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p 4 Subversion and Indecency, 1961–1962 The Communist Party is attempting to exploit the rise of materialism, irreligion , and lack of faith in our society. In an era when moral standards have been lowered, when family life has been disrupted, when crime and juvenile delinquency rates are high, communists have tried to set forth a goal—dressed in attractive phrases—that would captivate the longings and hopes of men and women. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit, 1958 C. Farris Bryant was inaugurated as Florida’s governor on January 3, 1961. A conservative Democrat from Ocala, Bryant had served as a member and as speaker of the state house of representatives and failed in his 1956 bid for governor. Soon after taking office, he created two advisory committees to address the problems of homosexuality and obscene literature. Under Bryant’s watch, the Johns Committee’s public school investigations continued, and the committee gained a measure of authority through cosponsoring with the Florida Children’s Commission (FCC) a series of educational conferences about the need to eradicate indecency from public life and to expose and remove homosexuals from state agencies, particularly schools. This momentary triumph, however, led the FLIC to overreach in a controversial investigation of the curriculum, speaker policies , and hiring practices of the University of South Florida, where every problem bemoaned by segregationists and conservatives appeared to have taken root among the faculty: communism, interracialism, indecency, anti-Christian bias, liberalism, and homosexuality. 122 · Communists and Perverts under the Palms This attention to social issues came at a time when the black struggle for equality, in Florida and elsewhere, was moving to the streets and department store lunch counters, interstate highways and Greyhound Bus waiting rooms, parks, beaches, golf courses, and college campuses. At the same time, Cold War tensions escalated in the first two years of the Kennedy administration, and Florida felt them acutely, given the ninety-mile proximity of the Soviet Union’s newest ally, Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Moreover, committees for decency in literature at the local, state, and national levels, many established during the 1950s, proliferated in the early 1960s. In Florida, ordinary citizens as well as politicians turned to Charley Johns and his committee as the appropriate body to address the problems that, in their view, loomed in dangerous concert with these national and international developments. In their original mission of resisting blacks’ entrance into Florida’s public schools, committee members remained devoted to exposing Communists and subversives within the civil rights movement, at the same time extending their role as defenders of traditional values into new arenas. * * * The FLIC joined an investigation into male prostitution and pornography in the Miami area in early 1961 at the request of Thomas J. Kelley, director of the Dade County Department of Public Safety. In the previous two months a team of detectives headed by J. Duane Barker had uncovered two men who produced and sold pornographic pictures of boys and men of varying ages. Barker notified R. J. Strickland that he had information about “numerous teachers at Dade County Schools that are homosexuals ” as well as a gay physician suspected of taking nude pictures of boys. Barker drew up a report on the investigation in which he identified the main target as “producers who are all aggressive homosexuals, and who are inducing young juveniles to pose and then to commit, or allow the subjects to commit unnatural sex acts upon them.”1 He likely included gay teachers in an effort to entice Strickland and the Johns Committee to join him, and it worked. The investigator was in Miami by the first of the year. Miami represented a unique project for the committee. Rather than seeking to expose homosexual teachers, now the FLIC was helping police track down men engaged in exploitative, criminal activities involving the abuse of underage boys. Barker and his fellow detectives rounded up more than a dozen teenagers who had been hustling on the streets of Miami. Subversion and Indecency, 1961–1962 · 123 They cooperated with the police, providing names of customers and men who had taken nude or sexual photographs of them, and some of the witnesses drove around the city with detectives pointing out private residences , clubs and bars, hotels and motels where they had engaged in these activities. One informant, aged nineteen, told Barker he had been hustling for six years. It started when an older man had picked him up after school and given him “money to mess with...

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