I'm Eric Marcus and this is making gay history. When I did the original research for my oral history book back in the late 1980s, I was determined

to tell the story of the LGBTQ Civil rights movement beyond New York, Los Angeles,

and San Francisco.

Every city, as I came to discover,

had its own history and stories

as the gay rights struggle spread across the country.

And that's how I stumbled across Boise, Idaho's 1955 homosexual panic.

There's no other way to describe it.

John Gerassie, a journalist, wrote about it in his 1966 book, The Boys of

Boisie. As he explained, it all started with the arrest of two men on morals charges and the false claim by a Boise probation

officer that about a hundred boys were involved in a homosexual ring.

As the phony scandal unfolded over several months, the police questioned nearly 1,500 Boise citizens in a town that had only 40,000 residents.

They gathered the names of hundreds of suspected homosexuals, many of them in heterosexual marriages.

In the end, 16 men were arrested, 10 went to jail.

For most of them, their only crime was engaging in sex with another consenting male.

I found it hard to imagine what the lasting impact was on Boise's gay citizens and the families of those men whose lives were upended by a senseless witch hunt.

I had to go to Boise.

But the challenge was finding someone who was gay,

who remembered what happened, and who had talked to me.

In 1989, this wasn't exactly a piece of Boise history that anyone was proud of

and wanted to revisit, whether they went to jail or just watched it from the sidelines.

So I called Boise's Gate Community Center and explained what I was looking for.

...