Adult Movie Theatres in Boise

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The Boys of Boise

On Halloween night 1955, three men were arrested in Boise following an investigation by a private detective, on charges of having sex with teenage boys. The Idaho Statesman reported the arrests two days later, and its editorial board ran the words that gave the whole thing its shape: crush the monster.

What followed has to be described carefully, because two separate things happened and they are usually collapsed into one. Allegations of sex with minors were made and some of the charges concerned exactly that. They are a serious matter and nothing here is an argument otherwise.

The investigation did not stay there. It widened into a general search for any man in the city who was homosexual or suspected of being so, and the charges reflect it: lewd conduct with a minor sat alongside lewd and lascivious conduct and infamous crimes against nature, the last being the charge used against consenting adults.

Sixteen men were charged between the end of October 1955 and 7 January 1956. All but one were convicted. Four were given probation and eleven went to prison, with sentences running from six months to fifteen years. By the time the investigation wound down two years after it started, roughly fifteen hundred people had been questioned in a city of around thirty-five thousand.

Gay life in Boise did not recover for more than a decade. That is the actual product of the exercise: not the convictions, which were few, but the fifteen hundred interviews, which were the point. John Gerassi wrote the standard account of it in 1966 and the title has stuck to the city ever since.

Why it belongs on a page about cinemas

Because it is the same machine with the casing off. Everywhere else in this directory the law is pointed at a building, and the building absorbs it: a licence is refused, a buffer is drawn, a door is taken off a booth. Oklahoma City is the nearest comparison, where an investigation that began with a film ended with police at two private addresses collecting videotapes.

Boise is what it looks like when there is no building in the way at all. The subject was not a premises or a product, it was a category of person, and the method was to keep asking until the list was long enough. Seventy years later the city has one shop with nineteen booths on a boulevard four miles from downtown, open until two in the morning, and nobody writes editorials about it.