Its biggest attraction being the shortness of the book--only 100 pages. That was perhaps its only attraction. In a blog or a narrative, I expect the writer to use "I" a lot--it's a personal story and the writer is, in essence, the main character and generally the focal point. When someone writes about a subject and uses "I" to start every paragraph, if not most sentences, that seems a bit....slanted? Ego-maniacal? Smarty-pantsish? It went back to the library in favor of this:
Sociology is a REALLY broad field, and if one is trying to get out of reading a John Locke essay, one can make a pretty good case for reading about cases of mass-hysteria. "Mass" might be a bit of an overstatement, as the book is about Boise (Idaho) in the mid 1950's when it boasted a population of 50,000, which probably doesn't count as a "mass." Still, that mini-mass did a really nice job on the "hysteria" part.In December of 1955, Time magazine, in what can only be described as irresponsibly-sensational journalism, printed the following:
Boise, Idaho (pop. 50,000), the state capital, is usually thought of as a boisterous, rollicking he-man's town, and home of the rugged Westerner. In the downtown saloons of the city a faint echo of Boise's ripsnorting frontier days can still be heard, but its quiet residential areas and 70 churches give the city an appearance of immaculate respectability. Recently, Boiseans were shocked to learn that their city had sheltered a widespread homosexual underworld that involved some of Boise's most prominent men and had preyed on hundreds of teen-age boys for the past decade.
Leaving aside for a moment that Boise's "ripsnorting" days were long past and that showdowns at high noon had long been given up as a messy and ineffective way of handling disputes, and having willfully learned nothing from the McCarthy witch-hunts and the "Red Scare" hysteria, Time seriously misstated the facts--which were themselves misstated.
Written in 1965 at a time when homosexuality was both illegal and thought to be a mental disorder, Boys of Boise is pretty shocking. Convictions were obtained on poor evidence--even a sworn statement that had the name of the accused changed after the fact--and the widespread belief that people could be "turned" gay if they spend time with a known homosexual led to very harsh sentences--in spite of the fact that several of the men convicted had been promised therapy if they pled guilty.
I'm currently about a third of the way through the book, and what I have learned so far is:
1. Larry Craig probably has a justifiable reason to stay in the closet, though he might have wanted to avoid that rest room
2. Boise is still really, really conservative, but less so than it used to be.
3. The Salem Witch Trial mentality isn't a thing of the past--only the witches are.
4. Geraldo Rivera isn't responsible for the sensationalism of today's journalism.
5. Nothing is so dangerous as a prejudice backed up by selective "data"
6. John Locke might be boring, but his essays don't keep me awake at night
1 comment:
A disturbing book to read..........
Post a Comment