Long before Ron DeSantis, Charley Johns terrorized queer Floridians. We can learn from his downfall.
No one can accuse Robert W. Fieseler of taking the easy road.The journalist and historians first book, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, chronicled the horrific mass murder in a New Orleans gay bar and the extraordinary bigotry exhibited by public officials and religious leaders in the aftermath. Related Florida GOP trying to ban Pride flags in direct attack on LGBTQ visibility Relying on a treasure trove of previously undisclosed documents, Fieseler exposes the Johns Committee, a state legislative organization using the cover of anti-communism to attack political opponents. Spearheaded by Charley Johns, a multi-term smear artist in a gerrymandered legislature, the Committee tried to eliminate threats to the hegemony of the states white, conservative regime just as minority groups were starting to assert power.Sound familiar? Well, thats the point.With the publication of American Scare, Fieseler, who lives in New Orleans with his partner, Ryan, has joined the ranks of the nations top investigative reporters, chronicling and winning multiple awards. In fact, American Scare in November was named a Kirkus Best Book of 2025.LGBTQ Nation chatted with Fieseler via Zoom to understand the historical gravity of his work and the parallels to todays politics, a time when MAGA employs many of the same strategies of demonizing and discriminating against marginalized groups to gain and retain a stranglehold on power.LGBTQ Nation: Dostoyevski would have a lot to say about American politics. There are moments in our history that explain the cycle of queer liberation and backlash, such as the Florida Johns Committee, the Matthew Shepard murder, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, or the Upstairs Lounge fire disaster in New Orleans. Both your books cover such tragedies. What do they reveal about LGBTQ+ life? Never Miss a Beat Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Robert W. Fieseler: Especially today, our news cycle continually chases its tail and fails to account for the historical background needed to understand any given headline. Were in a time now where deep undercurrents are affecting our present moment more than our daily tidal shifts, and thats why historical context is so important to factor in: It reveals the seeds and sources of contemporary phenomena.I wrote about the 1973 Upstairs Lounge tragedy a notoriously unsolved arson fire in New Orleans that claimed 32 lives for my first book Tinderbox, right around the time of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. I felt disoriented when contemporary news accounts of the Orlando tragedy offered me none of the substantive societal subtext I needed to understand and process the massacre. For me, the Upstairs Lounge tragedy provided a window or another way of widening the frame on Orlando to think about queer tragedy, or what academics call subaltern tragedy, writ large. This is the kind of tragedy that marginalized communities suffer disproportionately. In such emergency moments as a fire, a shooting, or a natural disaster, our country tends to reveal its true feelings about marginalized people.With my second book, American Scare, my rationale and motivation were similar: I was experiencing disorientation with the present. A few years prior, Id felt proud of our country during the Obama presidency. Based on that era, I thought I knew how the 21st Century was going to unfold. So I was shocked and fearful with this sudden turn to arch conservatism, scapegoating, and borderline fascism under a growing rightwing fringe that basically abandoned conservatism.A kind of white lawlessness was emerging, and I felt as though I had no lens through which to understand this turning point. If I delved into the past, I wondered if I might find something that was a progenitor of what we are living through. I needed to consider this fundamental question: Was there a historical moment where hysteria, panic, scapegoating, and white lawlessness could all be aligned to or revealed to share a relationship with today? To ascertain that answer, I needed to delve further into 20th-century history than I had studied before, to a time when sentiments about the intersection of race and queerness were more overt. I found that historic progenitor to the scaremonger right-wing in the southern dredges of the 1950s Red Scare, where white elite leaders of the racial apartheid system saw the words communist and subversive as a mechanism to take the peoples power and scapegoat individuals.Dixiecrat elites used anti-Communist hysteria as a distraction while they held onto another year, another month, another day of segregated power and dominance. Make no mistake: They perpetrated this two-step because they benefited financially. They benefited in status, and they benefited from the radical white affirmative action that segregation represented. Segregation wasnt just separate; people forget, it was also vastly unequal. White males got to sit on the heavy end of a social scale while saying, Im self-made, and Ill be the dominant voice at the dinner table and in state capitals.How does this history lesson apply to the MAGA movement today?Heres where my research into the Florida Johns Committee for American Scare comes into play. From 1956 to 1965, the residents of the massive boom state of Florida were held hostage to an old-school legislative cabal that had the power to declare anyone it didnt like enemies of the people, including Black integrationists, closeted queer teachers, charismatic state employees, and alleged communists.A strident segregationist legislator named Charley Johns chaired the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, and the damage Johns wrought through his roving, reputation-lynching cabal became so notorious in its time that it put a chill over his entire state. Researching the Florida Johns Committee helped me understand our American moment. I didnt fully fathom before writing American Scare how white elites like Charley Johns so effectively ruled by dividing and conquering minority and marginalized groups. And also how frequently men like Charley Johns are defeated when those targeted marginalized groups band together in coalitions to resist, which is how the Southern Red Scare and the Florida Johns Committee were ultimately brought down.People forget how the Red Scare was part of the white resistance to the American Civil Rights movementthe non-violent campaign to bring down regional racial apartheid in the United States. Such dark historic moments are emotionally fraught to study, but they can give us hope. They represent unplanned instances of tremendous societal release and progress. They reveal ways to harness change toward equality.The American right argues today that the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the overthrow of the Johns Committee, and McCarthyism mean that multiculturalism is threatening their own equality. They return to the same period and present the opposite argument. Today, they argue they are the actual victims of multiculturalism, of wokeness, of DEI.That argument comes from people who basically have no understanding of the reality of segregation and its all-encompassing corruption. Charlie Johns was a state senator earning money from the government. But he also owned an insurance company that issued policies to state agencies through a legislative appropriations committee on which he sat. Johns, in fact, issued all the insurance policies to the state prison, called Raiford, located in his legislative district. And no one in the good old boy system saw a problem with this or even deigned to call it spoils. Such noblesse oblige allowed Johns to reap the rewards of his public office financially and also of a segregated judiciary that disproportionately incarcerated Blacks, where they ended up in the state prison he earned money insuring.Believe it or not, Charley Johns also happened to be a conductor for a segregated railroad company called Seaboard. When he started working for the railroad as a young man, he was immediately placed in a higher-level position than the most senior Black employee. Thus, he benefited from a false meritocracy in which the prevailing notion was that white talent was automatically superior.An obvious parallel to that historic dynamic is how Trump 2.0 assembled his White House cabinet. I mean, look at it. Rather than appointing the best person for each job, which would take into account factors such as professional suitability, CV experience, and competence, the president essentially cast the roles for blind loyalty, a hypermasculine aesthetic, and overall camaraderie.Likewise, todays anti-DEI arguments imply that for queer folk, or for any member of a non-white group, the only reason they hold a job or an authoritative position is the same reason that a white person got a job under segregation. Meaning, someone had their thumb on the scale for you for reasons other than merit. You were supposedly not deserving of the title and salary you were awarded. You purportedly werent the best candidateyou werent the most talented candidate, which is obviously ridiculous.Is this backlash to the relative success of the civil rights movement and the Obama administration really just a reaction, or is it a movement in its own right? It goes deeper. Its not just a reaction to Obamathe white apoplexy at a talented Black man being chosen for the nations most important job. Its a reaction to the success of multiculturalism in general, as well as to the demographics of Gen Z, the most diverse generation soon to hold significant power in America. But, to add complexity, there are male members of Gen Z who are vulnerable to the appeal of fascist thinking.However, you cant stop the tectonics of demography or Americas march to a majority minority. The 20th-century southern Red Scare was primarily a response to anticipated power loss due to integration. This 21st-century neo-Red Scare were living in has a lot to do with white heel-digging to their expected loss of power due to non-whites becoming more than 50 percent of the population, as just happened in Florida, actually.MAGA is trying to slow that paradigm of diversification down while also growing an archconservative base that chips away at apologists from various non-white opposition groups, who can then become mouthpieces for MAGA gays or MAGA Cubans, etc. Isnt MAGA a testament to the ultimate success of the movements for equality?Journalist Roxane Gay has called MAGA the last gasp of white supremacy in our country, but, rather hauntingly, she called it that in the 2010s. This so-called last gasp keeps on gasping, doesnt it? Whats pernicious about American white supremacy is that it lurks in our mindset and will find opportunities, such as the Red Scare in 1950s Florida or MAGA today, to exploit.Look, Im not cynical about this country or our grand experiment of a nation without kings. But because we havent experienced a real truth and reconciliation period on race and prejudice in American history, we will continue to experience white backlashes and revisit the same impasses for the foreseeable future. We dont really move on from them.MAGA is white Americas revisitation of the unfinished business of the mid-20th-century Red Scare, and the mid-20th-century Red Scare was largely white Americas revisitation of the unfinished business of the Civil War. And on and on it spins backwards in time. How do we reverse this trend?The arc of freedom is long, as MLK once said, but it bends towards justice. That remains true about our national character and the American experiment that Obama expounded, specifically Americas pursuit of becoming a more perfect union.Sometimes America falls short of its ideals, but it does strive for them, and thats remarkable. Many nations have no ideals beyond self-existence in the acquisition of power. There nonetheless lingers, in our country, also a capacity to corrupt ideals such as freedom or liberty or patriotism in such a way that allows for only the freedom or patriotism of the white supremacist.Robert W. Fieseler | ProvidedI wish that werent the case, but what I am learning about the Civil Rights Movement makes me understand that its possible to combat or undo the white supremacists corruption of ideals and of language. Unfortunately, given the politicization of school curricula, most Americans never learn the history lessons that would make them proud and informed about our collective past. But Americans have defeated several Red Scare movements before and brought an end to grave injustices in our midst.The purple pamphlet is fascinating. Whats todays version?For the uninitiated, the Johns Committee stage-managed its own political Waterloo in 1964 when it became desensitized to queer materials. Or a little too curious about them. Because they put all their findings on queer in a public report paid for with tax dollars.Floridians nicknamed it the Purple Pamphlet, a document so notorious that it was almost instantly declared obscene and pornographic by state prosecutors. The Florida governor pulled it from distribution, but gay erotica presses got hold of it first, and they republished the Purple Pamphlet nationwide as a how-to guide on homosexuality, for a profit. And these gay presses could do it because a state document has no copyright. Maybe there isnt a current equivalent to the Purple Pamphlet, or not yet. Its not like the Access Hollywood tape or the Trump birthday card to Epstein brought down the archconservative movement. When such moments as the Purple Pamphlet arrive, they turn the tide only if they coincide with socio-political luck and excellent preparation by an opposition ready to guide public sentiment.The anti-Trump or anti-DeSantis opposition hasnt yet done this, or doesnt know how to play the timing game. It usually happens when the schoolyard bully is a little weakened and takes the wrong step, leaving him open and exposed.There have been all kinds of opportunities for the downfall of MAGA, and none of them have happened, thanks to all sorts of cowardice.Understanding that the platform embodying DeSantis-ism and MAGA is not new, with antecedents in the Florida Johns Committee and Tallahassee politics, shifts the conversation away from the strongman who seeks to be the subject of every headline and who has members of the media frantically scanning platforms like Truth Social for the next provocation. Trump 2.0 rules American society through the news cycle in this manner. And somehow, the media landscape doesnt fathom yet that their instinct to chase sensation has been co-opted so effectively as to make them dupes and accomplices in the theatre of distraction.This style of governing was executed and perfected to a T in bygone Tallahassee by men like Charley Johns, guided by the following principles: spoils and personal enrichment; revanchism, with no grudge left unturned; wild electoral manipulation and gerrymandering; and the use of constitutional loopholes to crown oneself king. Additionally, the tendency to double down, never admitting one is wrong, was a Charley Johns trope.For example, the chief investigator of the Johns Committee, Remus Strickland, basically ran amok throughout the state on Charley Johns command and then got himself in a kerfuffle when he interrogated the wrong gay Black educator, who sued for civil rights violations. This gay Black educator managed to convince a very conservative state court to agree that what Remus Strickland had done exceeded the bounds of the state law. In the next election cycle, Charley Johns ended up feeding Strickland to the political wolves in an act of self-preservation for the Johns Committee. Strickland got fired, and Charley Johns never felt the need to apologize for or admit to selling out his best man.In light of all this, what does Floridas anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and this bulldozing of rainbow crosswalks mean?I view the present anti-LGBT+ backlash to be the ultimate return of the scare tactics of segregation-era Tallahassee politics and a revisitation of Floridas unfinished business from the social wars of the 20th century. LGBT+ book banning and rainbow crosswalk erasures are just the latest attempts to cast queer citizenry as somehow dangerous to youth and therefore needing expungement from the public commons. Its a tired but brutal argument that doesnt allow for coexistence with or tolerance of non-heteronormativity.Some of the saddest folks Ive encountered on my extended book tour are moderate to progressive residents of Florida, many of whom still raise rainbow flags in front of their homes. Florida is such a massive state that its politically disenfranchised population roughly estimated at about 10 million is basically larger than the entire population of Georgia. These out-of-power Floridians recognize that theyve entirely lost control of their state apparatus and that this loss has detrimentally affected our national political climate, and they are often apologetic to the point of tears. They still have pride in their homes and communities and in the historic promise of Government in Sunshine, and are fighting the good fight in the trenches to regain a fraction of a millimeter of control. But, as Florida State Senator Lauren Book once summed it up to me, When you get power in Florida, you can use it to pick on anyone. Winners take all in a big, big way in the Sunshine State, and the victors of recent elections have capitalized in ways unseen since the 1950s.Johns was accorded considerable deference. That kind of personality politics resonates today.Much of whats happening today is reminiscent of a particular style of personality politics that gained traction after World War II. Florida was a fascinating state to be in back then the Sun Coast was becoming a significant real estate phenomenon. Private pools beneath palm trees were springing up in almost every Florida backyard. Preeminent artists were Florida residents, Jack Kerouac in Orlando and Jim Morrison in Clearwater. Every American consumer wanted a taste of a new concoction called frozen concentrated orange juice. Rockets and missiles were flying off Cape Canaveral.Meanwhile, you had one of the most old-school southern state governments sitting in the panhandle hat above the peninsula and achieving a stranglehold on the lions share of the tax revenue from new Floridas growth. It behooves Americans now to understand the basis of Tallahassee politics, as we are seeing a comeback.Charley Johns never got his comeuppance the way Joseph McCarthy did. Johns died unrepentant. It means Trump might get away with it, too. The justice served is the way Johns will go down as evil in your book, American Scare. His place in history is well chronicled here. But how did they get away with this? Charley Johnss allies in Tallahassee feared that if everything he perpetrated came to light, it would not just tarnish his reputation as one former officeholder but also diminish public faith in the offices themselves.So, the state resolved to move past the Johns Committees abuses without any debrief or reflection about what had transpired and the damage done. A good-faith truth and reconciliation phase post-1965 would have included the perspectives of Black leaders like Theodore Gibson, the former president of the Miami NAACP, whom Charlie Johns essentially hounded to the steps of the US Supreme Court. Alas, Gibsons testimony concerning Johns abuses was never actively sought out and dealt with.Despite everything, Charlie Johns was permitted to maintain his companies and move back to his hometown of Stark, FL, to sit on his porch and command as a shadow influencer from his rocking chair. In the end, nothing but biology caught up with him. He was sick for a long time in his 80s with a terrible cancer. He had multiple seizures. And by the end of his life, the charming man with an elephantine memory for names had nothing going on up there. Theres an old newspaper photograph of him in a wheelchair, and hes staring into the lens, as if death is staring back.Yet even after Johns became wheelchair bound, he still had enough sway to keep the records of his committee from the 1950s and 1960s sealed. Its only after he dies in 1990 that, coincidentally, a state constitutional amendment is finally allowed to proceed, which leads to the opening of the legislative records. This makes the state legislature nervous because it wants to maintain its credibility as a branch of government.The Johns Committee left a legacy of whispers, with legislators referring to Charley Johns actions for decades as among the worst abuses of state power ever. Did the man have a moment of conscience?He felt that what hed done to help his white friends was the right thing, and he thought that what he did to persecute dangerous homosexuals and racial integrationists was moral and just. In addition to being a fundamentalist Baptist, Charley Johns was also profoundly sexually naive. He said that he wished he didnt have to hurt anybody, but he thought he was protecting children from homosexual grooming and interracial corrupting.This save the children notion later inspired Anita Bryants Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida, in the late 1970s, with the same message that homosexuality is a danger. Bryant aped many of Charlie Johns greatest anti-homosexual hits to create a new social panic about gays molesting and converting the innocent.Were going through another right-wing backlash in Florida with Governor DeSantis grooming libel and sweeping anti-trans legislation. Our books are being banned. Whats the historical connection to the Johns committee? Is there a dotted line?Since the Johns Committee unraveled, once a decade or so, a new anti-queer or anti-Black movement seems to sprout from Florida soil, gain critical mass, and spread its seeds across the country. In the 2000s, it was Governor Jeb Bush and support for anti-gay adoption laws as well as anti-same-sex-marriage initiatives. Then comes Republican Ron DeSantis. Whats interesting is that none of these individuals are students of history, and they all seem to believe that their fear-messaging is part of an original platform. But its actually the saddest old tune that plays onward to keep their base simultaneously terrified and angry, the idea being that White Daddy in a suit will keep me safe from the immoral hordes.Is DeSantis playing on fears of losing white privilege still? Or is this grooming hysteria something else?Within white supremacy is the implicit notion of white male entitlement, the belief that any white man should receive, with a little bit of work, access to wealth, power, and class advancement. And if, as a white male, you have not gotten those things, not been bestowed those things by a society built to serve your self-esteem, then youre being cheated. The next step is to name the cheaters, and those named groups become the social scapegoats. Some gay men collaborated with Johns.These men thought of themselves as heterosexuals with a private side habit. Many of them were married, and they also liked naked horse play with other men, or they liked to gain sexual release from other men in cruising centers, such as the basement bathroom of the Alachua County Courthouse.Wow!Which sounds like the hottest place, honestly, Ive ever written about. My God, a place where desperate longing found desperate release. Can I get in a time machine, Jesus, just for five minutes?HahaHowever, most Florida bachelors or single men believed what they were doing sans pants was an activity, a behavior, rather than a characteristic that they had to internalize. So it makes sense that many gay Floridians of the 1950s broke under interrogation when the state agents targeted them. These men were brought to frightening, isolated locations and suddenly informed that their behavior was consequential, that it meant something about them, and that the state would make it public if they didnt confess under oath right now.Does that help explain MAGA-supporting gay men today?More contemporarily, among MAGA-ish gays, we can observe self-hating and homonormative queers who have that instinct to align themselves with power. They often have this odd relationship with white masculinity, and theyre usually seeking older brother figures to support them in a political rise. They strive to gain approval in those environments, and to do so, they perpetrate some of the worst deeds against people who are much more like them in every way than with the conservatives they serve. Its Machiavellian. You know, even Roy Cohen, a protg of McCarthy and a mentor to Trump, had a lover who loved him. Trump 1.0 purportedly shouted in a meeting, Wheres my Roy Cohen? when he thought his team was not being loyal enough or aggressive enough. It looks like Trump 2.0 has found a few gay men of that mold.This is difficult material. What do you do to get away from it all? Whats your life like in New Orleans?I live on the gayest street in New Orleans, which is a real place, but I prefer to keep the actual location mythic, like Brigadoon, for privacy purposes. On my street by the Mississippi, its hard to find a home without a Pride flag in the front window. There are so many gay guys named Ryan, including my husband Ryan, that we call the one straight guy named Ryan straight Ryan.There are two head lesbians, who organize the social calendar and who bought an empty lot to turn it into a permanent queer pool party in the summer. When it storms or hurricanes knock out power for extended periods, queer folk cook hot meals for each other, and people with their own generators set up power strips so everyone can keep their phones charged and in contact with worried relatives. My street is a vision of a better and more queer society, an improvised chosen community where neighbors say Good morning, and Good evening, and Happy Pride genuinely. It is a beautiful coalescence and a real thing.You are prolific, and your topics are complex and challenging. What do you do to relax?When Im not working, Im either exercising free weights or rowing hanging out with friends at dinner parties my husband forces me to go to, reading in cafes, or volunteering with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, a nonprofit queer archival organization for which I serve as an executive board member. Kids? Pets?Several years ago, Ryan and I adopted two kittens, a boy and a girl, domestic short hair, who have become like our babies. They are so darn spoiled with toys and treats and the best darn organic food; remind me that I want to be resurrected as a cat! Im also a very active Guncle, with eight nieces and two nephews. The oldest is eight, and she now avoids my FaceTime calls because she wants to play Roblox. The youngest is 4 weeks old, and she doesnt ignore me yet.What are you listening to? Watching?For culture, I like live jazz, and I live in a jazz city. We also inhabit the greatest age for scripted television ever, so I am binging multiple series at once. Right now, thats Slow Horses on AppleTV, Fisk on Netflix, and The Lowdown on FX. I read nonfiction for work, so my pleasure reading life is all fiction, all day longeither serious lit or speculative fantasy. I always tend to have a significant book Im working through and also a minor one that flows more rapidly, like a Sith Master and a Sith Apprentice, so right now the pair is Dostoyevskis The Brothers Karamazov and Murakamis Hear the Wind Song.On a final note, Im old enough to have graduated from college in 1986, and to try to reassure my younger friends about todays political moment by describing the progress Ive seen. While HIV was killing my friends, the Reagan administration was turning a blind eye, and gay bashing was endemic. Marriage equality was not even discussed. The military banned gay servicemembers. For nearly 40 years, our lives have undergone significant improvements. Given what you learned in American Scare, what should I tell them?Sometimes we have to put our faith in a national experiment that isnt yielding any visible results or concrete wins right now. But theres power in being part of the opposition, being part of the resistance.Its exciting to fight for your rights in America, and I find great fulfillment in that gesture.Chris Bull, author of Perfect Enemies, is the editorial director of Q.Digital, which publishes LGBTQ Nation, Queerty, Intomore, Outsports, and GayCities.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
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