Welcome to Fairyland by Julio Capó Jr

Author:Julio Capó Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Prosecuting Deviance

In addition to race, ethnicity, class, and gender, the policing and prosecuting of same-sex sexual acts also took form in relation to questions of normalcy and deviancy that were defined by concepts of age and (dis)ability. While the evidence suggests most gender-transgressive behavior and homosexual acts, when prosecuted at all, were more effectively regulated by local ordinances, the much more detailed and surviving cases for sodomy and crimes against nature that reached the Florida Supreme Court reveal the biases and systemic logic local police, legislators, public officials, and judges employed in their surveillance and interpretation of such acts. After all, the court took up the state’s crime against nature felony five times before 1940, likely a product of the statute’s vagueness. The court’s rulings had major ramifications for decades. The court affirmed its 1921 Ephraim ruling that oral sex constituted a crime against nature the following year in Jackson v. State.158 In 1929’s Drawdy v. State, the court took up a case of a man accused of bestiality with a mare. As with rape cases, Florida ruled that emission was not necessary for one to be found guilty of a crime against nature.159

The court’s last two cases on the matter before World War II occurred in Dade County’s urban frontier. In 1932, Florida’s Supreme Court heard Blameuser v. State, which charged a sixty-year-old man with committing a crime against nature on a nine-year-old boy in Miami. In December 1930, the boy told his uncle that a year prior Benjamin Blameuser had taken him to a vacant garage in northwest Miami, a less populated residential area just north of Flagler Street, and performed oral sex on him. By the time the Dade County solicitor filed charges against the man, fourteen months had passed since the incident allegedly took place. Miami jurors found Blameuser guilty and sentenced him to ten years of hard labor at the state penitentiary.160 In 1935, three years after the Blameuser decision, the Florida Supreme Court heard English v. Florida. Dade County jurors found John English, a man in his mid-twenties, guilty of a crime against nature. In this case, the court prosecuted English for performing oral sex on two boys, aged eleven and seven, in a gully also in the northwest section of the city. Like Blameuser, English was sentenced to ten years of hard labor at the state penitentiary.161

The two Miami cases reveal several significant changes in the state’s understanding of same-sex sexual behavior. The small number of Miami charges suggests local police’s hesitance to file felony charges for sodomy. It appears not only that police rarely enforced the state’s sodomy or crime against nature law but also that they most often sought lesser charges to prosecute offenders. Sodomy cases, for instance, were more frequently prosecuted only after a neighbor, relative, or “accomplice” reported it. Police did not often catch alleged offenders in the act.

It is also significant that both these cases received notoriety because they involved young boys and an older man accused of

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