Gays, Panic: The Original Power Couple that Spawned Gay Panic and the Murderous Queer Trope

October 6, 2020 Dudgrick Bevins 2 min read

It’s October, monster season, and for centuries queer folk have moved in and out of the space of monstrosity. For a wonderful academic read on the subject of “aberrant” bodies, try Leslie Fiedler’s book Freaks, particularly the chapter on the “hermaphrodite.”

Fiedler points to something most queer folks know: society at large does not like or reward individuals who resist existing categories. And if there’s one things queer folk hate, it’s someone else’s labels. Societies that had existing social categories beyond the binaries, which have choked much of western civilization for so long, revered homo- and bi- eros, intersex folks, and transgender individuals.

The contemporary fear is rooted in what has long been used as a legal defense: “gay panic” and now, “trans panic.” The tree of queerphobia did not spring from the Isle of Lesbos, the Roman baths, or even the raucous parties described in Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and Camille. Instead, the seed planted in the United States come from the real life murdering duo of Leopold and Loeb.

The subject of many books and films, Leopold and Loeb were two wealthy students at the University of Chicago, who, in 1942, kidnapped and murdered the fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. The two wanted to commit the perfect crime, and while they were quickly captured, their actions remain one of the most cited “crimes of the [last] century.” The story isn’t captivating because two young men killed another, but because two young men, who occasionally had sex with each other, methodically planned and executed a minor.

So much fear spun from this one act: Homosexuality, murder, and sexual abuse were linked, as a defense, for Leopold’s crime. Likewise, another defense linked malfunctioning endocrine glans. Both try to “blame” the murder away, and with it the gay. While those narratives did stick, the larger narrative of gay men plotting to abducting children as plaything fueled much larger and more dangerous fear.

In the 1966 “educational” (meaning “scare”) short film, “Boys Beware,” homosexuality is described as a “sickness of the mind” and “boys” are warned to stay away from pedophilic hunting grounds, like public restrooms; here the malfunctioning minds of Leopold and Loeb work in conjunction with their scheming urge to abuse a weaker and younger boy. Rippling out, the lurking intellectual pedophile gets a monstrous face in John Wayne Gacy, a face that became the monster in It, and then all of a sudden “it’s 2 am, do you know where your children are.”

The original “gay panic” duo persist, with an entire world of film attached! If October means monsters to you, start the the original mad-eyed queers that kicked off a terrible set of beliefs about queer folks, and a great set of movies.