity, as a measure that the State of Oregon used to deal with the sexual menace during this time. Between 1917 and 1983, when the state officially shut down its Board of Eugenics, it had over 2,600 Oregonians sterilized, not all of whom were homosexual. However, when dealing with gay patients and prisoners, the government preferred full castration to vasectomies.203 Forced sterilizations were common practice in Oregon as early as 1912, and the state used it as eugenic science, a measure of therapy, or a form of discipline against those it deemed sexually deviant, especially criminals.204 As one 1947 Oregonian reader put it, “the remedy and the only one that will ever be 202 Biggs, How to Protect Your Child for the Sex Criminal, 26-7. “Eugenics Victims to Get Apology,” The Eugene Register-Guard, November 16, 2002, 10. Whereas a vasectomy consists of severing the vas deferens, an integral part of the male reproductive system, and thereby rendering the patient infertile, castration included the added measure of emasculating the patient. In terms of sexual criminals, castration seemingly ensured that they would not be able to violate anymore victims. Though compulsory sterilization continued until the 1980s, its early recipients were usually homosexual men or “promiscuous” women. In 2002, Oregon governor John Kitzhaber released an official apology to those who had been victims of forced sterilization at the hands of the state. Mark A. Largent, “The Greatest Curse of the Race: Eugenic Sterilization in Oregon, 1909-1983,” Oregon Historical Society 103:2 (Summer 2002), 205. 204 Jenette Eccleston, “Reforming the Sexual Menace: Early 1900s Eugenic Sterilization in Oregon,” (undergraduate thesis, University of Oregon, 2008), 10-2. Officially, Oregon law claimed that that sterilization measures were not punitive in nature, but were only used to prevent the transmission of criminal tendencies to future generations. Sterilization, and the pseudoscience of eugenics, became a popular measure to many white Americans in the early 20th century, especially American feminists and proponents of birth control. Stemming from Darwin’s theory of evolution, eugenics could be seen as a way of “directing” evolution by discouraging and “eliminating unfit citizens or undesirable traits,” according to historian Mark Largent. Oregon was home to one of the pioneers of statesponsored sterilization and a nationally-recognized eugenics-enthusiast, Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, who helped write the state’s sterilization law. She also happened to be Oregon’s first female doctor. Through sterilization, proactive doctors could prevent “inborn” traits such as criminality or “feeble-mindedness” (a term that meant many things from insanity to sexual deviance) from passing to future generations. Eccleston, 14; Largent, “The Greatest Curse of the Race,” 189. See also: Bethenia Owens-Adair, Human Sterilization: It’s [sic] Social and Legislative Aspects ([Portland,] OR: [Metropolitan Press,] 1922), http://www.heinonline.org/HOL/Index?index=beal/aduy&collection=beal (accessed February 1, 2013). 203 Thompson 60 effective is emasculation” as it would “lessen the propagation of potential criminals by inhuman characters who should never have been born into the world.”205 When the sex offender subverted proper gender norms, the state could exact a sort of vengeance through castration. Many believed that sterilization would keep undesirables from reproducing and passing on criminal traits, so would help keep Oregon’s streets safe and middle-class families comforted. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Oregonians began to question the amount of money going to the state prisons. In order to reduce costs, lawmakers first removed prisoners’ right to consent to the surgery and then agreed to release convicted sex criminals on the condition that they voluntarily opt for sterilization.206 It would seem that the practice by and large fell out of public favor after World War II, when Americans learned of the Nazi practice of “sterilization and other fiendish methods of controlling birth in the so-called inferior races,” which one Oregonian claimed evinced “the everlasting shame and sorrow of all mankind.”207 However, many vocal members of the local community continued to advocate for continued sterilization of “sexual beasts,” as one called it “a remedy that would put a quietus on this dastardly habit” of deviant sex. This concerned citizen believed that lawmakers needed to “put the ‘fear of God’ in the hearts and minds of other beasts of like character.”208 Perhaps the ties to Nazi Germany convinced Biggs to discredit sterilization as a method of treating sex “abnormalcy,” but he continued to work within the frame of a generally-accepted sterilization law while authoring a reform bill. The medical community in general had begun to actively condemn sterilization, in Oregon and elsewhere; in keeping with his interest in medical research, Biggs therefore voiced 205 H.W. Botkin, letter to the editor, The Oregonian, May 24, 1947, 8. Largent, “The Greatest Curse of the Race,” 201-2. 207 Sam Kramer, “Tolerance Essential,” The Oregonian, September 9, 1945, 6. 208 Botkin, letter to the editor. 206 Thompson 61 his disapproval of sterilization on medical grounds. He did not, however attempt to address it when advocating for sex crime law reform. While Biggs firmly believed that contemporary “laws [were] more than adequate... in view of human nature, and what is natural and normal, in relation to sex in all of its manifestation, the laws need changing, in keeping with modern knowledge and nature.”209 The increasing prominence of medical and psychological literature allowed more and more Americans to trust in the opinions of professionals and experts, which largely drove Biggs’s desire for reform. Medicalization and scientific knowledge signified modernity and gave hope to anxious citizens, especially in the face of a Cold War enemy battling the United States in technological prowess.210 The wide availability of medical knowledge after World War II, as exemplified by Alfred Kinsey’s reports, the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis, and treatises like Biggs’s that were intended for the layperson to understand, exemplified a growth of American knowledge that such archaic laws did not reflect. With the democratization of medical knowledge on sexuality, more and more of Portland’s citizens wished for sex offenders to be taken off the streets and put away so that they could neither harm the city’s children nor recruit them into a life of sexual deviance.211 Popular understandings of sexual pathology suggested that sexual deviants could inculcate their victims 209 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 115. Bold his. Furthermore, these laws seemingly posed a threat to national security through blackmail, to which many Americans believed their queer neighbors were especially susceptible. Cory explained the American fear that the homosexual would pay off the Soviet in order to keep his sexual exploits a secret and further undermine his status as a citizen. Biggs refers to blackmail, noting its prevalence is due to the uneven enforcement of sodomy statutes. Cory, 41; Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 110. 211 Dorothy Lee’s 1952 committee on sexual deviance (see pages 20-22) felt it was necessary to make sex offenses into felonies, rather than continue at the municipal level where she and others felt the criminals could not be held for long enough sentences. Biggs often noted that prison itself was not suitable for sex criminals; they often returned to society without having changed. By 1953, the widely-accepted professional opinion favored indeterminate sentences. Though the public divided on whether or not to treat sex “abnormalcy” as a medical condition or a simple crime, many agreed that Oregon’s 1923 code that standardized sterilization of sex criminals was not effective or necessary. Baker, “Sex Offender Problem Studied;” Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 101-3, 126-9; “Tigard Speaker Denounces Lack of ‘Sex’ Laws,” November 11, 1954, Folder 7, ERBP. 210 Thompson 62 into a life of perversity as the interruptive factor of their healthy psychosexual development. Biggs’s policy of an intensive psychological approach as opposed to a purely penal one was largely accepted and promoted by the medical community at the time. Biggs claimed, “Medical science through its specialized branches, such as psychology, psychiatry and endocrinology, can cure many cases of sex abnormalcy,” from sexual arousal to arson and homosexuality.212 Whereas sterilization manifested what historian Mark Largent calls “the widespread conviction that experts could locate the source of complex social problems in the biology of problematic individuals,” psychoanalysis represented the move away from biology to study the inner workings of the human brain.213 One local doctor lamented in the Oregonian, “No, castration is not the answer to the sex criminal problem. We must look elsewhere, and no doubt, the solution in the end will be as complicated and varied as the problem itself.”214 The pathology of sex crimes had become clear and Biggs, along with similar writers and moralizing citizens, believed that a medical approach to sexual deviance was necessary. In an attempt to make the suggested treatment of sex abnormals law, Biggs moved forward in 1953 to co-write a law with Multnomah County representative Phil Roth. Rather than attack sterilization as an outdated practice, Biggs and Roth drew on certain aspects of the preexisting sterilization law to promote the use of psychiatric care for criminals. Whereas many Oregonians viewed castration as “a cheap, effective and time-honored method which would allow the ‘unsexed’ and therefore noncriminal subject to live safely and freely with his fellow men,” according to a local doctor, those who, like Biggs and Roth, had more familiarity with medical literature and the fields of psychology and psychiatry promoted a 212 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 26. Largent, “The Greatest Curse of the Race,” 206. 214 John W. Evans, “Surgery Not the Solution,” The Oregonian, December 7, 1949, 20. 213 Thompson 63 different path.215 In either case, however, the state’s goal was to “segregate the unfit,” as historian Largent comments.216 Instead of removing sex criminality from Oregon’s gene pool, Roth and Biggs sought to establish a “segregation unit” that would “furnish a complete physical and mental inventory of each individual committed to it and develop the most effective curative or rehabilitative procedures.”217 Biggs cited the belief of criminologists that sex offenders needed to be separated not only from the rest of society because of their pathology, but also from other prisoners.218 Only “keeping him in some institution or colony rather than a prison appears to be the only safe and just answer,” Biggs admonished.219 While this rule applied to rapists, child molesters, and perpetrators of violent sex-driven crimes, Biggs, like so many Oregonians, rarely removed the homosexual from the heading of sexual deviant. Pulling from his research on medical models of sexuality and psychopathology, Biggs concerned himself with the psychological welfare of the homosexual. According one of his contemporaries in Michigan, the homosexual experienced, as a result of his homosexuality, “human unhappiness, discouragement, and neurotic anxiety,” a “very large number of broken homes, divorces, and suicides,” and a loss of “faith in God and men,” all of which led him to “drift into a life of worthlessness.”220 Biggs corroborated this stance by admitting that a “few sex abnormals harm no one but themselves.”221 Biggs and his ilk largely viewed these issues as Evans, “Surgery Not the Solution.” Largent, “The Greatest Curse of the Race,” 191. 217 Earl Biggs and Phil Roth, House Bill No. 208, section 14, part 4, Folder 7, ERBP. 218 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 126. Largent shows that many prisoners were castrated for their sexual activity while incarcerated and that the Oregon Eugenics Board ordered them sterilized to deal with “rampant” homosexual activity in the state penitentiary. Largent, “The Greatest Curse of the Race,” 205. 219 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 126. 220 Hartwell, 6. Many gay and lesbian people, in an effort to stay hidden and therefore somewhat safe from public vitriol, married a straight partner and had children. 221 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 128. 215 216 Thompson 64 symptoms of homosexuality, as only further manifestations of one’s illness, rather than related to the public atmosphere that demonized them. The notion of sexual deviance as a form of self-harm was par for the clinical course during the 1950s. As historian Roy Cain claims, “The subjective distress or guilt that kept the patient from divulging his homosexuality to others was seen as evidence of a promising degree of normality” in the medical community.222 Biggs discussed this “guilt feeling” in relation to those who developed neuroses “because [their] normal and natural sex conduct is contrary to a law, a taboo, an idea of sin, etc.”: for example, oral sex, manual stimulation, and masturbation had long been “abnormal” sexual behavior.223 However, because he considered homosexuality “abnormal,” this definition did not extend to queer people. Nevertheless, he strongly believed that “[c]ondemnation is not the answer to problems,” and that society should offer “some acceptance” of those gays and lesbians who were “willing to accept treatment and conform to certain conditions in the light of modern science.”224 To Biggs, “modern science” acted as the cure to deviant sexuality alongside familial love. Concomitantly, he showed a small amount of compassion for those sexual others who were willing to work within the medical model of rehabilitation towards a more normative sexual expression. He constantly stressed openmindedness to those willing to work within the mores of a modern society. Roy Cain, “Disclosure and Secrecy among Gay Men in the United States and Canada: A Shift in Views,” American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race Since the Civil War, edited by John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 291. 223 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 133-4. 224 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 137. Biggs reinforces historian George Chauncey’s claim that psychiatrists posed queerness “as a deviation from the psychological norm and the symptom of a deeper pathology or mental illness, which could be treated more effectively by medical men than by clergymen or the police.” Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” 166. 222 Thompson 65 Despite his view that same-sex desire was “neither quite natural nor normal” the BiggsRoth Bill was startlingly radical in its implications for homosexuality.225 Though the bill does not ever mention homosexuality, it does offer a series of reforms to the state code on “sodomy or the crime against nature.”226 The original law encompassed much more than anal sex in its definition of sodomy, including “any act or practice of sex perversity, either with mankind of beasts” and any form of oral sex; all of the delineated practices granted the criminal a minimum sentence of 1 year and a maximum of 15.227 However, like Biggs and Roth’s proposed reform, the code does not explicitly mention homosexuality. Biggs and Roth explicitly added stipulations about the consent of those engaging in those acts classified as sodomy and created two degrees of nonconsensual sodomy.228 Other members of the state legislature likely balked at these propositions because of the conflated public images of the homosexual and the violent sex offender and the widespread notion that acting on queer desire was criminal conduct. The state would not overturn its sodomy statute until 1972.229 Though Biggs and Roth made room for homosexual sex in their bill, the ultimate focus was on decriminalizing those sex acts that fell under the original statute, such as oral, manual, and anal stimulation, especially between adult consenting heterosexual couples. Because Kinsey Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 135. Specifically, Biggs claims that for one to claim “that homosexuality cannot be regarded as abnormal or unnatural, is like saying that the common cold or any other widely prevalent ailment or disease cannot be regarded as unnatural or abnormal. The presence of homosexuality is a definite indication of psychopathic personality to some degree and is therefore neither quite natural nor normal.” 226 Section 23-910 of the Oregon Code Laws Annotated, “Sodomy or the Crime Against Nature” is quoted in both Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 109 and Cory, 289. Cory specifically notes it as a particularly harsh law, if only for its vague language. Cory, 54. 227 Biggs himself could seem to decide if the law states a maximum sentence of 10 or 15 years for sodomy; in Sex, Science, and Sin, he quoted it at 10, but in his research notes, he lists it as 15. Cory, however, also quotes it at 15, which he stated “makes the law itself a laughing stock in the eyes of any intelligent person.” Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 109; “Sodomy,” Sexual Offenses notes, Folder 7, ERBP; Cory, 54, 289. 228 Biggs-Roth Bill, Sections 3, 4-1, and 4-2, ERBP. Sodomy in the first degree applied to acts with prisoners, animals, birds, and dead bodies while sodomy in the second degree applied to acts with minors. 229 George Painter, “The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers: The History of Sodomy Laws in the United States: Oregon,” Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest, http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/sensibilities/oregon.htm (accessed February 1, 2013). 225 Thompson 66 found that American men engaged in a wide range of sexual practices that were technically outlawed, the public now understood that a variety of sexual expressions could be performed within the confines of heterosexuality and that, because of their far-reaching nature, should not be considered deviant or immoral.230 For his part, Biggs believed that the law ought to “prohibit only those sex acts that are detrimental to the general welfare, and leave man’s private sex life private, whether in or out of marriage,” but that did not make same-sex love a normal expression of sexuality on the same level as heterosexual, familial love.231 However, because he viewed homosexuality as a psychopathic condition, he tended to brand gays and lesbians as “enemies of society.”232 Because the original sodomy statute outlawed a number of sexual practices that Biggs considered “normal” within the confines of a straight relationship, such as oral and manual stimulation, he felt it needed to be thrown out. However, it is entirely possible that, between writing his book in 1950 and writing the bill in 1953, Biggs altered his position somewhat on homosexuality. In his books, he strongly cautioned his audience of the psychopathic tendencies of the homosexuals. Biggs acknowledged that this assertion flew in the face of his own personal hero, Alfred Kinsey, and the findings in Sexual Behavior of the Human Male.233 Kinsey admonished, “The opinion that homosexual activity in itself provides evidence of a psychopathic personality is materially challenged” by his Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio surmise that this “revelation of a wide divergence between ideals and actual behavior alleviated the anxiety of many Americans about whether their own private h apart from others. And the scientific credentials thor gave legitimacy to the curiosity many Americans had about sexual subjects.” D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 286-7. 231 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 125. 232 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 128. 233 Even though Kinsey’s work showed that homosexual activity was far more common than anyone had previously thought, and that Kinsey advocated to divest homosexuality of its associations with psychopathy, he noted that, even “in light of the Kinsey survey,” he considered homosexuality evidence of a psychopathic personality. Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 135. 230 Thompson 67 data.234 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), first published in 1952, also likewise ignored Kinsey’s claim that same-sex desire was a natural expression and its authors designated homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” until 1973.235 In many cases, the medical community viewed deviant sex as evidence of underdevelopment in childhood. Biggs characterized homosexuality as “a cowardly way to escape from life and its normal responsibilities taken by individuals... who lack sufficient courage to assume the full duties and responsibilities of adulthood.” He adhered to a Freudian idea of homosexuality as abnormal psychological development and believed that “sex abnormalcy” needed to be treated professionals because of the dangers it posed to gay people themselves, rather than society at large.236 Following Sigmund Freud’s ideas of sexual development in childhood, Biggs constantly reiterated that queer desire was evidence of abnormal psychological development. Biggs summarized Freud’s “balanced view” of sexual development, stating that the psychoanalyst “demonstrated that deviations from so-called normal sexual behavior are not monstrosities but... slight mental disorders in the adult [that] were remnants of earlier sexual patterns and ought to be understood as neurotic symptoms (one accounting for infantilism) rather than morally and legally condemned vices.”237 To Biggs, however, “HOMOSEXUALITY IS EVIDENCE THAT THE INDIVIDUAL HAS NOT REACHED A NORMAL SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT, BUT IS STILL MORE OR LESS OF AN INFANT OR CHILD SEXUALLY.”238 By viewing same-sex desire as “infantilism” and grouping it with sexual “abnormalcy” in an era when the public Alfred Kinsey, et al., “Homosexual Outlet,” in The Homosexual Dialectic, edited by Joseph A. McCaffrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), 29. 235 George T. Nicola, “Oregon’s Psychiatric Establishment’s Pioneering Support of Gay Civil Rights,” Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest, http://www.glapn.org/6181PaulyAPA.html (accessed February 1, 2013). 236 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 135, 67, 121. 237 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 121. 238 Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 135. Capitalization his, frequently used throughout his books for emphasis. 234 Thompson 68 legitimately feared anything they believed to be sexual perversion did not alter public views of the homosexual but only served to solidify him as an inhuman threat in the public consciousness.239 Because Biggs classified homosexuality as infantilism, he removed any aspect of adult autonomy and ultimately undermined any provisions in the Biggs-Roth Bill for consensual adult sex applying to the homosexual. Beyond an attempt to legalize private, consensual sex between adults, Biggs mainly focused his reform efforts on attempting to establish this psychiatric care unit in order to better treat and cure sexual deviance. Unlike eugenicists twenty years earlier, Biggs believed, “It does no good... to put a man in prison for 20 years and then to release him to society to perform the same offenses all over again.”240 Instead, he advocated for indeterminate sentences in cases where the sex criminal was deemed mentally unsound or especially violent.241 One newspaper article stated that the bill, “which would provide extensive psychological treatment for convicted sex deviates, and hand out indeterminate penitentiary sentences to incurables,” would also require a new staff at the Oregon State Hospital and was estimated to cost upwards of one million dollars.242 The cost could be attributed to Biggs’s desire to allocate a facility specifically for the psychiatric and medical rehabilitation and treatment of sex abnormals. As he noted in his discussion of rehabilitation in Sex, Science, and Sin, “Treatment incorporated with incarceration in order to be successful in most cases of sex abnormalcy would have to be in an institution for sex offenders only, or else in a strictly supervised and segregated section of a penal institution” Infantilism, to Biggs, was “considered to be caused by arrested or retarded development of both the mental and physical side of sex nature” and was ultimately synonymous with pedophilia. Biggs, Sex, Science and Sin, 80. 240 “Tigard Speaker Denounces Lack of ‘Sex’ Laws,” November 11, 1954, Folder 7, ERBP. 241 “Indeterminate sentence” is listed as no less than 90 days and with a maximum of life imprisonment in nearly every section of the Biggs-Roth Bill. House Bill No. 208, Sections 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, ERBP. The bill expounds upon the “indeterminate sentence” in sections 13 through 27. 242 Herbert Baker, “Sex Offender Problem Studied,” Eugene Register-Guard, March 4, 1953, 1B. The Biggs-Roth Bill would have provided a full staff of psychological and psychiatric professionals to “devote their full time to the treatment of persons committed to the segregation unit established.” Biggs-Roth Bill, Section 14-3, ERBP. 239 Thompson 69 where sex criminals could “be permanently removed from society.”243 His view that sexual deviation stemmed from mental disorders was in keeping with contemporary medical literature; however, it did not alleviate the sense of moral panic to the public’s satisfaction, and Oregonians sought a different, more drastic method, of dealing with the sexual menace. Also in 1953, Multnomah County’s other representative, Dorothy Wallace, proposed a similar option that would compete with the Biggs-Roth Bill and that the state favored and eventually chose, though the legislature continued to draw on House Bill 208’s recommendations over the next few sessions.244 Wallace’s proposal reflected the general anxiety over the welfare of Oregon’s children as well as the national trend of so-called sexual psychopath laws.245 Both representatives sought to strengthen punitive measures for sex offenders and championed the psychiatric sector, but Wallace’s bill appealed more to voters in its slightly more extreme, and certainly less expensive, approach. One writer characterized the Biggs-Roth bill as “an omnibus approach” that “may be too sweeping a piece of legislation” and that did not appeal to “economy-minded” legislators. The bill addressed measures against all the many specific types of sexual abnormal that Biggs had outlined in both his books: homosexuals and sodomites, rapists, pedophiles, and “firebugs,” or those who commit “arson with the intent of sexual gratification.”246 According to historian George Painter, the Wallace bill specifically targeted sodomy as “one of two triggering offenses,” reflecting Oregonians’ image of homosexuality as 243 Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 127-8. Fraternal Order of the Eagles Flyer, May 14, 1956, Folder 7, ERBP. Wallace was one of two female representatives in the House during the 1953 session. Much like Dorothy Lee, Wallace became fodder for heavily gendered ridicule in the local newspapers. In the humor-driven opinion section of The Oregonian, “Behind the Mike,” an editor mocked her and her fellow “distaff” representative for their choice of hairstyles. B. Mike, “Behind the Mike,” The Oregonian, January 19, 1953, 16. 245 Estelle Freedman claims that these laws “did not necessarily name specific criminal acts, nor did they differentiate between violent and nonviolent, or consensual and nonconsensual, behaviors. Rather, they targeted a kind of personality, or an identity, that could be discovered only by trained psychiatrists.” Freedman, “Uncontrolled Desires,” 209. 246 McCready, “Control of Sex Pervert,” 32; Biggs, Sex, Science, and Sin, 92. 244 Thompson 70 ultimately violent and punishable.247 This “wholesale criminalization of sodomy,” to borrow Nayan Shah’s words, “regardless of consent,” characterized a swath of laws passed at the time, and the need to determine who could participate in which sexual acts. Such issues of consent differed greatly between the two bills. Wallace’s bill also called for examination of convicts, but rather than have such examinations performed by a new department of professionals, these examinations would be conducted by the state eugenics board “to determine whether he is a potential menace to society” and fully embraced the possibility of sterilization.248 Furthermore, Wallace’s bill targeted anyone over the age of 16 who engaged in sexual activity--consensual or otherwise--with anyone under the age of 15, listing such actions as “psychopathic.”249 The state chose to back the cheaper and more severe option from Wallace, though Biggs and Roth continued to work with the legislature to draft other sex crime measures. Biggs may not have had his work accepted by the state, but he continued to be an active and sought after expert amid Portland’s moral panic. Up until he retired in 1957, he continued to lecture in and around Portland, furthering his mission of educating the public throughout the decade, as he wholeheartedly believed in the importance of sex education and preparedness to educate Oregon on the fear and dangers of sex crime. By teaching the marvels of modern science and protecting the family, the nucleus of American life, he believed he could help make the world a better place. Conclusion Painter, “The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers.” “Wallace Bill Changes Plan,” The Oregonian, February 13, 1953, 16; “Sex Offense Bills Topic,” The Oregonian, February 20, 1953, 16 (quoted). 249 Painter, “The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers.” 247 248 Thompson 71 Earl Biggs, whose extensive work with the police department and personal interest in issues of sex, medicine, and law, became one of the key figures in postwar Portland sexual discourse. The pervasive fascination with sexuality at the time, combined with a fear of social and sexual deviation, led to a public atmosphere that was obsessed with sex. As a form of moral panic erupted over the apparent proliferation of sexually-driven violent crimes, Oregonians navigated that sex anxiety in a variety of ways. For some, like Dorothy McCullough Lee and Dorothy Wallace, two women who deliberately left the home sphere to pursue a career in politics, moral panic could be wielded as a weapon. The tension in the air led these two women and their supporters to implement the rhetoric of the panic in tangible forms as a way to remove undesirable citizens from the city. For Lee, attacking issues of vice extended to attack the city’s gay and lesbian residents with the purpose returning the city to its quiet, clean, and isolated prewar state--a vision that was really a postwar myth. Vice regulation and her hounding of those sex “deviates” that plagued the city allowed her to gain a sense of power over a city of wartime workers turned permanent residents who, whenever they strayed from the straight (white, middle-class) path, needed to be pushed back in line or else pushed out of the city. Similarly, for Wallace, the rhetoric of moral panic could be productive by adopting a sexual psychopath law. For Wallace, in order to contain this menace that threatened her, and by extension, the state’s, children, ensured a brutal law that refused to acknowledge consent and barred any hope of decriminalizing sodomy. Like Lee and Wallace, Earl Biggs wanted to regulate non-normative and violent sexual expressions; he did so by extolling the virtues of a medical model. Medical regulation put sex offenders directly in the hands of the psychopathological expert rather than the police or government. He strongly believed that all consensual sexual acts between adults should not be Thompson 72 persecuted by the law, but seemed to struggle over whether or not this should extend to gay and lesbian couples. Biggs, like many Americans, focused on the family as the nucleus of patriotism, safety, and normative sexuality. Through proper adherence to sexual and gender roles, parents could teach their children how to properly perform sexual citizenship. On the police force, where the surveillance of local gays and lesbians kept their community from infringing too much upon the rights of the heterosexual, white middle-class to feel safe and secure, Biggs witnessed the myriad ways in which sex “subversives” lived and expressed themselves. By 1953, he sought to alter the legal measures that were so frequently used to attack the local gay community, but frequently seemed to struggle with how to categorize homosexuality. Biggs represented the constant push and pull between fear of and fascination with sexuality in the postwar period through his life and writings. In 1952, a year before Biggs, Roth, and Wallace brought their bills before the state, Mayor Lee lost election to her own councilman, Fred Peterson. The same year that Peterson took office, Sergeant Earl Biggs and County Representative Phil Roth failed to pass their sex crime bill in the state legislature. The state’s representatives chose to back “the lady legislator” Dorothy Wallace and her House Bill 539.250 In spite of defeat, Biggs himself continued his work on the police force, as an educator, and as an advocate. Over the next four years, the legislature revisited the Biggs-Roth Bill several times, but never passed it, leaving sexual perversion a largely criminal, rather than medical, issue. By 1957, aged 60, Biggs retired from the force and spent his remaining years with his family. 251 In light of Earl Biggs and the case of Portland, “moral panic” as a category of analysis oversimplifies and fails to express the wide range of reactions to homosexuality or sex crime that 250 251 B. Mike, “Behind the Mike,” The Oregonian, March 20, 1953, 34. “Sex Expert Quits Force,” Oregon Journal, September 19, 1957, Folder 9, ERBP. Thompson 73 Americans experienced at the time. While certainly many Americans engaged in aspects of moral panic, the variety of ways in which people navigated this trope clarifies a picture of sexual ideology in the early 1950s. In many ways, Cold War-era Americans were as aware of the anxiety that permeated the country as historians have been, and some even attempted to counteract it. Because of the dual interest in sexuality as a source of both wonderment and worry, many Americans struggled to balance their own personal views with the mass moral code that condemned certain sexual practices and vilified innocents. Through Sergeant Earl Biggs, as a police officer, as a father, as an activist, as a researcher, and as an expert who funneled a number of different discourses on sexuality into his books, lectures, and legislation, moral panic becomes a gradated, oft-contradictory picture of American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Thompson 74 Bibliography Newspapers: The Eugene Register-Guard The Oregonian Oregon Journal Primary Sources: Biggs, Earl R. How to Protect Your Child from the Sex Criminal: Rules and Suggestions for the Protection of Children from Sexual Molestation, Assault and Murder. Portland, OR: New Science Book Company, 1950. Biggs, Earl R. 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