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SEVEN The Ingredients of Offense I have pieced together the following two episodes from sparse court and newspaper records. As far as I can tell, it might have happened like this: it was cold in the train station, and two young men quickly grew tired of waiting for the irregular holiday trains. It was New Year’s Day 1925, and Sam Jackson, sixteen, and his friend Pete Cash, seventeen, both from the small town of Prescott, Arkansas, were traveling home by train from Graysonia, where they had been celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends and relatives. The train stopped in Gurdon, and the boys had about one hour to wait for the connecting train. Bored and cold from waiting around the near-deserted depot, the boys set out for a walk about town to pass time until their transportation arrived. Returning to the depot by a different route, the youths passed by the home of bachelor John Strum, who, noticing Jackson and Cash, walked to the street and invited them to come in and warm themselves while waiting for the train. The boys agreed but soon discovered that Strum had a broader definition of small-town hospitality. After only a brief while in the front parlor, the three adjourned to Strum’s bedroom where he performed fellatio on them. Soon after, the two boys left, apparently satisfied at their act of homosex. But something happened on their way back to the train station. Nearly there, the two boys turned around and walked briskly back to Strum’s home, where they dragged him from his living room into the street. Strum broke loose from his attackers and ran down his street with the two boys chasing after him. As it continued, the chase came to the attention of several of Strum’s fellow townspeople who, recognizing Strum and not the two boys, intervened on his behalf thinking a robbery was in progress. Sometime during the incident, concerned bystanders had notified the town marshal, R. C. Tyson. Strum told Tyson that the two boys had broken into his 83 home to rob him and he began the chase after he discovered them. When the two boys were interrogated, they told Tyson of the sexual encounter in Strum’s bedroom. Tyson then arrested Strum for violating the Arkansas sodomy statute based on the information given by the two boys.1 According to the law at the time, “everyone convicted of sodomy, or buggery, shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary for a period of not less than five nor more than twenty-one years.”2 There was a question of evidence. Tyson and the prosecutors knew that the local court would be hard-pressed to convict with only the testimony of the two teenage boys from out-of-town. Jackson and Cash told Tyson that after the act of fellatio had been committed, Strum spit the semen into a spittoon underneath his bed. Hoping to find some sort of physical evidence of the crime, Tyson searched Strum’s house for the spittoon but found instead a wooden box beside the bed filled with sawdust and a substance that appeared to be semen. No analysis of the substance was made, and upon trial the presiding judge threw out the box as evidence. However, based on the testimony of the two boys, he convicted Strum of sodomy. After an initial unsuccessful appeal, Strum took his case to the Arkansas Supreme Court who dismissed the testimony of Jackson and Cash and that of Marshal Tyson as “unreasonable” and “too weak to uphold a conviction.”3 The Strum case is significant insofar it was the first to involve homosex between men. It was, however, not the first sodomy case on the books. Four years earlier, on March 13, 1921, Dixie Smith had her husband, C. V. Smith, arrested. According to the report given to the Sebastian County circuit court in Fort Smith, Smith had violated the “peace and dignity of the state of Arkansas” when he made “an assault upon and did then and there unlawfully, feloniously and diabolically carnally know and abuse” his wife, Dixie.4 With this, C. V. Smith was arrested for violating the Arkansas sodomy statute. Once the case went to trial, the proceedingshit a snag, and C. V. Smith was not going down without a fight. He contended that the charge of sodomy was bogus and used the very language of the law to buttress his argument. The Arkansas statute, although prescribing...

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