April 13, 2010 (Release Date) The Fall of '55, DVD, Narrated by Claudia Weathermon (Actor), Seth Randal (Director)

April 13, 2010 (Release Date) The Fall of '55, DVD, Narrated by Claudia Weathermon (Actor), Seth Randal (Director)

In the fall of 1955, a gay sex scandal erupted in the unassuming, wholesome and "vice-less" town of Boise, Idaho, as teenage boys who had prostituted themselves to older men began to disclose their dalliances to authorities. Overnight, Boise's homosexual underworld - comprised mostly of married family men - was splashed onto headlines and thrust into the spotlight. Reputations were shattered and lives ruined as the rumors and accusations flew. What followed was a classic witch-hunt, marked by intense homophobic hysteria, in which the whole town became embroiled. Seth Randal's gripping documentary provides unique insights into the pre-Stonewall gay experience as well as 1950s' America's struggle with the issue of homosexuality and the prevailing myth that it was a cancer that could be spread to the youth. Interesting parallels are also drawn with the era of McCarthyism, during which fear and paranoia supplanted rational thought, and the federal government began its own purge of gays (one that continues to this day in our military).

The film raises many questions that prove difficult even in 2007: With the accusers ranging in age from 15 to 22, at what age did their accusations of sexual corruption become simple hypocrisy? What kinds of behavior were immoral? How far should the community have gone to protect the youth? Who were the victims, and who were the exploited? In Boise, more than fifty years later, opinions are still deeply divided.

Few if any people could have anticipated it, but in 1955 Boise (BOY-see) Idaho, largest city in the state and its capital, faced what social observer Charles L. Stout has called "a confluence of motives" -- the storm surge of McCarthyism had begun to recede, but in its wake left a loose nationwide tangle of law-enforcement types who were skilled in ferreting out homosexuality in the armed forces and Civil Service in order to kick them out. A far more credulous populace than today's was used to responding in lockstep when it believed (or was told to believe) that a new monolithic threat to the community loomed. The rising adult generation had cut its teeth on bogeys of monolithic "deviates": the stereotyped "Jap" of WWII posters, trying to eavesdrop on loose-lipped conversations in bars and restaurants; later Communists, then "suspected Communists," then "security risks" in general -- including most emphatically gay men and lesbians who were thought to be if not inherently unreliable, then a threat because of susceptibility to outing and blackmail.

Then in the fall of 1955 all hell broke loose. The leading daily paper trumpeted the arrest of several so-called "deviates" on morals charges and shortly thereafter ran an editorial, tortured by illogic and complacency, that told the public they ought to respond to a threat of massive homosexuality that was cleverly written enough to conceal the fact that the threat was only hypothetical. The mythical number of one hundred was bandied about, with nothing to back it up. In fact, a lot depends on interpretation. On the one hand in Boise in 1955 lots of people qualified as homosexual, under standard civil and medical defintions, including people today we'd call kids fooling around, the sexually cynical budding "gay for pay" day w*ores, and tons of bisexuals or the "closeted".

In the USA of fifty years ago, merely to be homosexual (including what we would today call bisexual or bi-curious) made a person diseased in the eyes of the medical establishment; combined with loosely worded morals statutes, that made an indictable felony possible for a surprising number of men and a "thought crime" for even more. Physically, even oral sex between consenting husband-and-wife partners, in private with no force or money involved, was illegal practically everywhere in America. The police were all about thorough enforcement of the law -- but only to one group, the gay or those thought to be gay. The cops could get away with it, too: It was the tenor of the times that once a man was exposed under that very flexible psychiatric and legal term -- "homosexual" -- his life as he knew it would crumble, with job loss, threats of violence and social ostracism practically guaranteed. The authorities knew that, concentrated on that group, and were more than happy to threaten by implication what we'd today call outing . . . the non-monetary equivalent of blackmail payoff often being to name more names.

But in particular the police targeted homosexuals, commonly slurred in even respectable daily papers as "perverts" or "deviants" The tabloids even used "Homo" as both noun and adjective, as in POLICE NAB 5 IN HOMO RAID. The well-trained body politic coughed up with swift and appalling predictability, offering thousands of calls and letters to the cops. Tragically, "naming names" began with not much more logical impetus other than the-paper-says-so. In came in accusations of sexual deviance from the citizenry who knew or suspected someone, or, perhaps, merely wanted to trash an enemy, who could so easily now be isolated and stigmatized as "the other." The first police sweeps were highly labor-intensive and consisted largely of staking out a few bars or other downtown locales already well-known to the cops as places where men-meet-men. [In a lawman's version of everybody-knows-about but nobody-talks-about, they left alone the surprisingly busy basement "tearoom" at the public library, in which someone definitely drilled a hole in a stall wall (how did they say "glory hole" in the Fifties??). At least one book (Gerassi's BOYS OF BOISE) said that the adult was the instigator, the fellator, and the payer of cash. Through the hole went the young 'un's nascent manhood, under the stall went the cash. We also are told that the adult/john/fellator was too ashamed to see the beneficiaries (or victims) of his job and so he never had to look at, or be looked at by, the partner during these brief carnalities. The police left alone that obvious public exploitation, the kind one would think ready-made for a morals charge, quite alone.]

Instead, along with the anticipated "trash" the entrapment raids brought in some articulate and well-educated bachelors and family men who knew their rights and had the power (and money) to back them up by hiring lawyers and fighting prosecution. Parallel to, but unlike the busts covert, law enforcement set up an efficient if Constitution-torturing interrogation machine, a darkened house near downtown which people knew about but rarely spoke (constrained silence once again arising as an ongoing motif in this period of Boise's history). Inside the house was a constantly-spinning tape recorder and an outside expert specially brought in, a crack professional interrogator named Fairchild who had cut his chops on driving gays and lesbians out of the military per massive federal effort just the year before and who had been "imported" into Idaho.

In a few months law enforcement and the public prosecutors had cherry-picked a solid core of 'deviates' (aka "homos" in screamer newspaper headlines) who made it all the way to open jury trial. Most of cases involved brief liaisons between a minor, or a young adult who was under 18 two or three years back and still indictable as a minor at that time, and an adult. Interestingly, the exception to the general rule of societal ostracism came in the form of an executive whose name made the headlines early on; he rehabilitated soceitally fairly quickly (Did it help that he had a crack attorney, by all counts the best in town?) In sixteen of seventeen cases, the offending duo always consisted of one adult male and one "boy" not of legal majority. It mattered little whether the "teen" was what was then called a "latent homosexual" in his first fumbling experimentations, or a rebellious troubled type deliberately thumbing his nose at society, or even a rough guy starting to hone a career as a paid hustler (male prostitute), the ones Vladimir Nabokov wittily denominated as "self-sufficient rapist[s] with pustules and a souped-up car," mixing it up with "sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings" (LOLITA, pub. 1955 but banned in the USA). Who propositioned whom and who was fellator and who was fellatee (to use modern slang, who was "Top" and who "Bottom" or which participant "controlled the scene") didn't matter as much as whether a payment of a couple of dollars "gas money" or a ride home or a Coke was proffered or given. Virtually at whim under expert questioning, a frightened or troubled teen could come out looking like a responsible young citizen doing his duty, or like a poor exploited working-class boy, or like "trash" come of trash.

Yet the sex-crime laws of the day did not oblige the law to discriminate between a technical minor who used discrete extortion with hints of "exposure", and a john who gave willingly but furtively, and sometimes not even which male made the cash or symbolic payment. In another sad irony, THE FALL OF '55 understands that sometimes the child is indeed a boy: a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, say, who may well have been abused or exploited by some vampiric adult. Society, especially in the form of its weakest members, needs protection. Perhaps that's why some experts today say we need flexible legal guidelines to determine maturity; that using a consistent age of majority (or age of consent), while appearing egalitarian, might do more harm than good. Nonetheless the harmed must be helped. On a lighter note, during the numerous trials, the admixture of prostitution casuistry and broadly worded morals and child-abuse laws occasioned some judges to sanction limited spoken testimony of street language that "nice people" weren't supposed to know, but did, even the ladies... among all the sexual posturing at least some vernacular entered the realm of reality in polite society if only temporarily. During trial, relatively innocuous terms like "go down on" needed clearance but did of necessity wind up in the record, though there were probably laws extant then that deemed such transcription obscene in and of itself. All this complicated the trial and definitely raised the general embarrassment and "ick" levels on the part of the jurors and others.

The underlying hypocrisy, referenced both in this video and in John G. Gerassi's 1966 THE BOYS OF BOISE, is that Boise and its suburbs, like any metro area big enough to occasion social and class divisions*, relied on a myth of purity that may have buffaloed corporate relocation experts but sealed off the most sexually vulnerable teens.
*Boise in the Fifites was a highly churchgoing town, but it had not only the usual white-collar / blue-collar divide, but a deep if unacknowledged religious gap: between the roughly half of the town who were Mormons and 'most all other believers. This compartmentalized and fragmented social and political discourse when it was most needed. Technically it is wrong to call this "provincial" or "small-town"; instead Boise, despite its relatively temperate populace, was disproportionately large with the kind of schism we bemoan in big anomic cities.

After the public named names, and the arrested and covertly interrogated named names, the public atmosphere fell under what amounts to a mini-reign of terror. I am reminded of Nicholas von Hoffman's autobiography of Roy Cohn, CITIZEN COHN. Hoffman defines the naming-names terror as the worst: because it involves not only threats and potential or actual violence, but that the acts of betrayal and self-betrayal destroyed the individuals who "named names." In this video, we see three different outcomes of the Boise scandal. First is an informed, wise and intelligent woman who moved from New York City to Boise with her family just as the scandal broke. She was enlightening and insightful and once or twice even slyly humorous. Her family was not directly involved in the scandal but she learned a great deal about life and the workings of Boise. The second is of a graying Baby Booomer, a ten-year-old boy whose family lost its two businesses when his father was charged with two morals violations. We can tell it is with a great deal of effort that he relates this sad story, and it would haunt any of us.

The third lengthy lay interviewee, is an exception on several fronts. He is the late Mel Dir, who died in 1990, but whose prior witness on audiotape is crucial. Dir's outspokenness and general disinclination to suffer "Bulls**t," to use his term, served posterity well. With his sufferings, he verges on martyrdom, with his gutsy and forthright attitude, a hero as well.

It took THE FALL OF '55 to detail and so well consolidate this courageous man's outrageous and appalling treatment. Dir was the last individual arrested, the latter half of the seventeenth orally-sodomitic cases arrested and brought thru to trial, and the only teen-on-teen (as opposed to adult/teen) duo prosecuted. The circumstances Dir faced are beyond unusual. Dir was a teen at the time of the alleged act, in 1954, still a minor living in Boise. Yet at trial he was framed (in both senses of the word) and presented to the jury as an adult predator. Ironically, shortly after the worst of the Boise scandal, Dir had moved to San Francisco and at the time of his arrest during the holiday season, 1955, was making his own way as a young adult, with every reason to believe he had freed himself from any potential legal repercussions from Boise. It took a lot of effort (and undoubtedly many Constitutional violations) to bring Dir in. The arresting Boise sheriff drove with his wife to San Francisco on a "vacation" but with a warrant for Dir in his pocket, who was arrested at work and outrageously extradicted in the family Chevrolet back to Boise. Even the San Francisco policeman present for the bust was appalled.

Why did Sheriff go to such trouble? Could it possibly have had anything to do with Dir's record of defiance? He was the rare Boisean male during the Fairchild period of taped interrogation who knew the questioning was out of line and said so, calling it "Bulls**t." In his 1970s taped interview, Dir used the term "bl*w job" about his indiscretion, one of a very few profanities THE FALL OF '55 permits. (It would have been ludicrous not to.) We have strong reason to believe Mel had severely ticked-off the law-enforcement establishment in Boise in 1955; but as of now (May 2010) the cops plead they were "just doing their job" and that no higher human authority sic'ed them on Dir. **I've realized I've spent a lot of time on Mel Dir's case. But this is only the beginning of his story!

Another specific glory of this remarkable video is not only that it lays out the 1955-58 goings-on so well, but also that it updates the aftermath up to 2007. This includes the surprise success of Gerassi's 1966 recounting, the well received and surprisingly popular BOYS OF BOISE, which became a paperback-rack bestseller in 1967, and set up frequent travelers like salesmen for some vulgar and repetitive puns on "boys" from the newly aware outlanders. Well into the 2000's can you guess whether modern Boiseans wanted to talk about it? Thankfully, this vid documented some people who were silent back in the day and opened up now. They are still the exception, it seems.

It's hard to recommend this video too heartily; it does what it does efficiently and, within the bounds of journalistic propriety, even entertainingly. Great-looking too, having been produced for TV, not the cinema. I do have a few minor objections, which are understandable and perhaps even excusable:

(1) I for one, after reading Gerassi's THE BOYS OF BOISE, had been hanging on for a revelation of the identity of the rich, propertied, shadowy man (enticingly nicknamed "The Queen") who was said to be at or near the origin of the whole surreal and depressing mess. A couple of mentions in Gerassi's book and then after another 31 years, nothing more at all in this vid. We now know that the impetus behind this whole sordid scandal was not public outrage, nor even irresponsible journalism, but a privately-funded investigation paid for by a morals group with heavy Mormon ties, which itself was probably occasioned by a type of ongoing *Putsch* of a struggle between two rival factions in Boise government, one "gang" allied mostly with career politicians lining up against the other gang, that included much of the town's appointed bureaucracy. I had hoped for more but feel pretty confident that the people who made THE FALL OF '55, having demonstrated their own mastery of the Gerassi source material, did the best they could.

(2) THE FALL OF '55 is well-wrought journalism and surprisingly beautiful television (especially given the volatile subject mater) but the history as documented had to be, to a large extent, about malfeasance of law enforcement and civil rights and by necessity had a large printed-word component. Gerassi was able to quote large swatches of trial transcript and relate legal battles with force and immediacy in his book of several hundred pages; he used not only court transcripts but relevant 1950s articles and editorials and such. The printed word. This video has to relate some of this for the sake of good storytelling and background, but even so there are (relatively brief, admittedly) periods during which the forward narration halts and we get takes like a slow pan over an empty courtroom while trial transcript is shown in the background and read out loud. For this I do not blame producer/director Seth Randal or producer Louise Luster or narrator Claudia Weathermon (and that's the entire production staff listed in the description), but the limitations inherent in the medium of TV itself, in particular the genre of TV documentaries and the routine assumption of TV and most theatrical documentaries that the audience will go into Too Much Information ("TMI") mode as the running time exceeds an hour and a half and approaches that of a feature (fiction) film. (Even Michael Moore has usually respected this precept.) At 82 mins. (1 hr, 22 mins.) I could have used a little more, but leaving the public craving more is a more honorable theatrical precept than pushing too many people into "TMI" territory.

(3) At the time of this posting (5-1-2010) there are no "recommended by" or "frequently sold" links from either the Miller book or the Gerassi book towards this DVD, available to the public for home use only (like most all our DVD's) and costing (again, pretty routine) in the mid-twenties of dollars. Any alpha search on my part has lead only to a public-rights-included version - same content exactly - that costs eleven times as much, its benefit being virtually unlimited replay rights. (I imagine but am not sure that the hoped-for customer base on the $$ three-figure job is people who slot content in at public TV stations and such; perhaps also teachers of things like social history and sociology or U.S. political history or GLBT studies.) Unless the situation has changed, you had a time finding this review! I had to wait a while to let my anger simmer down a little because it was unmerited, though I was plenty upset. While I do think it is this company's obligation to make the cross-references whole lest the much cheaper consumer DVD stay stuck in invisibility, I am confident Amazon will fix it. If cybernetics didn't do it, though, I have to raise the hope human beings will set things right, even as I hope these objections will soon be irrelevant.

I almost gave this product **** instead of *****, but only because I considered the flaws enumerated above as something correctible. Since only one slight defect is open to correction, and probably will be fixed, I decided I was behaving too much like those paid investigators and enlisted snitches grabbing for technical violations. I could not in good faith recommend this experience and not give it anything less than the five stars it deserves. I hope it sells well and rewards its maker and this vendor in all kinds of ways. But do make sure you pay the correct price according to which of the identically contented DVD-R's you prefer with their very different prices and screening permittance.

In this instance, a semi-custom DVD at mass-market prices that informs and satisfies, and IMHO is worth seeing again and again . . . granted that there are some people who will be repelled at the mere fact that this video deals with homosexuality, but such folk are slowly declining in numbers. This product is the right thing at the right time and I wish it very well.

THE FALL OF '55: WELCOME TO BOISE, identically contented DVD's in home-use and public-showing formats (at the time of this writing S24.99 and $275-, both necessiting a DVD-R burn but readily available.
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John G. Gerassi, THE BOYS OF BOISE, orig copyright 1966, reprinted, new copies available in trade-paperback format.

Neil Miller, SEX-CRIME PANIC: A JOURNEY TO THE PARANOID HEART OF THE 1950s, copyright 2002, in print and available as trade paperback.