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Abstract
Despite unfolding as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1920s, Leopold and Loeb's “trial of the century” elicited a deluge of constitutive discourse that struggled against overt articulation and circulation of the boys’ queerness. In this essay, I argue that those discourses—dominant reportage, in camera courtroom conferences, and Clarence Darrow's famous summation—manifested what I label “passing by proxy,” a collusive and convulsive act of straight closeting that speaks queer sexuality despite concerted effort to silence it.
Earlier versions of this essay were presented in colloquia at the University of Georgia, Pennsylvania State University, and Vanderbilt University.
Earlier versions of this essay were presented in colloquia at the University of Georgia, Pennsylvania State University, and Vanderbilt University.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks for the lively and insightful conversation generously shared at those gatherings. I am particularly grateful to my reviewers at QJS, Brad Vivian, and my best colleague and friend John Sloop, for the deep fund of advice and encouragement that immeasurably enriched this essay. As always, my work is dedicated to Scott Rose.
Notes
Earlier versions of this essay were presented in colloquia at the University of Georgia, Pennsylvania State University, and Vanderbilt University.
1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 8.
2. My use of “queer” in reference to Leopold and Loeb denotes the historically specific term designating those gay men most engaged in passing during the early decades of the twentieth century. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 15–16, 101; “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 294–317. I agree with the revision of Chauncey's definitions offered by Marilee Lindemann in Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 2–4. When used in reference to my own and others’ method, queering suggests resistance against sexual normalcy inspired by queer theory and activism.
3. Clarence S. Darrow, “The Skeleton in the Closet,” in A Persian Pearl and Other Essays (Boston: The Stratford Company, 1931), 142–44.
4. My understanding of heteronormativity is derived from Berlant and Warner: “By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions.” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 548.
5. This familiar epithet is derived from Warner Fabian, Flaming Youth (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923).
6. For those unfamiliar with this rhetorical figure, ethopoeia is the vivid description and portrayal of character. See Silva Rhetoricae: http://www.rhetoric.byu.edu, s.v. “Ethopoeia.”
7. According to the survey conducted by Martin Medhurst and Stephen Lucas, the speech ranks #23: see http://www.news.wisc.edu/misc/view.php?get = speeches/index. For existing rhetorical scholarship, see Martin Maloney, “The Forensic Speaking of Clarence Darrow,” Speech Monographs 14 (1947): 111–26; Martin Maloney, “Clarence Darrow,” in A History and Criticism of American Public Address, ed. Marie Kathryn Hochmuth (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1955), 262–312; David Kaufer, “Analyzing Philosophy in Rhetoric: Darrow's Mechanism in the Defense of Leopold and Loeb,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 45 (1980): 363–77; Richard J. Jensen, “The Old Lion: Defending Leopold and Loeb,” in Clarence Darrow: The Creation of an American Myth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 61–84.
8. Such accounts might be said to have begun with coverage of Loeb's murder (1936), amplified by Meyer Levin's book Compulsion (1956), extended in treatments of Leopold's parole and his autobiography Life Plus 99 Years (1958), and given lasting currency in the theatrical and cinematic legacy that includes Rope (1948), Compulsion (1959), Swoon (1992), Never the Sinner (1997), and Murder by Numbers (2002). The best survey of twentieth-century representations of the case is provided by Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,” The Journal of American History 80 (1993): 919–51. Rope and Swoon have been the subjects of explicitly queer scholarship. See D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Dianna Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 119–41; Michele Aaron, “'Til Death Us Do Part: Cinema's Queer Couples Who Kill,” in The Body's Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, ed. Michele Aaron (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1999), 67–84.
9. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event,” 940. In a similar vein, Meyer Levin reflected, “It was an intellectual crime, committed by two brilliant university boys in, it seemed to us, an almost abstract experiment in immorality, for the element of sexual perversion was not generally understood.” Meyer Levin, In Search: An Autobiography (New York: Horizon Press, 1950), 27.
10. Meyer Levin, Compulsion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
11. See Paul B. Franklin, “Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of Nathan ‘Babe’ Leopold Jr. and Richard ‘Dickie’ Loeb,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 121–48.
12. Andre Tellier, Twilight Men (1931; Republished, New York: Greenberg, 1948), 50–51.
13. Among the excellent scholarship in rhetorical studies, see Radha S. Hegde, “Narratives of Silence: Rethinking Gender, Agency, and Power from the Communication Experiences of Battered Women in South India,” Communication Studies 47 (1996): 303–17; Lester C. Olson, “On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 49–70; Robin Patric Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Dana L. Cloud, “The Null Persona: Race and the Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of '34,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 177–209; Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27.
15. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3.
16. In some sense this conception extends, if not reconfigures, our understanding of the role of “dupes,” i.e. straight audiences, in sexual passing. See Peter J. Rabinowitz, “‘Betraying the Sender’: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts,” Narrative 2 (1994): 202–205; Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994), 715–24; Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 228–44.
17. In this configuration, I am thinking of passing in relation to Butler's theory of performativity, as well as Cheryl Glenn's observation that, “Like the zero in mathematics, silence is an absence with a function, and a rhetorical one at that.” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 95; Glenn, Unspoken, 4.
18. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 4.
19. Although the authorization implied by the term “proxy” perhaps overstates the relationship between passer and dupes, it does usefully suggest the mutual investments inherent in a closet culture, and the extent of tacit if not outright collusion revealed in seemingly adversarial rhetorical performances.
20. This is perhaps a different way of saying, to paraphrase Foucault, that there is no plain and simple imposition of silence but only a new regime of discourse. By pointing to this homophobic “flaw,” it is also an amendment of sorts to his claim that, “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” Foucault, History of Sexuality, 27, 35.
21. D. A. Miller, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 194.
22. By this Goffman meant mustering the requisite focus to achieve, despite contingencies, a seemingly flawless performance; or, to put it differently, mastering a performative “straight face.” In my configuration, it is a disciplinary silence undermined by a disciplinary lapse (or queer convulsion). Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), 216–18.
23. William N. Eskridge, Jr., Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 52.
24. Eskridge, Jr., Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet; Janet E. Halley, “The Politics of the Closet: Towards Equal Protection for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity,” UCLA Law Review 36 (1989): 915–76; Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. The Supreme Court (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
25. Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Jurisprudence as Performance: John Brown's Enactment of Natural Law at Harper's Ferry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000), 194.
26. Robert Hariman, “Performing the Laws: Popular Trials and Social Knowledge,” in Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law, ed. Robert Hariman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 23.
27. Judge Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), 104.
28. Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Revolution in Morals,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 349.
29. See Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931); Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
30. V. F. Calverton, Sex Expression in Literature (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 308–309.
31. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 21.
32. See Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 13–118.
33. Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 57–79, 146–79.
34. Allen, Only Yesterday, 118.
35. Kevin White, Sexual Liberation or Sexual License: The American Revolt against Victorianism (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 69.
36. See Chauncey, Gay New York; William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (New York: Viking, 2001); David K. Johnson, “The Kids of Fairytown: Gay Male Culture on Chicago's Near North Side in the 1930s,” in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97–118; White, The First Sexual Revolution, 64–70; John Loughery, The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 17–35.
37. Rather than being partnered in the demolition of Victorian strictures, heterosexual men understood queers as their bête noire: “[T]he homosexual was specifically presented as the antithesis of the heterosexual, the male ideal. Indeed, in many ways, by the 1920s, men's fear of effeminacy … was diffused into a fear of the new category, the homosexual. This added a whole new dimension to the sexual demands and expectations on men.” White, The First Sexual Revolution, 64–65.
38. Samuel M. Steward, Chapters from an Autobiography (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981), 21.
39. White, The First Sexual Revolution, 67.
40. Joseph Collins, The Doctor Looks at Love and Life (New York: Doran, 1926), 64.
41. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 205.
42. For my account of the boys’ background and relationship, see Hal Higdon, Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Leopold-enLoeb Trial Transcript, Northwestern University Special Collections; Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., Life Plus 99 Years (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1958), 23–82; and coverage by the Chicago Daily Tribune (hereafter CDT) and Chicago Herald and Examiner (hereafter CHE).
43. Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1941), 388.
44. CDT, August 5, 1924, 2.
45. Elmer Gertz, A Handful of Clients (Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1965), 98–99.
46. Expurgated versions of the letter appeared in the CDT, May 31, 1924, 3; CHE, May 31, 1924, 2; and Darrow's summation. It is significant to note that what is omitted (but included in the trial transcript), is the epithet “cock suckers.” Leopold-Loeb Trial Transcript, vol. 2, 840.
47. I would argue that Blumgart's theory (a perspective that Fass argues did not emerge until the 1950s) reveals the open secret that had imperfectly been maintained throughout the cultural spectacle of the case: “The over-development of Leopold's intellectual life was a never-ending attempt to defend himself against his own homosexual perversion. He trained himself to have no emotions, because he associated all feeling with the one feeling which he knew marked him out from his fellows, and which he feared and abhorred. Leopold's fear of his own abnormal feelings, not fear of the consequences of his crime, was the basic cause of most of his behavior.” Leonard Blumgart, “The New Psychology and the Franks Case,” The Nation 119 (September 10, 1924), 261; Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event,” 943.
48. See, for instance, CDT, May 24, 1924, 1–2; CHE, May 24, 1924, 1; CHE, May 25, 1924, 2.
49. CDT, May 28, 1924, 2. For a queer depiction of teacher Walter Wilson, see CDT, May 23, 1924, 2.
50. Hughes, in fact, was unequivocal: “I am convinced that the boy knew and trusted the person or persons who killed him. They enticed him to some room, attacked him and killed him under threat of exposure.” CDT, May 26, 1924, 2; CDT, May 27, 1924, 2.
51. CDT, May 24, 1924, 2; CHE, May 28, 1924, 2.
52. CDT, May 28, 1924, 1. Two days earlier Crowe's office released a statement that Mitchell had confessed to acts of perversion. CHE, May 27, 1924, 2.
53. CDT, May 27, 1924, 2; CHE, May 30, 1924, 2.
54. CHE, June 1, 1924, 4.
55. CHE, May 31, 1924, 1–2; CDT, May 31, 1924, 2–3.
56. CHE, June 1, 1924, 2.
57. CDT, June 3, 1924, 1 and 3.
58. CDT, June 1, 1924, 3.
59. CDT, June 4, 1924, 2.
60. CDT, June 2, 1924, 4.
61. CDT, June 1, 1924, 3.
62. CDT, June 9, 1924, 1.
63. See CHE, June 1, 1924, 2; CHE, June 4, 1924, 2; CHE, June 9, 1924, 3; CDT, June 5, 1924, 2. Contradictory statements, sometimes within the same assessment, suggest struggle with the open secret of sexuality. Charles Bonniwell's analysis, which noted that Leopold exhibited “strength of character” and a “strong animal nature,” nevertheless identified “the shrewdness of a female” and an “abnormal penchant” for “sexual subjects.” He concluded, “In all possibility it will be found that, while he is perfectly normal in most of his actions on most subjects, there is one subject upon which he is found wanting, and that is sex.” CHE, June 1, 1924, 2.
64. CDT, June 2, 1924, 1.
65. CHE, June 12, 1924, 1; CHE, June 14, 1924, 5; CHE, June 18, 1924, 3; CHE, June 27, 1924, 7.
66. It is noteworthy that in the same issue that described Loeb as a romantic lover there was juxtaposed the story that linked him to the sexual mutilation of Charles Ream. CHE, June 4, 1924, 2, 3; CHE, June 2, 1924, 2; CDT, June 2, 1924, 1.
67. CDT, June 4, 1924, 2; CHE, June 4, 1924, 2; CHE, June 23, 1924, 3. Mark Lynn Anderson situates Loeb and Valentino within the period's sexually turbulent mass culture of fandom. Anderson, “Twilight of the Idols: Male Film Stars, Mass Culture, and the Human Sciences in 1920s America” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1999), chapters 2 and 3. See also Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
68. Such topics recurred throughout June and July 1924. See, for instance, CHE, June 4, 1924, 3; CDT, June 5, 1924, 3; CDT, June 7, 1924, 1; CHE, June 11, 1924, 6; CHE, June 13, 1924, 6; CHE, June 15, 1924, 1, 3; CHE, June 17, 1924, 1; CHE, June 18, 1924, 3; CHE, July 14, 1924, 11.
69. For copious coverage of this debate, see CDT, July 17–22, 1924.
70. CDT, July 19, 1924, 3.
71. CDT, July 19, 1924, 3; CHE, July 19, 1924, 1, 3.
72. CDT, July 22, 1924, 1; CHE, July 22, 1924, 1.
73. For accounts of Caverly's in camera moments throughout the hearing, see CHE, July 29, 1924, 2; CHE, July 30, 1924, 2; CHE, August 5, 1924, 1, 3; CDT, August 5, 1924, 1–2; CDT, August 6, 1924, 3; CHE, August 15, 1924, 4; CHE, August 16, 1924, 1; CHE, August 19, 1924, 2; CHE, August 27, 1924, 1–2; CDT, August 27, 1924, 1–2.
74. For the Bowman/Hulbert report, see CHE, July 28, 1924, 1–3; CDT, July 28, 1924, 1–3. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event,” 928–40.
75. CHE, July 28, 1924, 2.
76. For accounts of their testimony at the hearing, see CHE, August 2, 1924, 1–3; CDT, August 2, 1924, 1–2; CHE, August 3, 1924, 3; CHE, August 4, 1924, 1–3; CDT, August 5, 1924, 1–2; CHE, August 5, 1924, 1–3; CHE, August 6, 1924, 2; CDT, August 6, 1924, 3; CHE, August 7, 1924, 1–3; CDT, August 7, 1924, 2–3; CHE, August 9, 1924, 2–3; CHE, August 10, 1924, 1–4; CDT, August 10, 1924, 1–2.
77. Quoted in Higdon, Leopold and Loeb, 252–53.
78. CHE, August 5, 1924, 3.
79. CHE, August 6, 1924, 2.
80. For Crowe's summation and Caverly's response to his perversion references, see CHE, August 27, 1924, 1–3, 4; CDT, August 27, 1924, 1–2; CDT, August 28, 1924, 2.
81. Crowe based his blackmail theory on a brief section of the Bowman/Hulbert report alluding to four criminal episodes referenced by the boys but unexplored. His theory was that Leopold knew of Loeb's other crimes, and blackmailed him with threat of exposure as an inducement to engage in their sexual relationship. See CDT, September 1, 1924, 1, 4; Higdon, Leopold and Loeb, 249–60.
82. See, for example, CHE, July 30, 1924, 2; CHE, August 5, 1924, 1, 3; CHE, August 6, 1924, 2; CDT, August 6, 1924, 3; CHE, August 7, 1924, 1; CHE, August 16, 1924, 1.
83. CHE, August 27, 1924, 1.
84. Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, 76.
85. Clarence Darrow, “Summation,” in Alvin Sellers, The Leopold-Loeb Case (Brunswick, GA: Classic Publishing Company, 1926), 185. I have chosen to use Sellers’ reprint instead of that published by the Chicago Press because of its convenient page numbers.
86. Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, 72–73.
87. Also unsurprising is the absence in Darrow's later writings regarding the case of any discussion of homosexuality as a strategic consideration. See Clarence Darrow and Walter Bachrach, “Introduction,” in Maureen McKernan, The Amazing Trial of Leopold and Loeb (1924; New York: Signet, 1957), vii–ix; Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1932), 226–43.
88. Higdon, Leopold and Loeb, 146.
89. Darrow, “Summation,” 123, 129.
90. Darrow, “Summation,” 203.
91. Darrow, “Summation,” 168.
92. Darrow, “Summation,” 170.
93. Darrow, “Summation,” 173.
94. Darrow, “Summation,” 177.
95. Darrow, “Summation,” 174.
96. Darrow, “Summation,” 179–80.
97. Darrow, “Summation,” 185–86.
98. Darrow, “Summation,” 185–90.
99. For a transcript of Caverly's verdict, see McKernan, The Amazing Trial, 294. All subsequent quotations from the text are taken from this source.
100. Leslie A. Fiedler, “Leopold and Loeb: A Perspective in Time,” in No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 214–16.
101. Darrow, “The Skeleton in the Closet,” 143.
102. Eskridge, Gaylaw; Hariman, “Performing the Laws.”
103. Darrow, “The Skeleton in the Closet,” 142.