Books
Florida’s war on Black, queer lives hidden no more
New book ‘American Scare’ exposes truth of decades of erasure, attacks
‘American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives’
By Robert W. Fieseler
“What’s with Florida?,” Bobby Fieseler, disgusted, asked after completing his initial research into the vicious investigation of suspected homosexual teachers by the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) in the 1950s. How did the official animus toward all things queer happen in Florida, Fieseler pitched his publisher. We can be grateful Dutton gave him the green light for “American Scare, Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives.”
Fieseler’s book is a masterpiece of archive activism that begins in a rental van escaping Florida with some 20 boxes of historical documents meant to be seen by no one. The cartons contained a secret second copy of materials that had been held back from the jaws of the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee. Soon, more folders would surface with unredacted materials. “There are friends of Dorothy in any system,” he explains his archival detective work with a wink.
What’s with Florida? In the 1950s, it was all about legislators exposing politically helpless homosexuals to justify the committee’s investigations and budgets. The FLIC documents reveal the names of the accused “perverts,” the cops who raided the restrooms, the terrified queer informants and the professional interview techniques that would extract confessions from the victims. On another level, this was about old-school Southern racists determined to stop integration at all costs with intention to weave lies about Communist infiltration of the NAACP. Finally, Fieseler encountered first-hand an official determination to erase and lock-up this history. The statewide obsession with erasing history continues to this day. The Florida Department of Transportation this year painted over the community rainbow crosswalk memorial to the Pulse nightclub massacre victims in Orlando.
“American Scare” is such a fully documented investigation of what unfolded, it will be impossible to paint over the magnitude of this assault. The book bears witness in gory detail to the ruination of private people that exceeds in pure perniciousness the more famous “Lavender Scare.” Although the “Lavender Scare” purged many more individuals, it was about the U.S. Department of State firing public officials slimed as “pinstripe twerps.” The Florida investigations were a statewide purge using a dark politics of exposure of schoolteachers leading private lives. Fieseler quotes Remus Strickland, the head homo-hunter and executive director of the Southern Association of Intelligence Agents formed in response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision (1954), “If the Committee’s first pursuit (race and Communism) was a mandate, its second pursuit (homosexuals) was an opportunity.” Remus (that’s really this Southerner’s name) explained years later without remorse, “We first looked at the University of Florida for Communists….then we came back and did the homosexual purge.” Fieseler’s archival research reveals how far-right politicians and investigators like Strickland characterized Communists, African Americans (through the NAACP) and homosexuals as aligned “treasonously in a subversive societal infestation.”
The whole show was the creation of a wily, populist politician — a Florida “Pork Chopper” — Charley Johns, president of the Florida Senate. “Pork Choppers,” the rural, white Northern Florida wing of the old Democratic Party, controlled the state legislature from the 1930s to the 1960s. They were strongly opposed to integration, Communists, homosexuals, reapportionment and government reform. Johns owned the Charley E. Johns Insurance Agency, which insured state agencies. Fieseler’s history brings these North Florida politicians into grotesque focus. Their “power had lynched history,” he writes about his passion to excavate how they sealed and redacted the records so they would never face responsibility for their actions.
“American Scare” reveals how these Pork Choppers were willing to crush homosexuals as an instrument to maintain power. Their victims were isolated gay and lesbian teachers who could only plead for mercy, vanish or inform on one another. They were entrapped by the system itself. Fieseler tells the story of how Remus Strickland pulled Miss Poston, a physical education teacher out of her classroom surprising her with a tape recorder and a request to give a misdirecting statement about the prevention of child molestation. Suddenly Remus changed the subject: “Miss Poston, in your acts with Miss Bradshaw whom you referred to on this record, would she play the part of the aggressor…..She was known as the butch is that true?….Was there any occasion of any oral copulation?” He closed in for the kill, “Could there have been more than one time”? Miss Poston caved, “Possibly but if so only one more time.” The reel-to-reel tape is turning.
Concert pianist and music teacher William James Neal received the same taped grilling. Remus begins the interview, “You’re an educated Nigra,” confronting Neal with testimony he was a homosexual “nigra.” Years later, Neal remembered, “He told me I would never teach within the continental limits of the United States. He said he had proof I was a homosexual.” An African-American concert pianist, Neal had extensively toured the U.S. playing with major orchestras and hosting his own radio program in Florida. Neal had the self-respect and courage to take his illegal termination to the Florida Supreme Court. In 1962, the court ruled in his favor (Neal v. Bryant) handing Remus Strickland a devastating defeat, writing “The statements accused teachers allegedly made were obviously extracted under a threat of publicity.” Vindicated, William Neal nonetheless left Florida never to return.
There have been resolutions for an acknowledgment and apology. None have advanced through the Republican-controlled legislature occupied with a slew of “Don’t Say Gay” bills. “American Scare’ is larger than a small-bore history of investigations. It is the story of a Great Florida Teacher’s Purge launched to stop integration. Fieseler is done with redactions. He names names. If there is anything redemptive in this Southern hot mess, it is this: Bobby Fieseler, a queer historian, rescued the boxes and delivers readers their contents with history’s gale force.
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‘La Lucci’
By Susan Lucci with Laura Morton
c.2026, Blackstone Publishing
$29.99/196 pages
They’re among the world’s greatest love stories.
You know them well: Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Abelard and Heloise. Phoebe and Langley. Cliff and Nina. Jesse and Angie, Opal and Palmer, Palmer and Daisy, Tad and Dixie. Now read “La Lucci” by Susan Lucci, with Laura Morton, and you might also think of Susan and Helmut.
When she was a very small girl, Susan Lucci loved to perform. Also when she was young, she learned that words have power. She vowed to use them for good for the rest of her life.
Her parents, she says, were supportive and her family, loving. Because of her Italian heritage, she was “ethnic looking” but Lucci’s mother was careful to point out dark-haired beauties on TV and elsewhere, giving Lucci a foundation of confidence.
That’s just one of the things for which Lucci says she’s grateful. In fact, she says, “Prayers of gratitude are how I begin and end each day.”
She is particularly grateful for becoming a mother to her two adult children, and to the doctors who saved her son’s life when he was a newborn.
Lucci writes about gratitude for her long career. She was a keystone character on TV’s “All My Children,” and she learned a lot from older actors on the show, and from Agnes Nixon, the creator of it. She says she still keeps in touch with many of her former costars.
She is thankful for her mother’s caretakers, who stepped in when dementia struck. Grateful for more doctors, who did heart-saving work when Lucci had a clogged artery. Grateful for friends, opportunities, life, grandchildren, and a career that continues.
And she’s grateful for the love she shared with her husband, Helmut Huber, who died nearly four years ago. Grateful for the chance to grieve, to heal, and to continue.
And yet, she says of her husband: “He was never timid, but I know he was afraid at the end, and that kills me down to my soul.”
“It’s been 15 years since Erica Kane and I parted ways,” says author Susan Lucci (with Laura Morton), and she says that people still approach her to confirm or deny rumors of the show’s resurrection. There’s still no answer to that here (sorry, fans), but what you’ll find inside “La Lucci” is still exceptionally generous.
If this book were just filled with stories, you’d like it just fine. If it was only about Lucci’s faith and her gratitude – words that happen to appear very frequently here – you’d still like reading it. But Lucci tells her stories of family, children and “All My Children,” while also offering help to couples who’ve endured miscarriage, women who’ve had heart problems, and widow(ers) who are spinning and need the kindness of someone who’s lived loss, too.
These are the other things you’ll find in “La Lucci,” in a voice you’ll hear in your head, if you spent your lunch hours glued to the TV back in the day. It’s a comfortable, fun read for fans. It’s a story you’ll love.
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Books
Risking it all for love during World War II
New book follows story of Black, gay expat in Paris
‘The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram’
By Ethelene Whitmire
c.2026, Viking
$30/308 pages
You couldn’t escape it.
When you fell in love, that was it: you were there for good. Leaving your amour’s side was unthinkable, turning away was impossible. You’d do anything for that person you loved – even, as in the new biography, “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram” by Ethelene Whitmire, you’d escape toward danger.
On Aug. 28, 1938, Reed Peggram boarded a ship from Hoboken, N.J., hoping to “become a proper gentleman” and fulfill his dreams. A prolific writer and Harvard scholar of comparative literature, he’d recently been awarded the Rosenwald Fellowship, which put him in the company of literary stars like Du Bois, Hurston, and Hughes.
Both Peggram’s mother and grandmother were then domestic workers, and they had big expectations for him. Reed himself was eager to study abroad, for professional and personal reasons; he was “determined to become a French professor and an accomplished linguist” and “He also hoped to find love.”
What better place to do it than in Paris?
Outgoing and confident, Peggram made friends easily and had no trouble moving “through the world of his white male peers.” Where he faltered was in his lack of funds. He relied on the kindness of his many friends – one of whom introduced Peggram to a “man who would become so pivotal in his life,” a Danish man named Arne.
Peggram and Arne had a lot in common, and they began to enmesh their lives and dreams of living in the United States. But there were complications: homosexuality was largely forbidden, World War II was in its early stages, and it quickly became apparent that it was dangerous to stay in Europe.
And yet, Peggram loved Arne. He refused to leave without him and so, while most visiting Black Americans fled the war in Europe, “Reed was trying to stay.”
There’s so much more to the story inside “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram,” so much to know about Reed himself. Problem is, it’s a long haul to get to the good stuff.
In her introduction, author Ethelene Whitmire explains how she came to this tale and yes, it needs telling but probably not with the staggering number of inconsequential details here. Peggram moved homes a lot, and many people were involved in keeping him in Europe. That alone can be overwhelming; add the fact that costs and other monetary issues are mentioned in what seems like nearly every page, and you may wonder if you’ll ever find the reason for the book’s subtitle.
It’s there, nearly halfway through the book, which is when the tale takes a tender, urgent turn — albeit one with determination, rashness, and a dash of faux nonchalance. Also, if you’re expecting an unhappily-ever-after because, after all, it’s a World War II tale, don’t assume anything.
Reading this book will take a certain amount of patience, so skip it if you don’t have that fortitude. If you’re OK with minuscule details and want a heart-pounder, though, “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram” might be a good escape.
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Books
Laverne Cox, Liza Minnelli among authors with new books
A tome for every taste this reading season
Spring is a great time to think about vacations, spring break, lunch on the patio, or an afternoon in the park. You’ll want to bring one (or all!) of these great new books.
So let’s start here: What are you up for? How about a great new novel?
If you’re a mystery fan, you’ll want to make reservations to visit “Disaster Gay Detective Agency” by Lev AC Rosen (Poisoned Pen Press, June 2). It’s a whodunit featuring a group of gay roommates, one of whom is a swoony romantic. Add a mysterious man who disappears and a murder, of course, and you’ve got the novel you need for the beach.
Don’t discount young adult books, if you want something light to read this spring. “What Happened to Those Girls” by Carlyn Greenwald (Sourcebooks Fire, June 30) is a thriller about mean girls and a camping trip that goes terribly, bloodily wrong. Meant for teens ages 14 and up, young adult books are breezier and lighter fare for the busy grown-up reader.
If you loved “Boyfriend Material” and “Husband Material,” you’ll be eager for the next installment from author Alexis Hall. “Father Material” (Sourcebooks Casablanca, June 2) takes Luc and Oliver to the next step. First was dating. Then was marriage. Is it time for the sound of pitter-patter on the kitchen floor?
Maybe something even lighter? Then how about a book of essays – like “The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay” bycomedian and writer Eliot Glazer (Gallery Books, Aug. 11). It’s a book of essays on being gay today, the irritations, the joys, and fitting in. Be aware that these essays may contain a bit of spice – but isn’t that what you want for your reading pleasure anyhow, hmmm?
But okay, let’s say you want something with a little more heft to it. How about a biography?
Look for “Transcendant” by Laverne Cox (Gallery Books, June 9), or “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This” by Liza Minnelli (Grand Central Publishing, March 10), and “Every Inch a Lady” by Audrey Smaltz with Alina Mitchell (Amistad, July 14). Keep your eyes open for “Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge” by Harvey Brownstone (ECW Press, May 26) or “The Double Dutch Fuss” by Phill Branch (Amistad, June 2).
Then again, maybe you want some history, or something different.
So here: look for “Queer Saints: A Radical Guide to Magic, Miracles, and Modern Intercession” by Antonio Pagliarulo (Weiser, June 1) for a little bit of faith-based gay. Music lovers will want “Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000” by Barry Walters (Viking, May 12). Activists will want “In the Arms of Mountains: A Memoir of Land, Love, and Queer Resistance in Red America” byformer Idaho state Sen. Cole Nicole LeFavour (Beacon Press, May 26).
And if these books aren’t enough, then be sure to check with your favorite bookseller or librarian. They’ll have exactly what you’re in the mood to read. They’ll find what you need for that patio, beach towel, or easy chair.
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