On Infamous Crimes Against Nature

What began as unremarkable arrests in the quiet suburbs of Boise, Idaho, quickly escalated into a scandal that gripped the nation. On Halloween night in 1955, three men—Ralph Cooper, Charles Brokaw, and Vernon Cassel—were taken into custody for engaging in homosexual acts. The charging documents established more than just allegations of a crime; they betrayed moral outrage. Cooper and Brokaw were charged with lewd and lascivious conduct while Cassel was charged with “infamous crimes against nature.”

Two days after the arrests, the city’s paper of record, the Idaho Statesman, published a front-page news story that framed the arrests as having barely “scratched the surface” of a kind of moral turpitude that was plaguing the city. The three men, the news article reported, were part of a homosexual underworld that was targeting hundreds of teenage boys. The article immediately sparked panic—residents called police stations and elected officials, demanding swift action, while parents called schools looking for answers. The following day, after the Statesman’s initial news article, the paper published an editorial titled “Crush the Monster,” which intensified the situation considerably.     

“Disclosure that the evils of moral perversion prevail in Boise on an extensive scale must come as a distinct and intensely disagreeable shock to most Boiseans,” the authors of the editorial wrote. “It seems almost incredible that any such cancerous growth could have taken roots and developed in our midst.”

In the weeks that followed what became known as the “Boys of Boise” scandal, more than 1,500 people were interrogated; 16 were charged, 15 sentenced—some to probation. Among those convicted was Ralph Cooper, who received the harshest sentence of all: life in prison.

The Statesman’s editorial and its coverage of the ongoing investigation did more than reflect public fear—it manufactured it. The “homosexual underground” the Statesman claimed to uncover was a projection of anxieties about bodies, pleasure, and the kind of desire that could not be safely mapped onto the normative customs of the day. Journalist John Gerassi, in his book The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City (1966), presents a portrait of a community desperate to believe in its own innocence—a city so eager to preserve its image of decency that it sacrificed its most disposable members. These sacrifices were necessary for a city seeking to exonerate itself from what many clearly believed were “infamous crimes against nature” visited upon the innocent. The very architecture of Boise’s moral authority was at stake.

The Boys of Boise scandal is as much about the power of narrative—and about who gets to wield that power over others—as it is about moral norms. Throughout history, those who control the flow of information have shaped public perception and influenced societal values. But regardless of the platform and how it evolves, the culture of exercising narrative control remains the same.

In Boise, the Idaho Statesman played this role with precision by curating silence—selecting which boys to name, which arrests to publicize, and which hearsay to elevate into headlines. The editor, Jim Brown, did not need an explicit mandate to “crush the monster;” he sought only the city’s compliant nod. In the very vocabulary his writers employed and his editorial team approved, we find signs of judgment and condemnation: “ring,” “network,” “invasion,”—language specifically chosen to paint queerness as something organized and dangerous. Decades later, the same language continues to surface in various forms, used to categorize certain groups as threats to social order, often framing them as part of a broader, coordinated menace. These choices reflect a long-standing tendency to brand certain identities or communities as criminal or morally corrupt, echoing the same dynamics of exclusion and vilification that characterized earlier moments of social panic.

The press is often a tool for control. Those who have lived under the weight of someone else’s version of the truth know too well how dangerous a headline can be.

Silence is not simply absence—it is a deliberate act of authorship. In Boise, in 1955, the men who launched a witch hunt against queerness wore suits, ran editorials, and sat on school boards. They were trusted. That trust is sharper than anything they had to say.

Boise is a symbol of silence, curated by design. If Boise reveals how queer life can be disavowed in the name of order, then a city that prides itself as a queer safe haven raises questions about what it means to be invited in. Places where pride flags hang from businesses year-round, murals of queer icons decorate alley walls, and piers fill with bodies each summer—many of them brown, many of them young, many of them kissing without fear. A city’s queerness invites desire and attention, but often at the cost of complexity. What are we not shown? Whose queer body is framed? Whose story is erased to make the picture less confrontational?

It has not fully dawned on many who praise cities as queer havens that their perception of the cities’ image is a curated surface—a product of historical forgetting as much as progressive ambition. The celebrations are real, yes, but they suggest a city without conflict, without contradiction—a place where queerness simply belongs. This sanitized image obscures the labor, the struggle, and the exclusion that continue to shape the lived reality of those at its margins. Visibility in the city has been made possible by the erasure of harder histories, by the displacement of working-class families, and by the flattening of queer identity into something decorative and nonthreatening. The progress paraded in the streets often conceals the work still undone—and worse, it can obscure the people whose survival never made it into the frame. When a city becomes an image, it risks becoming a lie, or at least a half-truth. Half-truths when trusted as whole ones become dangerous.

In 1955, the state branded queer men as predators to preserve a vision of civic innocence, casting safety as something that could only exist through exclusion. The rhetoric has not disappeared; it has only been repackaged. Political leaders invoke “public safety” to justify sweeps of the unhoused while corporations drape themselves in progressive slogans each June, then quietly fund legislation that harms the very communities they profit from. In both past and present, the logic is the same: erase what unsettles the image. For those of us whose stories were never meant to be visible, the city’s silence is not just historical—it’s intimate.

Queer safe havens have always known how to make themselves desirable. It is a city that knows how to sell itself, and it is easy to sell. Queer people are welcomed here not because they are understood but because they are useful to a brand of liberalism that prides itself on openness but resists real reckoning. The city is warmest to those who can perform well within its image, or at least convincingly pretend to.

But what about the rest of us? What about those of us who are still split open, who carry a story the city has no iconography for?

It is too easy to believe in the surface of things. It is too easy to look at Boise and say, “That was then,” and look at a “queer” city and say, “We’ve made it.” These places, for all their proclamations of unity, still draw lines they refuse to admit are there. It is one thing to celebrate diversity—it is another to confront intimacy across that diversity, to name the hierarchies within our own desires, our chosen families, our imagined freedoms.

When we talk about inclusion, we often mean proximity, not connection. There is pride in the cross-cultural image but also unease when that image suggests something deeper—love, accountability, or inheritance. Words like “progressive,” “safe,” and “open-minded” can be invoked and repeated so many times that they lose all meaning. Growing up in a so-called safe city is knowing that both things can be true: a place can celebrate who you are and still fail to keep you from being hurt for it.

We are not as far from 1955 as we would like to think. We are not as distant from Boise as we imagine. We are cities engaged in a fragile performance. For some of us—for the boys who were not protected, for the people still standing at the threshold of their own stories—the performance is no longer sustainable.