From The Fall of ’55 Documentary web site…

In the fall of 1955, the citizens of Boise, Idaho were told there was a menace in their midst. On Halloween, three men were arrested — accused of being part of a giant "sex ring" preying on teenage boys. There was no such ring, but the result was a widespread investigation which some people now call a witch hunt.

By the time the investigation ended, 16 men were charged with sex crimes — including men accused of having relations with other consenting adults. But countless other lives were also touched. In some cases, men implicated fled the area. At least one family actually left the country.

The investigation attracted the attention of "Time Magazine" and newspapers across America. In 1966, the book "The Boys of Boise" once again brought the cases to the nation’s attention. The "morals drive" — and the subsequent publicity — left scars which remain to this day.

When people scratch their heads over the behavior of men like Larry Craig, it helps to look back at the world they grew up in.  I was lucky enough to have entered adolescence in the late 60s, just as the modern gay rights movement was taking shape, and so I was spared a lot of what those men had to live through.  But I was close enough to it to have felt some of the venom, the relentless  pathologizing of homosexuals by the culture of the 50s.  When I was a kid, it was routine for newspapers, TV shows and movies to portray homosexuals in the ugliest, most psychotic ways possible.  In films and on TV, the homosexual characters usually met violent ends, as Vito Russo documented in his landmark book, The Celluloid Closet. 

What happened in Boise surely isn’t the only homosexual panic that occurred during the 1950s, that resulted in a witch hunt of gay men.  The book, Sex Crime Panic, documents another one that happened, also in 1955, this time in Soux City Iowa.  In that one 20 men were rounded up and committed for an indefinite period to a mental institution as "criminal sexual psychopaths", housed in a ward created especially to house homosexual men.  Their only crime was being homosexuals, and having affairs with other consenting adults.  Not one man incarcerated in that mental ward was there for the crime that originally set off the panic…the abduction and murder of two children.  Those killers were never found and brought to justice.  But nobody questioned the logic of rounding up a bunch of homosexuals and locking them away as a public safety measure. 

It was most likely viewed back then, as the more humane alternative…

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich…Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old, and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."

"You seen that?"

"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron…"

-Annie Proulx – Brokeback Mountain

Larry Craig, born in Council, Idaho in July of 1945, would have been 10 when the 1955 Boise homosexual panic happened.

[Edited a tad…]