not everything is getting worse…
[a counter-example for those who think we’re on the road to fascism]
New York Times - February 20, 2006
Joel Dorius, 87, Victim in Celebrated Anti-Gay Case, Dies By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Joel Dorius, one of three gay professors of literature caught in a pornography scandal and forced out by Smith College in 1960 only to be exonerated in a celebrated case of sexual McCarthyism, died on Tuesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 87.
The cause was bone marrow cancer, said a friend, the Rev. Paul G. Crowley. In an academic career that spanned five decades, Mr. Dorius taught Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama and the classics of English literature at Harvard, Yale, Smith and other colleges; he retired in 1984 after 20 years on the faculty of San Francisco State University.
But his life at Smith, in Northampton, Mass., crashed on Sept. 2, 1960, when three state troopers, a local police officer and a United States postal inspector raided the home of a colleague, Newton Arvin, 60, and found boxes of “beefcake” magazines and pictures of men - illegal pornography then, but much of it like today’s Calvin Klein underwear ads - and diaries detailing 20 years of his closeted gay life.
Under interrogation, Mr. Arvin - a professor of American literature at Smith, winner of the 1951 National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville, a friend of the critics Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Crowley and a former lover of Truman Capote - named names, including those of Mr. Dorius and Edward Spofford, both untenured Smith professors. Their homes were raided, too - Mr. Dorius was away at the time - and more materials deemed pornographic were found.
The raids were part of a crackdown on obscenity in the mails by President Eisenhower’s postmaster general, Arthur E. Summerfield, whose ban on “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was overturned by the courts. The authorities raided warehouses, seized publications and then went after people on the mailing lists.
In an era when homosexuality was widely viewed as an abomination - criminal, sinful and a mental disease - but accepted on many college campuses as long as it did not surface publicly, the arrests crossed the line, and Smith suspended the three professors. Mr. Arvin was later allowed to retire at half-pay, but, despite faculty protests, the contracts of Mr. Dorius and Mr. Spofford were not renewed.
All three, and four other men named by Mr. Arvin, were charged with possessing pornography, and Mr. Arvin was charged with being lewd and lascivious. Under pressure by the prosecution, Mr. Arvin testified against the others and received a one-year suspended sentence. He suffered a breakdown, committed himself to a mental hospital and died in 1963.
Mr. Dorius and Mr. Spofford, under a quirk of Massachusetts law, accepted the court’s guilty verdict, without presentation of evidence, to preserve their right to appeal. In 1963, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the convictions of all three professors, ruling that search warrants for the raids were unconstitutional because they had failed to define obscene materials.
In 1964, Mr. Dorius, who had worked in New York as an editor and taught at Hamburg University in West Germany while his appeal was pending, joined the faculty of San Francisco State. After his retirement, he wrote a memoir, “My Four Lives,” which appeared in 2004. Mr. Spofford, who taught for many years at Stanford University and retired in 1988, lives in Palo Alto.
Raymond Joel Dorius, who never used his first name, was born in Salt Lake City on Jan. 4, 1919, and graduated from the University of Utah. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during World War II and later earned a doctorate and taught at Harvard. He taught at Yale from 1949 to 1958, when he joined the Smith faculty.
He is survived by a sister-in-law, two nieces and a nephew.
While the scandal was all but forgotten for decades, interest was revived in recent years by a book, “The Scarlet Professor - Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal” (Doubleday, 2001), by Barry Werth; by a television documentary, “The Great Pink Scare,” by Tug Yourgrau, a Boston writer, director and producer; and by articles in The New Yorker, Out and other publications.
In 2002, Smith, the nation’s largest liberal arts college for women, acknowledged a wrong from four decades earlier by creating a lecture series and a small scholarship - the $100,000 Dorius/Spofford Fund for the Study of Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression, and the Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies, a $500 annual stipend. But despite faculty appeals, there was no apology.
Mr. Dorius and Mr. Spofford did not return to Smith for the occasion. But Father Crowley, a Jesuit priest who is chairman of the religious studies department at Santa Clara University in California, said that both felt relieved and vindicated by the gesture. “Joel was deeply touched,” he said. “It really did bring this whole ordeal to a close, and freed him to enter his final years.”
The case also spoke much about a changing America, Father Crowley said, recalling an era when civil liberties were trampled and careers ruined by hard laws and public attitudes toward gay people. “Younger folks can’t imagine how different the world was not so long ago, and the price people paid,” he said. “Joel and his generation suffered ignominies, but have made life easier for those who follow after them.”