In 1955, allegations around a predatory sex ring in Boise, Id., grew into an all-out moral panic. Adult gay men in consensual relationships were drawn into the investigation, which eventually came to be known as “The Boys of Boise.”
Seth Randal is the documentarian behind “The Fall of ’55,” which uses archival research and primary source interviews to chronicle “The Boys of Boise” and its fallout.
Randal, who founded North Idaho College’s original Gender & Sexuality Alliance when he was a student at the college, first released “The Fall of ’55” in 2006. This week, the film returns to North Idaho for a 20th anniversary screening in Coeur d’Alene.
Spokane Public Radio’s Audrey Nelson called Randal to learn more about the film and how he’s thinking about it now.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AUDREY NELSON: So “The Fall of ’55” is about this moral panic incident that's known as the Boys of Boise. And the film's website actually calls it “one of the most significant, yet least-known civil rights episodes in American history.” Tell me what happened during this moral panic.
SETH RANDAL: Well, it initially started with allegations of a sex ring, of grown men preying on teenage boys. The allegations caused a lot of hysteria within the community. And as a result of that, the investigation ended up turning its focus to consenting adults, to gay men having relations with each other.
I spoke with a man who had been a former Idaho State Supreme Court justice. He was a high school student, a high school senior in the class of 1955. He knew some of the people who had been involved. And he was off at Harvard when this originally started happening, but word had spread through the news. His Harvard classmates were making fun of him for being from Boise, "where the boys are."
And what he ended up saying is that the mood when he returned for Christmas vacation was almost like people were looking under their own beds. You had neighbors turning on each other. If there was a single man living by himself, that could be suspect. Or two men living together could be suspect. And there were actually people at the time, according to the newspaper reports, who wanted to create a jail just to put all the gay men in.
In the end, 16 men ended up being prosecuted. And the city was around 50,000 people at the time, and the reaction that the community had ended up being something that had long-lasting implications.
AN: How did the story first pique your interest?
SR: One thing that caught my attention was when the Idaho Statesman newspaper did a 40th anniversary article, in 1995, that looked at some of the lives that had been impacted by it, the consequences for some of these people. And that was what I wanted to know more about. How did these events shape the community of Boise, and how did it impact the lives of the people who were connected to these cases?
I actually partnered with Alan Virta, who at the time was the head of the archives and special collections at Boise State University. He knew more about doing in-depth, archival research than I did. So I partnered with him.
A lot of it was sending letters to people in the mail saying, “Hey, would you be willing to talk about this?” And sometimes I had to keep the letters kind of vague. Some of the men who were prosecuted ended up getting married after this happened. In some cases, some of them were married and stayed married. And over time, we were able to get some people to talk.
Now, there was still a lot of resistance at that time. We had people saying, “Why are you dredging this up again?” And that was challenging because when I first started working on this, I knew that it had been a very controversial issue that had scarred a lot of people in the community. And my goal was not to scar them again, but rather to understand what happened.
AN: “The Fall of ’55” came out in 2006. Back then, what did you hope people would take away from the film?
SR: A sense that we need to ask questions. We need to approach problems from a level-headed point of view instead of getting caught up in hysteria. I still hope that that's the case.
AN: I think my last question is: You'll be giving a virtual Q&A after the film is screened in Coeur d'Alene. You've obviously got roots in North Idaho. You attended North Idaho College. How did you decide to bring the film back on this 20th anniversary?
SR: Well, it's a story that I think still continues to have resonance. And like you said, I used to live in Coeur d'Alene. I also used to live in Spokane. And it seemed like a natural to bring the film back to the Inland Northwest to let people know that our history still matters.
