Arthur Gary Bishop (with David Eichert)

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The crimes, trial and execution of Utah citizen and devout Mormon Arthur Gary Bishop seemed to be the manifestation of many of both the public fears and moral panics of the United States in the 1980s. 'Stranger Danger', pornography, homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse became the focus of heated public debate and new religiously-inspired political organisations such as the Moral Majority. Huw is joined by David Eichert, a PhD candidate studying international law, sexual violence, gender and sexuality, to discuss Bishop, his relationship with his Mormon faith, and wider social attitudes towards his crimes. Visit our website for t-shirts, an episode archive, and more. ----more---- SOURCES: Carlisle, Al, The Mind of the Devil: The Cases of Arthur Gary Bishop and Westley Allan Dodd, Carlisle Legacy Books, 2020Petrey, Taylor G., Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism, University of North Carolina Press, 2020Nathan, Debbie and Snedeker, Michael, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, iUniverse, 2001Strub, Whitney, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, Columbia University Press, 2013 Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to a special episode of Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:21.7	My name is Hugh Lemmy, I'm a writer, and I'm joined today by David Eikert, a PhD candidate at LSE.
0:28.8	Regular listeners to the show will know that we normally steer clear of the sort of true crime
0:33.2	genre, you know, people who are known for their crimes alone. But today we're deviating them from
0:40.0	that little bit to discuss the life of Arthur Gary Bishop, and hopefully the reasons for that
0:45.1	would become clear over the course of the episode. So with that, I will now pass over to David.
0:52.2	Cool. Great. Hi. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
0:55.6	Really excited to talk about the very troubled life of Arthur Gary Bishop.
1:01.5	This is a relevant topic to me. I am a gay Mormon, and Arthur Gary Bishop is perhaps
1:08.2	maybe the baddest gay Mormon. He's a child rapist and murderer
1:12.3	who killed five boys between 1979 and 1983. Before starting, obviously, a few disclaimers.
1:20.7	I'm going to be talking a lot about pedophilia, child pornography, and murder, and also briefly
1:25.2	about suicide, gay conversion therapy, and other forms
1:27.8	of religious homophobia. So big trigger warning for anyone who needs it. Also, I'm going to be
1:34.0	using the term Mormon here to refer to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
1:38.7	which is the biggest, wealthiest, Mitt Romneyist kind of Mormonism. The term Mormon, Mormon can also be used to
1:45.4	describe other smaller branches of Mormonism, including the fundamentalists who still practiced
1:49.5	polygamy. But here I'm just using it in its most colloquial widespread use. Finally, last
1:55.1	disclaimer, and just to clarify, I'm strongly opposed to child sex abuse, murder, and all the
2:00.2	crimes committed by Arthur Gary Bishop that we're going to talk about. And I don't opposed to child sex abuse, murder, and all the crimes committed by Arthur
2:01.4	Gary Bishop that we're going to talk about.
2:03.9	And I don't want to be misunderstood here as trying to excuse any of his actions or dismiss
	...

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