Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1948: “Homosexual Ring Broken Up” At Mizzou

From page 1 of The St. Joseph (MO) News-Press, May 27, 1948.

A veteran University of Missouri journalism professor was arrested and charged with sodomy as Prosecutor Howard B. Lang, Jr. described to reporters fantastical tales of “mad homosexual parties” and “abnormal orgies” in Columbia, Missouri. According to the Associated Press on the day of his arrest:

The prosecuting attorney said he had issued a warrant for the arrest of E.K. Johnston, for 24 years a member of the faculty of the university’s school of journalism, after a long investigation into abnormal sex orgies here and other central Missouri cities. Two other men were held in the Boone County jail on similar charges. They are Willie Coots, a gift shop employee here, and Warren W. Heathman, 35, Rolla, Mo., an itinerant instructor for the Veteran Administration’s farm training program.

Lang said both had signed statements, implicating Johnston as a principal in what he called a homosexual “ring” at Johnston’s apartment which Coots had shared for the last 15 or 16 years. At least of score of University of Missouri students and other residents here, Lang said, also are implicated in the ring. No charges have been filed against any one except Coots, Heathman and Johnston, but several are being held in jail for investigation or as material witnesses.

Heathman, Lang reported, told a near-fantastic story of “mad parties” at Johnston’s apartment and at a cabin near Salem, Mo., in which as many as 30 members of the “ring” gathered to boast of conquests and to indulge in homosexual practices.

Johnston was released after posting a $3,500 bond (that would be nearly $35,000 in today’s money), and the university fired him the next day. Other students were subsequently arrested — some were beaten by police — then released, only to be dismissed by the university and sent home to their parents, who were told why they were expelled. One of the students committed suicide.

Johnson initially pleaded not guilty to the charge of sodomy, but after Coots and Heathman testified against him, he changed his plea to guilty. His attorney then called ten character witnesses in a bid to get Johnston sentenced to probation rather than a prison term. One witness, Dr. Edwin F. Gildea, head of the psychiatric department at Washington University in St. Louis, testified, “I examined him specifically for an hour this morning to find out of he would be a mecance to society. I do not believe that he is.” Other character witnesses included the dean and two professors from the Mizzou’s school of journalism. The testimony paid off, and Johnston was sentenced to four years’ probation under a $2,000 bond. Terms of the probation included “cessation of homosexual practices.” The others also pleaded guilty and were placed on probation.

Johnston was just one of a large number of students and faculty who were caught up in a wider anti-gay witch hunt then taking place on the UM campus, spearheaded by the university’s vice president Thomas A. Brady. In the late 1940s, the university had gained a reputation as a “safe haven” for gay people, and the state legislature exerted pressure to get them out of the university. The university set up an investigative committee under Brady’s guidance, and the committee set about identifying gay students and faculty based on the interviews with those who were offered immunity in return for testifying against the others. That investigation led Johnston’s arrest along with several other students. Decades later, some of those students recalled what those times were like:

“Phillip,” a former MU student interviewed by Jim Duggins of the GLBT Historical Society, describes running into a gay friend who’d been caught “at a party out in the woods in Salem, Mo., in a cabin, having a wild time.”

“The university got rid of everyone,” Phillip says. “Each student who had been involved had his transcripts stamped, ‘This student will not be readmitted to the University of Missouri until he is cleared of charges regarding homosexual activities.’ That’s why one kid killed himself right away, and others killed themselves during the ensuing months. It was just tragic.”

Phillip and the other interviewees also discuss the 1948 dismissal of MU advertising professor E.K. Johnston. “E.K. Johnston had been at the party,” Phillip says. “He was immediately dismissed; the chancellor of the university, or whoever it was, said, ‘We had no idea. Such a respected man,’ though Johnston had been talked about for years.”

The pall of those investigations, and the attitudes toward gay people that they engendered, hung over Mizzou for decades afterward. Bob Callis, who became dean after Brady’s retirement, wrote in a 1966 memo: “The record does show rather clear evidence that several incidences of homicide and suicide were a direct outgrowth of the activities of homosexual rings in operation at that time. Damage to human life and welfare of less serious proportion than suicide and homicide is also evident from the record.”

In 2006, after UM students approved a $63 million expansion and renovation of the student union building which had been named for Brady when it first opened in 1963, a campus controversy erupted when several students uncovered Brady’s anti-gay investigations and publicized them on campus. The students formed a group called Not My Brady and called for renaming Brady Commons. After all, they argued, it would essentially become an entirely new building for a new era, and keeping Brady’s name on it, given his anti-gay policies, was no longer appropriate. The university President and Chancellor both made it clear that they wouldn’t consider the change. But when the building opened in 2010, Brady’s name was quietly dropped. It is now officially the MU Student Center.

After his arrest and conviction in Columbia, Professor Johnston moved to Kansas City, where he lived until his death in 1990.