Robert W. Fieseler is a local journalist and historian whose first book, Tinderbox, won multiple major awards and has become the preeminent publication on the topic of the UpStairs Lounge fire. I recently met with him to discuss his new book, American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, a fascinating exposé of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (better known as the Johns Committee), which devastated the lives of queer and Black Floridians in the mid-20th century.
JM: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. This is a fascinating subject, and the book is an absolute page-turner, with plenty of lessons for our times. What initially drew you to research the Johns Committee?
RF: After I finished the very long process of researching and writing and touring Tinderbox, I felt like I had an understanding of not just queer life, but about the way that American society worked. And then our country changed radically and profoundly in the mid-2010s. It pivoted direction, and I was suddenly extremely disoriented. I felt like I didn’t understand the American story anymore. And then my mentor, Professor Sam Friedman, told me about an exhibit at the HistoryMiami Museum called Queer Miami. As soon as I walked into that exhibit, there was one corner devoted to the Johns Committee and two screens. The most famous Johns committee scholar, Stacy Braukman, was on one screen saying, “I don’t think anyone knows about the Johns Committee anymore.” So I decided to follow this Johns Committee story to the end of the earth, and to figure out what it has to do with what we’re experiencing now.
JM: What was the Johns Committee?
RF: The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was formed by Charley Johns, a racist segregationist who was a former acting governor turned state senator in Florida. From 1956 through 1965, this largely forgotten social panic held residents of the state of Florida ransom to an extrajudicial committee that had the power to declare anyone it didn’t like – Black activists, queer activists, Cuban immigrants, librarians, you name it – enemies of the people. It could abduct people in public places. It could kidnap you into basement rooms, and interrogate you until you confess to something. It could force you to sign loyalty oaths. It could edit your witness testimony so that you could be charged with crimes. They could rifle through your medical records, even your mental health records. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, in the early days of the gay rights movement, these white segregationists pulled a tantrum that almost brought down our country wholesale. The committee was so powerful and so notorious in its day that it gained the nickname of the guy who was leading it.
JM: My understanding is that it initially began as an investigation into suspected members of the Communist Party.
RF: The Johns Committee did not have the practical capacity to locate, unearth, or expose a single Soviet spy. Those actually did exist, but these were incompetent, bumbling fools who had attained their positions by being buffeted by a system of white privilege that rewarded them for their incompetence, and allowed them to exist in high ranking positions regardless of their skill level. But they understood that the public hated the term “Communist,” which served as a code word for an enemy of white dominion.
JM: The committee’s papers were publicly revealed in the early 1990s, but in a highly redacted form. How did you gain access to the missing information?
RF: The officially released files were nearly useless, but I found a master’s thesis from the mid-1980s written by the first Johns Committee scholar, a graduate of University of South Florida named Bonnie Stark. I reached out to her, and we met. She told me, “I have the secret second set of the Johns Committee records, and I’m going to give them all to you.” I was floored. And when I saw them, I realized it was going to be possible to write this book. And I learned that Bonnie, who received little to no credit from other academics, had been central to the documents being released, and had found transcripts that weren’t fully redacted. This was due to her efforts and her testimony in Senate committees where she was sometimes the lone voice defending the preservation of this history.
JM: Why do you think certain people are drawn to the kind of power that something like the Johns Committee held over others?
RF: I think it’s addictive to a certain psyche. They got their first taste of power over others at some point in their formative years, and they loved it, and they never wanted to give it up. That sort of power trip is addictive. I think race based power highs are addictive. I think sexual orientation based power highs are addictive. I think gender based power highs are addictive. There’s a certain kind of person that likes to be above others. It’s an inherent impulse in some human beings – outside of talent, outside of excellence, or ability, or intelligence, or even being a good charmer – that makes them think, “I’m better than you.” That impulse, in certain people, becomes a force that is impossible to quell.
JM: Some of the people the committee interrogated, many of whom were college professors, named names and betrayed friends and colleagues fairly quickly under pressure.
RF: Most of the people who became informants or collaborators for the Johns Committee in those darkened rooms were profoundly in denial that they existed in any way counter to the system. They thought that they were not “homosexuals.” They thought that they engaged in some sort of unlabeled, loosely defined, naked horse play with other men, but that they were straight and married. And they were not against segregation. When they were accused, maybe for the first time in their lives, that their behavior existed counter to the southern order, they tripped over themselves to prove, “No, I’m not like those freaks you’re saying I am. I deserve to be part of the South that you’re a part of.” One of the greatest collaborators for the Johns Committee was a University of Florida English professor named James Congleton. At the risk of losing his entire academic career, he named the name of every other fellow gay person he knew on the University of Florida Campus. Why? Because he’d gotten caught literally with his pants down in the greatest hookup zone in Gainesville, Florida, which was the basement bathroom of the county courthouse. But he was married. He had a daughter who was married to a famous athlete. Everyone who informs thinks they have reasons to save their own hides. But in the end, he was fired in the same purge with all the people he named.
JM: There were also people who resisted these interrogations.
RF: The individuals who stood up, I think, were individuals who were already wrestling against the chains of that society, who were already very irked with the oppression of the segregated south. They didn’t have sympathies for the “moonlight and magnolias” of the old southern system. They didn’t relate to cops, and they knew inherently to admit nothing to these authority figures. They were part of a group of people who were trying to remake Florida into a sort of southern paradise, with a head that had a northern economy and mentality. They wanted a South with an international bent in its culture, in its defense spending, in its space program, and in all these exciting things that had nothing to do with a South that ran on an apartheid system.
JM: Were there other forms of resistance?
RF: Some of the most intensive cases of abductions, interrogations, firings that the Johns Committee perpetrated were at the University of Florida. And the students felt like their school’s reputation had been tarnished, in addition to their whole academic year being screwed up by this committee. So during the Spring semester of 1959, they started rebelling, and you started to see examples of civil disobedience, like when students hung an effigy of Charley Johns from a tree in the quad. There was a mass political reaction among the students who took a stand against some of the most powerful politicians in Florida.
JM: How did Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, the so-called “Purple Pamphlet,” bring about an end to the committee?
RF: The “Purple Pamphlet” was published by the Johns Committee in 1964. It was supposed to shock the public into understanding the dangers of homosexuality. But it put forward imagery and terminology that citizens of 1960s Florida had never heard before. The document was declared obscene by a Dade County prosecutor. It was pulled from distribution by the governor, and declared by many parties to be a pornographic document. And it actually is pornographic, to the point that a queer press in DC reprinted it and sold it to queer readers throughout the country, who then campily displayed it on their coffee tables. It had the unintended boomerang effect of damaging, not the reputation of gays in Florida, but the reputation of the Johns Committee.
JM: You mention three publications you consider particularly significant to the Johns Committee era: the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the Kinsey Reports, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
RF: The Johns Committee cited all of those. They pivoted away from Black activists, who’d gummed them up in the court system, to queer people who would have no safety in the courts. They considered those books to be serious scholarly writing, with a clear anti-homosexual bias. This scientific, medical, psychological research all stated that this phenomenon that’s coming to the surface in a big way for the first time in our country, is detrimental to Americanism, and detrimental to the security of our post-war society. But homosexuality was removed as a diagnosis from future editions of the DSM. And if you read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, you see that Kinsey is saying that the existence of a spectrum of sexualities is simply a fact of human nature. And scholars now agree that the RSV’s use of the word “homosexual” was based on a mistranslation. But the damage had already been done, in terms of the conservative Christian ethos that continues to impact our society today, and many people don’t even know what the basis of those biases are in their own lives. They just take it to be religion. But it’s a social religion that was born then.
JM: What was so unique about Charley Johns that he was able to wield such influence in Florida?
RF: Though he was uneducated, and though he was incredibly Machiavellian, and opportunistic, and insincere, he did have talents. He was an incredibly charismatic and likable guy. He had an elephantine memory, and could remember anyone’s name upon first introduction. He could remember where they’re from, the names of their spouses, their family members. One of his greatest political enemies said, “Charley Johns is the most likable guy I’ve ever met. I have to remind myself that I hate him.” So he came forward with a very nasty political ideology, and he also warped the rule of law to become a king, a pharaoh of his own land, and to do basically whatever he wanted to other citizens of the state of Florida for the span of about 10 to 15 years. He was able to do it because if you or I had met him in a room we may have fallen into the traps of his charm. This was a guy who had the parliamentary trickery abilities of Mitch McConnell, the chumminess of George W. Bush, and the authoritarian bent of our current president. He was really the first politician in the South who ran a cabal like this. He successfully held back the ship of progress for as long as he possibly could so that Florida would remain a segregated state, a kingdom of white dominion. And he did it to the point that his state broke down, and they had to get a new constitution. That’s how successful he was at it. He had a certain set of skills that have become table stakes for a certain subset of political leaders today.
JM: Do you think he really believed, morally, in the aims of the committee?
RF: I think he thought the segregated system was a good deal for him, and he would do anything to keep it going. He would use fear to convince you that it was necessary for him to be in power. Because he could use that power to enrich himself and his family and his friends. So in terms of his morals, I do believe he was a segregationist and a racist. I think he was disgusted and confused by homosexuality in the same way that he was disgusted and confused by anything that was different from the sort of white style of life he loved so much. His only loyalty was to the system that rewarded him so well. He was, other than to his own family that he liked to enrich, a valueless man in that aspect.
JM: Thank you once again for meeting with me, and congratulations on the publication of American Scare.
