Wicked queens and gays that kill!

Killer queens and the gays that kill.
Mug shot of Carl Panzram.

To read the gay press you’d think that gayers are all perfect in mind and body, but the truth is we can be just as devious, corrupt and downright evil as straights. David McGillivray reckons it’s time to set the record straight… as he takes a look at wicked queens and gays that kill!

.HYPOCRITES AND CHEATS!

In the old days homos couldn’t be honest about their sexuality because they’d be prosecuted. Today it’s the anti-gay heteros who are prosecuted. But most gay men in the public eye are still dishonest. Despite this, there’s general agreement that outing is wrong unless the public figure preaches against homosexuality or blocks reforms.

A steady stream of these hypocrites is held up to ridicule in the press, particularly in the US, where homophobia is rampant and that’s just among the queers.

Arguably the gay fool who was the greatest hindrance in modern times to homo emancipation was Senator Joe McCarthy, whose “Lavender menace” panic spread to the UK in the 1950s.

Outed in 1952, he immediately married a female colleague. Two of McCarthy’s Commie-bashing minions, G. David Schine and Roy Cohn, are rumoured to have been a gay couple. Cohn died of AIDS in 1986.

The latest Christian evangelist to have been caught up in a rent boy scandal is George Alan Rekers, a Southern Baptist minister who’s campaigned against LGBT adoption.

In May it was revealed that his male “travelling companion” had been hired through a gay website.

Although Rekers claims he’s straight and has threatened to sue, he’s resigned from the board of NARTH, a notorious psychiatric group that believes gays can be “cured.”

TRAITORS!

The criminalisation of homosexuality caused millions of men, women and children to lose their lives because spymasters blackmailed gay men into betraying their countries.

The biggest arch-traitor of the 20th century was a gay Austrian army officer, Alfred Redl, who was paid handsomely by the Russians for military secrets during the turbulent years prior to World War I.

It’s estimated that half a million Austrians died because Redl gave Russia Austria’s plans to invade Serbia.

The Cambridge spy ring was a group of mostly gay men who passed information to theKGB during World War II.

The best-known members are Guy Burgess, who defected with Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951, and Anthony Blunt, who confessed, named names and was granted immunity from prosecution. He was famously pally with Queen Elizabeth through his job as Master of the Queen’s Pictures.

Other British gay spies include Jeremy Wolfenden¸ son of Lord Wolfenden, whose 1957 Report led ultimately to the decriminalisation of homosexuality; John Vassall, whose 1962 arrest inspired “How to Spot a Possible Homo”, a legendary tabloid attack on “perverts” (see QX 710); and John Amery, who (like the better-known William Joyce) broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II.

THIEVES AND TROUBLEMAKERS!

Larceny is one crime that attracts all types of people and plenty of gayers have done time for tea-leafing.

George Dyer was a petty criminal who met Francis Bacon when Dyer burgled the artist’s house in 1964. Dyer became Bacon’s lover and muse. (Daniel Craig played Dyer in the 1998 film Love Is the Devil).

John Wojtowicz tried to rob a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and then financed his boyfriend’s sex change with cash he received from Dog Day Afternoon, the 1975 film of his exploits.

In 2007 Michael Jude Fay, a Roman Catholic priest from Darien, Connecticut, was found guilty of stealing more than $1million from his church. He died in jail in 2009.


You may also like

REVOLTING QUEENS!


Further up the crooked ladder, there’ve been many gay crime bosses. The most famous is Ronnie Kray, who murdered rival gang member George Cornell in 1966 possibly because Cornell called Kray “a fat poof.”

For decades the Mafia ran gay bars throughout the US and, according to writer Wallace Hamilton, some Mafiosi mixed business and pleasure.

In 2009 hit man Robert Mormando shocked a Brooklyn court by declaring that he had renounced the Cosa Nostra and was now living with his male lover.

Several claims have been made that mobster “Whitey” Bulger is a former gay prostitute and transvestite. He’s currently on the run and is one of America’s Most Wanted.

A couple of other nasty pieces of work should be included in this criminal category.

German neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen was jailed twice and during his second stretch came out as gay. He was leading a group of violent skinheads weeks before he died of AIDS in 1991.

London skinhead Nicky Crane was jailed for persistently attacking black people, and then came out on the Channel 4 programme Out. He died of AIDS in 1993.

PAEDOS!

Until comparatively recently this was one of the few areas where we didn’t stand a chance of competing with the straight majority. Despite the widely-believed lie that all gay men are paedophiles, cases in which gay men were convicted of molesting underage boys stood out as extremely rare. (The majority of child sexual abuse involves girls being assaulted by male family members).

One of the few British gay men who deserve every bit of the vilification directed at him by the press is the unspeakably evil child killer Sidney Cooke.

In 1975 the TV documentary Johnny Go Home revealed the despicable activities of Roger Gleaves.

Both monsters are under lock and key.

A police operation centred on a 1970s disco in Walton-on-Thames nabbed a child sex ring that included pop star Jonathan King and DJ Chris Denning. The latter is now in jail in Slovakia for similar crimes committed in that country.

Since the 1980s we’ve become increasingly aware that members of a relatively small and secretive subsector of gay society – Roman Catholic clergy – have been giving the rest of us a very bad name.

Until the current scandal has been fully investigated and those responsible convicted, there’s little other than the obvious to add. The obvious being that religion – and Catholics are not solely to blame – appears to make gay men more rather than less inclined to have sex with boys.

KILLER QUEENS!

We mustn’t shy away from the big one. Considering we constitute at most 10% of the population, we’ve produced what seems like a disproportionately large amount of murderers. At the lower end of the scale we have the gay man who’s killed one really important person. Who to include?

Let’s start with Prince Yusupov. He may have been married to a woman. But he was also sexually obsessed with the bisexual Rasputin, whom he helped to murder in 1916.

Then we have the insanely jealous Kenneth Halliwell, who cut off his lover, playwright Joe Orton, in his prime in 1967.

Was Dan White, who shot Harvey Milk dead in 1978, a closet homo? That’s what’s been claimed.

Unlike hetero serial killers, who’ve been known to kill indiscriminately, gay crackpots almost always kill males. The list of gay crazies is too long to detail. But these ghastly examples can’t be forgotten.

In 1999 Colombian Luis Garavito confessed to the murder of 140 boys. But he may have killed 300, ranking him with the UK’s Harold Shipman among the world’s most prolific serial killers, gay or straight.

American John Wayne Gacy, who murdered at least 33 young men and boys in the 1970s, is the world’s most feared/revered gay bogeyman. Like “hetero” serial killers like Jack the Ripper and Ed Gein, he’s a cult figure. He’s dead (thank God).

“In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.” – Carl Panzram.

In recent years two gay serial killers have lived in our nightmares.

British Dennis Nilsen killed and then sometimes had sex with at least 15 male victims between the 1970s-80s. He’ll never be released from jail.

The horribly similar American Jeffrey Dahmer killed and partially cannibalised perhaps 17 mainly ethnic victims between the 1980s-90s. To everyone’s great relief he was killed in jail in 1994.

Other gay madmen continue to fascinate us because their warped lives are continually dramatised.

German Fritz Haarmann murdered at least 24 boys and young men, mostly in the 1920s. He’s also suspected of selling parts of their bodies as meat. His lunacy inspired one movie classic, Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and a minor classic, The Tenderness of the Wolves (1973), among others.

In 1924 American lovers Leopold and Loeb murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks. The killers’ motives have been debated ever since. The 1929 play, Rope, was televised in 1939 and filmed (by Alfred Hitchcock) in 1948. It was novelised in 1956 and this book was filmed in 1959.

In 1992 the Leopold/Loeb case was filmed, for the first time with its gay subtext intact, as Swoon. One of the most recent dramatisations is Thrill Me, a 2005 off-Broadway musical.

The gay killer most likely to intrigue future generations is American Andrew Cunanan, who killed five men including Gianni Versace in 1997. The weirdo left no clues as to what was going on in his mind.

The scariest gay ghoul? He could be American Carl Panzram, who raped and killed boys and young men in the 1920s.

He was hanged in 1930. When asked if he had any last words, Panzram allegedly spat in his executioner’s face and barked, “Yes, hurry it up, you Hoosier [resident of Indiana] bastard! I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!” Gulp!

Nightmare On Cleveland Street

Advertisement

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here