Arts, Faculty of
Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Cassisa, Susanna Leigh
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Over the last four years, the term “groomer” has emerged as a political weapon against the LGBTQ+ community to conflate queerness with child abuse and “recruitment.” Although this particular iteration is new, the sentiment behind it has deep historical roots that can be traced to nineteenth-century Germany. Groomer Rumor is a podcast and experimental master’s thesis that explores the history and functions of this ongoing moral panic that labels queer people as sexual predators. The podcast uses historical examples from Germany and the United States to critically analyze the weaponization of this trope against the LGBTQ+ community. Incorporating archival audio footage, interviews with scholars, and original narration, Groomer Rumor traces a transnational genealogy of the “groomer” trope over the course of more than a century to emphasize the deeply entangled queer histories of Germany and the United States, while highlighting the distinct characteristics and implications of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in unique political, cultural, and temporal contexts.
GROOMER RUMOR: THE TROPE OF THE QUEER CHILD PREDATOR IN GERMANAND AMERICAN POPULAR MEDIA (1869–2024)bySUSANNA LEIGH CASSISAB.A., The University of Mississippi, 2021A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THEDEGREE OFMASTER OF ARTSinTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES(Germanic Studies)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Vancouver)July 2024© Susanna Leigh Cassisa, 2024iiThe following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduateand Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled:Groomer Rumor: The Trope of the Queer Child Predator in German and American PopularMedia (1869–2024)submitted by in partial fulfilment of the requirements forthe degree ofinExamining Committee:Kyle Frackman, Associate Professor, German Studies, UBCSupervisorErvin Malakaj, Associate Professor, German Studies, UBCSupervisory Committee MemberKamal Al-Solaylee, Professor, Journalism, UBCSupervisory Committee MemberSusanna Leigh CassisaMaster of ArtsGermanic StudiesiiiABSTRACTOver the last four years, the term “groomer” has emerged as a political weapon against theLGBTQ+ community to conflate queerness with child abuse and “recruitment.” Although thisparticular iteration is new, the sentiment behind it has deep historical roots that can be traced tonineteenth-century Germany. Groomer Rumor is a podcast and experimental master’s thesis thatexplores the history and functions of this ongoing moral panic that labels queer people as sexualpredators. The podcast uses historical examples from Germany and the United States to criticallyanalyze the weaponization of this trope against the LGBTQ+ community. Incorporating archivalaudio footage, interviews with scholars, and original narration, Groomer Rumor traces atransnational genealogy of the “groomer” trope over the course of more than a century toemphasize the deeply entangled queer histories of Germany and the United States, whilehighlighting the distinct characteristics and implications of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in uniquepolitical, cultural, and temporal contexts.ivLAY SUMMARYThis master’s thesis, written as a five-part podcast series, critically analyzes currentanti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that labels LGBTQ+ individuals as “groomers,” or sexual predators,particularly to children. Using examples from Germany and the United States, this thesis tracesthe historical roots of such narratives and their usage as a political tool to roll back advances inLGBTQ+ rights.vPREFACEThis thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Susanna Leigh Cassisa.viTABLE OF CONTENTSABSTRACT................................................................................................................................... iiiLAY SUMMARY........................................................................................................................... ivPREFACE........................................................................................................................................ vTABLE OF CONTENTS................................................................................................................viACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...........................................................................................................viiDEDICATION................................................................................................................................ ixINTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................... 1EPISODE 1: THE HOMOSEXUAL............................................................................................. 15EPISODE 2: THE SEXUAL PSYCHOPATH............................................................................... 45EPISODE 3: THE SEDUCER.......................................................................................................77EPISODE 4: THE RECRUITER.................................................................................................103EPISODE 5: THE GROOMER................................................................................................... 134CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................165BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................169viiACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI have been fortunate enough to work on this project alongside colleagues, friends, andfamily—both close by and far away—who have been willing and eager to collaborate. I’mhonored to have shared this process with them and grateful for their feedback, reassurance, andlaughter as I wrote this thesis.I’m keenly aware that writing a podcast as a Master’s thesis, particularly in the field ofGerman Studies, is unconventional. I extend deep gratitude to my thesis committee memberswho made it possible: Kyle Frackman, my supervisor, whose work helped spark my curiosity inqueer German Studies as an undergraduate and who encouraged me to pursue a nontraditionalformat for my thesis, Ervin Malakaj, whose fierce advocacy for young scholars and writers Ihope to emulate moving forward, and Kamal Al-Solaylee, who graciously stepped in as my thirdreader to offer valuable feedback from the perspective of a seasoned journalist. I am thankful forthe time and effort each of my committee members invested in this project and in me as astudent, researcher, and writer.This project also received generous monetary support from the University of BritishColumbia’s Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Centre for European Studies, andDepartment of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, including through the HindaAvery scholarship in Holocaust Studies, and the Waterloo Centre for German Studies at theUniversity of Waterloo.Working on this podcast has given me the chance to uniquely connect with scholarswhose work has greatly influenced my own. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jenniver Evans, SamuelHuneke, Harper Keenan, Ervin Malakaj, Jake Newsome, Erik Rebain, Paul Renfro, Leila Rupp,and Javier Samper Vendrell for sharing their time and expertise with me through our interviews.viiiIt has been a privilege and a great pleasure to collaborate with and learn from them. Additionally,Zavier Nunn offered insight and reading recommendations through email correspondence, forwhich I am grateful.The following dear friends and colleagues who spent their weekdays with me in theCENES grad office were vital support for the duration of my graduate program: Braden Russell,for being my first friend in Vancouver and helping me feel more at home, especially during myfirst (very challenging) year, John O’Hara, for leading by example and showing me how to be amore thoughtful friend and researcher, Steve Commichau, for being a constant source of support,celebrating in the highs and brewing tea to share in the lows, and Sushant Pathak, for his goodhumor, cat GIFs, and wise words of encouragement. They supported my growth as a writer,friend, and person. I am forever grateful for the time I spent learning with and from them.My friends and family back home in Mississippi sustained me from many miles away.My parents, Paul and Jane Cassisa, have offered steadfast support, both personally andprofessionally. Matt Moore co-wrote theme music for the podcast and kept me in good companyvia FaceTime as I worked on the project.Finally, my husband, Tyler Daniels, has been my greatest source of support andencouragement throughout the last three years in Vancouver. In addition to his technicalknowledge and impeccable audio production skills, his home-cooked meals and selflesswillingness to help in innumerable ways, which changed from day to day and month to month,made this project possible. His partnership makes me a better writer and a better person.ixDEDICATIONIn loving memory of Dr. Willa Johnson1INTRODUCTIONOn March 4, 2022, press secretary of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Christina Pushaw, tweeted:“The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described asan Anti-Grooming Bill. If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer orat least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This ishow it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”1 The tweet referenced Florida’s nownotorious Parental Rights in Education Act which went into effect on July 1, 2022, severelylimiting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. Pushawcharacterized such content as “grooming,” a term that describes the deliberate tactics used by anabuser to gain the trust of their victim in an effort to facilitate the abuse.2More recently, it has become a slur used against members of the LGBTQ+ communityand their allies to suggest that any mention of non-normative gender identity or sexualorientation around children is inherently sexually abusive and coercive. As civil rights attorneyand transgender rights advocate Alejandra Caraballo has pointed out, Pushaw’s tweet marked thefirst instance of a government official playing into such “groomer” rhetoric, which has beencirculating in online spaces like 4chan and Twitter since at least March 2020.3 According toMedia Matters, between March 17 and April 6, 2022, Fox News aired nearly 200 segmentscovering trans issues, repeatedly doubling down on the myth that trans children “have been led to3 Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_), “There has been an extreme increase in anti-LGBTQ accounts pushing thehateful attacks equating LGBTQ people with child ‘groomers’ and ‘pedophiles,’” X, April 6, 2022, 2:36 p.m.,https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1511820213276143622.2 Daniel Pollack and Andrea MacIver, Americanbar.org (American Bar Association), accessed April 5, 2023,https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law/resources/child_law_practiceonline/child_law_practice/vol-34/november-2015/understanding-sexual-grooming-in-child-abuse-cases/.1 Christina Pushaw (@ChristinaPushaw), “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be moreaccurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.,” X, March 4, 2022, 3:33 p.m.,https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1499890719691051008.2where they are by adult predators.”4 As of May 13, 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union istracking 515 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the United States.5This specific formulation of anti-queerness, articulated through accusations of child“grooming,” may be unique to the 2020s, but anxiety over LGBTQ+ people in relation tochildren has a long history. Many writers and academics have argued compellingly that thisrhetoric has historical roots in the late 1970s, when pop singer and former beauty queen AnitaBryant led her infamous Save Our Children campaign in response to an ordinance inMiami-Dade County that prevented housing and employment discrimination on the basis ofsexual orientation.6 According to Bryant, it was her civil rights, and the rights of others whoshared her Christian faith, that would be violated by the imposition of this law.7 As a mother, sheargued, it was her right “to defend her children, and all children, against their being recruited byhomosexuals.”8 Anita Bryant’s political campaign against homosexuality was a critical momentthat firmly implanted the image of the homosexual child predator in the American consciousness.However, the historical roots run deeper than the 1970s, and restricting our analysis to theAmerican context alone limits our understanding of an increasingly global anti-LGBTQ+movement—one that presently focuses much of its vitriol on the transgender community in8 Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 99.7 Fred Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America's Debate on Homosexuality (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2008), 80.6 See for example Jillian Eugenios, “How 1970s Christian Crusader Anita Bryant helped spawn Florida’s LGBTQculture war,” NBC News, April 13, 2022,https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/1970s-christian-crusader-anita-bryant-helped-spawn-floridas-lgbtq-cult-rcna24215; Christian Paz, “Old-school homophobia is back,” Vox, April 13, 2022,https://www.vox.com/23021971/florida-gay-trans-lgbtq-laws; Jesse Walker, “A Modern History of ‘Groomer’Politics,” Reason Magazine, February 2023, https://reason.com/2023/01/14/a-modern-history-of-groomer-politics/;Joshua Zeitz, “From Pizzagate to Drag Bills: The ‘Groomer’ Myth That Will Not Die,” Politico Magazine, March 4,2023, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/04/pizzagate-drag-bills-groomer-myth-00085323.5 “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2024,” American Civil Liberties Union, lastmodified May 10, 2024, https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024.4 Alex Paterson, “‘Doom & Groom’: Fox News Has Aired 170 Segments Discussing Trans People in the Past ThreeWeeks,” Media Matters for America, April 8, 2022,https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/doom-groom-fox-news-has-aired-170-segments-discussing-trans-people-past-three-weeks.3particular. This master’s thesis, delivered in the form of a five-part podcast mini-series entitledGroomer Rumor, analyzes the history and function of the trope of the LGBTQ+ “seducer,”“recruiter,” or—most recently—“groomer” throughout the last century to contextualize thecurrent usage of LGBTQ+ rights as a political battleground. Incorporating nine interviews withscholarly experts and original narration and analysis, this podcast bridges the gap betweenscholarly research and critical journalism on the current anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic. Thepodcasts uses historical and contemporary examples from Germany and the United States totrace a transnational genealogy of bigotry that labels LGBTQ+ people “groomers.”In her 2021 video essay on J.K. Rowling’s transphobia, popular YouTuber Natalie Wynn,better known by her channel name ContraPoints, reminded her audience that “[b]igotry alwayshas a history. And in order to understand bigotry, you have to learn that history. Prejudices aremade up of tropes, stereotypes, narratives, arguments.”9 These tropes evolve throughout time butbuild on one another, even as they adapt to more socially acceptable standards. For this reason, itis easier for those less familiar with the history of anti-queerness to identify, for example, the Xaccount Libs of TikTok as bigoted, with its outright claims that LGBTQ+ teachers are“groomers” if they come out as gay.10 However, it could be more challenging to see thecontinuities between Libs of TikTok and something that is, on its face, a more respectable pieceof journalism, like Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender CrazeSeducing Our Daughters. While couched in the aesthetics of investigative journalism, the bookrests on many of the same reactionary assumptions that drive Libs of TikTok’s bigotry, arguing10 Taylor Lorenz, “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine,” TheWashington Post, April 19, 2022,https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/19/libs-of-tiktok-right-wing-media/.9 ContraPoints [Natalie Wynn], “J.K. Rowling,” YouTube video, January 26, 2021, 13:21–13:34,https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us?t=800.4that there has been an increase in gender dysphoria among adolescents assigned female at birthand that this “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is attributable to social contagion.11Bigotry is a contested term in academic literature, and this project employs it broadly. Ireject definitions of bigotry that confine it to a certain personality type,12 as well as those thatreduce it to explicitly hateful or contemptuous language and sentiment.13 Such narrow definitionscould potentially rule out, for instance, Anita Bryant’s crusade against gay teachers as bigotrybecause according to Bryant, she “had love and concern for homosexuals, too.”14 Under mydefinition of bigotry, I instead seek to encompass a wide range of behavior that “poses a politicalthreat to the target group,” to use Natalie Wynn’s formulation.15 “I do not know what is inRowling’s heart,” wrote columnist Monica Hesse in a 2022 piece for The Washington Post,“[b]ut … [h]er Twitter feed does not ask its readers to think. It asks them to fear. It createsphobias. Of trans people. It creates trans phobias.” I am not interested in determining who is or isnot a bigot, but rather how the employment of rhetoric and stereotypes of LGBTQ+ people asthreats to children contribute to broader anti-queer prejudice and discrimination.In The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists (2014), Stephen Eric Bronner states that the book“is intended to help educate the bigot’s enemies.”16 Similarly, Groomer Rumor is not designed toconvince the audience that LGBTQ+ people are not groomers; it is written to furthercontextualize and critique this narrative for an audience who already rejects it. But Bronner’s16 Bronner, 3.15 ContraPoints [Natalie Wynn], “J.K. Rowling,” 15:50–15:55.14 Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of MilitantHomosexuality (Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977), 28.13 See John Corvino, “Puzzles About Bigotry: A Reply to McClain,” Boston University Law Review 99, no. 6(2019): 2590, quoted in Linda McClain, Who’s the Bigot?: Learning from Conflicts Over Marriage and Civil RightsLaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 7.12 See Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1955); Stephen EricBronner, The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).11 Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington, DC: RegneryPublishing, 2020).5formulation implies a dichotomy between bigot and non-bigot of which we should be wary. Ihave written this podcast for those committed to pushing back against bigotry but recognize thatbigotry is pernicious and can be unknowingly internalized or reproduced. It therefore aims toprovide listeners with one possible framework to help them resist prejudice by illustrating thecommon features in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric throughout history.The myth of the queer child predator has proved remarkably persistent across time andspace. As many scholars, including Lisa Duggan and Judith R. Walkowitz have shown, murdernarratives prove fruitful for examining contemporary discourse around gender, sexuality, anddeviance.17 In particular, sexually motivated murders—or those that can be portrayed assuch—instruct the culture on whose sexuality or gender identity exists outside the boundaries ofacceptability. Narratives of child murder, then, are one site at which the “groomer” trope appearsconsistently, and for this reason I focus on several such accounts throughout the series ofepisodes.Historical BackgroundHistorian Robert Beachy has described homosexuality as a “German invention.” Of course, therehave always been people who engage in romantic and sexual relationships with partners of thesame sex, but our modern conception of homosexuality as a distinct identity emerged relativelyrecently. Beachy points out that this development was a product of the social, political, and legalconditions of Germany in the mid-nineteenth century.1818 Robert Beachy, “The German Invention of Homosexuality,” The Journal of Modern History 82, no. 4 (2010):804–5.17 See Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Duke University Press, 2000);Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1992).6Germany saw many “firsts” in the realm of early gay rights activism during this timeperiod. It was the Hungarian-German journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny who coined the term“homosexual” in 1869 in two letters sent to the Prussian Minister of Justice advocating for thedecriminalization of homosexuality in an imminently unified Germany.19 Kertbeny and hiscontemporaries were ultimately unsuccessful in their advocacy efforts. Unified Germany didadopt the Prussian anti-sodomy statute into its penal code as Paragraph 175, but a growingnumber of activists continued to push for decriminalization.20 In 1897 Berlin, sexologist MagnusHirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual rightsorganization in the world.21 One year earlier, Adolf Brand had started publishing The Special(Der Eigene), the first gay magazine.22 It was these German activists who laid the foundation forthe first organized homosexual rights movement.The interwar period and foundation of a new German democracy—the Weimar Republic(1918–33)—saw the rise of a vibrant queer subculture, particularly in larger cities like Berlin.Activists including Hirschfeld and Brand continued to push for the decriminalization ofhomosexual acts and were joined by a new generation of homosexual rights activists, includingFriedrich Radszuweit, who led the League for Human Rights (Bund für Menschenrecht), the firstmass homosexual organization, which at its peak in the late 1920s had a membership of 65,000.23Although their methods were varied—Hirschfeld favored a scientific approach, while Brand’spublications emphasized individualism and glorified masculinity—together they pushed for theabolition of Paragraph 175.2424 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 5.23 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 5022 Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 5.21 Beachy, “The German Invention,” 806.20 Beachy, “The German Invention,” 804–805.19 Robert D. Tobin, “Kertbeny’s ‘Homosexuality’ and the Language of Nationalism,” in Genealogies of Identity(2005), ed. Margaret Sönser Breen and Fiona Peters, 3.7However, as Javier Samper Vendrell has argued, internal divisions within the Weimar-erahomosexual rights movement ultimately sabotaged their efforts at legal reform. Activists wereunable to come to a consensus on one issue in particular: age of consent. This issue loomedespecially large because as the homosexual rights movement became more visible and wieldedmore political influence in the tumultuous interwar period, a moral panic emerged over thealleged seduction of youth by homosexual men.25 Germany in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, then, is a useful starting point for contextualizing contemporary discoursearound LGBTQ+ “grooming.”The early homosexual rights movement in the United States was also deeply influencedby German activism. Many historical accounts of American homosexual rights activism begin inthe post-World War II period with the formation of the Mattachine Society, which historian JohnD’Emilio claims “mark[ed] the start of an unbroken history of homosexual and lesbianorganizing that continues to this day.”26 But such organizing had earlier roots in the UnitedStates. Frequently reduced to merely a footnote in accounts of American queer history, the firstdocumented American homosexual rights group—the Society for Human Rights—was foundedin 1924 Chicago by a young German-American, Henry Gerber, who was inspired by the work ofGerman activists to attempt to organize in the United States.27While serving in the United States Army, Gerber had been stationed in Germany in theearly 1920s and had been introduced to homosexual rights organizing in Berlin, where hesubscribed to some of the many German queer publications, attended lectures, and visitedMagnus Hirschfeld’s renowned Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft).2828 Elledge, 27.27 Jim Elledge, An Angel in Sodom: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement (Chicago: ChicagoReview Press, 2022), 20–28.26 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States,1940–1970, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), 2, 58, emphasis original.25 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 4.8Upon returning to Chicago, Gerber, along with a handful of other men, founded the Society forHuman Rights, named and modeled after Friedrich Radszuweit’s League for Human Rights. Hehoped to foster the kind of politically conscious homosexual community he had found inGermany—something which had not yet formed in the United States.As historian John D’Emilio pointed out, without the sense of a homosexual identity thathad emerged decades earlier in the German context, early American gay rights activists “had notonly to mobilize a constituency; first they had to create one.”29 German activists also had a singlepiece of legislation—Paragraph 175—against which to mobilize, while in the United States,anti-sodomy laws varied from state to state, making efforts at legal reform more challenging.Gerber later wrote that “[u]nlike Germany, where the homosexual was partially organized andwhere sex legislation was uniform for the whole country, the United States was in a condition ofchaos and misunderstanding concerning its sex laws, and no one was trying to unravel the tangleand bring relief to the abused.”30The Society for Human Rights fell apart after less than a year, without achieving any ofits political goals, but it did produce lasting ripple effects. In 1929, a seventeen-year-old namedHarry Hay met a man who mentioned he had been a “friend of Henry Gerber in Chicago” andhad been a member of the Society for Human Rights.31 This was Hay’s first introduction to thepossibility of political organizing for homosexual rights, and it stuck with him for the next twodecades. In 1950, Hay—whom activist Jim Kepner described as “hot to emulateGerber”32—founded the Mattachine Society. Like its German predecessor decades earlier, the32 Quoted in Elledge, 204.31 Elledge, 199.30 Henry Gerber, “The Society for Human Rights– 1925,” ONE magazine, September 1962, 6.29 D’Emilio, 5.9first American homosexual rights movement was accompanied by a panic over homosexualityand so-called “sexual psychopaths” committing sex crimes against children.33Transnational Organizing, Transnational HistoriesMy project builds on the works of previous generations of scholars who paved the way to writingqueer history. George Chauncey’s landmark 1994 book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture,and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 remains one of the foundational texts onqueer life in early twentieth-century America, inspiring Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplaceof a Modern Identity twenty years later. These two texts also reveal a feature common inscholarly accounts of queer history. Many of these histories apply narrow geographical scopes,often restricted to urban areas.34 But conceptualizing homosexual rights organizing in Germanyand the United States as disparate histories casts a limited understanding of queer history, whichis by no means confined by the somewhat arbitrary demarcations of regional or national borders.More recently, scholars have increasingly focused on transnational connections whenwriting queer history. In his book Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of theHolocaust, historian W. Jake Newsome, an interviewee on Groomer Rumor, adopts atransnational approach to analyzing queer organizing in the postwar decades. Focusing on howactivists in West Germany and the United States mobilized Holocaust memory in the struggle forgay emancipation, Newsome argues that these movements were not merely international butwere “truly transnational” in that their success was made possible through the interpersonal34 See for example Julio Capó, Jr., Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2017); James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (New York:Henry Holt and Co., 2022); Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019); MarcStein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2000).33 See Estelle Freedman, “Uncontrolled Desires: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,” Journal ofAmerican History 74, no. 1 (1987); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays andLesbians in the Federal Government, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).10connections and transatlantic flow of ideas between the two nations.35 Groomer Rumor builds onthis methodology by establishing that these transnational ties between queer activism inGermany and the United States can be found in the decades preceding World War II and byanalyzing anti-queerness as a lens through which to trace these connections.Format ReflectionBefore I began the drive from my hometown of Oxford, Mississippi to Vancouver, BritishColumbia, to begin my master’s program, I didn’t listen to podcasts. Only three years later, it’shard to imagine a time when they weren’t an integral part of my daily life. On the forty-hourdrive, my partner and I listened to season two of In the Dark. The host, Madeleine Baran,outlines in careful detail the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man on death row who had beentried six times for the same crime: a 1996 quadruple homicide committed at Tardy Furniture inWinona, Mississippi. The team of reporters for the podcast exposed unreliable informants,missing evidence, and continuous racial prejudice on the part of the District Attorney.36 Baran’sstorytelling stuck with me. It was compelling, thoroughly researched, and had a very tangibleimpact.37My graduate program in German Studies got off to a rocky start, not least because wewere still in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. I felt like I didn’t belong. I had never readHegel. Or Kant. Discussions in my biopolitics seminar about themes of alienation in the works ofKafka hit too close to home while I felt too far from it. Born from this sense of alienation from37 The podcast contributed directly to the exoneration of Curtis Flowers in 2020. See Alissa Zhu, “How aninvestigative podcast helped free Curtis Flowers,” Clarion Ledger, September 10, 2020,https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2020/09/10/how-investigative-podcast-in-dark-helped-free-curtis-flowers/5747054002/.36 Parker Yesko, “Will Doug Evans face accountability?,” APM Reports, October 14, 2020,https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/10/14/will-doug-evans-face-accountability.35 W. Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust, (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2022), 111–112.11academia was this project: a podcast master’s thesis written accessibly for a non-specialistaudience—perhaps, initially at least, because that’s how I saw myself.I’ve grown as a writer and researcher since then, and so has my confidence in the meritsof public-facing scholarship. Despite entering graduate school during the pandemic, my timingwas, in some ways, fortuitous; in recent years, more scholars have begun to emphasize thevalidity and importance of different modes of scholarship. In his 2017 acceptance speech for theTruman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, Kevin Birmingham spoke earnestly about theadjunctification of academia and the constraints imposed on the works of graduate students andearly career scholars—the need to “play it safe” because our research is so often ultimatelywritten in service of securing a tenure-track job.38 Anna Williams, who completed the first everpodcast dissertation in 2019, has also discussed the “homogenizing effect” that these formatlimitations have on academic research.39 When we imagine, or indeed create, a world in whichour skills and work are useful and readable only to those within our niche subfields, we do adisservice to ourselves, the public, and the profession in a moment where budget cuts tohumanities programs are dire.In her 2019 book Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University,Kathleen Fitzpatrick makes a compelling case for the need for academics to more meaningfullyengage in public-facing work. The initial knee-jerk reaction to this from within the academy canbe defensive. But the idea behind public scholarship has never been to invalidate the scholarlyconversations that are essential to academic research and usually inaccessible to those outside ofthe given subfield. Rather, it’s a call to supplement this dialogue with conversations written with39 Anna Williams, “Dissertation Innovations: A Podcast Dissertation,” MLA Profession, Modern LanguagesAssociation, accessed April 14, 2024. https://profession.mla.org/dissertation-innovations-a-podcast-dissertation/.38 Kevin Birmingham, “The Great Shame of Our Profession,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12,2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-great-shame-of-our-profession/.12alternative audiences in mind. The research academics do is often narrowly focused andtherefore may not immediately grab a public audience’s attention, especially when the work iswritten with other academics in mind. But this doesn’t mean our work is irrelevant to broaderaudiences; it just means it’s on us to contextualize our work for them and show them why it isrelevant. Fitzpatrick writes that “[w]e ought to be thinking about ways to ensure that wecommunicate our arguments—and especially those arguments with broad public interest orimplications—in order to engage readers where they are, rather than always forcing them tocome find us, in our venues and on our terms.”40 There are a million reasons for our audiencemembers not to enter the halls of the academy, and there are a million reasons why they shouldstill be afforded the opportunity to learn from and engage with our work, often at least partiallyfunded by their tax dollars.Still, many subfields of academia remain resistant to public scholarship. That I’ve beentasked with writing this format reflection, yet another part of this project that is not standardpractice in academic theses, is a testament to the fact that this work is not yet taken seriously inacademia, broadly speaking. It requires justification that traditional theses do not. I highlight thisdisparity not to suggest that I should not be asked to reflect on my format. On the contrary, Ibelieve that there is great utility in such a reflection, so much so that scholars conforming to thestatus quo may do well to engage with questions around the affordances and limitations of theirformat, as well.Narrative podcasting has afforded me the ability to write in a way that feels authentic in away traditional academic writing never did to me. Steven Lubar has critiqued the usage oflanguage like “applied” and “translational” when referring to publicly engaged scholarship40 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2019), 138.13because these terms “suggest we do our work, in our normal way, and then that it is thenconverted into something for the public.”41 For me, podcasting as a means of public scholarshiphas been liberating precisely because it affords me the ability to communicate my ideas in theregister in which I think and speak, without sacrificing academic rigor.Recent initiatives, including the University of British Columbia’s Public Humanities Hub,support such scholarship written for the “general public.” In writing Groomer Rumor, I amwriting for a public audience that I assume—safely, in my opinion—to be every bit as capable ofcritical thought and intellectual engagement as I am, and in many cases, likely more so. I put mywork out in public not to bestow onto them some wisdom I have been privy to during my time asa graduate student, but to make a scholarly contribution to a conversation that has been, for betteror for worse, playing out on a very public stage. This conversation has always belonged to thepublic.Episode OutlineGroomer Rumor is a transnational comparative study of this trope as it has manifested inGermany and the United States. Episode 1, “The Homosexual,” begins in late nineteenth-centuryGermany but focuses heavily on the interwar period. I discuss two murder cases: the Carl vonZastrow case (1869) and the Fritz Haarmann case (1924), both of which helped to amplify amoral panic over the alleged homosexual seduction of youth that gripped Germany during thistime. Episode 2, “The Sexual Psychopath,” uses the Leopold and Loeb case (1924) to juxtaposeAmerican discourse around sexuality with that of Germany, concluding with a discussion of thepost-World War II escalation of homophobia and fears of “sexual psychopathy.” Episode 3, “The41 Steven Lubar, “Seven Rules for Public Humanists,” Public Humanities & More, June 5, 2014,https://stevenlubar.net/public-humanities/seven-rules-for-public-humanists/.14Seducer,” focuses on the Nazi regime’s violent enforcement of homophobic policy and thenarratives that informed this. Episode 4, “The Recruiter,” discusses the West German gayliberation movement to contrast it with the political situation in the United States. The 1980spanic over “stranger danger” built on narratives of homosexual “recruitment,” proliferated byAnita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay campaign, to implicate queer men. Episode 5, “The Groomer,”concludes with an analysis of contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, emphasizing thedisproportionate hate directed towards trans people. The project’s transnational approach tracesthe deeply entangled queer histories of Germany and the United States, while highlighting thedistinct characteristics and implications of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in unique political, cultural,and temporal contexts.15EPISODE 1: THE HOMOSEXUALSusanna: “Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic.”42These are the opening lines of sociologist Stanley Cohen’s classic 1972 book, Folk Devils andMoral Panics.By Cohen’s definition, moral panics occur when “[a] condition, episode, person or group ofpersons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”43 Even if youhaven’t heard it articulated in this way, as a “moral panic,” chances are you’ve probably heard ofsome of the more famous ones.In the post-World War I era in the United States, jazz music was supposedly a sign of a fallingsociety—of American decadence run wild thanks to the rowdy, sexual youth culture of theRoaring 20s.44 According to one article in Ladies’ Home Journal,Speaker 1: “In so far as jazz dancing relaxes morality and undermines the institution of thefamily, it is an element of tremendously evil potentiality.”45Susanna: In the 1950s, America saw a panic over comic books. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’sinfamous 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, called for regulation of comic book sales,45 Quoted in Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 22.44 Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press,1977), 22.43 Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1.42 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd ed. (Abingdon, Oxon:Routledge, 2011), 1.16arguing that comics were linked to a rise in juvenile delinquency and characters like Batman andRobin implicitly endorsed homosexuality.46Speaker 2: “The difference between surreptitious pornographic literature for adults andchildren’s comic books is this: in one it is a question of attracting perverts, in the other of makingthem.”47Susanna: In the 1980s, we saw a panic over the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons &Dragons, which was ostensibly linked to satanism, mind control, and violence.48[clip from Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism (1989)]Documentary narrator: For some of these young people, their fixation on violence, evil, anddeath leads them to commit abominable crimes, including suicide and human sacrifice.49Susanna: We can see some trends emerging here: parental anxieties, youthful innocencecorrupted, and external threats to dominant societal institutions, like the family.49 Alt-Left Utopian, “Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism (1989) ‘Satanic Panic’ documentary,” YouTube video,June 6, 2023, 1:16. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Documentation/faq0359.html.48 Daniel Martin and Gary Alan Fine, “Satanic Cults, Satanic Play: Is ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ a Breeding Ground forthe Devil?” in The Satanism Scare, ed. Joel Best, David G. Bromley, and James T. Richardson(New York: de Gruyter, 1991), 108.47 Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 183.46 Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York, Rinehart, 1954); See also Carol L. Tilley, "Seducing theInnocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics," Information & Culture 47, no. 4(2012): 383; 393–95.17I mean hell, we can trace this all the way back to antisemitic tropes like blood libel, whichaccused Jewish people of murdering Christian children to use their blood for religious rituals.These things are all, in one way or another, interconnected. Find a cultural anxiety, blame it on asocial outgroup. It’s a tale as old as time.But the thing about cultural anxieties is that they’re, well, cultural. They work their way into theculture and do their best to stay there, and these moral panics help to achieve that. But this alsomeans that it can sometimes be harder to identify something as a moral panic when you’re in themidst of it. It feels to a lot of people like an appropriate response to a real threat—that’s whatmakes these panics work.Especially because we often scapegoat some abstracted version of a social outgroup—it’s notBlack people who are bringing about the fall of civilization, it’s jazz music. It’s not homosexuals,it’s comic books with homosexual themes. And we just want to protect our vulnerable childrenfrom these corrupting forces.Painting a person or group as a threat to children is one of the easiest and most effective ways tomobilize against them. I mean, I think if you asked most people the worst type of person theycould think of, you’d probably get some version of child abuser, child molester, and childmurderer pretty consistently. These are the people that our culture has collectively decided areevil, irredeemable, subhuman.18If you’re plugged into current events and politics, especially in the United States, butincreasingly across the globe, you’ve likely seen this playing out in real time, with the help ofone word in particular: groomer.[clip from The Ingraham Angle]Laura Ingraham: When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentiallygrooming centers for gender identity radicals?50[clip from 60 Minutes]Leslie Stahl: [quoting Marjorie Taylor Greene] “The democrats are a party of pedophiles.”Marjorie Taylor Greene: I would definitely say so. They support grooming children.51The term “grooming” typically describes the deliberate tactics used by an abuser to gain the trustof their victim in an effort to facilitate abuse. But in the last couple of years, it’s been co-opted bythe far right as a slur to smear all LGBTQ+ people who dare to exist around children. Recently,trans people have disproportionately been the focus of right-wing vitriol.51 MSNBC, “Rep. Taylor Greene calls Democrats ‘pedophiles’ on 60 Minutes,” YouTube video, April 3, 2023,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a7XmH5VIBU.50 Media Matters Staff, “Fox News chyron: ‘Liberals are sexually grooming elementary students,” Media Matters forAmerica, March 9, 2023,https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/fox-news-chyron-liberals-are-sexually-grooming-elementary-students19But this trope has a long history. Over the course of the last century, LGBTQ+ people have beenthe target of a moral panic that labels them child abusers, child murderers, and pedophiles whoare trying to recruit children into a cult of sexual deviance. We’ve seen cyclical resurgences ofthis panic arise with renewed support for “saving the children” from queer “corruption” and“contamination.”[theme music soft, growing louder]Over the next five episodes, we’ll be looking at where this idea came from, how it’s manifestedover the last century, and why we just can’t seem to get rid of it.This week, we’re taking a look at discourse around homosexuality in 1920s Germany, where wecan see proto-“groomer” rhetoric first starting to take root.I’m your host, Susanna Cassisa. And this is Groomer Rumor.[theme music]Susanna: Welcome to Groomer Rumor, the show where we dissect the history and function ofthe age-old trope of the queer predator who recruits, seduces, or—most recently—groomschildren.20At this point you might be wondering why I’m focusing on Germany. And it’s a fair question.The honest answer is a two-parter: first off, I’m producing this podcast as I’m working tocomplete a master’s degree in German Studies. So, it is a bit of a requirement.But as it turns out, Germany is also a really excellent place to start telling the story of modern“groomer” rhetoric. Lots of great scholars, some of whom you’ll hear from in the comingepisodes, have written about the history of similar narratives in Germany and in the UnitedStates, but what I noticed early on in the process of researching this podcast is that these scholarsare rarely in conversation with each other. And I want to make the case that looking at thesehistories side by side reveals some really interesting transnational dimensions of discoursearound homosexuality. So that’s what we’ll be doing in this series.So, why is Germany a logical place to start?Ervin: So those of us who are interested in the history of sexuality are very much intrigued bythe mid to late 19th century in a German context, because it’s been such an incredibly importantmoment in time that had a lot of different intellectuals, scientists, public advocates, public writerswho were trying to articulate what it is like to live life as a what we would today call a queerperson.5252 See Robert Deam Tobin, Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2015).21Susanna: This is Dr. Ervin Malakaj. He is an associate professor of German Studies at theUniversity of British Columbia. He’s also been a mentor for me as I’ve been working on thispodcast.Ervin: One of the major figures in the second half of the19th century who was affiliated withhomosexual rights organizing advocacy, is a person by the name of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, whowas an incredibly important precursor for some of the advocacy work that ends up emergingaround 1900 and moving forward in Germany history.He had been a lawyer, a public writer, was an openly out homosexual man who developed someof the early language for homosexuality that was positive in nature.Susanna: Ulrichs coins the term “Urning” in the 1860s, which is what he uses to refer to menwho are sexually attracted to other men.53Ervin: He understood homosexuality to be innate and had written a number of pamphlets inorder to sway some of his contemporaries to support queer people as best as they could.Susanna: On August 29, 1867, he attends a law convention in Munich and comes out publicly asan Urning and calls on his colleagues to push back against anti-sodomy laws. And he’s basicallykicked out of the convention for this.5454 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 10.53 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 11.22Ervin: And so the very name, the very term homosexual comes from this cultural context of thelate 19th century and was coined by the Austro-Hungarian public intellectual Karl MariaKertbeny, who among other people, including Karl Heinrich Ulrichs but also other sort of publicintellectuals, was coming up with terminology to describe this sexuality.Susanna: Until this time, sodomy, as it was commonly understood, was something onedid—something that anyone could do—and it was presumed to be the result of moral failure andsexual excess.55Ervin: So prior to this moment in time, you had various kinds of folkloric and/or religiouslyinspired terms that would describe queerness most prominently in the term sodomite.Susanna: The term sodomite, then, was merely a descriptive category to identify a criminal’soffense, like arsonist or thief. Homosexual, on the other hand, was an identity label thatdescribed a consistent sexual desire for partners of the same sex. And what’s notable about thisterm is that it’s coined in an explicitly political context—it’s used in a call for action to demandrights for these people that Kertbeny calls homosexuals.56Ervin: And so when people write queer history, one of the places where they find quite a lot ofevidence for queer life is in the sort of criminal context. And so there’s an association ofqueerness with criminal life just by the nature of a lot of the quote unquote evidence for queerlife in the 19th century coming from within the criminal discourse.56 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 17.55 Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1998), 26.23Susanna: Of course, queer life has never been confined solely to a criminal context. Socriminality should not be our primary lens for telling queer history. But what I’m trying to get atin this series is not a social history of queer life and queer experiences. Instead, I’m trying toanalyze how, broadly, our understanding of sexuality is shaped by certain narratives andtropes—specifically, the trope of the queer child predator.And this trope has really taken shape in the criminal context and in particular in media coverageof child murders allegedly committed by queer perpetrators. So child murder is a useful site foranalyzing the discourse around sexuality in different moments throughout history, and we’ll beusing that as kind of a guiding framework throughout the series.So let’s start with one from 1869—the Carl von Zastrow case.Ervin: The Carl von Zastrow case is super interesting, very important, and also a very painfulkind of moment in queer history because it becomes one of the major public spectacles at thecenter of queer life in the 19th century.Susanna: In 1867, the body of a teenage baker’s apprentice was discovered in a park in Berlin.His death was the result of extreme sexual violence.5757 Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 33; Scott Spector, ViolentSensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 100.There are some minor discrepancies between accounts of the Zastrow scandal. For instance, Beachy gives the boy’sage as sixteen, while Spector’s account claims he was fifteen.24Ervin: [Y]ou have this kind of cultural moment where a primal fear of parents is kind ofactivated. The fear that there is an unknown, all powerful threat to the wellbeing and lives oftheir children.Susanna: Two years later, there’s another attempted murder—equally as brutal. This time, it’s afive-year-old boy who actually survives the attack.58Ervin: And in public media, this kind of fear had variously been activated in really successfulways in order to basically organize entire communities against a perceived threat, namely that ofwhat becomes a very common trope in 20th century cultural life—that of this sort of likepredatory homosexual man.Susanna: Carl von Zastrow was an easy scapegoat: he was an openly homosexual man, who hada history of run-ins with the law.59Ervin: And they absolutely wanted to make an example of someone. So he was arrested. He hadbeen put into trial.Susanna: His trial begins in the summer of 1869, and his desire for consensual relations withother adult men becomes conflated with a tendency toward sexual violence against children,59 Spector, Violent Sensations, 106.58 Spector, Violent Sensations, 100.25despite his insistence that he is not attracted to younger boys.60 He’s ultimately found guilty andsentenced to 15 years in prison, where he dies in 1877, still maintaining his innocence.61Ervin: But one of the more important aspects of the trial was that it ended up pushing queertopics into the public discourse for the better or for worse.Susanna: I find the Carl von Zastrow case illustrative in a couple of ways:First, it shows us the association that existed between homosexuality and criminality andviolence—an association that persisted well into the twentieth century and arguably still today.62But more specifically, the case also shows us that around the time homosexuality came to beunderstood as a unique sexual orientation that existed in opposition to heterosexuality (which isalso a new concept), homosexuality was associated with sexual violence against children. Imean, people like Kertbeny and Ulrichs get involved in this case and start trying to push backagainst this narrative that queer people pose some sort of inherent sexual threat to children.63Ervin: And so there’s a direct linking of queer desire, pederast sexuality, but also sexual abusethat all kind of gets variously kind of encoded in this one name Carl von Zastrow. And a lot ofsort of media culture at the time was an incredibly important disseminator and facilitator of whatbecame one of the early sort of high-profile queer panics in the world.63 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 77.62 Spector, Violent Sensations, 103.61 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 11; Beachy, Gay Berlin, 35–36.60 Beachy, Gay Berlin, 34; Spector, Violent Sensations, 103–106; Tobin, Peripheral Desires, 11–12.26Susanna: This association hadn’t yet taken the shape of the full-blown moral panic that I want tofocus on throughout this series, but the Zastrow case was sowing the seeds for it.And in a moment where these early activists are fighting for decriminalization, this scandal helpsto really solidify public support for an anti-sodomy law. And so in the new criminal code, thislaw becomes Paragraph 175, which prohibits sex between men.64And it’s in response to this law that we see the first organized homosexual rights movement inthe world, which really gets its feet off the ground at the very tail end of the nineteenth century.Ervin: One of the major moments in sort of queer cultural history is 1897 with the foundation ofthe Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which isfounded by among others Magnus Hirschfeld, a really important sexologist and homosexualrights advocate at the time, who develops this kind of organ by which to connect to variouspublic figures, but also individual actors in building what ends up commonly referred to as thefirst homosexual rights movement.Susanna: Hirschfeld is an important character who will come up in future episodes. His work isreally central to the early gay rights movement, and his advocacy efforts are largely driven byscientific thought.65 He believes homosexuality is an inborn characteristic and for that reason, itshouldn’t be criminalized.66 So the Scientific Humanitarian Committee produces a lot of research66 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 22.65 Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 11.64 Beachy, Gay Berlin, 46.27on human sexuality and uses that research to campaign against discrimination that queer peoplefaced.67Ervin: Next to the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee we have in 1903 the formation of theGemeinschaft der Eigenen or the Association of the Self or Own-willed that gets founded by avery important early queer rights figure named Adolf Brand.Susanna: Adolf Brand publishes the first homosexual magazine in 1896. But his approach isvery different from Hirschfeld’s. Brand has a much more libertarian approach. He believes in theinherent freedom of the individual.68So at the turn of the century, you have these different strains of thought emerging.Javier: Hirschfeld and Brand, they laid the groundwork for homosexual emancipation.Susanna: This is Dr. Javier Samper Vendrell. He’s an Assistant Professor of German at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, and his first book, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture andHomosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic, came out in 2020.Javier: The Weimar Republic is the period of German history between 1918 and 1933, so whatwe call the interwar period, it was Germany’s first constitutional republic, and it emerged out ofpolitical, social and economic turmoil that the First World War brought about.68 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 5.67 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 5.28Susanna: So Germany is a democracy for the first time, and this new constitution is one of themost liberal in history, which allows for the homosexual rights movement that’s been in theworks for many decades at this point, it really allows it to flourish to a certain extent.69Ervin: I want to be careful not to oversell this enthusiasm because the first years after the warwere incredibly challenging. This was not an ideal context for queer rights organizing andvariously interrupted a lot of the work by some of the major figures.Susanna: But within the first couple of years after the war, you do see this really remarkableresurgence in queer rights organizing.Ervin: Hirschfeld founds in 1919 the Institute for Sexual Science, and it becomes a majorcultural and scientific institution in the Weimar Republic internationally for the better part of adecade.Susanna: Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was an incredibly important feature of queerlife in the Weimar Republic. It served as a kind of combination research institution, library andarchive, museum, medical clinic, and advocacy center. The Institute employed queer people whomay have had trouble finding jobs, and many of these employees lived on site at the Institute.Ervin: And as a result, the importance of the Weimar period for queer rights organizing, I thinkcannot be overstated because it was a drastically new moment of enthusiasm.69 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 38.29Javier: The movement during the Weimar Republic, however, belonged to a new generation ofgay men and so on, belonged to a new generation of queer women, trans people who had beenborn already in the 20th century or around the turn of the century, and for whom homosexualitywas not a secret anymore, like it had been for men and women from an earlier generation.So here's where we enter Friedrich Radszuweit, the person I’ve written mostly about.Susanna: Friedrich Radszuweit was born in 1876, so technically speaking he really belonged tothe generation of Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Brand.70Javier: But he did not identify with them much. He was more attuned to the needs of theyounger generation and he was aware that they wanted to be informed, they wanted to have fun,but they were asking for a community. And he responded to that.Susanna: Radszuweit was really pragmatic—he was a businessman. And he wanted to run thegay rights movement like a business.71Javier: He chose to fight for gay rights, but through sort of popular culture.Susanna: Radszuweit wants to entertain as well as inform members of the homosexual rightsmovement.71 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 39.70 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 5.30Javier: And this is something that is very interesting because we see how the development of thequeer rights movement is connected to consumer culture and capitalism in a way.Susanna: Radszuweit led the League for Human Rights, the first mass homosexual organizationin Germany. And the numbers this organization attracted are kind of astounding and speak to justhow prominent the movement was. In the spring of 1923, the League for Human Rights had2,780 members throughout the country. One year later, its membership was more than 12,000,peaking in 1927 at 65,000.72 But with these impressive numbers came some significantlimitations.Javier: So the League for Human Rights, so his organization, did not blatantly exclude people,but it did stress that inclusion and the right to be sort of visible as a gay person was contingent onrespectable behavior.Susanna: So Radszuweit prioritizes conformity, assimilation right? He’s pushing for gay rightsbut really at the cost of queer people who are marginalized in other ways.Javier: For him, only the productive the white—he doesn’t talk about race that much, but youknow, the underlying assumption that white, cis, cisgender men, who contributed to the wealthand the health of the nation are those who should enjoy the privilege of being out to family, tofriends at work, while still keeping their sexual lives in private.72 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 49–50.31Susanna: But despite these limitations, Radszuweit’s publications through the League forHuman Rights are widely available at newsstands across the country, and this helps define thegay rights movement of the Weimar Republic and also fuel the moral panic over the seduction ofyouth. And a tricky aspect of this is that Radszuweit, along with Adolf Brand, actually feed intothis panic by including sexualized photos of adolescent boys in their publications.73Javier: He was a businessman. He knew that in order to sell magazines, he had to make themsexy, he had to make them alluring. And he knew that his readers wanted to see young men onthe covers.Susanna: But this is pretty contradictory to his respectability politics, right? I mean in one breathhe’s claiming respectability, and in the next he’s essentially providing the fuel for this moralpanic.Javier: So their stories and images seem to confirm what psychiatrists and conservativecommentators were saying all along.Susanna: This plays into the kind of Greek model of homosexuality—this glorification ofpederasty, or sex between older men and underage boys that, to be clear, did exist within themovement. But that didn’t mean that homosexual men were seducing youth. I mean, think abouthow teenage girls are sexualized even still today—it’s not good, but it also doesn’t make straightmen unanimously seducers of young girls somehow.73 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 64.32But this imagery that’s present in Radszuweit’s publications feeds into this narrative that it’shomosexual propaganda that’s corrupting the youth and corroding the nuclear family.Javier: Homosexual propaganda was the, sort of the big issue for them, and propaganda youknow, we could count the magazines, examples of that, and the work that Hirschfeld was doingas well.Susanna: One of the targets of this panic over homosexual propaganda was a 1919 film calledAnders als die Andern, which translates to Different from the Others. The film is co-written byMagnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald.74 Dr. Ervin Malakaj recently published a book on thefilm, so I spoke with him about it and the controversies that surrounded it at the time.75Ervin: [S]o Anders all die Andern is a film about Paul Koerner, an accomplished musician, amusician who lives a very comfortable upper middle-class life and who falls in love with astudent of his, a younger man by the name of Kurt Sivers.Susanna: The two of them are happy in their relationship until one day, during a stroll in thepark, they encounter a man who blackmails Koerner, threatening to out Koerner as homosexualif he doesn’t pay up.7676 For a summary of the film, see Malakaj, Anders als die Andern, xii–xvii.75 See Malakaj, Anders als die Andern.74 Ervin Malakaj, Anders als die Andern, (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023), 8.33Ervin: And Koerner initially gives in and at one point is fed up with it, rejects him and theblackmailer does exactly what he promised and the social consequences of this publicannouncement of his queerness through Paragraph 175 cost Koerner his livelihood, hisrelationship with Sivers, and ultimately leads to his suicide.Susanna: It’s a very sad movie, and it ends with a call to abolish Paragraph 175. And this call toaction actually comes directly from Magnus Hirschfeld, who basically plays himself in themovie.Ervin: So the main point of this film is through a very convincing, sentimental, emotionallycharged storyline to convey to the public why Paragraph 175, this legal codex is causing quite alot of harm to respectable gays, respectable citizens, in fact.Susanna: What’s interesting is that in a way, the critics were right: Anders als die Andern waspropaganda that very explicitly advocated for legal reform to improve the lives of queer peoplein Germany.Ervin: It premiered in 1919 and became something of a sort of like sensation on the filmlandscape because people were absolutely intrigued by the very idea that a film would feature, atits core, a gay love story. Like this was absolutely a drawing point for a lot of audiences. And itbecame kind of like a more or less successful movie with regard to box office success. But it alsoinspired quite a lot of backlash.34Susanna: Film was still quite a new medium at this point, so by depicting homosexual lovebetween the two men on the big screen, Anders als die Andern caused a huge scandal.Ervin: And so what ended up happening in the discourse around this film, it was accused ofeverything you can imagine of like from, you know, being an assault to the nation, to being anassault on a family, to being dangerous for children, to being dangerous for women in a lot of ina lot of really kind of bizarre ways, but in a lot of bizarre ways that had material effects for,negative effects for quite a lot of people.It didn’t quell the interest in the movie. If anything, it kind of interested audiences more in it, butit was definitely a contested film. Shocked everybody.Susanna: And ultimately this controversy led to an official ban of the film on October 16, 1920and contributed to the reimplementation of censorship laws in general in the Weimar Republic.After this point, only certain physicians and researchers could screen the film, and even theseviewers had to jump through censorship hoops to be able to watch it.77 Cinema seemed adangerous medium that had the potential to pervert young minds with immoral ideals.In particular, the relationship between Paul Koerner, the violin teacher, and Kurt Sivers, hispupil, seemingly embodied conservatives’ worst fears about homosexuality and the increasinglyvisible homosexual rights movement.77 Malakaj, Anders als die Andern, 58; Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 11–12; See also James D. Steakley“Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders Als Die Andern,” Film History 11, no. 2(1999): 181–203.35As we discussed in the Carl von Zastrow case, homosexuality had long been associated withpederasty, or sex between an older man and an underage boy, so there was already fear that gaymen were preying on youth. But in this cultural moment of the Weimar Republic, these fearsmorph into a panic over youth being seduced into homosexuality. So the relationship betweenKoerner and Sivers didn’t have to be violent in order for these anxieties to be activated. On thecontrary, it was perhaps this tenderness of their on-screen relationship that was most threateningto these critics.78Ervin: [I]t’s precisely this kind of gentle presentation of their life, life and love with one anotherthat irked conservative critics the most because it actually from the standards of contemporaryaudiences, this is a kind of a boring gay couple.This is not like a set of, you know, queer rights in the streets, you know, destroy the patriarchyand, you know, straight culture is killing us. It’s actually like, what would the kids today wouldcall, like a homonormal relationship among two well-off white men, you know.Susanna: And so the film is accused of essentially normalizing queerness in a way that is notjust dangerous to children, but also to the family and to the state, which is trying to repopulate inthe aftermath of World War I and the mass death it brought about. And so if children are seducedinto homosexuality, this directly threatens these efforts.Javier: And in the postwar period, we have psychiatrists like William Stern, who is makingthese arguments about seduction and theorizing about it. In fact, he believes that in postwar78 Malakaj, Anders als die Andern, 58.36Germany there was like an epidemic of seduction and that youths were just, you know, becominghomosexual in a way that they had never before.79Gay men had a potential to be seducers to make your child gay, so to speak.Susanna: An “epidemic of seduction.” Of course, there was no data to support this—Stern wasessentially basing this claim on vibes alone. But there were particular social, cultural, andpolitical circumstances that allowed this panic to proliferate in the early 1920s. Nearly 2 millionGerman men died in World War I, leaving a gender imbalance in the population, which led tosome serious anxieties about traditional gender roles and the birth rate.80Javier: This context is important for us in order to understand how did this trope of this strangerlurking in the dark, it’s become such a pervasive, homophobic trope.We have this sort of social anxiety, this sort of rapidly changing world. And then we also havesort of this science backing these sort of theories. And we have mass media like we’ve never hadbefore spreading this message. And makes it stick. And moral panics work this way.Susanna: The media was absolutely critical in spreading this panic, often focusing on storiesthat supported these claims and using language that painted homosexual men as sexual predators.And in the summer of 1924, a story broke that fed perfectly into this narrative.80 See Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 27–28.79 See Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 16–37.37A couple of kids who were playing by the river in Hannover discovered a human skull. Within afew weeks, many more bone fragments were discovered—all from boys roughly fourteen toeighteen years old. One June 23, police arrested Fritz Haarmann, who confessed to sexuallyassaulting and killing somewhere between fifty and seventy young boys and men.81Susanna: And this story is huge. I mean, there’s even a little children’s song that comes out ofthis called the Haarmannlied that warns kids about how a killer is coming to make mincemeatout of them.[clip from Haarmannlied]Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen,bald kommt Haarmann auch zu dir,mit dem kleinen Hackebeilchen,macht er Schabefleisch aus dir.Aus den Augen macht er Sülze,aus dem Hintern macht er Speck,aus den Därmen macht er Würsteund den Rest, den schmeißt er weg.Susanna: Fritz Lang’s film, M, one of the more famous cultural products to come out of theWeimar Republic, even opens with children singing a version of this song, although they don’t81 Theodor Lessing, “Haarmann: The Story of a Werewolf,” in Monsters of Weimar, 13–156, trans. Mo Croasdale(London: Nemesis, 1993), 17–19; Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 125.38use Haarmann’s name. So all of that’s to say, this really captures the country in a moment wherethere’s already so much anxiety about the wellbeing and safety of children.82Javier: But what is important about this is that the case of Fritz Haarmann, particularly,confirmed these theories and these beliefs of seduction.Susanna: In the popular imagination, it was Fritz Haarmann’s homosexuality that led him tokill.83Javier: But the media play a huge role in sort of creating a media sensation about this. Courtproceedings were being published daily in the press, and people were following this, wereexcited about this.Susanna: He was tried for twenty-seven and found guilty of twenty-four murders and wasbeheaded on April 25, 1925.84 But his specter stuck around. The way Haarmann had told hisstory, he would go to the train station to pick up boys, often ones who had run away from home,which made them harder to trace.85Javier: And he would offer them some food or a place to stay for the night. And that’s the waythat he then abused them sexually and murdered them. So that cemented this idea that thehomosexual man was a potential predator.85 Lessing, “Haarmann: The Story of a Werewolf,” 35–36; Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 125.84 Lessing, “Haarmann: The Story of a Werewolf,” 129, 151; Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 126.83 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 126.82 See Javier Samper Vendrell, “The Queer Threat to Civilization in Fritz Lang's M.,” The Germanic Review:Literature, Culture, Theory 92, no. 3 (2017): 264–279.39Susanna: Perhaps one of the less intentional messages of this podcast is that true crime hasalways been a lurid point of fascination, a site where cultural narratives are embedded andnegotiated, where “evil” is given a face that invariably seems to align with our own expectationsand confirm our fears, channeling them toward the threat of the outsider. True crime is, for allintents and purposes, modern folklore.And this was absolutely the case in the coverage of Fritz Haarmann’s trial. The writer TheodorLessing documented the details of the murders and the trial in a piece called “Haarmann: TheStory of a Werewolf.” Haarmann did actually bite his victims, and there were rumors that he soldtheir flesh on the black market, which earned him the title of “werewolf” or “vampire.” But theusage of the extended werewolf metaphor also reflects the belief that Haarmann was a seducercontaminating youth, that his bite would imbue his victims with his own monstrous sexuality.And Lessing’s account really focused on Haarmann’s sexuality. According to Lessing, by the ageof seven,Speaker 3: “He had been corrupted by an early experience at school [...] and this turned him intoa corruptor of other small boys.”86Susanna: The imagery Lessing used fed right into the biases the German public already held.86 Lessing, “Haarmann: The Story of a Werewolf,” 24.40Speaker 3: “Any boys he liked (homeless, runaways, unemployed) were offered food, work andaccommodation; they stayed with him for a night, or several nights, when he seduced them andthen murdered them in sexual passion.”87Susanna: The mainstream press indicted the entire homosexual emancipation movement.Speaker 4: “Magnus Hirschfeld and his followers function like a mushroom spreadingcorruption … These demons damage the body of the German youth and poison the German soul,and rob the purity of the German mind.”88Susanna: Another, blending homophobia and antisemitism in a way that would soon be standardunder the Nazis, claimed that Hirschfeld and his allies,Speaker 5: “with the conscious backing of the Jewish press, are unleashing a contagiousplague.”89Javier: So the media plays a huge role in sort of creating this panic at the time.Susanna: These excerpts really capture the homophobic ethos of the moment: the homosexualemancipation movement was a highly contagious force of corruption not just to individual menand boys who were seduced by perverse homosexual men or deviant propaganda, but to thenation as a whole.89 Quoted in Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton University Press, 1995), 56.88 Quoted in Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 126.87 Lessing, “Haarmann: The Story of a Werewolf,” 35–36.41Javier: And this is very interesting because in the gay press, in Radszuweit’s publications, all ofthis was debated.Susanna: Radszuweit and the League for Human Rights were placed on the defensive, forced todefend themselves from accusations that they were somehow associated with or even responsiblefor the crimes of Fritz Haarmann. In many publications, Radszuweit and his followersemphasized their commitment to law and order, collaborating with the police to help findmissing youth by publishing missing persons reports.90To further distance themselves from violence against youth, Radszuweit’s publicationsmaintained that true homosexuals had nothing at all in common with Fritz Haarmann. In onepublication, the editors firmly stated:Speaker 6: “It is our opinion that we are not dealing here with a homosexual, but rather with asadist, who probably had accidentally run into this youth, and who under different circumstanceswould have acted upon a girl in the same way.”91Javier: And I think it’s fascinating how this sort of idea of protection of children becamesomething that even, you know, gained a foothold within the gay rights movement.91 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 126.90 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 127.42Susanna: At any chance he got, Radszuweit emphasized that the movement was committed toprotecting children and stood for law and order. When other boys went missing, supposedly atthe hands of homosexual men, Radszuweit urged his readers to collaborate with the police.92Javier: But then definitely the fact that there were these murders and that they were so mediaties was very important in sort of creating this panic over time.Susanna: Ultimately, these anxieties over the seduction of youth contributed to the downfall ofthe homosexual rights movement in the Weimar Republic. The movement was divided over theissues of seduction and age of consent, among others.93Javier: In 1929, the German parliament, a subcommittee was debating whether to decriminalizemale same sex acts. And in the end, the issue of age of consent and the possibility of seductionwas what kept it on the books.Susanna: In an effort to prove that respectable homosexual men had no interest in seducingyouth, Radszuweit supported implementing a higher age of consent and criminalizing male sexwork in exchange for the decriminalization of same-sex acts between consenting adult men. Butin doing so, he really lent legitimacy to the trope of the homosexual predator.94Javier: It was a concession that he was willing to make, even though it was a slippery slope.94 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 146.93 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 146.92 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 127–128.43Susanna: He vowed that if this goal was achieved,Speaker 6: “homosexual propaganda would stop and no one would speak about homosexualityever again, so that this matter disappears completely from public discussion, just as it is the casein other states, where there are no laws against homosexuality.”95Susanna: Radszuweit’s need to promote the image of homosexual respectability came at a cost.The conservatives he aligned himself with aimed for decriminalization not for the benefit of gaymen, but to silence so-called homosexual propaganda. On October 16, 1929, the Criminal LawCommittee voted to remove Paragraph 175 from the criminal code with caveats around sex workand age of consent, although the economic crisis and the impending rise of the Nazi Partyprevented the proposed amendment from being implemented.96The Weimar Republic was a promising moment for homosexual rights activism, but theconservative backlash stalled any formal legal successes the movement might have enjoyed, inpart because of gay activists’ own collaboration with homophobic reactionaries.Friedrich Radszuweit’s methods were deeply flawed and often contradictory, but he neverthelessplayed an important role in homosexual rights activism in Germany and across the globe.96 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 150–54.95 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 146.44Next episode, we’ll be discussing the situation in the United States in the 1920s, and learningabout a German-American gay man inspired by Radszuweit to import the German model of gayactivism back to the United States. I hope you’ll join.45EPISODE 2: THE SEXUAL PSYCHOPATHSusanna: I want to tell you about an American murder case that has been on my mind for thelast year or so. This case has a lot of parallels to the case of Fritz Haarmann, the German serialkiller who sexually abused and murdered young men and boys in Hannover.This one was playing out at the same time as the Haarmann case—both a hundred years ago, inthe summer of 1924. And both were huge media sensations. And, like the Haarmann case,looking at the media coverage of this case can tell us a lot about how sexuality wasconceptualized and talked about—or not talked about—in early twentieth-century America.If you’re getting curious about this case, then yay, that means I’m doing my job. But I’m goingto leave you hanging for a moment because I want to briefly tell you about someone else whosestory can also give us a peek into how sexuality was understood in the Roaring 20s. Someonewho notably did not attract media attention. And someone who, like we did in the last episode,learned about homosexual rights activism in Germany through the work of Friedrich Radszuweitand Magnus Hirschfeld. His name is Henry Gerber. He was a German immigrant who settled inChicago, and he’s an important but often forgotten figure in queer American history.Jazz Age Chicago was home to many queer people. But unlike in Germany, where you have thisreally robust homosexual rights movement in the interwar period, this kind of activism wasnonexistent in the US at this point.46So when Henry Gerber enlists in the army and is stationed in Germany in the early 20s, heencounters this kind of politically driven homosexual movement for the first time, and he’s reallyimpressed. We don’t know too much about what he was up to in the few years he was there, butwe know he went to Berlin in his free time, where he would have been able to connect with othergay men and learn about Magnus Hirschfeld, Friedrich Radszuweit, and Adolf Brand, the leadersof the German gay rights movement. We know he subscribed to some of the many queerpublications that were available, and we know he visited Hirschfeld’s Institute for SexualScience.97When he returned stateside in 1923, he was feeling energized and inspired and he decided hewanted to give this whole activism thing a try.But there were some bumps in the road. Homosexuality was a hot topic in Germany, but in theUS, it was not openly discussed in the media. And Germany had Paragraph 175, which appliedto the whole country, but anti-sodomy laws in the US varied from state to state, meaning therewasn’t one, uniform piece of legislation against which to fight.98But Gerber was stubborn and crotchety even in his early 30s, so these minor snags weren’t goingto stop him. Once he was back in Chicago, he and a handful of other gay men founded the firsthomosexual rights organization in America in December of 1924. They called it the Society forHuman Rights, named after Friedrich Radszuweit’s League for Human Rights. Their stated goalsincluded hosting educational lectures and advocating for legal reform of anti-sodomy laws. They98 Henry Gerber, “The Society for Human Rights– 1925,” ONE magazine, September 1962, 6.97 Jim Elledge, An Angel in Sodom: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement (Chicago: ChicagoReview Press, 2022), 18–28.47even briefly published a newsletter, which they called Friendship and Freedom, an homage toone of Adolf Brand’s publications.99 And, I guess noting the charges his German comrades werefacing, Gerber also included in their outlined goals that they would “urge against the seduction ofadolescents.”100It was a short-lived organization that never really got off the ground. Gerber and his co-founderswere arrested in the summer of 1925 after one member’s 12-year-old daughter reported them tothe police.101 Gerber later recalls the detective asking him, “What was the idea of the Society forHuman Rights anyway? Was it to give you birds the legal right to rape every boy on thestreet?”102Henry Gerber had spent months writing letters petitioning for support and had blown through hisentire life’s savings between promoting his organization, bailing out his friends, and losing hisjob after his arrest, which was enough to crush the excitement he’d once had for the Society forHuman Rights.103Several decades later, Gerber remembered his arrest being featured in a front page article underthe headline “STRANGE SEX CULT EXPOSED.”104 In reality, the 150-word article was tuckedaway on page 11 of the newspaper beneath the somewhat less salacious headline: “GIRL104 Gerber, 8.103 Gerber, 10.102 Gerber, 10.101 Gerber, 8.100 Gerber, “The Society for Human Rights– 1925,” 6.99 Elledge, An Angel in Sodom, 37–41.48REVEALS STRANGE CULT RUN BY DAD.”105 Nowhere in the article did it mention thepurpose of the Society for Human Rights, or anything about homosexuality for that matter.I think Henry Gerber’s story is so interesting, especially when you look at it against the backdropof what’s going on in Germany at the time. And looking at it this way also brings up some reallyinteresting questions. The detective makes this comment about Gerber supposedly wanting to“rape every boy on the street,” so there’s already an association between homosexuality andpederasty in America at this point. But the Society for Human Rights and its downfall barelymakes local news, let alone national. It certainly would have in the German context, but it wasapparently of little interest to an audience in the states.Why didn’t Gerber’s activism and arrest turn more heads? Why is the nation’s first gay rightsorganization so often forgotten in accounts of America’s queer history? And what can 1920sAmerica tell us about the moral panic we’re in the midst of now, 100 years later?[theme music soft, growing louder]To try to get at some answers to these questions, we’re going to take a look at a classic Americanmurder-turned-media circus. Because apparently even in the 1920s, a story sold for its sex andviolence was something Americans just couldn’t resist.I’m your host, Susanna Cassisa. And this is Groomer Rumor.105 “Girl Reveals Strange Cult Run by Dad,” Chicago Evening American, July 13, 1925.49[theme music]Susanna: Welcome back to Groomer Rumor, the show where we dissect the history and functionof the age-old trope of the queer predator who recruits, seduces, or—most recently—groomschildren.Last week, Drs. Ervin Malakaj and Javier Samper Vendrell joined us to discuss the moral panicthat Germany experienced in the 1920s, where parents, educators, and government officials werereally concerned about so-called “homosexual propaganda” turning the children gay. And thiswas sometimes articulated through news coverage of murder, like the Fritz Haarmann case.But this wasn’t the case in the United States—at least, not yet.On May 22, 1924, just as Henry Gerber was returning from his time stationed in Germany, andjust five days after the first remains of Fritz Haarmann’s victims were discovered, news breaksabout the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy in Chicago named Bobby Franks.106Like with Henry Gerber, Bobby Franks isn’t a name that is widely recognized today, but it’smuch more likely that you’ve heard the names of his killers: Nathan Leopold and RichardLoeb.107107 For a thorough overview of the case, see Hal Higdon, Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case (NewYork: Putnam, 1975).106 Erik Rebain, Arrested Adolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023),54–55.50Erik: Turns out they did it. They killed this 14-year-old.Susanna: This is Erik Rebain. He’s a librarian and archivist and the author of ArrestedAdolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold, which came out in 2023. I spoke with himabout the Leopold and Loeb case.Erik: They are extremely well educated. They have both graduated from college, even thoughthey’re 18 and 19 years old.Susanna: People are totally shocked that these young men who seem to have it all wouldcommit this crime in cold blood.Erik: Yeah. Their fathers, even back in the ’20s, their families were millionaires.Susanna: Despite their wealth and privilege, Leopold and Loeb had planned the murder formonths with the intent to commit the “perfect crime.”108Erik: The motives that Leopold and Loeb gave were really—it was, “we wanted to do it,”basically. Like “we thought it would be fun to specifically commit a ransom.” Like what Loebhad wanted to do was a ransom scheme. He wanted to successfully pull it off because he thoughtit was a really difficult crime.108 Rebain, 42–44.51Susanna: But in order to pull that off, they decided they’d have to kill their victim so theycouldn’t be identified.109Erik: Leopold and Loeb tried to get a ransom from Bobby Franks’s father after he was alreadydead.Susanna: They had chosen Bobby Franks at random—he just happened to be walking homefrom school alone as Leopold and Loeb were driving by, looking for a victim.Erik: The murder was just, “OK, well, he would probably—whoever we kidnapped wouldprobably be able to identify us and incriminate us. So we’ll have to kill him.”Susanna: And it was this—the random choice of victim and the months of carefulplanning—that really disturbed people.Erik: It wasn’t out of passion. It wasn’t for money. And so people just thought it’s this horriblething that they could not understand.If they can go wrong and no one noticed, you know, no one saw this coming.Susanna: So instantly, the media started churning out explanations for how and why this couldhave happened.109 Rebain, 43.52Erik: Yeah, it’s fascinating because the most dominant narrative, the reason why the most peoplewere saying this must have happened is education: either secular education, or they were beingtaught evolution, or they were over-educated like they, they had too much book learning and notenough hard work.Susanna: Just as this crime is hitting the newsstands, I mean literally like two days after Leopoldand Loeb confess, the Child Labor Amendment is proposed.110Erik: So some people said if they had done hard labor as children, this wouldn’t have happenedbecause they would have been more stable and more normal, again with the over-education kindof thing.Susanna: So just in case you think the panic over college students and their gender studies issomething new, 1920s anti-intellectualism literally said college educations were causing the kidsto murder.Erik: There were, of course, a lot of other causes. There was, you know, drinking and too muchwealth. Definitely just because, you know, they had their parents, didn’t watch them closeenough and they just gave them money and they just ran wild.110 Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University ofIllinois Press, 1994), 96.53Susanna: The lack of parental supervision issue was especially prevalent in the post-World WarI era when many more women were entering the workforce and weren’t staying home with theirchildren.Erik: The KKK got involved, you know, they have their own newspapers and they’re like,obviously it’s because they’re Jewish. Jewish newspapers said no. It’s because they weren’tJewish enough.Susanna: So, this case tapped into a lot of cultural anxieties that were bubbling up in theRoaring ’20s: debates about criminality and capital punishment, concerns about youth andjuvenile delinquency, and, of course, sex.111Something I haven’t mentioned yet is that Leopold and Loeb had a sexual relationship with eachother.Leila: I would say in general, the United States was behind Germany in terms of thinking aboutsexuality, partly because most of the sexologists came out of Europe.111 See David S. Churchill, “The Queer Histories of a Crime: Representations and Narratives of Leopold and Loeb.”Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 2 (2009): 287–324; Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: TheLeopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,” The Journal of American History 80, no. 3 (1993): 919–951; Paul B.Franklin, “Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of ‘Babe’ Leopold Jr.and Richard ‘Dickie’ Loeb,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, andAnn Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 121–48; Charles E. Morris III, “Passing by Proxy:Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of Leopold and Loeb,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 3(2005): 264-290, Jordan Schildcrout, “Queer Justice: The Retrials of Leopold and Loeb,” Journal of AmericanCulture 34, no. 2 (2011): 175-188.54Susanna: This is Dr. Leila Rupp. She is a professor in Feminist Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara, where she studies sexualities and social movements, with a focus onwomen’s movements.Leila: Then that work took a while to get to the United States, and then also because it’s theUnited States, has traditionally been such a kind of anti-sexual culture, you know, we call itpuritanical, the Puritans were actually less puritanical than a lot of the later cohorts ofAmericans.Susanna: There were certainly people both in the American context who were studying andtalking about sexuality. I mean, it’s worth mentioning for instance, that the term “sexology” waspopularized in 1867 in the United States by a woman named Elizabeth Osgood GoodrichWillard.112But the prominent voices studying sexuality in the American context were pushing a vision ofsexuality that was heteronormative and reproductive and often didn’t even mentionhomosexuality.113 So how did Americans conceptualize same-sex sexuality in the first decades ofthe twentieth century?Leila: I think the ideas about homosexuality came later and there’s just a number of places whereyou can see how all these contradictory and conflicting ideas were coming together at the same113 Kahan, “The Unexpected American Origins,” 73.112 Benjamin Kahan, “The Unexpected American Origins of Sexology and Sexual Science: Elizabeth OsgoodGoodrich Willard, Orson Squire Fowler, and the Scientification of Sex,” History of the Human Sciences 34, no. 1(2021): 73.55time. And so it’s those moments that I find particularly interesting and one of those is the case ofthe Navy in Newport, Rhode Island.Susanna: The case she’s referring to here was a 1919 investigation into same-sex encounters atthe Newport Naval Training Station in Rhode Island. The navy had concerns about the alleged“immorality” happening there, so they dispatched a group of volunteers to go out, have sex withthose sailors suspected of such “immorality,” and then testify against them in court.114Leila: And you know, you really see that in the trial where they actually got men in the Navy tobe decoys and have sex with men who were clearly identified as homosexuals.And you know, they, they volunteered for that activity. There was nothing. They didn't thinkanything of it. It was, it was fine, but then the defense of the people and trial were really trying tomake something of it that, “you chose to have sex with other men.”Susanna: What this case reveals about same-sex sexuality in the early twentieth century is thatwhat we now call homosexuality was divided into much more specific subcategories backthen—ones that don’t really exist today as they did then. Sexuality was generally understoodthrough the lens of traditional gender roles. So men who assumed more traditionally feminineroles like wearing makeup and adopting a passive role during sexual intercourse were commonlycalled “fairies” or “pansies.”115115 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940(New York: Basic Books, 1994), 4.114 George Chauncey, “Christian Brotherhood Or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction ofSexual Boundaries in the World War One Era,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 2 (1985): 189.56Leila: It was, you know, it was understood that there were people called pansies and they werevery effeminate men who dressed in a certain way, behaved in a certain way, and those were thehomosexuals.Susanna: Men who engaged in sexual acts with other men but adopted the traditionallymasculine role, who were then called “trades” and today we might call “tops” or “butch” weremore ambiguous in terms of categorization. Many of them wouldn’t have seen themselves assexually devious because they’re still assuming a masculine role.116Leila: So I mean I think to me that is such a perfect example where you see these ideas inconflict. And it really takes a while for that to work out, so it's really the movement from the ideathat same-sex sexuality was something that any and particularly this was really men that any menmight engage in in some context, and it didn't necessarily mean something about their identity ortheir sense of being.[O]f course it was criminal to be, you know, to engage in same-sex sex. So right away, like, untilit wasn’t, you were criminal, you were breaking laws and you were engaging in criminal activity.So you’re, you’re breaking laws, you’re engaging in anti-social behavior, you’re, you know,you’re not normal. So therefore what are the limits of what you might do?116 Chauncey, Gay New York, 16.57Susanna: What are the limits of what you might do? Homosexual behavior, murder—they’reboth criminal, right? And both are seen as profoundly anti-social. So for a lot of people, theprogression from homosexuality to murder wasn’t really a logical leap.Which brings us back to Leopold and Loeb. Even before the police know who the perpetratorsare, there’s speculation that the murder of Bobby Franks might have been sexually motivated.Erik: When the body was found, when it was taken to the morgue, it was thought that it mighthave been a sex crime because it was a 14-year-old. He looked a little younger than he was andhe was found naked and so immediately it was: why?Susanna: He was found in a culvert, so police initially thought that maybe he had drowned. Butonce it becomes clear that drowning was not the cause of death, pretty quickly they turn theirattention to the possibility of sexual assault.117Erik: And the coroner found that he had a dilated rectum, which at the time they did not knowthat this is something that just happens when you die, especially with children. Your musclesrelax.Susanna: So they’re not looking at it as a definitive rape case, but they’re quite suspicious thatthis may have been the case.117 Erik Rebain, Arrested Adolescence, 57.58Erik: So they go after the teachers, the teachers of Bobby Franks, and they arrest three or four ofthem immediately. And they kept some of the teachers for like, a week. They apparently treatedthem very badly, just trying to get them to confess that they had raped one of their students.118But they were following a lot of leads and they also went after other “degenerates,” other known“degenerates.” The kind of going after queer people was strong right from the very beginning.Susanna: So when Leopold and Loeb confess and the police find a letter that Leopold hadwritten to Loeb, insinuating that they had had a sexual relationship, this fits into the narrativethat’s already emerging about the murder.Erik: It is interesting in the media, it’s not as talked about as, say, it would be today. Not asopenly because you can’t say certain words in the newspapers at that time.Susanna: A lot of papers even published a censored version of the letter, omitting wordsconsidered too offensive to print.119Erik: But you can kind of infer what might be happening. And they say at one point like, “oh,there’s these rumors about them, but they’re manly. Appearance belies all that.”Susanna: So you can see that there’s this incongruity right? Straight America generally imaginesa homosexual man to be effeminate, but these two are both pretty masculine. So again we seethat gender expression is quite central to the public’s understanding of sexuality.119 Churchill, “Queer Histories of a Crime,” 304.118 Rebain, 57–58.59Erik: People who were keeping up with the newspapers, they know it’s about sexuality. They’relike, “oh yeah, that sex case.” And a lot of them still from those early rumors assumed it was asex crime.Susanna: The word “homosexual” really hadn’t become part of the popular vernacular inEnglish at this point, but there were euphemisms that got the message across.Erik: I think people might miss it because homosexual is not—it’s more “moron,” or “pervert,”or “abnormal,” and usually you know, Bobby is never said to have been raped. He was attacked.And so there’s these words that you might not notice at first, but that’s what they’re saying, andso the public very much knew what was happening.Susanna: And a lot of this became even more blatant once the cast went to court.Erik: They were eventually defended by Clarence Darrow, who’s famous in his own right. Sothe case just got even more media play.Susanna: The following year, Clarence Darrow would go on to serve for the defense on theScopes Monkey Trial, which dealt with teaching evolution in schools. But the Leopold and Loebtrial went through the summer of 1924. Darrow pled them guilty to avoid a jury trial, which hewas certain would end in a death sentence. And he was successful; the judge ended up decidingthey were too young to be sentenced to death, so he gave them each life plus 99 years in prison.60The basis of Darrow’s argument was not that Leopold and Loeb were criminally insane, but thatthey had certain mental abnormalities that were mitigating factors in their guilt.120Erik: They were immature, they were going off of these weird ideas, especially like Nietzsche.Leopold was obsessed with Nietzsche, they said, and so it warped his mind, and Leopold had thisabnormal sexuality and that also contributed.Susanna: So the defense had some well-known psychiatrists come in and evaluate Leopold andLoeb to diagnose them and try to provide some kind of explanation for why they had plannedand committed this murder.Erik: Several of the psychiatrists diagnosed Leopold with an abnormal sexuality, and it was seenas weird, his obsession with Loeb, his extreme interest in him. He would quote poetry about him,and that's something the psychiatrists are like, “Oh, wow. What's going on with this guy?” It’slike, well, he’s a teenager and he’s in love like, that would be a normal thing if it had, they wouldthink of it as a normal thing, if it was a heterosexual couple.Susanna: And a lot of this stuff dealing with their sexuality was discussed in the courtroom.Erik: They tried sometimes to not talk about it in front of the reporters. Like if the psychiatristswere testifying about specific sexual acts that Leopold and Loeb did together, they would kind oflike, gather all the lawyers in front of the witness stand and make the reporters stay away and justlike whisper what was going on.120 Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event,” 931.61Susanna: Before one psychologist described the sexual acts Leopold and Loeb had engaged in,the judge had all the women leave the courtoom.121Erik: But if the State’s Attorney asked the leading question, if he asked, “Oh, could you tell mewhat forms of perversion Leopold practiced on Loeb?” in open court, and then you go whisperabout it, everybody already—they know what you’re talking about.Susanna: The State’s Attorney basically ignores the coroner’s statement that there’s no evidenceto suggest that Bobby Franks had been sexually assaulted and focuses on their deviant sexualityto really drive home his point that they’re irredeemable monsters who deserve the deathpenalty.122The defense relied on psychiatric testimony to downplay the issue.Erik: [B]ut they argue that Leopold and Loeb were, you know, childish. They had childish sex,so it wasn’t a big deal. You know, they—they might not become adult homosexuals, especiallyLoeb.Susanna: So sex is pretty ubiquitous in the coverage of this case, even if it’s not talked aboutwith the language we might use today. So much so that there’s even a comment on it from122 Rebain, Arrested Adolescence, 106–107.121 Churchill, “The Queer Histories of a Crime,” 301.62Magnus Hirschfeld himself, who a lot of people believed was going to be brought in to testify forthe defense. In mid-June, Hirschfeld is quoted in papers, saying:Speaker 1: “The real motive for the astonishing crime has its roots in the dark, turbid mysteriesof sex. The youths were most likely driven to furies by irresistible instincts which may makethem guilty, but also irresponsible.”123Susanna: He went on to claim that he believed Leopold and Loeb were,Speaker 1: “super-educated, super-refined individuals who find pleasure in cruelties—the typeswhose lowest and most brutal representative is ‘Jack the Ripper’ but [...] this predisposition hasnothing to do with brains or the lack of them, although it may dominate the most cultivatedminds and use the intellect to aid gratification.”124Susanna: Hirschfeld didn’t end up testifying for the defense, but tons of doctors from across thecountry shared their opinions with the press. On June 8, the newspaper The Brooklyn Daily Eaglepublished a piece featuring the professional opinions of eighteen doctors. The takes were hot,and they varied widely.Speaker 2: “It is my opinion that both Leopold and Loeb are sexual degenerates whose atrociousacts in reality are solely of sexual origin […] Had these young men been brought up under good124 “Experts,” Quad-City Times, June 12, 1924.123 “Experts from Germany Will Appear in Case,” Quad-City Times (Davenport, Iowa), June 12, 1924.63home influences with religious training, they would not be standing before the bar of justicecharged with murder today.”Speaker 3: “Personally I believe both boys are sexual perverts (homo-sexualists) and ifseparated for any length of time it might cause within them suicidal tendencies. I would not saythat home conditions are directly responsible.”Speaker 4: “I believe that this murder was prompted primarily by abnormal sex tendencies,particularly of the homosexual and sadistic. I believe that home conditions, lack of propersupervision and a personal interest in their childhood on the part of their parents, with adelegation of these responsibilities to hired employees, has been a most potent factor in thedevelopment of their abnormal tendencies.”Speaker 5: “A sexual freak cannot be recognized until a dramatic overt act shocks the world.Leopold is such a freak … As for Loeb, he was a victim of Leopold’s malignant sex fascinationand pervert practices.”Speaker 6: “In my judgment both Leopold and Loeb are sane. They are exceptionallyprecocious and intellectual and in that sense abnormal, but not insane. They are perverts withmarked criminal tendencies, but perversion is not insanity.”Speaker 7: “Leopold and Loeb are sane, but of the type known as sexual perverts … I feel thatthey can be held responsible for their actions.”125125 “Boro Doctors Hold Parents At Fault in Leopold-Loeb Case,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 8, 1924.64Susanna: My personal favorite headline that I’ve found during my research on the Leopold andLoeb case ran on page two of the June 4th edition of the Daily Worker, a communist newspaperin Chicago. It reads: “TWO SONS OF MULTIMILLIONAIRES COMMIT ATROCIOUSMURDER AS CLIMAX TO CAREER OF PERVERSION.”The article critiqued the media’s capitalist tendencies to print lurid details just to turn a profit.Quote: “Nothing helps to induce the public to buy papers so much as a spicy murder reekingwith sex.”126 I mean, they make a compelling point.But frankly, these newspaper articles explicitly addressing the alleged sexual nature of the crimeare in the minority. When papers did print, for instance, the psychiatric reports, they removed thesections discussing Leopold and Loeb’s sex life, which was considered “unprintable matter.”127Homosexuality, at this point in US history, was something that the general public just had areally hard time conceptualizing. It just wasn’t part of public discourse yet. The language of thetime, as we heard earlier in doctors’ opinions on the case, was one of “perversion” and“abnormality,” which was understood as part of a person’s psyche even if they didn’t act uponit—something that made them inherently inclined toward criminality.127 Maureen McKernan, The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb (1924; reis. New York: Signet Books,1957), 63126 “Two Sons of Multimillionaires Commit Atrocious Murder As Climax to Career of Perversion,” The DailyWorker (Chicago, Illinois), June 4, 1924.65And that’s generally how Leopold and Loeb were viewed—as perverted, as abnormal—and thiswas presumed to contribute to their choice to carry out the murder of Bobby Franks. But what’snotable about the media coverage of the Leopold and Loeb case is that for all the media coverageand for all the sexual overtones, it didn’t feed into or launch a moral panic over young peoplebeing seduced into homosexuality.At this time in the United States, there was, on the one hand, the emerging figure of the sexcriminal; but on the other hand, there was the figure of the “fairy,” who was harmless andcomical. The image of the homosexual seducer of youth had not yet solidified in the Americanimagination.This is in stark contrast, you’ll remember, to the situation in Germany at the time. The Germanmedia coverage of Fritz Haarmann focused so heavily on his sexuality, using his crimes asfodder for the ongoing panic over the seduction of youth, as if it confirmed the fears of theGerman public: fears that your child, too, could be seduced into homosexuality.But in the US, the anxieties that we see around Leopold and Loeb seem to center more on thefact that it could be your child who becomes a murderer.128 And I’m really fascinated bythis—the fact that if this crime had taken place in Germany, for instance, I think it would havebeen covered and received quite differently, with much more focus on deviant sexuality. Thesame is true for if it had happened in the US, but thirty years later. So, what happens in thosethree decades? How do American discussions of homosexuality and violence change? We can128 Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event,” 928–29.66start to see some of these shifts in the coverage of Richard Loeb’s death in prison, twelve yearsafter the murder of Bobby Franks.Erik: So in 1936, January, Loeb was slashed something like 55 times with a straight razor in abathroom. And he ended up dying from that. And his murderer was known immediately becausehe came out of the bathroom covered in blood and holding the razor.Susanna: His killer was another inmate named James Day, who claimed that Loeb had pulledthe razor on him and threatened to rape him, so he had killed Loeb in self defense.129Erik: It’s not what happened. It was later found that James Day is the one who took the razor tothe bathroom that the first cut Loeb received was to his throat and from behind. It was adeliberate murder.Susanna: And sexuality features much more explicitly in the coverage of Loeb’s murder than inthe media coverage of the murder of Bobby Franks twelve years earlier.130Erik: Sexuality was everywhere, it was “pervert Loeb cut to pieces,” and it was extremelyblatant. All of the sexual details are just printed in the newspapers. They’re talked about in opencourt.In the trial, James Day’s lawyers were saying, look, he was just fighting to keep his innocence,130 Rebain, 148–50.129 Erik Rebain, Arrested Adolescence, 146.67and that’s what every man would do. Like every red-blooded American. Like, that’s—if you'regoing to be raped, well, obviously you fight to the death to do that.Susanna: And the general consensus was basically that Loeb was gay, so of course he must havetried to rape James Day.Erik: That's the whole trial was trying to prove if Loeb is gay or not, not even what happened.The murder itself of Loeb was such an obvious—like James Day came out of that with noscratches, no injuries, and Loeb has fifty-five cuts with a straight razor.The judge did rule in favor of Day that he was found not guilty of that murder, and the judgeactually said, like, you’re such a lovely young man, I’m going to do everything I can to get you aparole like immediately. It was completely celebrated that Loeb had been killed in this way.There were a lot of editorials at the time that were like, why are we even having a trial? Weshould be celebrating him. We should be paroling this murderer because he did what should havebeen done.Susanna: America, in 1936 is on the cusp of a sex-crime panic. The following year, FBIDirector J. Edgar Hoover declares a “war on sex criminals.”131 The panic dies down a bit duringWorld War II, since Americans have other things to focus on, but it’s in full swing again by 1947,when Hoover publishes this infamous article called “How Safe is Your Daughter?” that warns131 Estelle B. Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,” TheJournal of American History 74, no. 1 (1987): 94.68against the rise of “degenerate sex offenders.”132And there’s also a lot of discussion and legislation trying to address “sexual psychopaths,” whichare allegedly distinct from sex offenders in that they don’t just have these immoral, deviantimpulses, but they’re also unable to control them.133 And while it doesn’t exclusively refer tohomosexuality, it does become more or less a euphemism that is used to describe queer people.134Leila: Well, and the rise of psychology, you know, really the dominance of psychology as aninstitution in society.Susanna: Psychology and criminology, at this point, had converged in their interest in the sexcriminal.135Leila: You know, it was criminal. It was. It was an illness. And so if it’s an illness, it’s a kind ofmental illness, right? And so therefore, there's this association still between criminality andmental illness.Susanna: Then, in 1948, Alfred Kinsey drops his bombshell study on male sexual behavior thatindicates that homosexuality—or at least engaging in same-sex relations—is far more commonthan people expected. By his estimation, something like two-thirds of men in America had135 Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 90–91.134 Fred Fejes, “Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic: The 1954 Media Campaign against Miami’s Homosexuals andthe Discourse of Civic Betterment.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 3 (2000): 319; Freedman,“‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 103.133 Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” 167–68; Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 84.132 George Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. WilliamGraebner, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 161–62; Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 93.69engaged in “deviant” sexual behavior. But if such a huge chunk of the population was engagingin such behavior, was it really deviant? And if so, deviant by what standard?136The Kinsey reports really propel the topic of homosexuality into the mainstream in a momentwhere there’s already a lot of anxiety about changing gender and sexual norms in postwarAmerica.137 So over the course of a couple of decades, the figure of the homosexual man goesfrom the comical, effeminate fairy to the deviant, violent sexual psychopath.Leila: But that, that kind of emerges in the context of, you know, McCarthyism, right?Susanna: In 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy began to claim that the US StateDepartment had been infiltrated by Communists, who were subverting America from within.That same year, the federal government launched a formal inquiry into “homosexuals and othermoral perverts” within the government and began systematically purging queer people from theirpositions.138 And this, which was not unique to the US and resembled similar efforts in Canadaand the UK, is now known as the Lavender Scare.139Leila: You’re a criminal because you're, you know, either, you know, potentially committingtreason or you’re, you know, you’re the subject of blackmail, blackmail immediately gets youinto, you know, the criminal element.139 This term was popularized by historian David K. Johnson. See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The ColdWar Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).138 John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harperand Row, 1988), 292.137 Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” 175.136 Jenkins, Moral Panic, 70–71.70Susanna: The argument was that homosexuals were national security risks because theirsexuality made them easy targets for blackmail.Leila: It's like fear and threat and you know, all of those things tied together.Susanna: Even amidst all of this though, queer people found each other. In 1950, a gay mannamed Harry Hay got a group of gay men together to found the first major gay rightsorganization in the United States: the Mattachine Society. Hay was in his late thirties at thispoint, but the idea to organize had been planted in his mind when he was still a teenager. In 1929,he had met an older gay man who had told him about an organization he had been a part of backin 1924. It was, of course, Henry Gerber’s Society for Human Rights. So even though Gerber’sactivism failed, his legacy inspired lasting gay activism decades later.140 Within a few years, whathad started as a social club for lesbians transformed into a political organization pushing forlesbian rights.141 And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we also see the national panic over sex crime startto focus in on queer people, and gay men in particular.So in 1951, a journalist named Howard Whitman publishes a book called Terror in the Streets.It’s basic fear-mongering journalism stoking anxieties about rising crime in America, especiallysex crime. Here are the opening lines of the book:141 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1991), 148–50; Marcia Gallo, A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise ofthe Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), 1–20.140 Elledge, 199.71Speaker 8: “All of us want to protect our families and ourselves from the major hazards oflife—disease, accidents, war, and crime. This book deals with the fourth of these latter-day FourHorsemen—crime.”142Susanna: Whitman dedicates a lot of the book to discussing violent sex crime, which he claimsis rising at an alarming rate. And he claims that a lot of this is being perpetrated against childrenin particular.Speaker 8: “In alarming numbers, the little ones [are] becoming hunted game, stalked by themolester, the despoiler, and the sex psychopath.”143Susanna: In one chapter called “Crime and the Homosexual,” he talks about the case ofnineteen-year-old Ted Hilles, who sexually assaulted and murdered a six-year-old boy namedGeorge Counter in Detroit. He tells the story of Ted, beginning at age fourteen, being repeatedlycoerced into having sex with older men for money, until he eventually began initiating theseencounters himself.Speaker 8: “Then, as Ted was embarking on his career as a corrupter of children—atnineteen—his eye caught little, stocky, six-year-old Georgie.”144144 Whitman, 147.143 Whitman, 50.142 Howard Whitman, Terror in the Streets (New York: The Dial Press, 1951), ix.72Susanna: He and George live in the same neighborhood, so they know each other, which makesit easier for him to gain George’s trust. He tries to assault George, who begins to scream, and Tedkills him in an effort to keep him quiet.Speaker 8: “A twisted, ugly path had reached its destination.”145Susanna: The insinuation Whitman makes here is that murder is the almost inevitable result ofhomosexuality. And he goes on to make this more explicit.He describes accompanying a police officer to watch his work on the vice squad.Speaker 8: “Detroit, like most big cities, is plagued by the homosexual prowler.”146Susanna: Whitman and the officer go into a public restroom in a park and watch men, who hecalls “accosters,” who are cruising for sex. They watch, as one man propositions a few othermen, but is unsuccessful and moves on to another location after seeming a bit anxious, perhapsbecause there’s a cop and a journalist ogling him.147Speaker 8: “Suppose he got more panicky as the evening wore on? Suppose he kept stalking andhunting without success until his twisted passions were even more inflamed? Supposed he finallysnapped up a child? In an alley somewhere. Or a basement. And if the child screamed, or147 Whitman, 148–49.146 Whitman, 147.145 Whitman, 147.73threatened to tell? … I remembered the hissing furnace against which little Georgie Counter’sbody had been crammed.”148Susanna: So, what Whitman is describing here is a gay man cruising for consensual sex in apublic bathroom and leaving after they turn him down. And then he launches into these rhetoricalquestions about if he attempted to assault and kill a child—something so unrelated to what hejust described that it would almost be comical if it wasn’t such a ubiquitous way ofunderstanding gay men in midcentury America—one that informed policy and resulted in manygay men being arrested or involuntarily institutionalized.And this is really different from what we saw in the ’20s with Leopold and Loeb, right? I mean,think about how the discourse has changed around nineteen-year-old queer killers. Leopold andLoeb were perverts who killed a young boy. Ted Hilles killed a young boy because of hisperversion.One of the things that really jumps out at me from Whitman’s writing overall is this kind ofself-congratulatory undertone—he seems to be patting himself on the back for taking what heclearly considers to be the more “progressive” stance on the issues he’s discussing.For instance, he acknowledges that it’s more often than not the gay men who are the victims ofviolence. But even here, he still frames it in a way that blames gay men for trying to “seduce”straight men and boys, and then claims that those who perpetrate such violence are likely148 Whitman, 149.74repressed homosexuals themselves, which is a really roundabout way of confirming that gay menare indeed violent predators.149And all the while, he’s calling men who sexually assault young girls “child molesters” and“pedophiles,” and referring to men who assault young boys simply as “homosexuals.” So ifyou’re a straight man who sexually abuses children, that doesn’t have anything to do with beingheterosexual, but if you’re a gay man who does it, then that’s apparently just par for the course.He concludes the chapter with a discussion of how to address the problem of gay mencommitting violent crime. According to Whitman,Speaker 8: “The complete conversion of a homosexual individual into a heterosexual individualhas, undoubtedly, been accomplished on occasion.”150Susanna: Citation needed, Howard, but he at least does acknowledge that this can’t be the onlysolution.Speaker 8: “The goal which is within grasp, however, is the social adjustment of the individual.We may not be able to change a man’s sexual character completely, but at least we can readjusthis social character so that he no longer is a public nuisance, a corrupter of youth, and a criminalmenace.”151151 Whitman, 162, emphasis original.150 Whitman, 162.149 Whitman, 155.75Susanna: Whitman clarifies that he’s only talking about the homosexuals who pose a risk topublic safety and that from all the police he’s talked to, none of them are worried about whatpeople do in private, behind closed doors152— which is fascinating, seeing as anti-sodomy lawswould remain on the books in all fifty states for another decade, until Illinois became the firststate to get rid of it while revising its entire criminal code in 1961. And the US Supreme Courtdid not declare anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional until 2003.153Speaker 8: “The many thousands of homosexuals who lead their own, private, unaggressivelives may be a problem for moralists or psychiatrists, but they are certainly no problem for thepolice. Witch-hunts aimed at those socially adjusted, though sexually deviated, individuals arefoul and medieval.”154Susanna: Again, you see here this kind of hedging—the old “I don’t hate homosexuals, I justthink we need to talk about the ones who are seducing and murdering our children,” schtick. It’sa common thread throughout history, and still today. Whitman doesn’t offer any meaningfulstatistics to indicate that gay men are more likely to kill than, say, straight men. There are nocitations in the entire 431-page book. But even if this were the truth, he never once considers thatthis would be a great argument to make our society more hospitable to queer people.And this isn’t exactly shocking, right? I mean, it’s 1951. The Mattachine Society hasn’t evenbeen around for a year. But like the German homosexual rights movement of the 1920s,154 Whitman, 163.153 Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).152 Whitman, 163.76homophile organizing, as it came to be known in the United States, coincided with a crackdownon homosexuality, often on the basis of it corrupting the nation’s youth.155Of course, there are nuances to this, and again, I want to be clear that I can’t make any causalclaims. I mean, for one, by the time the moral panic over the seduction of youth reached a feverpitch in Germany, gay rights organizing had been around for like fifty years. That’s definitely notthe case in the US.But what we see in both cases is discussions of homosexuality entering the political mainstream,in the wake of a world war, where there’s major anxiety about gender and the stability of thenuclear family. Queer people become a really convenient scapegoat to push these anxieties ontobecause—at least in the public imagination—they twist normative gender roles and violate thereproductive functions of the nuclear family.Next episode, we’ll be talking about how the Nazi regime takes these same fears and puts theminto violent practice. I hope you’ll join.155 See Fejes, “Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic,”; John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in anAmerican City (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Jenkins, Moral Panic, 49–93; Johnson, The Lavender Scare.77EPISODE 3: THE SEDUCER[brass band music playing]Susanna: Around 9:30 on the morning of May 6, 1933, truckloads of more than 100 studentsarrive outside the doors of a mansion nestled in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. Accompanied by abrass band, the students storm the entrance and force their way in.[glass breaking sounds, people shouting, brass band continues]Once inside, they start ransacking the establishment, breaking down doors and overturninginkwells as they make their way to the mansion’s library. The band continues playing as thestudents rip art, photographs, and charts from the walls, leaving them strewn across the floor ortossing them out windows to their collaborators below.This was the beginning of the now-notorious Nazi book burnings, and their target was MagnusHirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. This came just six weeks after the passing of theEnabling Act, which effectively made Germany a dictatorship under the rule of Adolf Hitler.Hirschfeld embodied everything the Nazis were railing against: he was Jewish, a pacifist, and anopenly homosexual man who was an outspoken advocate for the rights of sexual minorities. HisInstitute was a research center for the study of human sexuality, hosted lectures and publicevents, and offered medical services to queer patients, including the first known sexreassignment surgery.78Hirschfeld himself was not present at the Institute on May 6, although the students demandedthat he present himself. An eyewitness of the events recalled:Speaker 1: They repeatedly inquired when Dr. Hirschfeld would be returning; they wanted, asthey expressed it, to be given the tip as to when he would be there. Even before this raid on theInstitute storm troopers had visited it on several occasions and asked for Dr. Hirschfeld. Whenthey were told he was abroad, owing to an attack of malaria, they replied: “Then let’s hope he’lldie without our aid: then we shan’t have to hang him or beat him to death.”156Susanna: Hirschfeld was out of the country giving an international lecture tour. A few days later,he watched newsreel footage of the Nazi students destroying his life’s work. He died in France in1935 on his 67th birthday, never having returned to Germany, never able to see the end of theNazi regime.The students looting the Institute heaved a bronze bust of Hirschfeld out the doors and into atruck. By 3 PM, members of the stormtroopers, the Nazi paramilitary organization, showed up atthe Institute. Along with medical records and decades’ worth of research into gender andsexuality, the stormtroopers seized the works of Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis,and many other so-called “books of un-German spirit.”157157 For accounts of the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science, see Günter Grau, ed., Hidden Holocaust? Gayand Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933–45, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Cassell, 1993), 31–33; see Knuth,112–17; Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of theNazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 174–75.156 Quoted in Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction(Westport: Praeger, 2006), 113.79Jake: Clearly, the Nazis and their followers wanted to make a statement very clear that in thisnew Germany that they wanted to build queer people weren't going to be allowed to publiclyexist, not even in the pages of a book.Susanna: Four days later, outside Berlin’s opera house, the students used some 20,000 rarebooks, artifacts, and medical records from the Institute for Sexual Science as fuel for theinfamous book burning, as a crowd of onlookers cheered them on.Jake: And so as I’m listening to and learning about all of these “Don’t Say Gay” laws, we, youknow, we should protect our children from about drag queens and, you know, queer families, all Ican think of is those infamous images of college students standing around a bonfire and cheeringthe destruction of queer literature.[theme music soft, growing louder]The ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science on May 6, 1933 was a bleak foreshadowing ofwhat was to come for LGBTQ+ people under the Nazi regime. This week, we’re focusing on theNazi campaign against homosexuality and the legacy it left.I’m your host, Susanna Cassisa, and this is Groomer Rumor.[theme music]80Susanna: Welcome back to Groomer Rumor, the show where we dissect the history and functionof the age-old trope of the queer predator who recruits, seduces, or—most recently—groomschildren.Last time, we talked about two events from 1924 Chicago: the founding of the Society forHuman Rights, America’s first documented homosexual rights organization, and the murder ofBobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. With the help of fabulous guests ErikRebain and Dr. Leila Rupp, we discussed media coverage around the Leopold and Loeb case andhow homosexuality was (or wasn’t) understood at this time in the United States and comparedthat to discourse around homosexuality in Germany, where there was this really activehomosexual rights movement—and a growing moral panic over the seduction of youth, whichwe discussed in episode 1. A moral panic that the growing National Socialist German Workers’Party—the Nazis—would soon codify into legislation that would far outlive the end of the ThirdReich.Jake: You know, I think that one of the key factors that is really important to understanding theNazi rise to power is that the Nazis did come to power through democratic means.Susanna: This is Dr. Jake Newsome. He is a public historian of American and GermanLGBTQ+ history and the author of Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of theHolocaust. He’s also the founder of the Pink Triangle Legacies Project, a nonprofit organizationthat shares educational resources on queer victims of Nazism.81Jake: They were really what began in the 1920s as a small, fringe right wing party … that by theearly 1930s had achieved a decent voting block in the German parliament called the Reichstag.And they did so by, of course we know that a basis of Nazi ideology and their campaignstrategies was antisemitism of scapegoating the Jewish community for essentially all ofGermany’s problems.Susanna: On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Less thantwo months later, the Enabling Act passed, allowing Hitler to pass laws without the approval ofthe German parliament, officially marking the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning ofthe Nazi dictatorship.158Jake: [T]he Nazi leadership, you know, their primary goal was to essentially create and breed aso-called master race. Right. And they therefore were obsessed with trying to understand andthen control human sexuality, because that was the key to reproducing this master race.Susanna: In the mid- to late-twentieth century, scholars discussing the Nazis’ attempts to controlsexuality generally characterized the Nazi regime as sexually repressive. But in her book Sexafter Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, historian Dagmar Herzogwrites, “[a]lthough Nazism has been misremembered and misrepresented as sexually repressivefor everyone, what Nazism actually did was to redefine who could have sex with whom.”159159 Herzog, 18.158 Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic, 184–87.82So, there’s two sides to this approach to sexual politics. On one side, there’s the sexuality thatNational Socialism embraced and actively sought to foster.Jake: I mean, there were even things that the Nazis invented, like the Mothers Cross that weregiven, awarded very publicly to mothers who had lots of good German children and raised themand sent them off to the Hitler Youth.160Sam: [I]f you were an Aryan heterosexual or, you know, sort of individual, it encouraged sex,Right.Susanna: This is Dr. Samuel Huneke. He is an assistant professor of history at George MasonUniversity, whose work focuses on modern Europe and modern Germany in particular. He’s theauthor of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold WarGermany and A Queer Theory of the State.Sam: Because it wanted young couples to have lots of children.Susanna: Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, is particularly interested in asserting controlover sexuality. In 1935, he institutes the Lebensborn program, which offers support particularlyfor unmarried, pregnant women of “good racial stock.” The idea was to discourage these womenfrom seeking abortion by offering them financial resources, prenatal care, and just a place where160 For more on the Mother Cross, see Mouton, Michelle, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimarand Nazi Family Policy, 1918-1945 (Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–36.83they could see their pregnancy to term without the judgment that women often experienced forbeing pregnant outside of wedlock.161Jake: In 1936, he creates the Reich Central office, the Reich headquarters for combatinghomosexuality and abortion.Susanna: And with this, we start to see the flip side of the Nazis’ approach to sex, this violentrepression of sexuality for those the regime deemed “undesirable.”Jake: You can just see, even just from the name of this office that they were combating, I guessyou could almost call them, at least they thought of them almost as social plagues that threatenedthe German state, the Nazi government, because it threatened the birth rate of the master race.Sam: [T]he Nazi era was, was quite harsh towards sexualities with which it disagreed.Susanna: In 1935, the Nazis also implemented the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited marriageand sexual relations between Jewish people and non-Jewish Germans.162And, of course, there was rampant anti-queerness.Jake: So I think that in terms of the rise of the Nazis, the Nazi Party in their campaign platforms,in their propaganda, homophobia and transphobia was never like the central pillar in the same162 Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation, 88.161 Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation, 215. For more on the Lebensborn program, see Mouton, 216–17, 224–27.84way that antisemitism was. But they clearly made their stance on that issue crystal clear foranyone who would listen.So they are, you know, telling people in their campaign rallies or in speeches before theparliament that if left unchecked, homosexuality would lead to the downfall of the Germannation.Susanna: And this should sound familiar, right? It’s some of the same arguments, the sameanxieties that fueled the moral panic over the seduction of youth that we talked about in the firstepisode. And that’s important to note because, despite how the Weimar Republic has beenportrayed in pop culture—as this haven for decadence and sexual deviance, Nazi homophobia isa continuation and escalation of Weimar-era homophobia, not some kind of complete 180 degreeturnaround. It’s the same playbook, taken to the extreme.Jake: So in order to understand how the Nazis viewed sexuality and then reacted to it, it'simportant to understand that when it comes to queerness and queer people, queer experiences,the Nazis didn't believe that people were born gay or born lesbian.Sam: It’s not something that you are from birth. It’s not a natural predisposition. It is a learnedbehavior. And specifically, it’s learned or passed down to younger people through them beingseduced by older homosexuals.85Jake: [T]hat made it more dangerous in the Nazis’ eyes because it could spread to the youth. Itcould spread to the SA. The Nazis had all of these different military and paramilitaryorganizations which is full of all these young men who were—the Nazis wanted them to fosterdeep, almost passionate bonds of camaraderie.Sam: There’s this fear that gay men are not only sort of predatory looking for young gay men,just for young men to seduce into homosexuality, but that as they do, that all these gay men sortof band together in cliques or in conspiracies, and that this has a profoundly destabilizing effect,whether it's in a private company or in government.Susanna: These two prongs of Nazi homophobia—the fear of gay conspiracies and the fear ofhomosexuality spreading to German youth—collided in one incident in the summer of 1934.One of Hitler’s top officers and close friends, Ernst Röhm, was an openly gay man. His sexualityhad come to light back in 1931, when anti-fascists outed him in the media. A particular concernthey brought up was that Röhm was in charge of the Hitler Youth, which at this time was part ofthe SA—a paramilitary group under the Nazi Party. So these anti-fascists adopt homophobictalking points almost identical to those used by the Nazis in an effort to discredit the Nazi Party.But what’s really interesting is that this didn’t work. The break on Röhm’s sexuality hitnewsstands, and it definitely made a splash, but it wasn’t enough to cause major issues for theNazi Party. And certainly not enough to prevent them from coming to power in 1933.86Why? Well, largely because of all the work that activists like Friedrich Radszuweit and MagnusHirschfeld had put into normalizing homosexuality. It worked. And it worked so well that in thissituation, it benefited the Nazi Party.163But by the summer of 1934, the situation for Röhm had changed. The SA was growing steadilyin numbers and influence, and Hitler starts to feel threatened by this, so in June he has Röhm andabout 80 other perceived political opponents killed, with hundreds more arrested. And this comesto be known as the Night of the Long Knives.And the justification that Hitler gives to the public for these political murders is that the SA wasplanning a coup to overthrow him, but also that Röhm’s sexuality was a danger, thathomosexuality is rampant in the SA and these men are out in the streets seducing boys left andright. And what links these two justifications—the alleged coup and Röhm’s sexuality—is themyth of the gay conspiracy: the idea that because Röhm and his clique of homosexual men in theSA were banding together to plot against Hitler.164Sam: And this is really the fear. It’s not the reason for the Night of the Long Knives, but it’s thereason that Hitler and his lieutenants give for the Night of Long Knives, for the murder of ErnstRöhm. And so this becomes actually a core feature of Nazi homophobia.164 Stefan Micheler and Patricia Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Menunder National Socialism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/2 (2002): 105–109. See also EleanorHancock, “The Purge of the SA Reconsidered: ‘An Old Putschist Trick?” Central European History 44, no. 4(2011): 669–83.163 Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic, 146–50.87Susanna: The Night of the Long Knives also marks a turning point in the Nazis’ campaignagainst homosexuality. With Röhm out of the picture, there’s a huge wave of arrests forviolations of Paragraph 175—the law that prohibited same-sex relations between men.One of the men affected by this was Richard Grune, who moved to Berlin to be able to live moreopenly as a gay man.165Jake: But unfortunately for Richard, he moved in February of 1933. So this was literally justdays or weeks after Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany and had, withinthose matter of weeks, begun cracking down on shutting down the capital city’s famous, vibrantqueer life.And so as these public spaces for queer community for queer, you know, meeting other queerpeople as they were shut down, he decided to start hosting parties in his own apartment. Andthese—at least the two that we know of—occurred in the fall of 1934. So that means he’s alreadylived in Berlin for over a year, a year and a half or so. And from all of the archival records thatwe have, these were two very lively, very festive and have parties that everyone had a lot of a lotof fun at.165 For an account of Richard Grune’s experiences under Nazism, see Joachim Müller and Andreas Sternweiler,Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhausen (Berlin: Rosa Winkel Verlag, 2000), 190–206; W. Jake Newsome,Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), 25,34–35, 43, 48.88Susanna: But in the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, this was dangerous business.And one of the attendees took down the names and professions of over 70 gay men who hadattended Richard’s parties and handed it over to the Gestapo—the secret police.Jake: And in December of 1934, the Nazis made a coordinated mass arrest of 70 men across thecity, including Richard Grune.He, for a long time, spent many, many months in prison without ever having a trial. He wasfinally put on trial, convicted of Paragraph 175, served, sent to serve, I guess what you could callit, like a normal prison sentence. But as soon as that prison sentence was complete, the Gestapowas waiting on him.Susanna: They send him to a concentration camp, and he spends the next decade of his life inseveral different camps.Jake: Now, one of the interesting facts about Richard Grune’s case, is that a lot of times,especially in those early years in the 1930s, a man accused of paragraph 175 was only sent to aconcentration camp if they had been arrested more than once, if they were a so-called repeatoffender, because that allegedly signal to the Nazis that normal prison wasn't enough to cure thisman of their lifestyle.Susanna: Between Richard’s arrest and the end of his initial prison sentence, the Nazis hadrevised Paragraph 175. They adjust the wording so it’s much easier to arrest men suspected of89being homosexual. Even something like a flirtatious glance—whatever that means—can begrounds to arrest someone.They also add a new section that criminalized the so-called seduction of male minors, who in thiscase are defined as being under the age of 21. And this is a significant moment in the history ofthis trope of the gays coming for your kids because it means that this myth of youth seductionwas now enshrined in Germany’s legal code. And in the wake of this revision, the convictionsunder Paragraph 175 increase by tenfold.Jake: This was Richard’s first offense with, or conviction under the law, but they felt that heposed a particular danger to German society because he had hosted these parties that allegedlytempted and converted so many otherwise good German men into this lifestyle. So again, there’sthis idea that homosexuals are groomers, that they are trying to convert people and bring theminto their culture. So they said in order to protect German society, he needed to be locked away.Susanna: Richard survived the camps and during liberation, he was able to escape and make hisway back to his hometown, where he was reunited with his sister. But of course, this wasn’t thecase for many other inmates imprisoned because of their sexuality.Jake: [I]n the Nazi concentration camp badging system, the Nazis had a specific color-codedtriangle for prisoners, especially male prisoners who were sent to the camps for being gay. It wasa pink triangle.90Susanna: The “175ers,” as they were often called, were treated horribly in the camps and oftenreceived less sympathy from other prisoners because of their sexuality. Men imprisoned forbeing gay also slept in separate barracks to keep them from seducing other men.166Jake: [T]he Nazis feel out of all LGBTQ folks, queer men, as to whether gay or bi men who hadsex with men were perceived as the most dangerous threat. Because as we said earlier, in thiskind of gender segregated society the Nazis sought to establish. It was men who had thoseleadership roles. And so therefore, any so-called perversion in those men would pose a directthreat to the, you know, running the everyday running of the government.Susanna: There was never any legislation that explicitly outlawed same-sex relations betweenwomen.167Jake: And so that meant that when the Nazis did become aware of a trans person or, you know, alesbian woman, they did not have a single law kind of in their toolbox ready to prosecute thesepeople.167 Samuel Clowes Huneke, “Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State,” Central European History54, no. 2 (2021): 298. For additional information on the experiences of lesbians under the Nazi regime, see alsoAnna Hájková, “Between Love and Coercion: Queer Desire, Sexual Barter and the Holocaust.” German History 39,no. 1 (2021): 112–133; Samuel Clowes Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin”in The Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 1 (April 2017): 30-59; Laurie Marhoefer, “Lesbianism,Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939-1943.” The AmericanHistorical Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1167-1195; Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories ofLesbians during the Third Reich. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.166 Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 47.91Susanna: But this didn’t mean that gender-nonconforming people and queer women weren’tpersecuted by the Nazis.168Propaganda about the dangers of lesbianism was never as mainstream as discourse about gaymen. But this was largely the product of a highly misogynistic Nazi worldview that excludedwomen from positions of power and saw them primarily as mothers and wives who didn’t haveany sexual agency, and who—if it came down to it—could be impregnated by force.169Jake: And so I think that that is one thing to keep in mind, is that the Nazis felt that verydivided, specific gender roles were allegedly natural and that they wanted to follow thatsupposed natural order.Susanna: So lesbians and trans people violated this strict social order the Nazis wanted toenforce. And for that reason, in the camps they were often marked with a black triangle.Jake: This black triangle was the badge that was meant to identify so-called asocials, which wasessentially, you could translate as a social deviant.Susanna: In one of Dr. Huneke’s articles, he classifies lesbian experiences under Nazi rule as“heterogeneous persecution.” And what he’s getting at is that no, lesbians weren’t direct targetsof anti-gay legislation under the Nazis, but their sexuality and/or gender expression nevertheless169 Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 39.168 See Bodie A. Ashton, “The Parallel Lives of Liddy Bacroff: Transgender (Pre)History and the Tyranny of theArchive in Twentieth-Century Germany.” German History 42, no. 1 (2024): 79-100; Jennifer Evans and ElissaMailänder, “Cross-Dressing, Male Intimacy and the Violence of Transgression in Third Reich Photography.”German History 39, no. 1 (2021): 54-77; Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State”; Zavier Nunn,“Trans Liminality and the Nazi State,” Past & Present 260, no. 1 (2023): 123-157.92impacted the realities of everyday life under Nazism, marking them as suspicious, deviant, andeven dangerous—particularly when their lesbian identity intersected with other marginalizedidentities.Jake: I think that if we try to understand this history and tell it through, well, if lesbians werepersecuted for other reasons to where they really persecuted for being lesbian, I think that thatends up that runs the risk of us trying to understand and tell this history through the Nazis ownlens. Right. They—it’s reproducing these categories that the Nazis did in their categorizationsystem that said … you know, your only value is if you fit into one of these categories.We shouldn’t try to then tell that story using those categories. We have the ability and I think themoral obligation to look past those categories and tell, you know, human centered histories thatshow the complexity of human experiences, even though that might be harder for us to tease outand talk about motivations.But it also helps us understand the varied nature of persecution. And persecution doesn't meanonly arrested under a law. It can mean—and it looked and functioned differently for differentpopulations at different times.Susanna: The story of Ilse Totzke is useful for understanding some of the ways that persecutionfunctioned under Nazism even in the absence of explicit legal persecution of gendernonconformity and same-sex relations between women.170170 See Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State.”93I want to pause for a moment to note that we don’t know how Ilse Totzke identified in terms ofsexuality and gender identity, not least because a lot of the information we do have comes fromthe records of the Gestapo. Respectfully acknowledging this fact, I’ll be using they/thempronouns to refer to Ilse, but I do want to mention that existing scholarship by queer and transscholars uses she/her pronouns.171And just to get ahead of any comments about how using they/them pronouns isanachronistic—yes, it is. But a really important aspect of Ilse’s life under Nazism is their gendernonconformity, and using gender-neutral pronouns is helpful for us, in 2024, to better relate tothis.Jake: And I just, I love Ilse’s story because it makes us think about the role of gender and howordinary people might perceive you. And in this case, it actually shows us that it was ordinarypeople who ignited the persecution.Susanna: Ilse’s experiences were colored by how they were perceived by others. Ilse wasGerman, or so-called “Aryan.” From the photos we have, we know they wore their hair short andslicked back, and they wore boxy suits and ties that would have been considered distinctlymasculine, even within lesbian subcultures at the time.171 See, for instance, W. Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 35–36; 35; Samuel Clowes Huneke,“Heterogeneous Persecution,” 310–11.94And this leads to suspicion from neighbors and acquaintances, several of whom report Ilse to theGestapo for various reasons including: picking up mail from different addresses, being a“man-hater,” and seducing a minor, who, uh, turned out to be a 35-year-old woman.That mix-up, whether intentional or accidental, to me reads as a pretty clear indicator thatordinary people in Germany at this time saw any form of homosexuality as a threat to youth.But the accusation that was most damning was that Ilse maintained relationships with Jewishpeople. After receiving several warnings from the Gestapo, Ilse and their Jewish friend, RuthBasinski planned to escape Germany.Jake: They sneak across the border into Switzerland, I think it was in February, like through thenight. So incredibly cold in the dead of winter.Susanna: But they’re both apprehended by Swiss border guards, who turn them over to theGestapo.Jake: Both Ilse and Ruth were sent to concentration camps as Jewish. Ruth was sent toAuschwitz, and Ilse was sent to Ravensbrück, which was the Germans’, essentially theirwomen—the concentration camp for women.Susanna: Both Ruth and Ilse survived the Holocaust, but they never saw each other again.95What this story demonstrates is that, although Ilse wasn’t formally committed to a camp forbeing a lesbian or for transgressing gender norms, these aspects of their identity led others toview them as suspicious and increased their risk of being reported. It was ordinary people whoturned Ilse into the Gestapo.Jake: And so that also teaches us, I think, a lot about how fascism works, Right? It's not just atop-down form of government that issues persecution, but it also creates an environment inwhich ordinary people, neighbors, landlords, bosses, family even feel empowered to activate theviolence or the power of the government against people who they feel should not be in thecommunity.Susanna: Lesbians and trans people were admitted to camps for a wide array of offenses, whichmakes it difficult to pin down exact numbers. But we do know that between 1933 and 1945, theNazis arrested about 100,000 men for violations of Paragraph 175 and convicted about half ofthem.172 Somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentrationcamps. Less than 40% of them survived, with ¾ of them dying within a year of arriving at acamp.173Jake: But I think one of the things I want to touch on is that queer or persecution of queer peopleis not something that only exists in a dictatorship, right?173 Newsome, 48.172 Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies, 42.96One of the things that was so surprising to me in conducting this research was that when theAllies defeated Nazi Germany in May of 1945 and initiated the process of liberation for thehundreds of thousands of concentration camp survivors, those queer prisoners, those markedwith the pink triangle, were not part of liberation. The Allies, including the Americans, treatedthem as common criminals.Susanna: In this initial period of the Allied occupation, U.S. officials compile a list of Nazi lawsto be struck down, but Paragraph 175 isn’t included. It stays on the books. And that’s partlybecause a version of it had existed in the legal code prior to the Nazis coming to power. Butreally it’s also because the Americans don’t see gay men as victims of fascism—they see them ascriminals who happened to be serving out a sentence under a fascist regime.174Jake: And so any pink triangle prisoner who still had any time left on their sentence, they weretransferred by the allies from the liberated concentration camp to a nearby prison where theywere forced to serve out the rest of that term. So for some that might have been two or threeweeks. For others it might have been two or three years.Even after 1949, when the two new countries of Germany, East and West Germany werecreated—even in West Germany, which was the democratic, liberal progressive half of Germanythat was allied with the United States in the new Cold War, West Germany decided to keep anduse the Nazi version of paragraph 175.174 Newsome, 60.97Sam: And what that means practically, is that you have this beefed-up Paragraph 175, right?That the Nazis passed in 1935, and West Germany keeps that law on the books for an additional20 years until 1969.Susanna: And this beefed-up version of Paragraph 175 still has the clause that criminalizes theso-called seduction of men and boys under the age of 21, so this addition to the law continues toapply in this new German democracy.175Sam: In East Germany, on the other hand, the newly constituted communist Supreme Court rulesvery quickly in 1950 that essentially this is a holdover from the Nazi period. This is anessentially sort of Nazistic law, and therefore it has to go. And so East Germany reverts to themuch milder Weimar-era, a 1920s version of that law, which makes it much harder to getconvictions.This doesn’t mean that there’s no homophobia. Right. I mean, we people who study communismand homosexuality know that there’s a huge tradition of sort of communist homophobia.[B]ut the sort of terms of homophobia shift a little bit, and there isn’t as much focus on outrightlegal persecution, as much more of a focus on sort of othering where there’s the sense it’s quitecommon among communists that homosexuality is essentially a result of capitalism.Susanna: The history of sexuality and specifically queer rights organizing in East Germany issuper fascinating. And actually I have a particular fondness for it because writing about the East175 Huneke, States of Liberation, 37.98German gay liberation movement as an undergrad was my first real introduction to studyingqueer history and originally my intent was to study it further in grad school.And one thing I want to mention is that despite the East German state reverting back to thisversion of Paragraph 175 that doesn’t have this Nazi youth seduction clause, the idea thathomosexuality is a threat to the youth is still very much present really throughout EastGermany’s existence. I highly recommend checking out Dr. Huneke’s book, States of Liberation,and I’ll also include some other resources in the show notes if you’d like to do some furtherreading.176But one of the things I’m trying to do in this podcast is to draw connections between the queerhistory of Germany and the queer history of the United States and make the case that theseconnections are there and they’re worth considering. And because the US shared so much morepolitically and culturally during the Cold War with West Germany, I want to keep our focusthere.Jake: So in 1951, a judge in Bonn, the capital of West Germany, a guy named RichardGatzweiler, wrote that gay men, whom he called a cancerous ulcer on the German people, werealso a threat to the young German democracy. So he argued that just as Röhm had done in theNazi Party, gay men in West Germany were busy trying to form a so-called state within a state.176 For more information on the experiences of gay men in East Germany, see Jennifer Evans, “Decriminalization,Seduction, and ‘Unnatural Desire’ in East Germany,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 553-577; Kyle Frackman,“Persistent Ambivalence: Theorizing Queer East German Studies,” Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 5 (2019):669-689; Josie McLellan, “Glad to be Gay Behind the Wall: Gay and Lesbian Activism in 1970s East Germany,”History Workshop Journal 74, no. 74 (2012): 105-130; Robert G. Moeller, “The Regulation of Male Homosexualityin Postwar East and West Germany: An Introduction,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 521-527.99And in order to help justify this need to or at least what he felt as the need to go after queerpeople in Germany, Gatzweiler actually pointed across the Atlantic to the United States. Hewrote that quote, “The USA has recognized the danger of secret homosexual organizations andespionage groups, and we must also be careful.”Susanna: So queer people during the Cold War basically become this political punching bag,and homophobic rhetoric can be adjusted according to each state’s political needs. So in EastGermany, homosexuality is presented as decadent and capitalistic, and supposedly if capitalismis defeated, then homosexuality will more or less just disappear.But in the United States during the Lavender Scare, as we discussed last episode, homosexualityis seen as being associated with communism and espionage.Sam: And, you know, and that fits in really well also with this Cold War trope or stereotype ofqueer people as security threats or security risks, which really sits at the root of the LavenderScare in the U.S. David Johnson, who I think you can really credit with having popularized, youknow, understandings of the U.S. Lavender Scare, he’s argued that the US sort of exported theLavender Scare to its allies in the early Cold War.177 I think that’s certainly correct.[W]hat I try to point out is in Germany it actually is less this fear of queer people as securityrisks per se, and more a fear of both them seducing youth and again, forming these sort of177 See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the FederalGovernment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).100conspiratorial cliques that that really sits at the root of a lot of the sort of persecution of gay men,especially in the 1950s.178Susanna: What we can see from looking at the history of this idea of gay men as seducers ofyouth throughout German history is that this trope isn’t unique to any one form of government.We see it first starting to crop up in Imperial Germany, and it really amps up into a panic in thedemocratic Weimar Republic, really as a response to both the aftermath of World War I andsimultaneous political organizing for gay rights.179 Under the Nazi dictatorship, the state doublesdown and codifies it into law in 1935, which then sticks around until 1969. And even thoughEast Germany does get rid of the Nazi version of Paragraph 175, concerns for the welfare ofyouth absolutely animates homophobia under communism as well.180 So this trope is presentunder democracy and dictatorship, under capitalism and communism. It’s an effective andincredibly malleable tool, weaponized with political goals in mind.Sam: It’s usually a political project, it’s usually—it’s sort of, it arises for specific political orsocial reasons, and usually it goes away or dies down for sort of political and social reasons.And so, you know, a lot of what I’ve tried to write in the last year or two has been to point outthat a lot of the sort of grooming anti-trans anti-gay rhetoric is very similar to the kind of Naziera rhetoric that we see in Germany.180 Huneke, States of Liberation, 71.179 Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic,(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 16–37.178 See Huneke, States of Liberation, 42–48.101Jake: And it's not just the quantity of or the level of LGBT—anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that issurprising.It’s also the content, you know, the ways that some of the arguments, the phrasing, the wordingof homophobic and transphobic rhetoric that Republicans are using today almost sounds wordfor word that the Nazis were using in 1930s Germany.This idea that we—that society needs to protect children from being exposed to, you know, queerpeople, trans people, drag queens reading, you know, kids books to children. The idea that evenjust proximity or being exposed to it somehow physically, mentally damages children … That isa sentiment that existed almost word for word in Nazi Germany.So, again, this whole rhetoric of protecting children is usually a starting point, like it’s to get, youknow, get the foot in the door. Then more restrictive policies can be introduced.Susanna: And I think that’s something that’s important to remember. Homophobia andanti-queerness more broadly isn’t some natural, inevitable phenomenon. It’s a political project,composed of tropes and narratives, and it’s deployed to achieve specific political ends.Sam: It is sort of fascistic in its nature and, but also that there are ways of combating it. Right.And that we don't have to sort of give in to this framing of sexuality or gender and essentially notto lose hope.102Susanna: We absolutely shouldn’t lose hope.But we also shouldn’t underestimate the rhetorical power of one side framing themselves as “forthe kids.” Because if they’re “for the kids,” then anyone who pushes back can immediately beeasily framed as “against the kids.”And in the U.S. in the 1970s, there’s one anti-gay crusader who did the most to popularize theidea of queer people “coming for your children.”Next time on Groomer Rumor, we’ll be talking Anita Bryant, stranger danger, and gay liberationmovements in West Germany and the US. I hope you’ll join.103EPISODE 4: THE RECRUITERSusanna: I have a copy of Jonathan Ned Katz’s 1976 book Gay American History. It’sconsidered one of the foundational texts for, well, gay American history, and for queer history ingeneral. The copy I have is this giant red tome that kind of looks like a Bible, and it has thatdistinct “old book” smell. My copy also once belonged to David Thorstad, who was a reallyactive gay rights organizer at the time and also provided Jonathan Ned Katz with some of thematerials he used to write the book. Thorstad has handwritten annotations in the marginsthroughout the book. Sometimes they’re super salty, like one that says “distorting history!” orothers that point out where he felt he wasn’t properly credited for contributions he made to thescholarship.David Thorstad died in 2021 at the age of 79, leaving a really complicated legacy that I’m goingto do my best to leave complicated. He was undoubtedly a really important activist in the yearsfollowing the 1969 Stonewall riots—he was the president of the Gay Activists’ Alliance in NewYork City from 1975 to 1976, and he co-founded the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in1977.181He was also an independent researcher who, like Jonathan Ned Katz, was one of the pioneers ofwriting gay history for an American audience. In 1974, along with John Lauritsen, heco-authored the book The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), which was one ofthe earliest English-language texts to discuss the gay rights movement in Germany that hadgotten its start in the mid-nineteenth century. Even more concretely, as our guest from last time,181 Duncan Osborne, “Former Gay Activists Alliance President David Thorstad Dies at 79,” Gay City News,Published August 6, 2021, https://gaycitynews.com/former-gay-activists-alliance-president-david-thorstad-dies-79/.104Dr. Jake Newsome has written about, Thorstad was the one who first introduced the pink triangleas a symbol for gay liberation in America in 1974, after connecting with West German activistswho had been reclaiming the symbol over the previous couple of years.Now, I want to call back to one of our previous characters. Remember our friend Henry Gerberfrom back in episode 2? He was the German-American soldier who discovered gay rightsactivism in Berlin while stationed there, and then returned to his home in Chicago to start theSociety for Human Rights, America’s first documented homosexual rights organization. In theirbook The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, Lauritsen and Thorstad don’t mention HenryGerber at all. In fact, in the short section entitled “The Gay Movement in the United States andOther Countries,” they state explicitly that “[t]here does not appear to have been much, if any,organized gay rights activity during the period covered in this book.”182It seems to me, then, that in 1974, Thorstad wasn’t aware of Henry Gerber. But by 1976, thiswasn’t the case, because there’s a section on Gerber in Gay American History that Thorstad hasannotated. I can’t say for certain, but it’s possible that this was the first he heard about Gerber.The parallels between Thorstad and Gerber are fascinating to me—and demonstrate theimportance of a transnational approach toward understanding queer history. Both of themtraveled from the US to Germany and found strategies for gay rights activism there that they thenbrought back to the American movement. And there’s fifty years separating Gerber founding theSociety for Human Rights and Thorstad bringing the pink triangle over from Germany. To me,this is a testament to how influential German gay rights activism was to the American gay rights182 John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) (New York: TimesChange Press, 1974), 36105movement, and I think a decent amount of that can be attributed to the fact that in Germany,Paragraph 175 applied to the whole country, right? In the US, anti-sodomy laws vary from stateto state. But in Germany, they have this one law that they can focus their energy onchanging—whether that’s through the formation of gay rights organizations in the 1920s or byreclaiming the pink triangle in the 1970s.Dr. Jake Newsome’s book Pink Triangle Legacies makes a compelling argument for taking atransnational approach to understanding gay history, and specifically looking at how the gayhistories of Germany and the United States are so deeply intertwined. Dr. Newsome focuses onthe symbol of the pink triangle and on how Holocaust memory was invoked in both countries tofight for gay rights, ultimately contributing to the formation of what he calls a “modern,transatlantic gay identity.”What I’d like to suggest here is a kind of “yes and” argument: yes, Holocaust memory is a usefulfocal point for understanding how German and American efforts collaboratively contributed tothe formation of this modern gay identity, and we can also trace these connections furtherback—at least back to 1924 when Henry Gerber was importing German activist strategies to anAmerican context.But you’ll remember that I mentioned David Thorstad’s legacy is a complicated one. It’s also onethat reveals some of the fault lines that caused divisions within the American and German gayliberation movements in the 70s and 80s. In late 1978, Thorstad became a co-founder of theNorth American Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, which was dedicated to abolishing106age of consent laws and promoting what was once called pederasty, or sexual relations betweenmen and boys under the legal age of consent.NAMBLA was a divisive organization that caused major rifts in the American gay rightsmovement. It also gave the growing religious right a very convenient bogeyman to point to asthey increasingly conflated homosexuality and pedophilia. And they used this to bolster parentalanxieties about their children’s safety—especially around strangers.[theme music soft, growing louder]Susanna: This week, we’re focusing on the moral panic over “stranger danger” and how itintersects with the trope of the queer child molester.I’m your host, Susanna Cassisa, and this is Groomer Rumor.[theme music]Susanna: Welcome back to Groomer Rumor, the show where we dissect the history and functionof the age-old trope of the queer predator who recruits, seduces, or—most recently—groomschildren.Last week, Drs. Jake Newsome and Samuel Huneke joined us to talk about what queer peopleexperienced under the Nazi regime. For today’s episode, Dr. Huneke is back to discuss the West107German gay liberation movement that David Thorstad would have encountered during his timethere in the mid-1970s.But what’s going on in the 1960s in West Germany is important context for understanding thegay movement in the ’70s. So of course in the ’60s, across the world we see a wave of protestsand political activism, especially from students. In the West German context, this generation ofstudent protesters is the first postwar generation, who are coming of age in the mid-to-late ’60s.They’ve come to be known as the 68ers.Sam: And so the 68ers, you know, they’re, they’re also involved in anti-colonial protests,protests of the Vietnam War. There’s a major protest of the Shah of Iran in 1967. It also iswrapped up in series around the sort of lack of political opposition within the Bundestag.Susanna: This protest against the Shah is really instrumental in mobilizing the movementbecause of police brutality that culminates in a student protester named Benno Ohnesorg beingshot in the back of the head and killed. And this kind of sets off a wave of radicalization for the68ers.Sam: And they start pressing their parents’ generation on a lot of these questions on what wereyou doing in the Nazi period? Why hasn’t West Germany made more of an effort to sort of rootout Nazism?108Susanna: And this memory of Germany’s recent fascist past is part of what makes the WestGerman student movement, and for our purposes, the sexual revolution in particular, distinctfrom other movements for sexual liberation across the West. Because what becomes reallycentral to the 68ers’ understanding of Nazism is sex.183Sam: So their parents saw the Nazi era as this period of sort of sexual excess and that the 1950sand early West Germany was aimed at restraining that sexual excess.Susanna: The 68ers start to make the opposite claim. They argue that the Nazi era was stiflinglysexually conservative and that there’s this continuity between Nazi sexual politics and WestGerman sexual politics in the postwar period.Sam: And they even, you know, start making its claims that essentially fascism grows out ofrepressed sexuality and sexual conservatism.Susanna: Based on the work of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, they start to argue that theHolocaust was directly and causally linked to sexuality, that the most heinous Nazi war criminalscommitted these atrocities because their parents had been too sexually repressive. And thesebeliefs—which are incredibly reductive, I should add—kind of start to animate their views ondismantling the traditional patriarchal family structure.184184 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 156–160.183 Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005), 2–5; 141–142.109Sam: And essentially, they are really characterized by, as you were sort of hinting at a newconception of sex and gender and the family.Susanna: The 68ers critiqued the institution of the nuclear family as oppressive and challengedtraditional gender norms that were the bedrock of the family unit.Sam: It’s interesting, though, to point out the initial sort of wave of the 1968ers, thesemovements, these activists are mostly men. They’re mostly college educated men or men whoare in the process of getting a college education. There is a huge amount of misogyny, even asthey claim to be sort of liberating society from these, you know, bourgeois fascist sexual norms.Susanna: And despite the 68ers’ pushback against these sexual norms, queer liberation reallyisn’t high on their to-do list.Sam: There also is a complete lack of interest in homosexuality and the fact that paragraph 175was still on the books.Susanna: As we discussed last episode, West Germany kept the Nazi version of Paragraph 175in its criminal code—the one that made it much easier to convict and had that provision thatcriminalized the so-called seduction of youth. And between 1949 and 1969, the West Germangovernment convicted more than 50,000 men under Paragraph 175.185185 Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold WarGermany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 81.110To be clear, just because the 68ers generally didn’t care about the legal status of homosexualitydoesn’t mean they had nothing to do with legal reform. Riding the coattails of the so-called sexwave which brought about widespread access to the birth control pill and pornography, the 68ersmade significant contributions to the cultural shifts that precipitated the reform of Paragraph175.186Throughout the 50s and 60s, a small minority of outspoken lawyers and sexologists had arguedin favor of reforming Paragraph 175, even as many of them continued suggesting or outrightclaiming that gay men could and would seduce minors.187 So it was under these conditions that inJune of 1969, just days before the Stonewall riots in the United States, and a century after KarlMaria Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs began pushing for reform, the West Germangovernment decriminalized adult male homosexuality.Sam: So it's a moment of real change and it sort of sets the stage for the more radical gay andlesbian movements that got their start in the 1970s.Susanna: And this is the atmosphere that John Lauritsen, and David Thorstad would haveencountered during their time in West Germany in the early 1970s, this much more politicallyactive and radical gay movement.And now, even as Lauritsen and Thorstad are importing things like the pink triangle back to theUnited States, we also see the German gay liberation movement taking a lot of inspiration from187 Huneke, States of Liberation, 84–92.186 Huneke, States of Liberation, 95–100.111its American counterpart which really highlights the transnational nature of thismovement—ideas were flowing back and forth across the Atlantic, with each country’s approachinforming the other.188In his book, States of Liberation, Dr. Huneke has identified four fault lines that ran through anddivided the West German gay liberation movement in the 1970s.189Sam: One of them is just this question of, like, how radical or moderate do we want to be.Susanna: Similarly, these activists are also trying to negotiate the issue of socialism vs.capitalism.Sam: You have a lot of die-hard socialists who enter these movements and really see gayliberation as a subset of the struggle against capitalism, and they’re unwilling to sort of workwith people who maybe see gender and gender norms as a bigger threat to queer people thancapitalism per se.Susanna: Then, of course, there’s the issue of gender that haunts queer movements to this day.Sam: And so there’s a big fault line in some of these between sort of more gender radicals andsocialists, gender, and in particular, the place of women in the movement is a huge issue.189 Huneke, States of Liberation, 129–132.188 Huneke, States of Liberation, 128; W. Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of theHolocaust, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), 138–167.112And then the last fault line that I identify is this question of the age of consent.Susanna: And this is an extremely divisive issue that is kind of a thread that runs through thegay liberation movement and the New Left more generally, in both West Germany and theUnited States. But given the West German social and political context, there’s some particularsthat really set it apart.One aspect of the 68ers’ sex-informed outlook on life and the family centered around the idea ofantiauthoritarian child rearing. A small group of radical activists began running daycare centersthat prioritized this new method of parenting and transforming society through children.190Sam: And, you know, there are definitely some positive sides about the idea that, you know, youshouldn’t just sort of be under the absolute control of their parents, which, they see it asessentially abusive.Susanna: But there were also some really concerning approaches to what was ostensibly amovement to liberate children. The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich—the one who suggested thatsexual repression led to fascism—also had a keen interest in childhood sexuality, since hebelieved that this was when sexual repression began, at the hands of parents.191 So theseKinderläden, or alternative daycare centers, placed a huge emphasis on the liberation ofchildhood sexuality, even to the point where children were encouraged to openly touch their owngenitals and those of others around them, including adults.191 Herzog, 159.190 Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 162–174.113Sam: And, you know, there was a big New Yorker article a year or two ago about, right, this, thissort of experiment in Berlin, a Green Party sort of government councilor, was essentially likeplacing foster care children with a known pedophile because he thought it would be therapeutic. Imean, like really, really deeply disturbing stuff. So that is one strand of this sort of Green Party,68er interest in deconstructing the family that goes in a really dark direction.192Susanna: I recommend reading the New Yorker article, which will be linked in the show notes,but the gist of what was happening was that this psychologist and sexologist, Helmut Kentler,who was one of the leading voices on sexual advice in Germany at the time, was placing fosterchildren into homes with known pedophiles and explicitly encouraging sexual contact betweenthe foster father and the children as a means of resocializing wayward youth. Super disturbing.And this went on for a really long time. From the late 1960s all the way through the 1990s, withat least one of the foster children still under the care of one of these pedophiles until 2003. Andthis program was approved and financially supported by the Berlin Senate.And I bring this up just to give some context for this debate over the age of consent that wasgoing on within the gay liberation movement at the time.192 Rachel Aviv, “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles,” The New Yorker. PublishedJuly 19, 2021.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles.114Sam: There’s a really sort of famous moment in West Germany where the gay organizations, themore sort of moderate mainstream organizations, organize this grand political podium discussionfor the 1980 election.And they invite major representatives from all of the parties to Bonn, to the capital. They rent outthe Beethoven Hall, which is this giant 2000 seat auditorium, and basically stage a debate on sortof gay political priorities so that, you know, it’s like gays in the military, age of consent,reparations for gay victims of Nazism. These are the sort of issues they want to discuss withthese representatives. And the idea is to try and pressure the parties to start adopting more gayfriendly political platforms.But in the first, like, 10 minutes, pedophile activists interrupt the proceedings and essentially say,you are excluding us, you are persecuting us. They’re trying to frame themselves as persecutedby the sort of moderate gay mainstream. And the event, like, goes down in flames, ends in chaos.Susanna: This moment has been remembered as a colossal failure for the West German gaymovement and has come to be kind of emblematic of some of these major fissures that dividedthe movement.Sam: I argue in my book that actually it shouldn’t be seen that way, that in a lot of ways it seemslike they succeeded in pressuring various political parties, the Free Democratic Party, the sort ofmoderate Liberal Party that many of these organizations were urging their voters to, to go andvote for, you know, it had one of its best results ever in that election anyway.115Susanna: As I alluded to in the intro to this episode, the issue of pedophilia was very present inAmerican debates over homosexuality in the late 1970s as well. The “think of the children”argument that had been so successful for decades in Germany was about to really ramp up in theUnited States.Sam: And so, you know, it’s almost like homophobes in the US took what was happening inEurope and in Germany and said, oh like that seemed to work pretty well. Let’s try that, youknow, and it's a sort of intuitive, um, thing, right.You, if you want to get something done, you say it’s for the children and then it becomes veryhard to argue against and that’s essentially what, you know, Anita Bryant, she has the Save theChildren [sic] campaign claiming that, you know, we’re legalizing homosexuality, we’reintroducing it to the schools.Susanna: If you know anything about gay history in the United States, you’ve probably heardthe name Anita Bryant. She’s kind of entered back into more mainstream conversation recentlywith all this groomer rhetoric that’s being resurrected, and people really often point to her to say“look, here’s where it started.” Part of what I’m trying to do here is show that this trope actuallyhas a much longer history, and one that extends beyond the United States, but there is no doubtthat she is a character that’s central to the popularization and proliferation of this rhetoric,especially in the US. So let’s talk about her.116[audio clip of Anita Bryant]Anita Bryant: “I have been blacklisted for exercising the right of a mother to defend her childrenand all children against their being recruited by homosexuals.”193Anita Bryant enters the fray at a time where gay activists in America are really making someimportant strides right? So in 1969 we have Stonewall which is really a watershed moment forgay liberation. Between 1971 and 1976, sixteen states repeal their anti-sodomy statutes.194 Andby the end of 1973, the American Psychiatric Association no longer categorizes homosexualityas a mental disorder.195We’ve also recently started talking about child abuse as an issue that concerns the general public.So in 1962, a paper called “The Battered-Child Syndrome” is published in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association, which is one of the first instances we see of institutions startingto reckon with the physical abuse of children by their parents. And this is a big step away fromthe panic we saw in the postwar era panic over psychopaths who were out to get children. Theauthors of the paper acknowledge that perpetrators could be psychopaths or sociopaths, but moreoften than not, it’s a parent who seems “normal.”196196 Harry C. Kempe, Frederic N. Silverman, Brandt F. Steele, William Droegemueller, and Henry K. Silver, “TheBattered-Child Syndrome,” Journal of the American Medical Association 181, no. 1 (1962): 30.195 Fred Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America’s Debate on Homosexuality (New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 45194 Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1998), 124.193 SuchIsLifeVideos, “Anita Bryant - Save Our Children Campaign,” YouTube video, July 10, 2014.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB5H--b3Xho&t=328s.117In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement does a lot of the work to get the problem ofabuse against women and children into mainstream political conversations. And a lot of feministsstart to critique the power imbalances inherent to the patriarchal nuclear family.Anita Bryant’s crusade marks the beginning of a backlash against feminist critiques of thefamily.Paul: Of course, in the 1970s, there is tremendous anxiety in the United States and elsewhereabout the stability and sanctity of the American family and the child at the heart of that family.Susanna: This is Dr. Paul Renfro. He’s an associate professor of history at Florida StateUniversity and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the AmericanCarceral State.Paul: So there is this kind of fictive or fantastical quality to the family in that it's beenconstructed not only through social policy, but also through culture.Susanna: So this idealized concept of the family has these certain defining characteristics right?It’s a white, two-parent household that’s middle-to-upper class with two or three children, andthey probably live in the suburbs. Oh, and they’re probably Christian too, right? Thisquintessential ideal of the all-American family that’s kind of fundamentally unattainable—andthat’s the point.118Paul: It’s also very heterosexual. And so that is—that leads to, obviously, the production ofchildren, but that also requires that any sort of sexual subversion, any sort of deviance orperceived deviance must be sort of disciplined.Susanna: So it’s in this political and cultural context where there’s a lot of anxiety around theAmerican family and the threat of external sexual deviants that Anita Bryant comes into thepicture, in 1977.And I could sit here and do some analysis of how her anti-gay movement really represented thisanxiety over the American family. But I don’t have to because she really hands it to us on a silverplatter in the title of her book, which is The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’sFamilies and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality.And yes, I did buy a used copy of this book for this project, and yes, I did read the whole thing.The opening line of the book reads: “Because of my love for Almighty God, because of my lovefor His Word, because of my love for my country, because of my love for my children, I took astand—one that was not popular.”197So, who is she and what was she taking a stand against?197 Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of MilitantHomosexuality (Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977), 13119Anita Bryant was a singer, a former pageant queen, and the spokeswoman for the Florida CitrusCommission.198[clip from Anita Bryant TV ad]Anita Bryant: [singing] A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine. Orange juice,serve it generously from the Florida sunshine tree.199So in January 1977, in Dade County, Florida which encompassed the city of Miami, countycommissioners vote five to three to approve a law that bans discrimination on the basis of sexualpreference. So what this would effectively mean is that queer people can’t be denied housing oremployment based on their sexual orientation.And for Anita Bryant, this is simply too far.[clip from interview with Anita Bryant]Anita Bryant: According to the word of God, it’s an abomination to practice homosexuality.200Paul: It’s in that context and in other sorts of areas that Anita Bryant consistently articulates thisfear and this, this sort of attack that is so incredibly effective.200 SuchIsLifeVideos, “Anita Bryant Confronted In 1977 (Who's Who) Interview,” YouTube video, August 7, 2014.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fABwascm12s.199 ChuckD’s All-New Classic TV Clubhouse, “Florida orange juice ad w/Anita Bryant, 1972,” YouTube video,March 11, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ffEJJhB8qI.198 Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 78.120Susanna: So in response to the anti-discrimination ordinance passing, Anita Bryant launches theSave Our Children campaign, railing against gay rights on the basis of her Christian faith,claiming that it was, in fact, her rights that were being violated if openly gay teachers werepermitted to teach her children.Paul: And we see obviously it living on today this notion that gay people, queers, lesbians, reallyanybody under the LGBTQ umbrella somehow wants to, to recruit children and, you know, enlistthem in this movement.You know, to paraphrase Bryant, gays cannot reproduce, and so they must recruit.[clip from interview with Anita Bryant]Anita Bryant: Just biologically, that God made mothers so that we can reproduce. Homosexualscannot reproduce biologically, but they have to reproduce by recruiting our children.”201Susanna: And it really can’t be overstated, the role that Anita Bryant played in fomenting thisrhetoric of protecting children from this external threat. The following year, in 1978, the BriggsInitiative is introduced in California, a ballot proposition which would have banned gay men andlesbians from teaching positions.201 SuchIsLifeVideos, “Anita Bryant Confronted In 1977 (Who's Who) Interview.”121But unintentionally, she also mobilized and kind of unified the gay movement by giving them afigurehead to rally against.[interview clip with Bob Kunst, one of the most vocal activists pushing back against AnitaBryant’s rhetoric]Bob Kunst: I think that she’s doing more for the gay community than anyone else on this planet,I support everything that she’s doing, I would like to see her have as much exposure as possible. Ithink that she is rallying the community together like I have never seen before, there’s no way Icould’ve done it on my own. And the gays are coming out of the closet like crazy, the non-gayand the gays are talking for the first time, there’s absolutely incredible dialogue at every level ofthis community, every single family is talking about it, and who could’ve done it but AnitaBryant?Susanna: Across the country, people start boycotting Florida orange juice, so gay bars stopserving screwdrivers and instead serve vodka and apple juice, which they call an “AnitaBryant.”202 There’s t-shirts and buttons made with slogans like “Anita Bryant sucks oranges” and“A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine.”203In San Francisco, the openly gay politician Harvey Milk campaigned by playing off of AnitaBryant’s words.203 Johnson, This is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right, 64.202 Emily Suzanne Johnson, This is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right (New York:Oxford University Press, 2019), 64.122[clip from Harvey Milk speech]Harvey Milk: My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you!204Sam: And so it’s basically the same fear of the seduction of youth repackaged into a sort ofslightly different, more colorful sort of wrapping. But what’s interesting is that in West Germany,you don't have that same rhetoric nearly as prevalent.Susanna: As the rhetoric of youth seduction is dying down in Germany, it’s really picking upsteam in the United States. And this is a paradox I’m really fascinated by when thinking aboutsexual politics in Germany and the US. In West Germany, you have this much more visible andvocal minority that’s pushing for things like abolishing the age of consent and liberatingchildhood sexuality, and you have powerful political actors like Helmut Kentler actually enactingpolicy that really does put children in harm’s way.But in the United States, you have this extremely small group that’s pushing for getting rid of ageof consent laws. They never wield any meaningful political power, but NAMBLA is powerful inthat they are conservatives’ worst nightmare. They embody everything the right thinks is wrongwith the gay rights movement. So you get this backlash in the United States that we really neversee in West Germany.204 UCLA Film & Television Archive, “Pat Rocco: Harvey Milk speech in Los Angeles (1978),” YouTube video,December 7, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkEi6zlgtz8.123Sam: This is actually like a mystery that I mentioned in my book, and I’ve never really come upwith a satisfactory reason. Right. That you have Anita Bryant, you have Ronald Reagan, youhave this horrible response to the AIDS crisis in the U.S. and none of that happens in WestGermany.Susanna: To be clear, homophobia is absolutely still prevalent in West Germany—it just doesn’ttake on the dimensions that it does in the US. One possibility that Dr. Huneke and I discussed isthat because the movement for sexual liberation in Germany was so much more visible and somuch more radical, perhaps it was easier for more mainstream German society to kind of write itoff as not particularly threatening.Sam: Whereas in the US, you know, activists are in a certain sense, much more successful at sortof moderating themselves and actually passing, you know, they start passing anti-discriminationordinances in the 1970s. And that's really what Anita Bryant is initially a backlash to, is thisperception that gay activists are actually succeeding at passing local legislation. And so, youknow, there's also, then the element that you never have a sort of religious revival in Germany,like that that you have in the US, which is also going on.Susanna: Aside from Anita Bryant, there’s other conservative evangelical media personalitieslike Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Billy Graham who start to really push “family values” inAmerican politics in the late seventies into the eighties.124Sam: So you have even though you have these sort of superficial similarities between the twocountries, actually what's going on structurally is very different.Susanna: The religious right was undoubtedly crucial to the anti-gay movement and this rhetoricof gay recruitment, but what’s important to note is that it wasn’t only these hyperconservativeswho moved this political project forward.Paul: So in this context, you have not just right-wingers, people like Anita Bryant and JerryFalwell, who are expressing their concerns about the well-being of the family and the threat thatis posed supposedly by gay men in and through gay liberation. But it’s also expressed by liberalswho are essentially saying, well, yeah, the family is this critical unit, this, this vital sort of cog inthe machinery of the United States. And so we need to ensure its longevity. We need to ensure itshealth.Susanna: The impulse to protect the family unit and the apparent urgent need to protect childrenfrom an ambiguous external threat was very successfully marshaled into a bipartisan campaign inthe 1980s.Paul: So it’s in this moment that fears about the safety of children and specifically the fearsabout their vulnerability when it came to kidnapping and exploitation and murder. These allcome to a head in this moment.125Susanna: Now, we’ve seen this sort of panic before, right? In episode 2, we discussed how in thepost-World War II period in the United States, we see a similar panic over child murder and sexcrimes against children. In this late-twentieth century iteration of the moral panic over childsafety, these fears come to be articulated as “stranger danger.” And one case in particular—thecase of Etan Patz—did a lot to unify the fears of stranger danger and the fears of the gay malepredator, in service of addressing the crisis ostensibly facing the American family.Paul: And Etan Patz was a six-year-old boy who went missing in May of 1979 while walking tothe school bus stop for the first time, and obviously the last time.Susanna: His mother had finally given in to her son’s pleading to let him walk to the bus stopalone, less than two blocks from their home.Paul: And he was never seen again.Susanna: Like the Leopold and Loeb case in the 1920s, this case really just captures nationalmedia attention.Paul: One reason why this sort of captured the attention of New Yorkers and Americans moregenerally is because of the photographs that Etan’s father, Stanley, who was a professionalphotographer, had taken of Etan. And these were beautiful photographs. He was this veryphotogenic child. And so these images were, in a way, kind of ready for prime time.126Susanna: He becomes one of the first and one of the most recognizable missing children toappear on milk cartons across the country.205Paul: And that’s one of the sort of visual appeal of this case cannot be overstated, I think. Youknow, so because of these images which were so high quality, just, you know, crisp, beautifulimages, they enable people to connect with the case and to get to connect with the case and tofollow the case in in ways that perhaps would not be possible if those sorts of images were notavailable or if lower quality images were were all that were there, all available.Susanna: In the years immediately following the disappearance of Etan Patz, the police didn’treally have any leads or make any breaks in the case.Paul: But there is a presumed break in the case in late 1982. So over three years after Etan wentmissing, when police in Hamm, Massachusetts, raid a cottage that is allegedly linked to theNorth American Man Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, what police discover when raidingthis cottage, which sat on the waterfront in Massachusetts, was they find an image of a boy whokind of resembles Etan.Susanna: As you can imagine, the media had an absolute field day with this. And it’s not just thetabloids or hyper-conservatives who latch onto this story. It really seeps into mainstream media.205 Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2020), 29127Paul: You also have Bill Moyers on, I believe, at CBS, kind of inveighing against this andindicating that this is actually evidence of sexual liberation gone awry.Susanna: And this isn’t unique to this situation in particular. Actually, these kinds of politicalmovements often rely on reactionary centrists to bolster their support base. Here’s journalist BariWeiss in 2018 basically making a similar argument:[clip from Real Time with Bill Maher]Bari Weiss: You know, I went to a college where I was told that gender is a social construct,nature doesn’t matter at all, that there’s really no difference between men and women. I’m sorry,that’s just—those are myths. And that’s a lie that the sexual revolution sold to women.206Susanna: Bari, name one professor at Columbia who told you nature doesn’t matter at all.But the point is that you have people who would probably self-identify themselves as leaningmore progressive but are taking these reactionary stances, claiming that the sexual revolution has“gone too far.”You have people taking these accusations against NAMBLA, you know, that they allegedly hadthis photo of Etan Patz, and framing it as evidence of the fact that the sexual revolution hadfailed, and what do you know, we’re back to traditional family values, just with a liberal punditpushing it instead of Anita Bryant.206 Real Time with Bill Maher, “Bari Weiss on #MeToo | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO),” YouTube video,February 9, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6lCPvwiIqo&t=319s.128Paul: It turns out that this image did not depict Etan. It depicted a boy from a non-pornographiccalendar. But the work that this had done, I guess the die had already been cast. Right. The workhad already been done, and this work that I’m referring to is the the kind of stoking of theanti-gay kind of moral panic sex panic that very much animates the the missing childrenmoment.The concern that—and this is a widely held belief that children are increasingly vulnerable, theyare subject, increasingly subject to this grave and growing problem of child abduction andspecifically stranger abduction, and specifically, even more specifically, a sexually motivatedstranger abduction.Susanna: Overtones of anxieties over homosexuality were present in many of the high-profilestranger danger cases around this time, including the Iowa paperboy cases and the Atlanta youthmurders.207 The fact that murdering children seems quite contradictory to recruiting them intobeing homosexual was, of course, unimportant to those hellbent on ensuring queer people stayedon the margins of society.But setting sexuality aside momentarily, let’s consider a few statistics. The kidnapping ofchildren by strangers is exceedingly rare.207 Renfro, Stranger Danger, 80–85; 98–104.129Paul: It’s, it’s incredibly rare. Something like 100 children are abducted by strangers in theUnited States in any given year. Anybody is far more likely to be victimized by someone theyknow and more specifically someone in their family unit.Susanna: And the thing that people seemed to fear most during this moral panic—the sexuallymotivated abduction and murder of a child—happens incredibly rarely. The scholar PhilipJenkins puts this number at about 5 cases per year.208Paul: Nevertheless, this concern about stranger danger takes hold in this moment. And there isthis kind of anti-gay dimension to it.Susanna: I want to be clear that the rarity of this type of case in no way invalidates the reality ofwhat happened to Etan Patz. Etan was kidnapped by a stranger, an employee at a bodega whoconfessed decades later in 2012 to luring and killing Etan as he walked to the bus stop. And thisis a horrific tragedy. It’s also true that the rhetoric that emerged around Etan’s disappearance, andthe implication of NAMBLA—however fabricated—really helps to fuel the increasinglypervasive idea that strangers lurked out there, waiting to kidnap, exploit, and killchildren—particularly white, middle-class children.Paul: And this becomes the logic that elected officials employ as they seek to get tough on crimeand sexual crime, especially in the eighties and into the nineties.208 Jenkins, Moral Panic, 10.130Susanna: These fears that seeped into the American consciousness, with the help of the Reaganadministration, had far-reaching consequences—ones that built on the myth of stranger dangerand the fears Anita Bryant had stoked about the disintegration of the nuclear family.In the summer of 1983, the mother of a toddler who attended McMartin Preschool in ManhattanBeach, California, reported to the police that she believed her son to have been molested by ateacher at the preschool named Ray Buckey. This would turn out to be one of the first in a waveof allegations of satanic ritual abuse taking place at daycare centers across North America. It’snotable that the Satanic Panic, as it’s come to be called, was focused on childcare centers.Largely thanks to the work of feminists in the 1970s, more women than ever were entering theworkforce, which also meant leaving children under the care of strangers.The Satanic Panic drew explicitly on homophobic tropes popularized by Anita Bryant and herilk. Prosecutors never outright claimed that Ray Buckey was gay, but only because they didn’thave to. In his book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, Richard Beck writes“[b]y implying he was gay, Ray Buckey’s prosecutors were simply pursuing a tactic with aproven record of success.”209 In Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a nineteen-year-old, openly gaydaycare employee named Bernard Baran was sentenced to three life terms after being convictedof sexually abusing five children.210 During his case, the prosecutor claimed that a gay man in adaycare center was no different than a “chocoholic in a candy store.”211211 Beck, 115.210 Beck, 14.209 Beck, We Believe the Children, 201.131These cases of alleged child sexual abuse at daycare centers fomented the idea that sexual abuseis something that occurs outside the sanctity of the family—and is perpetrated by literal evilsatanists. And this was used to justify a carceral system that, unsurprisingly, disproportionatelyaffects queer people and people of color.212Paul: So these registration and community notification protocols become standard because of thestranger danger panic.Susanna: Sex offender registries were first introduced in 1994 under the Jacob Wetterling Act.Two years later, Megan’s Law went into effect, mandating that state sex offender registries beavailable online and neighbors alerted when certain offenders moved into their area.213 Andthey’ve only intensified since then.Paul: And it just seems like common sense for a lot of people.Susanna: One Gallup poll from 2005 indicates that 94% of Americans support registries forthose convicted of child molestation.214Paul: There’s a tremendous amount of sexual harm and sexual abuse that happens in the UnitedStates, and much of that is, children are oftentimes those who bear the brunt of that.214 Renfro, 226.213 Renfro, 12–13.212 Renfro, 56. See also Scott De Orio, “Bad Queers: LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America,”Law & Social Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2022): 691–711.132Susanna: According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or sexual assault.215Paul: So these systems, which are designed to prevent or mitigate sexual harm, they don’t dothat. They fail.Susanna: There are some 900,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, whose offensesrange from public urination, to consensual sex between teenagers, to the violent rape ofchildren.216 In addition to collapsing a wide variety of acts that exist on a spectrum of devianceunder the single category of “sex offense,” sex offender registries also reinforce the myth thatchild sexual abuse is likely to be perpetrated by a stranger.Paul: So the very idea that the scary stranger is the individual who is most likely to perpetratethis sort of harm, it enables people to feel safe in environments, settings in which maybe theyshould be more vigilant.Susanna: Sexual violence isn’t coming from evil satanists. It’s coming from people—93% of thetime, from people known by the victim.217 Because that’s how sexual abuse works, right? Byrelying on power dynamics, especially within trusted institutions like the family or the church.And that’s frankly much scarier than if sexual harm was only being perpetrated by satanic cults.217 “Children and Teens: Statistics,” Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, Accessed April 19, 2024.https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens.216 Renfro, 213.215 “Children and Teens: Statistics,” Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, Accessed April 19, 2024.https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens.133But it’s a reality we have to face if we’re serious about reducing sexual harm experienced bychildren.And this is a good reminder about the function that these panics over sexual predators serve. Thespecter of the queer seducer or recruiter isn’t the source of our anxiety; it’s a villain constructedto quell the anxiety we experience in moments of perceived social upheaval, especially aroundthe family.Next time, on Groomer Rumor, we’ll be discussing the current anti-trans moral panic, and whatit looks like in Germany and the United States. I hope you’ll join.134EPISODE 5: THE GROOMERSusanna: If you’ve followed anything in the few years pertaining to transphobia, you’veprobably heard J. K. Rowling’s name come up. You know, the one who wrote Harry Potter?Yeah, she’s spent the last five or so years at this point railing against trans people.It started back in 2019, when she started tweeting things directly out of the early-stagetransphobia playbook—things like:Speaker 1: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with anyconsenting adult who'll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But to force womenout of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill.”218Susanna: Here, she’s expressing support for Maya Forstater, a consultant in the UK whosecontract wasn’t renewed after she posted online calling transgender women “men.” And she’sdoing this hedging kind of thing—she’s not saying that trans women are men. She’s justsupporting Forstater’s right to say that. All she’s saying is “sex is real.” How could that betransphobic? And I think this is how a lot of people—read: cis people—understood this. That it’shardly transphobic to say that “sex is real,” it’s just a basic fact.And we’ll get into this later in the episode, but for now, consider some of Rowling’s more recentonline antics. As I was putting this podcast together, J. K. Rowling took to Twitter—or X, orwhatever, to deny persecution trans people faced from the Nazis.218 J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like.,” X, December 192019, 4:57 a.m., https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033.135She shared a screenshot of a tweet that had, at that point, been viewed 5 times. Viewed—notliked. The post asked,Speaker 2: “The Nazis burned books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperateto uphold their ideology around gender?”Susanna: To which Rowling responded by tweeting:Speaker 1: “I just…how? How do you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I shouldmaybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?”219Susanna: You, dear listeners, will recall that this was not, in fact, a fever dream. MagnusHirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was looted in May of 1933, and thousands of books andmedical records were burned at the Nazis’ infamous book burnings, including research on transhealthcare.220And Rowling has been quite vocal about her opposition to book burnings in the past.[Clip from The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling podcast]220 For accounts of the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science see, Günter Grau, ed., Hidden Holocaust? Gayand Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933–45, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Cassell, 1993), 31–33; see Knuth,112–17; Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of theNazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015) 174–75.219 J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), “I just…how?,” X, March 13, 2024, 6:57 a.m.,https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1767912990366388735?lang=en.136Rowling: “I suppose for me, book burners by definition, predictably, to me have placedthemselves across a line, across a line of rational debate. I'm simply going to destroy the ideathat I don't like. I will destroy the idea. I can't destroy it, so I'll, I will destroy its representation. Iwill burn this book. There is no book on this planet that I would burn. No book, including booksthat I do think are damaging.”221Susanna: Civil rights attorney Alejanda Caraballo responded to Rowling’s tweet, accusing herof Holocaust denial and linking two articles on Hirschfeld. Rowling responded by claiming that,Speaker 1: “Neither of [the] articles support the contention that trans people were the firstvictims of the Nazis or that all research on trans healthcare was burned in 1930s Germany.”Susanna: Which was … never the claim in the first place? Now, to be clear Rowling isn’tdenying that the Holocaust happened. I mean, presumably she believes that Jewish people andother marginalized groups were targeted. But she’s denying well-established historical factsabout Nazi crimes. The ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science did destroy research intotrans healthcare.And this exploded on Twitter. I mean, I tweeted out a list of peer-reviewed resources on transexperiences under Nazism, and amidst a wave of harassment, I had Graham Linehan—a very221 Megan Phelps-Roper, host, “Chapter 1: Plotted in Darkness,” The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (podcast),February 20, 2023, accessed May 13, 2024,https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-witch-trials-of-j-k-rowling/id1671691064.137notorious anti-trans activist with half a million followers—post my photo with a snarkyremark.222Someone in Rowling’s comments suggested that she google Magnus Hirschfeld, to which shereplied:Speaker 1: “I know all about Hischfield [sic]. Are you sure you want to make him a poster boyfor trans medicine? The man who believed in the sterilisation of the unfit?”223Susanna: Hirschfeld was a eugenicist. And we should interrogate that and critique hisviews—but we already are. Historian Laurie Marhoefer published a book on this very topic in2022 called Racism and The Making of Gay Rights which directly tackles some of Hirschfeld’smore unsavory stances.224 But the fact that Hirschfeld had problematic views doesn’t really tellus much about gender-affirming care then, let alone now. And it certainly doesn’t in any wayindicate that, as Rowling’s original post claimed, research into trans healthcare wasn’t destroyedby the Nazis.But why am I talking about this? I mean, Rowling isn’t calling trans people “groomers.” Right?Well, I mean technically that’s correct. As far as I know, Rowling hasn’t ever described transpeople that way.224 See Laurie Marhoefer, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of QueerLove (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).223 J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), “I know all about Hischfield,” X, March 13, 2024, 8:01 a.m.,https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1767912990366388735?lang=en.222 Graham Linehan (@Glinner), “Did Nazis read Tumblr in the 2010s? I’m definitely going to trust this person onthe matter,” X, March 14, 2024, 10:07 a.m., https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1768323135731073372.138But the Rowling saga, I think, is emblematic of a couple of things that I’m trying to get at in thisseries and want to talk about more in this episode. First, it shows how movements like theanti-trans, anti-LGBTQ+ movements rely on these kind of respectable, mainstream figures todisseminate more palatable versions of their bigotry. Sure, Rowling isn’t calling trans peoplegroomers—but she does have some “concerns” about the safety of women and girls if we allowtrans women into bathrooms.And second, her Nazi crime denial demonstrates the enduring importance of German history tocontemporary debates over gender and sexuality—both within and outside of Germany. Inparticular, Holocaust memory has long been a site for negotiating the rights of LGBTQ+ people.Dr. Jake Newsome, who we heard from on episode 2, has discussed this in his book PinkTriangle Legacies, which I highly recommend.As we see this rise in anti-trans legislation in the US, Germany gets invoked a lot, often in waysthat are fundamentally inaccurate. And part of this is that we can basically all agree that Nazisare bad, right? I mean the word “Nazi” has kind of become shorthand for describing all thingsevil. But there seems to be a lot of disagreement over what exactly National Socialism was interms of actual ideology.[clip from the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast]139Jordan Peterson: “I also think it’s an open question still, to what degree Hitler’s policies wereright wing versus left wing, and no one’s done the analysis properly yet to determine that.”225Susanna: This, to me, is a real testament to the importance of transnational perspectives of queerhistory, including the history of anti-LGBTQ+ hate. And these can’t just be done in smallacademic circles—it’s absolutely essential that this scholarship makes its way to the public.German history is being invoked in conversations with very tangible real-world implications forLGBTQ+ people in the US and elsewhere.[theme music soft, growing louder]On this final episode, we’ll be talking about the current anti-LGBTQ+ discourse, and especiallyanti-trans rhetoric, in Germany and the United States.I’m your host, Susanna Cassisa, and this is Groomer Rumor.[theme music]Susanna: Welcome back to Groomer Rumor, the show where we dissect the history and functionof the age-old trope of the queer predator who recruits, seduces, or—most recently—groomschildren.225 Jordan B. Peterson, host, “433. Streaming, Politics, & Philosophy | Destiny (Steven Bonnell II),” The Jordan B.Peterson Podcast, March 21, 2024, accessed May 13, 2024,https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/433-streaming-politics-philosophy-destiny-steven-bonnell/id1184022695?i=1000650050324.140Last time, we talked about Anita Bryant and stranger danger in the 70s and 80s. And today,we’re seeing a resurgence of Anita Bryant’s rhetoric, repackaged and resold to us. And this timearound, it’s trans people who have disproportionately borne the brunt of this moral panic.Harper: I finished my PhD in 2019, and when I started that PhD, there was almost nowidespread discussion of transgender people in schools.Susanna: This is Dr. Harper Keenan. He is the Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender andSexuality in Education at the University of British Columbia. His work sits at the nexus of transstudies and education, specifically K-12 education.Harper: There was a little bit in relation to things like bathrooms and sports, but it was nowherenear the level of discourse that we see now.Susanna: Trans people are in no way new, but it’s really pretty recently that they have become aculture war talking point.226Gay men were the primary focus of campaigns like Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaignin the 1970s and were often implicitly or explicitly invoked in discussions of “stranger danger.”But by the 2000s, homophobic rhetoric had started to shift. Certainly, references to pedophiliaand child abuse did not disappear completely, but as sociologist Amy L. Stone has pointed out,226 For an overview of transgender history in the United States beginning in the mid-twentieth century, see SusanStryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008).141anti-gay rhetoric became more covert. Instead of outright accusations of gay men perpetratingsexual abuse, talking points were the stability of households with a mother and a father, or the“sexual confusion” that children’s books like Heather Has Two Mommies allegedly instilled.227By the 2010s, trans people really began to enter public discourse. In 2014, TIME magazinefeatured prominent trans actress Laverne Cox in a cover story called “The Transgender TippingPoint: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier,” which discussed recent legal victories for the transmovement.228But shortly thereafter, we also start to see a wave of what have come to be referred to as“bathroom bills,” policies which would permit trans people to use public restrooms that alignwith their gender identity. And along with this came familiar anxieties about sexual predatorsposing a threat to vulnerable women and children.229 But while these bathroom bills generallyweren’t very successful, they did succeed at propelling the topic of trans people into themainstream.Harper: So a great deal has shifted and changed just in the time that I have been in academia.So I’ve gone from working in an area that was largely unfamiliar to most of my colleagues andthe general public, to now this topic of trans people and schools being at the center of the US229 Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook, “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics,” Contexts 14, no. 3 (2015): 28;See also Sheila L. Cavanagh, Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2010). Historian Gillian Frank has compellingly argued that these “bathroom bills”employ the same logic that was used to enforce racial segregation in public restrooms. See Gillian Frank, “TheAnti-Trans Bathroom Nightmare Has Its Roots in Racial Segregation,” Slate, November 10, 2015.https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/11/anti-trans-bathroom-propaganda-has-roots-in-racial-segregation.html.228 Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” TIME, May 29, 2014.https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/.227 Amy L. Stone, “Frame Variation in Child Protectionist Claims: Constructions of Gay Men and TransgenderWomen as Strangers,” Social Forces 97, no. 3 (2019): 1164–65.142presidential race, being what Republican candidates have campaigned on.Susanna: Dr. Keenan says that this has made his job more risky. He is the regular recipient ofonline harassment, including death threats sent to his university email.Harper: That should be startling to all of us that advocating for a particular group of people orsupporting a particular group of children in schools through the research and scholarship that Ido, would result in death threats to a university professor.Susanna: Dr. Keenan is not alone in these experiences. Online harassment against LGBTQ+people has really ramped up since the term “groomer” started getting thrown around. GrahamLinehan, a prominent voice in the anti-trans movement, has been using this term since late 2019,when he started responding to posts supportive of trans people with “ok groomer”—a play on thephrase “ok boomer.”230 In the spring of 2020, this phrase started gaining more traction on4chan—a web forum notorious for breeding far-right extremism.231But it really takes off in 2022, when the account Libs of TikTok starts using it consistently. Libsof TikTok is a far-right Twitter account that reposts videos and other social media posts,primarily from LGBTQ+ people and their allies to stoke rage in its follower base.232 ChayaRaichik, who runs the account, has bragged that teachers have been fired from their jobs after she232 Taylor Lorenz, “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine,” TheWashington Post, April 19, 2022.https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/19/libs-of-tiktok-right-wing-media/.231 Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_), “In March 2020, a 4chan thread spread,” X, April 6, 2022, 2:36p.m.,https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1511820214547075073.230 Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_), “P.P.S I missed this connection to Graham Linehan,” X, April 6, 2022, 3:07p.m., https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1511827923619119107.143reposts their content, but denies that she holds responsibility for the bomb threats that schoolsand hospitals regularly receive after being featured on Libs of TikTok.233The list of people and things that Raichik has accused of “grooming” kids is ever-growing, and itincludes: sex educators, Chasten Buttigieg, and the Trevor Project, an organization dedicated tosuicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth.234Raichik and her ilk have also railed against family-friendly drag performances—in particular,Drag Story Hour, which Dr. Keenan has written about in an academic paper from 2020,co-authored by the drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess, who is involved in organizing Drag StoryHour.235 I’ll link the article in the show notes in case you’d like to check it out.Harper: Drag Story Hour is exactly what it sounds like. It is drag performers reading tochildren, with their fabulous flourishes and engaging forms of entertainment that havehistorically appeared in queer nightlife, but adapted for children in a way that actively connectswith kids.235 Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in EarlyChildhood,” Curriculum Inquiry 50, no. 5 (2020): 440-461.234 Jeremy Stahl, “The Hate-Fueled and Hugely Influential World of Libs of TikTok,” Slate, April 27, 2022.https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/04/chaya-raichik-libs-tiktok-groomer-tweets.html. The Salish CoastAntifascist Action has archived now-deleted posts from Libs of TikTok, which can be accessed here:https://github.com/salcoast/deleted-tweets-archive/blob/main/datasets/libsoftiktok-deleted.md.233 Taylor Lorenz, “How Libs of TikTok became a powerful presence in Oklahoma schools,” The Washington Post,February 24, 2024.https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/24/libs-tiktok-oklahoma-nonbinary-teen-death/; Lorenz,“Meet the woman.”144Susanna: The program was originally conceptualized in 2015 by Michelle Tea, a queer authorwho wanted to find ways to connect her young child with queer culture.236Harper: And so it is really just a remixing of library story hours with drag queens, taking theplace or supplementing the role of the local librarian. Often the themes are around difference,around self-expression, creativity, things like that. And so it’s been actually a really wonderfulliteracy initiative that has, you know, created a new avenue for really engaging programming foryoung children.Susanna: But right-wing media has glommed onto Drag Story Hour as a culture war talkingpoint.[clip from Tucker Carlson Tonight]Tucker Carlson: Let’s say you were interested in sexualizing children—and unfortunately somepeople are—what would you do? You might have a Drag Queen Story Hour.So the deal always was, do what you want, just leave the kids out of it because child molestationis a crime. But they’re not leaving the kids out of it at all.Chris Rufo: The academic queer theorists and the people who founded the Drag Queen StoryHour movement have left a trail of evidence in academic papers and manifestos that say the goalis very clear. They want to sexualize children, they want to subvert the middle class family, and236 Keenan and Hot Mess, “Drag Pedagogy,” 441.145they want to basically eliminate what they call the “sexual hierarchy,” in favor of creating asexual connection between adult and child, which has of course long been the kind of final tabooof the sexual revolution.237Susanna: That was Chris Rufo, a conservative pundit and senior fellow at the ManhattanInstitute, on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Rufo was largely behind the whole “critical race theory”panic from a few years ago, and he’s now turned to a new academic bogeyman: queer theory.238Dr. Keenan is one of the “academic queer theorists” Rufo is referring to, who allegedly left“evidence” that the purpose of Drag Story Hour is to sexualize children.Harper: But the idea that queer people are sexual predators, that are targeting children, and thatfrequently goes along with ideas that, queer people who are connected to children throughschools and libraries and programs like Drag Story Hour are somehow indoctrinating childreninto becoming queer themselves, or are abusing them in some disgusting and harmful way. Thatis obviously a very dangerous idea, because it does scapegoat queer people in such a way thatpositions us at risk of being targeted for violence ourselves.239 Because obviously no one wantschildren to be abused or harmed in any way. And the idea that, you know, any particular group ofpeople might be doing that to children, therefore makes those, that group of people, at risk ofviolence.239 For an account of how trans women are scapegoated, see Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman onSexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2007).238 See Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory,”The New Yorker, June 18, 2021.https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory/.237 Charles Creitz, “Drag queen story hour slammed as ‘sexualizing children’ after Maryland library hosts interactiveevent,” Fox News, October 28, 2022.https://www.foxnews.com/media/drag-queen-story-hour-slammed-sexualizing-children-maryland-library-hosts-interactive-event.146Susanna: The arguments Rufo is making are strikingly familiar. LGBTQ+ people are infiltratingschools and indoctrinating children, fostering sexual abuse. It’s the same argument Anita Bryantmade back in the 1970s, with some new buzzwords sprinkled in.Harper: The other thing that I think the right wing rhetoric around grooming and indoctrinationis premised on is the idea that it is a bad thing to be queer. You do not become concerned aboutindoctrination into things that you don't find dangerous and problematic inherently.Susanna: The writer and activist Julia Serano has a useful way of talking about this in her bookSexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back. She talks about how queerpeople (and other marginalized groups) are often perceived as being “marked by sex”—that is,somehow inherently sexual because of the stigma attached to their marginalized identity.240 Andthis stigma, Serano argues, is understood as somehow contagious—that by interacting withsomeone stigmatized even in an entirely non-sexual context, you, too, could become imbuedwith this stigma.241Harper: My partner and I had a baby last year, and it was stunning to me to witness the way thatmasculinity was projected onto him from his first moments in the breathing world. You know,comments like, “oh, he’s, he’s going to really be a heartbreaker with the ladies” or “oh, what alittle bruiser.” On a days-old infant!241 Serano, Sexed Up, 172–80.240 Julia Serano, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back (New York: Seal Press, 2022),165.147This kind of, like, sexualization of children’s relationships happens left and right, and it ispredominantly heteronormative.Susanna: But heterosexuality is understood by the dominant culture as the “right” kind ofsexuality. You can’t be “indoctrinated” into the truth, so the argument goes. You don’t get“contaminated” with stigma when you’re taught from birth how to fit into a heteronormativeworld. So it’s treated as no big deal.But if, for instance, a teacher were to discuss queer or trans identities in a classroom, then theymight as well be serving the kids corruption from a silver spoon, “grooming” them into lives ofdeviance and promiscuity. And that’s how you end up with something like the Florida ParentalRights in Education Act—better known as the Don’t Say Gay bill.This bill, which went into effect in 2022, really pushed the “groomer” discourse into themainstream.242 On March 4, 2022, Ron Desantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw tweeted:Speaker 3: “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accuratelydescribed as an Anti-Grooming Bill. If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably242 The law was written with vague language that resulted in censorship of a valedictorian speech in which thespeaker mentioned he was gay, removal of anti-bullying programs that explicitly addressed bullying of LGBTpeople, and teachers being required to remove stickers designating their classrooms as safe spaces for LGBTstudents. In a recent settlement, language was clarified in an effort to prevent such discrimination. See JeffMcMillan, Andrew DeMillo, and Geoff Mulvihill, “What to know about a settlement that clarifies what’s legalunder Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law,” AP News, March 12, 2024.https://apnews.com/article/dont-say-gay-florida-settlement-schools-lgbtq-f7850eedcb8bc6a117690d2b84aff671.148a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence iscomplicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”243Susanna: This is really a turning point because we now have government officials playing intothe “groomer” rhetoric.244[clip from Rep. Lauren Boebert’s speech at 2023 CPAC]Lauren Boebert: “And stop confusing our babies with your groomer gender ideologue [sic].Shame on you!”245Susanna: And this includes elected officials who are themselves LGBTQ+. Consider formermember of the US House of Representatives, George Santos, a gay man who has been quitevocal about his views on the Don’t Say Gay bill.246 On April 16, 2022, Santos took to Twitter toexpress his support, claiming that the left is “hellbent on creating a false narrative because theywant to groom our kids,” along with a video giving a statement.[clip from video posted to George Santos’ X profile]246 Lil Miss Hot Mess, “Don’t Let George Santos Bring Drag Down,” Slate, January 31, 2023.https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/01/george-santos-drag-queen-past-lies-distraction.html.245 C-SPAN, “Rep. Lauren Boebert Speaks at Conservative Political Action Conference.” March 4, 2023.https://www.c-span.org/video/?526367-4/rep-lauren-boebert-speaks-conservative-political-action-conference.244 Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_), “On March 4, 2022, Ron DeSantis’ comms director,” X, April 6, 2022, 2:36p.m., https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1511820222415572992.243 Christina Pushaw (@ChristinaPushaw), “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be moreaccurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.,” X, March 4, 2022, 3:33 p.m.,https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1499890719691051008.149George Santos: “Hey everyone, George Santos here. Congressional candidate in New York’sthird congressional district. Let’s talk real quick about the Florida bill, “Don’t Say Gay.” [...]DeSantis, you have my full-blown support, and I support your decision to protect our children’sinnocence.”247Susanna: Images also surfaced of George Santos in drag, which he initially denied beforewalking it back and owning up to it, claiming that he was young and just having fun.248 Mostrecently, he’s been posting online about how he’s bringing his drag persona back after 18years.249At this point, it’s hard to keep up—he’s really put the con in “gay icon.” No really—he more orless fabricated his entire identity. His lies include: that his niece was kidnapped from aplayground, that his mother died in 9/11, and that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.250And the list goes on. God, Ernst Röhm is rolling in his grave!But Germany has queer politicians peddling this kind of rhetoric. The term “groomer” hasn’ttaken hold there as it has in the US, but the sentiment is definitely present. Alice Weidel is theco-leader of Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland, or the AfD, which250 Bess Levin, “George Santos Has Been Booted From Congress: A Look Back at His Most Absurd Lies and Cons,”Vanity Fair, December 1, 2023. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/george-santos-worst-lies.249 Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, “George Santos’s Newest Money Grab is His Most Hypocritical Yet,” The NewRepublic, April 29, 2024. https://newrepublic.com/post/181078/george-santos-money-grab-hypocritical-drag-queen.248 Hot Mess, “Don’t Let George Santos Bring Drag Down.”247 George Santos (@MrSantosNY), “‘Don’t say gay’ is fiction!,” April 16, 2022, 2:26 p.m.,https://twitter.com/MrSantosNY/status/1515441457057959940.150campaigns for protecting the traditional family and eliminating “early sexualization” and “gendermainstreaming” in schools.251 She’s also a lesbian.252And this seems like a contradiction to a lot of people, right? But history—especially the Germanhistory we’ve discussed in this series—reminds us that this is not necessarily the case. Same-sexsexuality does not automatically mean leftist, liberal, or even progressive.253 Ernst Röhm the firstout gay politician, and he was a fascist. He disagreed with the Nazi Party on their stance onParagraph 175, but for him, his masculinist view of homoeroticism was quite compatible with hisother fascist ideals.254Being a far-right queer person isn’t an inherent contradiction, although of course one can run intodiscrepancies in particular political parties, like Röhm did with the Nazis’ homophobic policy.But this kind of incongruity isn’t unique to queerness, like, at all. National Socialism was rifewith contradictions. I mean, it’s clichéd at this point, but Hitler didn’t have blonde hair, right?And it’s not like Ernst Röhm was an outlier. Adolf Brand, one of the most prominent figures inthe early homosexual rights movement, was right there with him. His organization, theCommunity of the Special, openly supported nationalist, antisemitic politics and celebrated when254 See Laurie Marhoefer, “Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History,” Notches, June 19, 2018.https://notchesblog.com/2018/06/19/queer-fascism-and-the-end-of-gay-history/.253 See Jennifer V. Evans, “The Appeal of the Queer Right,” in “The Origin and Futures of Queer GermanStudies—In Memory of Robert Deam Tobin (1961–2022),” ed. Heidi Schlipphacke. Special Forum, The GermanQuarterly, early access, May 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12442.252 Paul Hockenos, “Meet the Lesbian Goldman Sachs Economist Who Just Led Germany’s Far Right to Victory,”Foreign Policy, September 24, 2017.https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/24/meet-the-lesbian-goldman-sachs-economist-who-just-lead-germanys-far-right-to-victory/.251 “Grundsatzprogramm für Deutschland,” Alternative für Deutschland, April 30–May 1, 2016,https://www.afd.de/grundsatzprogramm/.151the Nazis targeted other activists like Friedrich Radszuweit and Magnus Hirschfeld, who he feltwere “doing homosexuality wrong.”255You also don’t have to self-identify as fascist or far-right to feed into a reactionary worldview.Radszuweit was certainly not a far-right nationalist, but his stubborn adherence to respectabilitypolitics meant that he still played into right-wing narratives of gay men seducing young men.256And the same holds true today.Jennifer: There are members of the queer community that are very definitely, they believethemselves to be left, left/liberal.Susanna: This is Dr. Jennifer Evans, a historian of German queer history at Carleton University.Her most recent book, Queer Life After Fascism: Kinship and the Queer Art of History came outin 2023.Jennifer: They move in those circles, but their politics and their comments in mainstreamnewspapers and, and in some cases, subcultural newspapers, in some cases and conferencepapers really shows that they are using a parallel rhetoric that is very similar to some of theseideas in the far right, especially against migrants.Susanna: Islamophobia has become a feature of queer liberal politics in recent years.257257 See Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.256 Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth, 132.255 Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 152–53; Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth: PrintCulture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 160–61.152Jennifer: The fact that it’s nearly impossible for some people to actually imagine that Muslimscould be clear or tolerant of queers, right? And that fact that that’s just not even possible to puttogether is itself an indictment of, you know, just how liberal are, you know, just howprogressive are Germans?And so, absolutely, xenophobia is, is, front and center to, to these things in Germany as well as inother, in other places. And again, not necessarily just from the far right, but seeping into the, intothe mainstream as well.Susanna: So this is all to point out that queerness does not equal progressive politics. Andturning to the history of sexuality, and to German history in particular, can help us to put some ofthese seemingly contradictory politics into their historical context and make sense of them a littlebit more.Jennifer: So it’s not just the CDU, it’s not just the AfD. It's actually within our own midst. Andwe are seeing that happen, over and over and over again in, in various different places in the USand Canada, in Germany, where people within the scene are actually some of the more vocalopponents to, whether it’s migration, whether it’s trans issues that this is where some of thebacklash is coming.Susanna: And the anti-trans panic has certainly reared its ugly head in Germany in the last153couple of years.258 As I mentioned, the specific word “groomer” isn’t really prominent there, butterms like “gender mainstreaming” are popular in the German anti-trans discourse.259Jennifer: But this kind of specific anti-trans sort of anti drag thing is coming more from sort ofthe Trump moment. And so when you see the kind of, you know, these stupid posters that weresort of popping up last summer in parts of Germany from the AfD where they were trying to say,you know, drag, drag story hours, you know, threatening the nation’s youth. I mean, that’s ablatant importation from what's going on in Trump's in, in the wake of Trump's America. Right.So Germany has its own sort of organic anti-gender debate, but then some aspects are beingimported.Susanna: I find it telling, for instance, that the term “gender mainstreaming” is articulated inEnglish rather than in German. It allows it to fit into the far-right argument that “gender” issomehow antithetical to “German values,” and makes it feel like it’s just a preposterous ideafrom elsewhere.But it’s also worth pointing out that these imports from Trump’s America are really products ofrhetoric that has its roots in Germany, right? And that’s not to try to flip it around and say “Look,the anti-drag stuff is actually all Germany’s fault!” but just again to point out the importance of259 “Grundsatzprogramm für Deutschland,” Alternative für Deutschland.258 For more on the anti-gender movement in Germany, see Jana Cattien, “Antigenderism and White FeministReconstructions in Germany,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 4 (2023): 825-848; JohannaSchuster-Craig, “Did You Know Facebook has Sixty Genders? Trans·Humiliation as a Performative Politics ofRight-Wing Women,” Feminist German Studies 37, no. 1 (2021): 138-162; Paula-Irene Villa, “‘Anti-genderismus’:German angst?,” in Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality ed. Roman Kuhar and DavidPaternotte, 99–116, (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).154analyzing this kind of rhetoric with a transnational and historical framework. Looking at it thisway allows us to see how ideas spread and how these exchanges shape discourse globally.Homosexuality as such was first conceptualized in Germany and then crossed the Atlantic to theUnited States, along with these anxieties over the seduction of youth. Now, America is exportingits own version of anti-queerness to Germany that builds directly on the myth of the queercorrupter of children.Jennifer: And and then there’s also a reason why there’s a conversation around pedophilia, andthat has partially to do as well with, in Germany at least, a very delayed sort of reckoning withforms of institutionalized violence against children and youth within institutions, and politicalparties. And so there is a very real need to, you know, sort through some of these very real casesof, of, violence against young people that have, have not always been processed.Susanna: And this is what we discussed last episode right? This awful experiment that wasapproved by government officials, where foster children were being placed with knownpedophiles as some kind of therapeutic intervention.260 And then this, of course, has deeper tiesto the 68ers, and their approach to combating fascism through sexual liberation and with thisemphasis on childhood sexuality.So I guess one of the things that I find so interesting about this current political moment as we260 Rachel Aviv, “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles,” The New Yorker.Published July 19, 2021.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles.155see the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ politics across the globe is that the discourse and policy in Germanykind of pales in comparison to what’s going on in the US (not that it’s a competition). But at thesame time, Germany arguably has a lot more fodder for fueling this culture war talking point. Imean, government officials placing children with pedophiles? Can you imagine if this hadhappened in the US? But most people I’ve talked to, including German colleagues and those whostudy the history of sexuality in Germany, weren’t aware of this scandal.And this is kind of an extension of the paradox we discussed last episode. Where in the 1970s inGermany, you’ve got this much more active political movement for things like lowering the ageof consent and liberating childhood sexuality that’s emerging at the same time as the gayliberation movement, and sometimes they’re overlapping with each other. But you don’t have asort of Anita Bryant figure railing against homosexual recruitment like you do in the UnitedStates. You know, some of that rhetoric is showing up in Germany, but these days, it doesn’t havenearly the same amount of political power that it does in the US. So Germany may have, in asense, given us this trope, but the US has really taken it and run with it, especially since the1970s.Jennifer: But then, you know, then there's the other story we’re thinking about, which is how isit that gender critical ideology has moved specifically in places like the UK, Australia, and nowthe U.S.? And so where does Germany play in all of that?Susanna: This, of course, brings us back to J. K. Rowling. But let’s back up for a second andgive some German context that led up to the Rowling Nazi crime denial debacle in spring 2024.156Jennifer: We’ve seen in 2023 January, you know, the inclusion of, you know, gay, lesbian andtrans victims within the sort of, our canon of Holocaust victims.261 And that was long and hardfought. So that’s, that’s an incredible success.Susanna: But, of course, this wasn’t without its critics.Jennifer: And there have been critics on a number of different levels. There have been critics,who come within, come from within the queer, the community. So someone like Alexander Zinnis very, you know, keen to point out that, you know, trans folks as victims is a really problematicidea in his mind because they weren't targeted specifically like gay men were with paragraph175. And of course, this was also his argument against including lesbians as victims. So he’sused this, you know this is how he comes to this question.Susanna: Alexander Zinn is a historian who has written a lot about the experiences of gay menunder the Nazis. But then there’s critics who really don’t have any expertise on the matterwhatsoever. And one that got a lot of press coverage in 2022 was Marie-Luise Vollbrecht, abiology graduate student at Humboldt University in Berlin.262Jennifer: And it had to do much, you know, in the same way that, the J.K. Rowling caserevolved around, a statement made sort of diminishing the experience of trans people as victims262 See Laurie Marhoefer, “Transgender Life and Persecution under the Nazi State: Gutachten on the VollbrechtCase,” Central European History 56, no. 4 (2023): 595–601.261 Nadine Schmidt, “German parliament officially commemorates LGBTQ victims of Nazi regime for first time,”CNN, January 27, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/27/europe/germany-nazi-lgbt-victims-intl/index.html.157under the Nazis. And this, this was disputed by Marie-Luise Vollbrecht. And then there waspushback by various trans NGOs and, some scholars who said, absolutely there was transpersecution. And then as this devolved, it became mired in sort of Holocaust memory, which isinteresting, you know, with the, you know, with trans NGOs basically saying that Vollbrecht wasdenying, minimizing, you know, the, the history of the, Third Reich prosecution and minimizingusing the name of the Holocaust, sort of in in vain because she refused to recognize trans peoplewere victims. And then that led to this court case.Susanna: Critics of Vollbrecht started using a hashtag that translates to#MarieDeniesNaziCrimes. This led to Vollbrecht suing, claiming that this claim was equivalentto accusing her of Holocaust denial, which is a crime in Germany.263 In November of 2022, thecourt ruled against her, citing that her statements “can be considered a denial of Nazi crimes.”264That is, the German court conceded that trans people were, in fact, victims of NationalSocialism.265 So this is the German legal precedent that is kind of the backdrop for the whole J.K. Rowling thing earlier this year.Jennifer: And this was, this is an interesting example of where the German story became part ofthe sort of U.S., gender critical, ecosystem and, and so, you know, there’s absolutely an argumentfor thinking about this issue transnationally.Susanna: So this is just another example of German history, and in this case, contemporary265 Marhoefer, “Transgender Life and Persecution,” 596.264 “Vollbrecht-Tweet darf als Leugnung von NS-Verbrechen bezeichnet werden,” Der Spiegel, November 11, 2022,https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/marie-luise-vollbrecht-verliert-streit-um-meinungsaeusserung-a-fabb1812-5a5c-4b52-8982-590f5b0e6f2f.263 Marhoefer, “Transgender Life and Persecution,” 595.158German politics as well, playing an important role in shaping the global debate over the validityof trans people. But just to be crystal clear, the discussion of whether or not trans people werepersecuted by the Nazis is relevant to historians, but it really has no bearing on the basic rightstrans people are deserving of today.Jennifer: But you know, about why does it happen and why, why are children so central. I mean,this is where we see the misreading of the history of sexology and the weird role MagnusHirschfeld in all of this. This was what we saw with the J.K. Rowling about how, seeing, youknow, looking through the 20th century and we see arguments being made, we can't trust gender,you know, gender affirming care.We can’t especially trust gender affirming care for minors, people under 18. Why? Because theyare being treated with that their consent or with, but without a full sort of knowledge of the kindof the consequences of their actions, as though these doctors are evil. Why are they evil? Well,they're inheriting a kind of a dark medicine, a dark legacy from not just the Nazis, but lookingthrough the Nazis all the way to Magnus Hirschfeld, weirdly, and as they're sort of medical heirto, you know, to all of this.Susanna: Uh okay, so a lot to unpack here. Basically, during the J. K. Rowling Twitter dumpsterfire, this thread from May 2023 started recirculating. It was originally posted by this guyMalcolm Clark, who describes himself as a “TV science writer who campaigns against pubertyblockers.” And the thread basically does exactly what was just described: it argues that genderaffirming care is somehow part of the Nazi legacy because Magnus Hirschfeld collaborated with159a surgeon named Erwin Gohrbandt, who invented the vaginoplasty and went on to makecontributions at a conference regarding some really horrendous Nazi experiments at Dachau.266And it just feels important to remind you that Magnus Hirschfeld was Jewish, and his instituteand work were explicitly targeted and destroyed by the Nazis. But Clark goes on to argue thatgender-affirming care was somehow part of the Nazis’ violent eugenics campaign.Speaker 4: “The sad truth is trans healthcare's founder and first surgeon championed eugenics.Together they invented a new way to sterilise patients, involving fake genitals created surgically.Two years after inventing the vaginoplasty Gohrbandt was busy sterilising the disabled.”267Susanna: It’s hard to overstate how blatantly misleading this statement is. Yes, Hirschfeld andGohrbandt were pro-eugenics, albeit to different degrees, evidently. But this meant that they fit inwith rather than stood out from many of their contemporaries. Of course this in no way excusesthese views that certainly did inform their medical practice, but it’s disingenuous to pretend thattrans medicine in particular is rooted in eugenics any more than the many other medicaladvancements made in the 1920s and early 30s. A lot of our medical history is really ugly whenyou take a closer look.Clark also claims that Gohrbandt was “at the heart of [the Nazis’] sterilisation campaign.”268268 Clark, (@TwisterFilm), “Trans Healthcare and the Nazis.”267 Clark, (@TwisterFilm), “Trans Healthcare and the Nazis.”266 Malcolm Clark (@TwisterFilm), “Trans Healthcare and the Nazis,” X, May 28, 2023,https://twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1662967148698820608. Cultural historian Heike Bauer succinctly addressesthe argument framing Gohrbandt’s surgical work on transgender patients as in line with his later collaboration withthe Nazis, writing “While it would be both reductive and misleading to read Gohrbandt’s Nazi work back into hisinvolvement in the institute’s sex change surgeries, it nevertheless reminds us of the ethical issues raised byadvances in medical technology, advances that at times rested on the treatment of patients as subjects ofexperimentation rather than medical care.” See Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and ModernQueer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 87.160There is no evidence of this. In fact, there is no evidence that Gohrbandt contributed to thedesigning or carrying out of unethical medical experiments at Dachau at all. He did contribute ata conference held in 1942, where he discussed those experiments, so it’s not that he can’t beimplicated whatsoever, but it is categorically overstated to claim that he had significantinvolvement in carrying out the experiments or that he was somehow central to the Nazis’sterilization campaign.269 And I did my due diligence here and emailed Dr. Zavier Nunn, one ofthe leading scholars on trans life in Weimar and Nazi Germany, to double check this, and heconfirmed this is accurate. Thanks, Dr. Nunn! But what’s more important to stress is that for thepurposes of evaluating trans medical care today, this is all completely irrelevant. It’s a totaldistraction from the actual discussion at hand.We don’t hold other medicine to these arbitrary standards, nor should we. But I still feel the needto fact check some of these talking points that get thrown around on Twitter by people with nocredentials other than a blue checkmark. Whether or not the Nazis ransacked Hirschfeld’sinstitute is also pretty irrelevant to how we approach medical care for trans people today, but it’sstill worth noting that these events did take place, that they’re historically and factually accurate.But these arguments that paint gender-affirming care as dark and sinister have become central toanti-trans discourse today in a way that is really insidious. And once again, it’s not all comingfrom the far right.Harper: The liberal media has certainly played a role in contributing to many of the problems269 George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin, The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in HumanExperimentation, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 36.161that trans people are articulating as causing us suffering and harm.Susanna: What we’re seeing is the same pattern of moral panics that we’ve seen over thedecades. Liberal media essentially launders far-right talking points, only in a way that’s morerespectable or palatable to a mainstream audience.270Harper: But they—there's a lot of concern from these publications being expressed about, overprescribing gender affirming care to young people. But it’s all kind of premised on this idea, thattrans ness is a disordered form of thought, and it's really just a tiny group of people. And we areover-diagnosing it, over-treating it, etc.Susanna: There’s little discussion of the possibility that children could, in fact, be capable ofdetermining their own gender.Harper: I think and that is a problem, because if you look historically to the development oftransgender social movements, what has always been at the core of them is the right to be able toself-determine one's gender. You don't get that in the New York Times. You don’t get that even on,you know, most mainstream television, etc. we don’t hear about the right to self-determination,to be able to name one’s body in the way that one sees it and, and views themself. And I thinkthat that is profoundly out of step with, you know, how trans social movements think about transliberation, and trans freedom.270 See Ben Miller, “How to Start a Fire,” The Forum, November 30, 2022,https://forummag.com/2022/11/30/how-to-start-a-fire/.162Susanna: One of the more well-known and egregious examples of this kind of reactionaryfear-mongering cloaked in a veneer of journalistic prestige is Abigail Shrier’s book IrreversibleDamage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.There’s a lot happening in the title alone, but it’s worth quickly looking up the cover art, as well.It features the image of a paper-doll-like image of a very young white girl, with a cut-out holewhere her uterus would be, signifying her loss of sexual function and/or fertility—the“irreversible damage” at the heart of the book. Historian Ben Miller has said that the book’scover art “could be a Nazi propaganda poster.”271 I agree.Shrier’s basic thesis is that there are too many (what she perceives as) young girls who aresuddenly deciding they are transgender and quickly getting access to hormones and surgeries.This “transgender craze” is nothing more than a fleeting fad, which is, as she puts it “seducingour daughters.” You, dear listeners, have probably already flagged the word “seducing” assending off moral panic alarm bells. This is the language that has been used to dehumanize queerpeople and limit LGBTQ+ rights since the early twentieth century.Shrier is careful to distance herself from the blatant transphobes. Her book, she says, has nothingto do with adult transgender people who are living happy, healthy lives.272 It’s only about theteenage girls who are supposedly getting swept up in the “transgender craze”—a term she notesisn’t pejorative, it’s a sociological term.273 Phew! Thank goodness no one ever uses academic273 Shrier, Irreversible Damage, 45.272 Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington, D.C.:Regnery Publishing, 2020), 11.271 Max Fox, “Learning from the ‘Bad Gays’ of History,” The Nation, October 26, 2022,https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/bad-gays-podcast-interview/.163terms to denigrate minority groups. Shrier would never call trans people “groomers”—howdistasteful! But here’s what she had to say in a 2022 tweet.Speaker 5: “ … I’ve found that most of the activists do not want a sexual relationship with thechildren. They want to pry the child away from their families and supplant the family’s valueswith their own. That’s bad enough.”274Susanna: And with that, we’re back to “family values,” the anxiety that seems to crop up aroundall of these panics over LGBTQ+ people “coming for your kids.”I can’t possibly debunk every erroneous claim made in the book, but I’ll link to some critiques inthe show notes. My point in talking about this book is to reiterate that you do not have toself-identify as anti-trans effectively be anti-trans. I’ll remind you that Anita Bryant declared herlove for homosexuals. Howard Whitman, the author of the 1951 book Terror in the Streets thatwe talked about all the way back in episode 2, doesn’t call all homosexuals child seducers. Hewas just worried about all those criminal homosexuals who prowl bathrooms, waiting to corruptand even kill unsuspecting targets. J. K. Rowling has never outright admitted to being atransphobe and probably never will. But history shows us which side they’re on. History showsus that anti-LGBTQ+ bigots use the “groomer” trope when they can get away with it, but pivot tomore abstract versions of the same narratives when they need to fool their audience—and maybeeven themselves—into believing that they’re “just asking questions.”274 Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier), “There are also instances of grooming not by gender activists,” June 17, 2022,2:55 p.m., https://twitter.com/AbigailShrier/status/1537916847768543234.164So. Where does this leave us? It would be disingenuous for me to end on a purely positive note.We’re witnessing the most intense wave of attacks on LGBTQ+ rights we’ve seen in my lifetime.As of writing this, the ACLU is currently tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in theUnited States.275 Many of these rely on some variation of the very narrative we’ve spent the lastfive episodes examining. I encourage you to consider donating to the Trans Justice FundingProject, which distributes all proceeds to grassroots, trans-led organizations across the UnitedStates. I also encourage you to follow the work of trans writers and content creators, and I willinclude a non-comprehensive list of recommendations in the show notes.The time is now to speak up and speak out for queer and trans people. I hope you’ll join.275 “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures in 2024,” American Civil Liberties Union, lastmodified May 10, 2024, https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024.165CONCLUSIONOn November 16, 1957, a fifty-one-year-old man was arrested in rural Plainfield, Wisconsin. Hisname was Ed Gein. What police discovered upon arrival at Gein’s farm was a ghastly scene—thedecapitated corpse of a missing local woman hung from the ceiling and body parts from tendifferent women were stored throughout his home, in some cases used to make furniture orclothing. According to the police, Gein confessed that his desire to rob graves and murder wasdriven by his desire to be a woman.276 Gein’s crimes would inspire the archetypal figure of thecross-dressing killer, popularized in some of the most iconic American horror films, includingPsycho (1960) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).277As I have demonstrated throughout this podcast series, murder narratives often becomesites for negotiating the boundaries of acceptable behavior with regard to gender and sexuality.In the last year, right-wing pundits have begun to merge the crossdressing killer archetype withthe LGBTQ+ “groomer” trope to push the narrative that multiple mass shootings can beattributed to the perpetrators’ gender identities. Initial news coverage of the Covenant Schoolshooting identified the shooter as a twenty-eight-year-old woman and former student of theschool, but subsequent reports claimed the offender was a transgender man.278 Marjorie TaylorGreene, a Georgia Republican Representative, tweeted, “How much hormones like testosteroneand medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?Everyone can stop blaming guns now.”279 In February 2024, in a remarkable display of overt279 Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG), “How much hormones like testosterone,” X, March 27, 2023, 1:45 p.m.,https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1640454996821934082.278 Daisy Ball and James Suleyman, “The Covenant School Shooting: Media Coverage and Backlash Against theTransgender Community,” Laws 12, no. 6 (2023): 1–2.277 Cartwright, Peculiar Places, 87.276 Ryan Lee Cartwright, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2020), 87, 96.166transphobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, she made baseless claims about the LakewoodChurch shooter, tweeting, “Not only was the shooter a trans from El Salvador, she also had a gunengraved with ‘Free Palestine’ but investigators can’t say if she was politically motivated ornot.”280Groomer Rumor has attempted to create a thorough, though not exhaustive, genealogy ofthe trope of the LGBTQ+ child predator that highlights the continuities in discourse aroundgender, sexuality, and child safety across time and space. The right-wing media’s attempts toimplicate all transgender people as potentially violent predators builds on decades of medianarratives of deceptive cross-dressing killers. This is consistent with the murder narratives I haveexamined throughout the series—from Carl von Zastrow in 1869 to the 1982 implication of theNorth American Man-Boy Love Association in the murder of Etan Patz—these cases rely onassociations between “deviant” sexualities and gender identities and violence and in doing so,further entrench these stereotypes within our media ecosystem.However, these cases also had (or were speculated to have) a crucial element that massshootings lack—a sexual component. I cannot predict the future. But my hope is that if we see achild murder in the coming months that the far right can spin into the narrative of a transgenderchild killer, listeners of Groomer Rumor will be better equipped to see this as what it is: a bigotedtactic with a long history, consistently used to dehumanize and delegitimize queer and transpeople.Perhaps more importantly, I hope to have given listeners the tools to identify variations ofthe same tactics when they come from self-proclaimed progressives. J. K. Rowling’s 2020 bookTroubled Blood, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, features a male serial killer who280 Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG), “Not only was the shooter a trans from El Salvador,” X, February 12,2024, https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1757092110119960592?lang=en.167dresses in women’s clothing to lure his victims into a false sense of security. These tendenciesare framed as the fetishistic consequences of childhood trauma.281 Nevertheless, there arenumerous Reddit threads, book reviews, and blog posts dedicated to rebuking the claim that thebook is in any way transphobic, often citing the fact that the character in question is nottransgender.282 But the hackneyed and offensive “man in a dress” trope straightforwardly reflectsRowling’s own understanding of transgender women. In a tweet posted on May 12, 2024,Rowling claimed that “[c]alling a man a man is not ‘bullying’ or ‘punching down.’Crossdressing straight men are currently one of the most pandered-to demographics in existence,and women are under no obligation to applaud the people caricaturing us.”283 When bigotry isnarrowly understood as necessarily direct, hateful, and contemptuous, we risk failing to identifyRowling’s views as bigoted.Stanley Cohen, the sociologist who developed moral panic theory, identified mass mediaas an “especially important carrier and producer of moral panics.”284 What for me began as aproject to dissect a far-right anti-LGBTQ+ trope resulted in an equally urgent indictment of theliberal media that facilitates the proliferation of such narratives. To quote feminist theorist bellhooks, “We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because284 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd ed. (Abingdon, Oxon:Routledge, 2011), 9.283 J. K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), “Calling a man a man is not ‘bullying,’” X, May 12, 2024, 5:58 a.m.,https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1789641182164688934.282 See for instance Nick Cohen, “JK Rowling’s latest novel isn’t ‘transphobic,” The Spectator, September 15, 2020,https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/j-k-rowling-s-latest-novel-isn-t-transphobic-/.; Debbie Hayton, “I’ve read JKRowling’s ‘transphobic’ new crime novel. I’m transgender & sensitive to such abuse – but there is NONE in thisbook,” debbiehayton.com, October 11, 2020,https://debbiehayton.com/2020/10/11/ive-read-jk-rowlings-transphobic-new-crime-novel/#more-1137.; AllanMassie, “Book Review: Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith,” The Scotsman, September 24, 2020,https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-review-troubled-blood-by-robert-galbraith-2982825.;Spiderwebs666, “JK Rowling’s Troubled Blood is NOT transphobic,” Reddit, September 16, 2020,https://www.reddit.com/r/bookscirclejerk/comments/itz2v2/jk_rowlings_troubled_blood_is_not_transphobic/.281 Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood, (New York: Mulholland Books, 2020).168it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”285 While critiquing the right-wingmedia’s usage of these tropes is vital work, it’s high time we take a hard look at the reactionarytendencies that transcend party lines, sometimes appearing under the guise of progressivepolitics.285 bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (Cambridge: South End Press,2006), 60.169BIBLIOGRAPHYAllport, Gordon. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Germanic Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Frackman, Kyle
Groomer rumor : the trope of the queer child predator in German and American popular media (1869–2024)
Text