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In 1960, I was hit by a lightning bolt that tore away my past accomplishments, my professional status, and my personal reputation—leaving me with feelings of emptiness and disgrace. Even now, it is difficult to write about this anesthetizing and shattering event, an event that often made me feel that I was half-dead. In retrospect, I’ve felt that the entire experience would have been less devastating had I not been burdened by an over-developed sense of guilt, a feeling of being an outsider and victim. And I wish that I then had had a stronger sense of self, with a clearer conviction of my rights and a more fully-formed character.

Although I had always found irony and a degree of comic distancing essential to daily life, during this period I completely lost my balance and perspective. My arrest and what followed remained dark presences just below the surface of my everyday life for four decades. The event seemed to have produced an hormonal or chemical change in me that I could not alter or reverse. For me, there was no antidote.

It never occurred to me or anyone I knew in the early Sixties to speak out for gay rights, since there were no such rights. There were similarly no support groups, publications, or civic services available that protected gays. During my trials, there were no legal precedents for defending homosexuals, even though my case occurred only nine years before the gay rebellion at Stonewall. “Homosexual rights” was an oxymoron. I have, of course, been amazed by the positive changes I’ve observed in life and in the media in the last 25 years. But there is also a powerful backlash, as we see frequently in the press, in our laws and in police conduct. At the beginning of a new century, I think that the prejudice against gays is still the most difficult of all fears and hatreds with which our society must cope. It touches upon the inner fears and doubts of a very large proportion of men in the world. The speech that opens this book emphasizes that under Bush, Ashcroft and their macho team, the rights of sexual and other minorities are being systematically abrogated, and there is no end in sight. The timely and brave conference held at Smith College in January 2003, featured several incisive essays on this topic.

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Ironically, the Second World War enabled many gay women and men to discover their own sexuality and to find one another. After gays returned from the war, they began to meet and correspond with one another and establish meeting places, clubs, and bars. In 1948, the Kinsey report on the sexuality of the human male validated what some already knew—that gays were an integral part of American life. They were everywhere and in great numbers—if not your son or brother, at least a distant cousin. For the first time, the general public learned that many men and women who identified themselves as heterosexual had engaged in homosexual acts. But almost immediately, religious, civic and cultural authorities repressed Kinsey’s findings.

Many discounted Kinsey’s work as immoral, unscientific, anti-humanistic or whatever. Congressional, legal, and religious leaders tried to dismiss Kinsey’s findings on the grounds that his clinical approach had been too narrow: the report only discussed the physical human being and his sexual outlets, not the moral or spiritual. But Kinsey claimed to do no more. He knew that his report had only touched the surface. After centuries, many in Europe and other countries had come to understand that an enormous proportion of men and women, for at least part of their lives, were bisexual. Wisely, they had learned to live with this fact. But contrary to nature itself, Americans have felt compelled to live within stark categories like “heterosexual” or “homosexual.” This unfortunately has led to fundamentalist moralizing, proscriptive laws, and untold suffering. American men seem especially unable to acknowledge their own sexual ambiguity. Many find this uncertainty intolerable—some even experience homosexual panic. Some even resort to overt and violent gay-bashing in an attempt to quell their fears that they themselves might be gay. In our puritanical country, black-and-white/evil-and-good categories still remain dominant. And in racial terms, there is a still wider gulf between blacks and whites, a problem we hoped we had solved 130 years ago with the Civil War. And unlike gays, blacks cannot as easily “pass” for "white."

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By 1953, President Eisenhower said that gays should be banned from working for the federal government as “security risks,” a charge frequently made. In a New Yorker article on the Arvin case, Barry Werth in 1998 wrote that it was easier to admit to being a Communist in the 1950s than to being a homosexual—and both could be indictable offenses. One member of Congress said of gay behavior in the services, “it is worse than murder.” Thus, homosexuality was linked with disloyalty and treachery. The reverberating effects of inquisitions—like those of McCarthy’s HUAAC—lasted from the early Fifties through the early Sixties. The Smith scandal erupted at the end of this period.

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Less than four months before the arrests at Smith College, Governor Foster Furcolo of Massachusetts established the Pornography Squad. The purpose of the Porn Squad was “ferreting out, investigating and prosecuting,” potential pornography cases. Sergeant John J. Regan was appointed head of this notorious unit. Our case came up for trial just two months before the election in November, 1960, and it afforded Furcolo and others, especially Regan, dramatic means for getting their names before the public. All gay men of my generation had heard of gays being arrested by the police, often by means of provocateurs and other decoys. But the dimensions of the controversy I was about to experience reverberated far more widely. Sergeant Regan, a man of gross sensibility, had been traveling around the state giving talks on the dangers of pornography. The ambitious cop had suddenly become a minor authority. Riding popular issues in a bid for the U.S. Senate, Governor Furcolo had built a large and powerful political machine.

When I arrived at Smith College in 1958, I thought that I might be able to let down the guard that all gay men in the teaching profession, and many others, then had to maintain. The college and the area were yet to begin the long period of liberalization that would later play a critical role in my life. Among the distinguished colleges in or near Northampton in Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, I even then mistakenly thought that I had found at Smith a spirit of relaxed tolerance in sexual attitudes. In this relatively sheltered environment, I was foolishly unaware that infringements of the state’s new obscenity statutes would soon destroy scores of careers and reputations, including mine.

I had lived in eastern Massachusetts during the war as a math teacher at MIT, then as a graduate student and teacher at Harvard. Those eight years, from 1941 to 1949, had been among my happiest and most fulfilling. We gays then thought that the “blue laws” of a state once famous for banning books were a joke. After all, didn’t this state boast of more institutions of higher learning than any other? In 1958, my professional and personal self-confidence had been seriously weakened by my failure to gain tenure at Yale. When I arrived in Northampton in the fall, the omens were not good. Close friends, formerly at Yale, gave me a rousing party to celebrate my arrival. But strangely, I had a negative reaction to this welcoming, finding myself an unwilling guest at my own party. I knew that I was urban to the core. After my university life, I kept telling myself, like a child having a tantrum, that I didn’t want to be in a small school in a tiny town in the countryside. I wanted to be surrounded by a major city—preferably New York—full of people living many alternative lives, not by open fields and trees. I had fears of terrible loneliness and nightmares of being lost and abandoned. In winter, I found myself identifying with the narrator of Frost’s “Desert Places,” afraid of the “blanker whiteness of benighted snow,” and all too able “To scare myself with my own desert places.”

In the classroom, I missed my former vigorously responsive male students and the ping-pong of their easy give-and-take. Far more than I wanted to admit, I simply missed being surrounded by young men, as straight male colleagues in a men’s college might have missed the company of young women. Nevertheless, I taught at Smith for two years with moderate satisfaction, and occasionally with passion. My students usually wrote excellent papers, but they spoke so little in class and afterwards that I was uncertain how they felt about the material or me. Within this time, however, in frank conversations with several of them, I learned that many students were paying very close attention and enjoying our reading. It wasn’t until 40 years later that I fully realized the depth of my students’ responses. In late l998, several of my former students wrote me wonderfully supportive and heartwarming letters in response to the New Yorker article about our case. Since I had been doubtful about my teaching at Smith, their validation of the quality of my work was of great value to me. More than one former student expressed outrage that I, as a gay man, had been punished for harming no one while heterosexual male faculty members were “sleeping their way through the student body.” Many students were very close to their house mothers, deans, or advisors on the faculty. It's impossible that none of these affairs had been reported to the administration. It’s equally unlikely that these confessions were reserved for the psychoanalysts at Austen Riggs. But, after all, these were vigorous heterosexual events, some of the girls were of “consenting age,” and besides, everyone knows that “boys will be boys.”

In the late summer of 1960, at the invitation of the excellent critic, Elizabeth Drew, I taught at Bread Loaf, a delightful summer retreat located in the foothills of the Green Mountains near Middlebury, Vermont. It was a rare and exciting experience. There I met several stimulating new colleagues, taught under almost ideal conditions, and found that my co-ed students responded eagerly, the women often being brighter than the men. I ardently hoped that I could return many times. In the fall after Bread Loaf, in a far better mood, I went back to what I now appreciated as my airy, spacious, and handsome flat in Northampton, on the top floor of an old gothic Victorian that could have been designed by Charles Addams. I bought attractive furnishings and even new clothes, a sure sign that my spirits were improving. Despite my qualms, I was now even more determined to make my teaching at Smith worthwhile. And I thought I might be on the verge of realizing some of my long-held dreams of fulfillment and stability. To mark some kind of turning point, I gave a small bibulous party for a few gay colleagues just outside the tower windows on the narrow roof of my apartment. I have often since thought of that precarious perch, my brief moment of confidence, and my imminent fall “from high estate to low degree.” We were surrounded by a sea of lovely old trees and church spires, with the Connecticut River shining in the distance. Usually wary of making fate-challenging remarks, I nevertheless told my friends, “For the first time, I feel that I’m in a place where my public and private worlds can finally meet.” Tragically, they collided almost at once, and the first nearly destroyed the second.

My ordeal began in early September. My Labor Day weekend with two New York colleagues in Provincetown was aborted when the hotel clerk told me that he had seen an article in The New York Times about pornography arrests at Smith College. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I read the name Newton Arvin. While we were on the highway, driving to Boston, an announcement came over the radio that there was a warrant out for my arrest. A criminal was loose in the Boston area! Only later did I realize that Regan was pulling all these strings.

Events were escalating so rapidly that I fell back upon the denying numbness I usually experienced in periods of extreme stress. None of this was really happening, or I was outside of myself looking on, a detached observer who wanted to chronicle each stage of a disaster. That night, when we arrived at Logan Airport, I was astonished to see my closest friend, Roy Fisher, waiting for us in heavy traffic on the side of the road. Miraculously, he had estimated the time and place of our arrival. This was only one of Roy’s many ingenious attempts to sustain me throughout this catastrophe. He got in the car, I dropped off my vacationing colleagues, and Roy told me to drive straight to the house of my old friend, Theodore Sprague. It was at Theodore’s home that I had listened to music with sympathetic friends for many of the years I had spent in Cambridge. Through Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Roy had already engaged an outstanding civil liberties lawyer, William Homans.

Ned Spofford and I were arrested over a holiday weekend when no authorities were in residence who could have dealt with the press. Thus Sergeants Regan and Crowley were able to fill the media with rancid details, and they promised that more names in a “network of sex-obsessed professors” were soon to be made public. Without this promise of ever hotter scandals, the press might not have highlighted our case nor kept it alive for so long. Of course, none of Regan’s ominous prophecies could be fulfilled. Contrary to the press reports, there was no porn circle and no distribution network. The investigation, which led nowhere, was closed after our arrests. As Roy drove me to the Spragues, I began to realize that I was caught in a fatal convergence of political and legal forces.

A restless and purposeful man, William Homans came to the Spragues soon after I arrived. He told me that he had long wanted to “get John Regan,” the unprincipled and publicity-mad officer in charge of the Porn Squad. He said that this roving band of self-righteous cops had been making arrests up and down Massachusetts for a few months, “cleaning up filth around the state,” as one newspaper put it. Within a few hours I had been transformed from a respected teacher into the subject of a sensational civil liberties case. I told Homans that one evening, only a few weeks before, I had joined three other colleagues at Newton Arvin’s apartment in Northampton. With an oddly prophetic sense of danger, I then shared for the first time in my life my small assortment of “blue” photos, and they passed theirs around.

Many men, straight and gay, kept controversial photos in their bottom drawers. Candid magazines like Playboy were already available at the time for straights. For gays, photos were a way of compensating for their limited and often forbidden sexual activity. Most of my pictures were at the level of today’s Abercrombie & Fitch ads or Tomorrow’s Man, at the time the only small magazine containing photographs of carefully “draped” models, available at most newsstands in America. A few of the models in my photos, however, were “undraped,” revealing the shockingly naked parts possessed by every man, but still termed “hard-core” when depicted in books, magazines or movies. In court, Homans contested that these had been planted.

The evening at Arvin’s was wholly discreet. I could never have imagined how this private sharing of photos could ever become subject to public scrutiny, much less result in a possible jail sentence. Our responses to these pictures that evening were not the “lascivious gloating” reported in the press, but admiration and delight in the glories of the human body.

As part of a national campaign, the Postmaster General had alerted post offices throughout the land to be on the lookout for “suspicious” materials. While I was away on vacation, members of the Porn Squad reportedly acted on the lead of a federal postal official in Springfield, Massachusetts, who said he had come upon “lewd material” addressed to Newton Arvin. The Squad soon descended upon Arvin in his apartment. Intimidated and frightened by a probable prison sentence, and with the police looking through his daily diary, Newton turned informer, giving the police many names, Ned’s and mine among them. When this astonishing betrayal was reported, it alarmed Arvin’s gay friends, many of them well known. They destroyed any incriminating evidence of their own and quickly disappeared. An old friend of Newton’s, Lillian Hellman, said of his act, “He panicked and he ratted, poor bastard, he must have been in total terror.” When Arvin and Ned Spofford, the man he loved most and had now named, met briefly in their jail cell, Newton told Ned that he could not go through this calamity alone, and suggested that the two commit suicide together. During Newton’s trial, he was given the choice of a year’s prison sentence or commitment to the Northampton State Mental Hospital. He chose the latter, to which he been admitted several times before.

After leaving Newton's place, the police immediately turned to the apartments of two of us living nearby in Northampton. Let in by my landlord, the Squad rifled through my possessions and confiscated a suitcase (found at the bottom of a closet), containing among other items what they called “obscene material.” The suitcase might as well have been chock-full of heroin, so serious was the charge at the time. I felt further violated when I learned that the Porn Squad had also stolen and combed through my intimate letters from friends for more names. These precious memorabilia of the previous 20 years of my life were never returned. I felt robbed of my past and my history, orphaned from my own life and the world I had known. When I learned of my hopeless predicament, I was so overwhelmed and in such a state of incomprehension, that Roy and Helen Bacon began to take charge of my life. I had no radio or TV in those days, and the sole newspaper I read was The New York Times, which often ignored local events. Our story soon broke even internationally.

When the police saw the large photographs of joyful dancers in ancient Etruscan frescoes from Tarquinia that decorated my walls, they reported to the press that my apartment was full of “obscene art.” The Squad tried to follow up on some of the names in my letters, fortunately without success. After a faculty member had phoned and warned other vulnerable men of our arrests, many gay colleagues buried or destroyed any incriminating evidence. My gay friends inevitably feared that the police unit, a rogue elephant, might pursue them. Fortunately, in the states where most of my friends lived, a warrant as loosely-worded as ours did not permit the police to break in.

Possession and sharing “pornographic” materials with friends on this single occasion was the sole charge against me, but under the new law, even this private act was termed “exhibition and distribution.” This absurdly misleading phrase could even refer to one person’s sharing photos with a friend. I was never accused by the court of showing pictures to any other or larger groups, and certainly not of circulating or selling photos, as several newspapers reported. But what could account, I wondered in amazement, for the red-hot publicity that blazed up in print and on the air at the time, and that flared up repeatedly afterward? I was appalled by the egregious disparity between what I had actually done and the tabloid accounts. I was being charged under hastily enacted statutes that Homans called “bad law.” In these circumstances, there were no constitutional rights to privacy. Ironically, looking at photos of nude males has never been of much interest to me. The newspapers made it seem as if I were in the business, when, in fact, I’ve never even owned a camera.

With the Smith case, Regan thought he had hit a bull’s-eye and he continued to keep the threat of impending arrests alive in the media for weeks. Comic and grotesque variations upon the reasons for our arrests were reported in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and sporadically almost everywhere in the states. The Christian Science Monitor announced bravely, “Massachusetts is moving solidly forward in its efforts to wipe out pornography.” No one characterized our “crime” in all its absurdity: It is filthy and illegal to look at the naked human body!

Helen Bacon: “The Onlie Begetter”

Roy Fisher’s devotion to my cause and well-being, and the imaginative and unflagging support of Helen Bacon, were brave and magnanimous acts of loyalty and love. I was too self-absorbed at the time to acknowledge their extraordinary efforts. Thus, in the fall of 1960, I started to live the life that I would maintain for two years before I left for Europe—that of a fugitive on the lam, going out very little and getting in touch with almost no one, except through letters. Over the months following my indictment, I wrote letters to friends by the score in attempts to maintain my fragile mental balance and lessen my isolation. These letters and my friends’ heartfelt answers proved to be my principal lifelines until I started teaching again in California.

On Wednesday, September 7, accompanied by Bill Homans, I turned myself in to the County Court House in Northampton. Three days later, I was brought before a judge in the lower court. In his chambers before the hearing, the judge had already decided on a guilty verdict on statutory grounds, and the so-called evidence against me lay unexamined in a corner of the room. Although I was too dazed to be aware of the nature of the proceedings, I was startled when Newton Arvin—now an ally of the police—testified against me on the other side of the room. The judge imposed a finding of guilt, a $1000 fine, and a year’s suspended jail sentence. I was immediately released on bail and scheduled to be arraigned on felony charges a few weeks later.

In my second trial in the Superior Court on October 11, Homans cited the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution in my defense, raising the legal issues of freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, lack of “probable cause” and the absence of due process. When Homans ended his argument, we were shocked when the judge ruled against us. This loss, of course, had serious psychological consequences.

One of the most humiliating aspects of the second trial was that, to save me from a possible jail sentence, Homans had to collect letters from several of my former Yale colleagues, attesting to my integrity. After this second trial, Roy and Martin Price of Yale, who had earlier visited several members of the Yale faculty to present my case and collect money for my legal expenses, were now badgered with questions from some of these donors. Could the evidence against me have been more incriminating than they had believed? I had taught at Yale for over eight years, but had I always been a Jekyll and Hyde? I was blessedly told nothing about any of this.

Daniel Aaron, a colleague at Smith who was present at both trials, commented that our cases were marked by “a kind of meanness, a rancor, a brutality.” Judge Taveira of the Superior Court said that he thought that Ned’s case and mine were so important that they should be argued before the State Supreme Judicial Court. In response, without warning, Homans told me at once that he wanted to accept the judge’s challenge. Without having time to think, I agreed. Had I known that I would have to wait over three years before I was exonerated, I might not have consented so readily. But in retrospect, I saw that if I wished to teach again in America, I had no choice. Not until July 1963, did the Supreme Court finally declare the case against me invalid. Although I was vastly relieved, I couldn’t have known that it would take years for a “felon” to feel totally liberated. The indictment had by then become part of my skin and bone. My journey from professor to criminal had taken less than a month.

The warrants used to search our apartments were so vague and loosely-worded that our case was won on this basis alone. Like Communism, homosexuality and pornography were then red flags, and could not be the foundation of a legal defense. Although we could only win on legal technicalities, only by winning could we teach again. I felt that my ultimate “crime” lay in my being both gay and a teacher, a combination as omnipresent and American as apple pie but that still shocks many righteous citizens. I am sure that the law would have found my thoughts criminal if it could. Perhaps Ashcroft may now find a way.

Although I understood their terror, I was hurt that many of my gay friends disappeared during the period between my first and second trial. One colleague, a supposedly close friend, urged me to “plead guilty and put an end to all this shrieking publicity,” which he, as a gay man, had found personally threatening. Stunned, I said little in response, but I wanted to shout, “Just who is bearing the burden of this public indictment, you hypocritical bastard? You’d have me jailed to keep the heat off you? I must appeal, or I’ll never teach again.” I’ve always been angry and ashamed that I didn’t say this. Luckily, none of my other friends were as grossly insensitive. I knew that my former students and colleagues were shocked by my association with male pornography—understandably, given their conditioning. Another of my colleagues even wrote, “I’m ashamed for you.” These remarks sounded the lowest notes in my colleagues’ responses.

At least three important decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court lay behind Homans’ arguments in my case. The most famous, Roth v. U.S. (1957), set the standard for the day in cases of seizure and “obscenity.” The Roth decision read, “A thing is obscene if, considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient interests, i.e., a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion, and if it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters.” The Roth case set important limits to police powers. But some of its phrases—“prurient interests,” “shameful or morbid interest,” and “customary limits”—were open to the widest interpretations, as were all earlier rulings. Roth, like other cases, could not cope with the question—prurient, shameful, or customary for whom? Lawyers had long found all definitions of pornography and obscenity subjective, yet they said they relied on the letter of the law.

As a gay man, I wondered how our laws, usually written by older, white, Protestant (and securely heterosexual) males with similar backgrounds, could possibly apply to homosexuals or members of other minorities in a multi-ethnic society with a wide range of social and sexual practices. For me, judicial language is at best woefully inadequate in dealing with the complexities of human behavior, especially sexual behavior. It can’t even satisfactorily define “obscene.”

The Mapp v. Ohio decision (June 1961) was handed down while Homans was preparing his brief for me. Homans knew from the moment he heard about it that it was the break we needed. The basis of Homans’ subsequent defense rested on the precedent set by Mapp: that the warrant used to search my apartment was simply too vague. This warrant had authorized the police to seize “indecent, impure, or obscene [material]...manifestly tending to corrupt the morals of youth, or intended to be…exhibited, circulated, and distributed.” Because my warrant failed to differentiate between what was to be seized, what was “obscene,” and what was constitutionally protected, Homans argued that it had been illegal. As Homans wrote, my warrant “gave the broadest discretion to the executing officer,” leaving to the individual judgment of this officer to determine what was obscene. Homans further pointed out that because the warrant focused on “corrupting youth” and “distribution”—neither of which I had done—it did not apply to my case. And yet this was in a period when the Supreme Court was happily far more progressive than the court of 2003.

Homans was also able to use rulings of another critical decision, Marcus v. Search Warrant (1961): “Procedures which sweep so broadly and with so little discrimination are obviously deficient in techniques required by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such procedures erode constitutional guarantees.” Today, the archly conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist has said that Supreme Court rulings should merely serve as “backstops,” as limits to the laws enacted by state and federal courts and legislatures. No liberal Justice Black or Douglas—with imagination and devotion to civil rights—in this court! And no Justice Louis Brandeis, who spoke movingly of “the right to be let alone, the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.” A strict constructionist, Rehnquist considers the Constitution divinely inspired. He thinks that the rulings of the 18th century should still govern thought and behavior in the 21st. The decisions of a majority in the current court have already demonstrated its right wing and paranoid tendencies. In 1987, 27 years after our trials, Homans wrote in a summarizing letter to me that Ned and I had been “caught in the [backlash against] a liberalization of attitudes towards sex and its portrayal….”

Chris Brown, co-editor, & Bob Garis, mentor