ON DECEMBER 8, 1977 the district attorney Garrett Byrne from Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes all of Boston and three smaller surrounding communities, called a press conference to announce the indictment of 24 men on multiple charges of statutory rape involving boys ages eight to thirteen. The men, according to the DA, had allegedly lured the boys with pot, money, and games, and then raped and photographed the victims. The DA claimed the men were part of a sex ring that was just the “tip of the iceberg” and that there would be more indictments in what was an ongoing investigation. Most of the men were arrested prior to the press conference. Several defendants were arrested out of state where they were held for extradition, and several others fled; some of those may have left the country.
The media coverage never questioned the accused men’s guilt or Garrett Byrne’s assertions, but instead vilified the defendants and published their pictures and their names and addresses (some television stations even put the names and addresses of the accused on screen) despite the constitutional presumption of innocence. Before this affair ended, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court would lose his job in what turned out to be a most bizarre but important subplot, the district attorney would lose his bid for re-election, and the controversial North American Man-Boy Love Association (nambla) would be formed.
The 24 men indicted by Garrett Byrne in December 1977 came from all walks of life, from the headmaster of a prestigious prep school to a bus driver. Some of the men were married with families, and many were respected professionals. To say that their lives were shattered by the indictments is an understatement, since most lost their jobs, many lost their families, and all lost their reputations from the extensive media coverage.
But as the cases unfolded it became clear that many of the facts and accusations were fabricated. Most of the men didn’t know each other. There was no sex ring. The vast majority of the accused men had had sex with one of two fifteen-year-old hustlers from Revere, Massachusetts, sometimes in the apartment of a man named Richard Peluso. Peluso had been having sex with local boys in Revere for fifteen years and was arrested on child molestation charges in June 1977, six months before the sex ring indictments. None of the boys involved was under thirteen.
John Mitzel, who has written the definitive work on these events (The Boston Sex Scandal, Glad Day Books, 1980), explains that the “sex ring” came about as a result of Peluso’s arrest: “Photos seized in Peluso’s apartment were used to identify 64 local youths. All were collared by cops and forced to spit out names. As it turned out, only thirteen agreed to cooperate, mostly under pressure by police, priests, and psychiatrists.” The testimony of those thirteen boys led to the 24 indictments.
The arrests were widely seen as part of Garrett Byrne’s strategy for re-election to an eighth term as district attorney. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The December arrests would keep Byrne’s name in the spotlight through ongoing investigations and trials right up to the November 1978 elections. Byrne had a history of using the investigative powers of the DA’s office to “uncover” sensational vice “rings” of one kind or another as election time approached, using the hysteria to keep his name in print and his image as a public protector and crusader against vice intact. Byrne will also be remembered for his efforts to ban William Burroughs’s best-selling novel Naked Lunch, the hit musical Hair, and the film I Am Curious, Yellow.
Byrne was first appointed district attorney in 1952 to fill an unexpired term, and he proceeded to win the next seven elections. But his seventh term would prove to be his last. Whether the DA’s arrest and persecution of gay men was a factor in his defeat is unclear. Byrne was eighty at the time, and it’s possible that voters thought he’d been district attorney long enough. But it’s also true that no one ever before challenged Byrne’s sensational arrests. Who would take the side of those he went after—drug dealers, illegal gambling interests, prostitutes? No one. Certainly no one had ever sided with gay men accused of having sex with consenting adults, let alone with underage boys. And Garrett Byrne had calculated that no one would come to their defense now.
But this time there was a surprise. Mitzel was present on December 9, 1977, when members of the radical Fag Rag collective formed the Boston/Boise Committee (B/BC) to defend and protect the rights of the 24 accused child rapists. Boise was a reference to a similar witch hunt that had occurred in 1955 in Boise, Idaho, when hundreds of gay men, including many prominent citizens, were arrested for sex crimes with teenagers.
In addition to the sensational and biased media coverage, the B/BC was concerned about a special “hotline” established by the district attorney’s office for citizens to call in anonymous tips about men who had sex with boys under sixteen. The Hotline moved the scandal into the realm of a witch hunt, and became, in Mitzel’s words, a “threat to the safety of all homosexual men (or those perceived to be homosexual).” “And we wanted to work to guarantee that the legal rights of the accused were observed in the midst of this panic. … It has always been the Fag Rag position that an attack on any part of the gay community (particularly one of its ‘fringes’) is an attack on all gay people.”
Certainly not everyone in the gay community rallied around the accused. The arrests touched a difficult nerve in the still fledgling gay rights movement, which was still trying to fight the old canard that gay men were child molesters. Many gay people were looking for respectability and acceptance and saw the sex case as a major setback. State Rep. Elaine Noble, widely recognized as the first openly gay elected official in the U.S., denounced the accused in a press statement issued the day after the arrests: “I have called this news conference as a legislator and as a concerned citizen to express my deep concern and outrage regarding the scandalous sexual exploitation and abuse of young children by adults.” Later in her statement she urged people with information to call the DA’s office and assured her constituents that all information would be held in the “strictest confidence.”
In most places and in most professions, it was not safe to be openly gay. People were afraid of losing jobs, friends, and family. But gays and lesbians were asserting their rights everywhere, contributing to a conservative backlash. Of course the backlash was a byproduct of all the radical social upheavals of the 1960’s and 70’s that included feminism, civil rights, and sexual freedoms. But homosexuality was still suspect even among progressive heterosexual leaders, which made gay people an obvious target.
One way the backlash manifested itself was in the “Save Our Children” campaign created by Anita Bryant, a singer and minor celebrity who was also a conservative Christian. She was appalled when the Dade County Commission in Florida included sexual orientation in the county’s anti-discrimination ordinance, and, in response, she launched a campaign to repeal the protections. Her campaign tied homosexuality with child abuse; she argued that since gays didn’t reproduce, they clearly needed to recruit children to maintain their ranks. Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign forced a referendum on the issue in Dade County, and the ordinance was overturned. But her effort created yet another backlash: outraged, many gay men and lesbians were apparently radicalized by Bryant’s effort and the gay rights movement gained new strength. (Bryant lost her job as spokesperson for Florida orange growers, by the way.)
In this atmosphere, it’s not surprising that Garrett Byrne went for a homosexual child-molester story to fuel his re-election efforts—or that gay people protested against this outrageous and unfair treatment for the first time in U.S. history. Seventy-five people showed up at the offices of Gay Community News a few days after the arrests for an emergency meeting called by the B/BC, and then an assistant district attorney, Thomas Dwyer, agreed to meet with three members of the B/BC to discuss the groups’ demands, including the resignation of Garrett Byrne and an end to the Hotline. But the DA refused both, and on December 15, 1977, about thirty people demonstrated in City Hall Plaza and then marched directly to the DA’s office and confronted Assistant DA Dwyer, but once again Byrne refused to end the hotline. Finally, the B/BC took the matter to court. Mitzel reports that John Ward, the B/BC’s attorney, was threatened by Assistant DA Jack Gafney, who reportedly said to Ward: “If you show up in court tomorrow, we’ll make sure you never practice law in this town again.” Ward did show up, but the case was moot. “Knowing the court would have restrained them, the DA’s office announced they had voluntarily discontinued the Hotline.”
At the time of these events, I was a reporter with WGBH-TV’s Ten O’clock News. Some of the information that follows is taken directly from my on-air scripts from that period.
ON THE EVENING of April 5, 1978, I brought a camera crew to the historic Arlington Street Church (a Unitarian congregation that was welcoming to the city’s gay and lesbian population) to cover a benefit for the B/BC. The group had asked Gore Vidal, the noted author, essayist, and political commentator, to speak at a benefit while he was in Boston on a promotional tour for his new novel, Kalki, and he agreed.
After speakers from the B/BC made their pitch, Vidal made his own remarks to the audience of more than 1,500 people, talking about how the right wing was using the fear of homosexuals to replace “godless Communism” as the enemy. To my great surprise, I noticed that Judge Robert Bonin was in the audience, sitting near the front on the left side. Bonin was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, recently appointed by Gov. Michael Dukakis in his effort to reform the state’s crony-ridden court system. Bonin was a former law professor and staff member in the Attorney General’s office. He was liberal, Jewish, and independent. He was definitely not part of the old-boy network that had run the state courts for years. Insiders, angered by the appointment, wanted him gone and began attacking him almost from the beginning of his tenure.
I was amazed to see him in the audience of a fund-raising event for homosexual men accused of child molestation. Did he know where he was? Gore Vidal was a popular writer and television personality, and it wasn’t inconceivable that Bonin simply wanted to hear him. In any case, I asked my photographer to get a shot of Bonin sitting in the pew. The event was ending too late for me to do anything with the material on the program that night, so I stored the tape at my desk and thought nothing more about it until the next morning, when I saw the Boston Herald-American. There, on the front page, was Bonin’s picture and the headline: “Bonin at Benefit for Sex Defendants.” The witch hunt had clearly taken a new turn.
For Bonin the incident ended his judicial career and almost ended his career as a lawyer. The story of his trial before the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) is a farce, which I covered daily for the Ten O’clock News. Bonin had apparently walked into a trap. Immediately after his appearance at the B/BC fundraiser there were calls for him to resign or face impeachment. The SJC’s Committee on Judicial Ethics drew up charges against Bonin, and the court took them up. Bonin was suspended pending the outcome of the trial. He was charged with accepting the gift of a leased car for his wife from a former client, Conboy Insurance, and with having improperly brought his secretaries from the Attorney General’s office when he moved to the Superior Court.
But most of the charges against Bonin were based on his attendance at the B/BC fundraiser. He was charged with lying about whether he knew in advance that it was a fundraiser for defendants appearing before the SJC—or, even granted this claim, with not having left the event once he understood its nature. One of the charges is that Bonin publicly shook hands with Vidal following the lecture, giving the appearance that he supported Gore Vidal’s viewpoints. The charges actually accused Bonin of “having pleasant conversation” with Vidal.
I must take a few moments to mention Robert Bonin’s wife, Angela. She was very attractive and intelligent, and seemed an unlikely partner for the rather mousy-looking Bonin. Bonin’s critics secretly made jokes about her, and she may not have helped her husband’s cause very much when she stormed into the press room during the SJC trial to denounce her husband’s detractors. She described her husband as another victim of the witch hunt against gays by forces opposed to judicial reform, telling reporters (in Mitzel’s words) that “if a judge cannot attend a lecture by an author in a church, none of us is safe.” And she added: “A support of gay rights is a support of all civil rights.”
Bonin, in his own defense, said that regardless of the purpose of the event, he had every right to attend and had done nothing wrong. He said in court, according to my script: “In fact, I think it is an obligation of judges to hear the view of sexual and other minorities. If I had known the lecture was a fundraiser or that cases before the Superior Court would be discussed, I would not have gone.”
The question at his trial became, What did Bonin know and when did he know it? Bonin maintained that he had seen a flier that listed only the “Boston/Boise Committee,” a meaningless name to him, announcing the event. The secretary at the Arlington Street Church who sold Bonin the tickets, Laura Campbell, testified that Bonin had asked her about the sponsorship of the lecture. Bonin denied that he asked her about it or that she had told him anything, and his testimony was corroborated by both a friend who accompanied Bonin to the church and a church volunteer who was present during the transaction. Imagine the state’s highest court taking the time to listen to this nonsense!
But Robert Meserve, who prosecuted the case against Bonin, brought in the Judge’s chief aid, Francis Orfanello. Orfanello had also been the aid to Walter McLaughlin, Bonin’s retired predecessor. Bonin had kept Orfanello on staff, perhaps as a gesture to the court’s old guard, the very people who were after him now.
Orfanello had been called by two attorneys who represented defendants in the sex cases, William Homans and Brian McMenimen, who asked that Bonin be warned not to attend the lecture because it was a benefit for the accused sex offenders. Mitzel says Homans also called Mass. Senate President Kevin Harrington’s office (Harrington had also bought tickets to the Vidal lecture) to warn him away from the fundraiser. Harrington got the message and didn’t attend. Bonin insists he never received the message from Orfanello.
At first Orfanello said he had not warned Bonin, but later, under oath, he changed his story and said that he had warned the Chief Justice. He explained to the court that he initially denied warning Bonin to protect the chief justice and that Bonin had in fact asked Orfanello to lie. In his closing argument Bonin’s attorney Paul Sugarman described Bonin as an outsider, opposed from the start and subject to intense pressure and rampant rumors and speculation. Sugarman attacked Orfanello’s credibility by pointing to the latter’s continued loyalty to his former boss, Chief Justice Walter McLaughlin.
Was Bonin telling the truth? Did Orfanello deliberately fail to warn Bonin and then lie about it under oath before the SJC? Did he in fact alert the press to Bonin’s presence? Or was Bonin lying? Did he arrogantly and foolishly attend the benefit, despite Orfanello’s warning?
Prosecutor Robert Meserve painted Orfanello as the hero of the affair. He characterized Orfanello as brave for putting his job, his family’s financial security, and his ticket to practice law on the line for the sake of truth. He argued that Orfanello had initially lied about what he told Bonin to protect his job. But Meserve, breaking into sobs at one point, argued that Orfanello’s integrity won out and the truth was told. Meserve, throughout his summation, referred to Bonin as arrogant and described the Chief Justice as a knee-jerk liberal, a phrase he used several other times in connection with pro-Bonin witnesses. He said the Chief Justice had no right to attend any kind of event sponsored by a gay group, because the judge knew or should have known that homosexual defendants were scheduled to appear in Superior Court.
In the end the SJC found Bonin guilty on several counts. It said it was wrong for him to have brought the secretaries with him from the Attorney General’s office, and that his presence at the benefit gave the appearance of impropriety. Bonin was not found guilty of lying, however. The court did not have the power to remove him from office, but censured him for these offenses, stopping just short of disbarment. The conviction led to a move in the state legislature to impeach Bonin, a move supported by Elaine Noble. Before the matter reached the governor’s desk for a signature, however, Bonin resigned.
None of the defendants in the case went to jail. Garrett Byrne was defeated in 1978 by an assistant district attorney named Newman Flanagan. For Flanagan the entire affair was a distraction that he wanted to go away. Byrne had assumed that most of the defendants would accept a plea to avoid publicity and jail, but to his surprise the vast majority wanted a trial, and all those trials would tax the resources of the county. Only one case actually went to trial. Dr. Donald Allen was charged with four counts of fellating a fifteen-year-old male hustler. Although he was ultimately convicted, the judge sentenced him to just five years probation, a signal to the other defendants, most of whom settled with a plea bargain and received light probation. Two cases were dropped because one defendant had a solid alibi and the witnesses in another case disappeared.
The Boston sex scandal also quietly disappeared, but not without its legacies. A subcommittee of the B/BC conducting legal research on age of consent laws sponsored what turned out to be the first meeting of nambla on December 2, 1978. The sex scandal also exposed the raw nerves and splits within the gay community. Those seeking “acceptability” were opposed to any activities that might seem to condone sex between adults and minors. A huge debate ensued; months, even years, the letters pages of Gay Community News were filled with arguments about pornography and child abuse.
Looking back, one has to conclude that the argument has been largely settled in favor of the view that adults having sex with minors is always wrong, while sex with minors has become an almost radioactive issue within the mainstream gay rights movement. But that doesn’t mean it should be. Because of our unwillingness to confront these issues, we remain victims of witch hunts. In Boston, dozens of priests have been accused of molesting children, and most are immediately suspended at the mere hint of an accusation, their careers in shambles, and every charge is reported in detail by the press. Because of the possibility of large monetary settlements, it’s likely that some of these accusations are fallacious and others exaggerated. Seeking to deflect scrutiny of its own complicity and failures, the Catholic Church accuses gay men as a group of being child molesters and questions their suitability for the priesthood, but the movement remains silent and fearful in the face of these accusations. This silence makes us easy targets.
Art Cohen is a freelance writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker working in Boston.
