Communists, Black folks, and queers, oh my! (with Robert Fieseler)

So this was an investigation that these people were doing into an apparent homosexual underground, they would call it, at the University of Florida.

Who the heck would have this kind of authority? Who's doing this investigating? How did this even happen?

Sure.

So these were agents – of a McCarthy-era cabal that was operating out of Tallahassee, Florida, the state capital.

They were called the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, and they were run by a very powerful segregationist state senator who had actually just been governor and gotten kicked out of the governor's mansion.

He was very bitter about it, a guy named State Senator Charlie Johns.

And what Charlie Johns was perpetrating as part of this supposedly It started off as this anti-communist committee, but he couldn't find any communists, so he started trying to go after black integrationists.

Then when they gummed him up in the courts, then he started going after the people that couldn't defend themselves, which were the closeted queer folk, the closeted gay folk hiding in these university towns.

And so what he was perpetrating was becoming so notorious in Florida that folks were nicknaming it the Johns Committee.

And Art Copleston had heard about this Johns Committee and was just starting to piece together that these agents following him, that these agents that just took him out of the final exam might be Johns Committee agents.

If I remember correctly, there was Tilliston or whatever that guy's name is that was kind of like basically stalking art.

Officer Tyleston.

Yeah.

He's a campus security officer.

Campus security.

Who was basically his main job was chatting students for throwing gum wrappers on the ground, basically, who'd then been drafted by the county sheriff and by and by state law enforcement.

to become a covert mole and an plainclothes investigator following around students that he suspected of homosexuality.

And Talston would go to local bachelor bars, they called it, in Gainesville, which is how he saw Art Copleston at a bachelor bar close to Art Copelson's dorm room, his dorm building, called the Burger House.

And then Art Copelson claimed that Tileson stared at him and eyeballed him and then began to stalk and invade his life, following him from class to class.

sitting in the dorm room cafeteria, watching him eat, at times standing outside of his dorm room door listening in, invading Art Copleston's last 10 feet of private space, and also enlisting Art Copleston's dorm mate, As a spy to try to get to try to find evidence that our Copleston was participating in homosexual activities.

This was this was his nemesis that was stalking.

I don't know who you were as a college undergrant.

I was a doofus, but he was following around our college.

I wasn't stalking anybody determined to get this guy.

So we have this campus security all the way up to this Charlie Johns, who's a state legislator.