Panic in Gleetown: The Lima, Ohio Homosexual Scandal of 1946

On a Tuesday night in 2009, the Fox Network premiered a show called Glee, and American TV audiences were introduced to Lima, Ohio, a town where stereotypical, gay kids; closeted, bi kids, lesbian cheerleaders; out-and-proud, gay jocks; a transgender football coach; a transgender diva of color; and a pair of fabulous gay dads could all manage to find a place in the world through the magic of show tunes.

But in real life, Lima hasn’t always offered a safe haven for the sexually diverse. On Sunday, April 28, 1946, residents of the town awoke to a headline in the morning paper featuring a word in large print that eclipsed everything else on the page: SODOMY.        

Two men had been arrested and accused of operating a “vice ring” that had drawn in as many as 150 men and teenage boys, the majority of them juveniles and some as young as 14. The reaction in this small, hardworking, Midwestern city was predictably extreme.

Says Bart Mills, a former reporter for the Lima News, “If you want to get people riled up, you tell them kids are involved.”

In 1946, Lima was booming. An industrial city of 50,000 in the center of northwest Ohio’s agricultural region, it boasted a major Standard Oil refinery, a steel mill, factories that built school buses and army tanks, and the Lima Locomotive Works, the nation’s largest producer of steam engines. A diverse economy based on essential goods had made it a major railroad hub since the early 1900s.

Like the rest of the nation, Ohio was feeling the strain of the emerging Cold War. Everyone was afraid of atomic bombs, afraid of Communists, afraid of sex perverts. During the war it had been widely reported that top Nazi officials and even Hitler himself were gay; now that stigma had been neatly transferred to the chiefs of the Soviet Union. Un-American Activities Committees at state and federal levels were off and running, and all those who didn’t fit into their narrow vision of democracy were tagged subversive.

Nobody in Lima dreamed they’d find a nest of Un-Americans hiding right in their midst.

At the initial hearing, the courtroom was packed. The seats were filled, and 20 more stood in the aisles or crowded the doorway. Prosecutors recounted how police had been alerted two weeks earlier by parents who became suspicious of their son’s remarks. Interviews with teens revealed that homosexual meetups had been going on for six months and “intensified” over the past 30 days.

Police investigators were reportedly shocked by the teens’ willingness to admit to the offenses, as well as their apparent lack of remorse or concern. They now said the number involved may be much larger than the 150 first reported. Parents were warned to keep a close watch on their sons.

On the surface, the case was strikingly similar to the “Boys of Boise” scandal that would rivet the nation nine years later—the chief difference being that while Boise teens were trading sex for money; the Lima boys were in it just for fun.

Letters to the News clearly conveyed the public’s outrage and alarm. A preacher warned curiosity seekers to stay away from the hearings for the good of their souls. A mother expressed relief that her son was safely away in the Army. Another railed, “Filthy scandal like front-page news in Sunday’s paper should NEVER be in print.”

The story was picked up by papers across the nation. In Lima, it made the front page for 12 straight days and 12 more times over the course of the summer. Editor Bob Barton, a no-nonsense newsman in mid-career, applauded prosecutors for exposing the vice at the risk of the town’s reputation. “Only by firm prosecution can the evil be stamped out,” he wrote. “Youngsters who seemingly do not realize the enormity of their offense are to be pitied.”

From all sides, the language used—“filthy,” “evil,” “revolting,” “malignant,” “wicked”—spoke to an utter abhorrence of gay men well beyond civic duty or religious fervor.  These men weren’t seen as mere criminals or sinners; they were monsters.

Allen County Prosecuting Attorney Paul T. Landis chose to handle the case personally and vowed that no one would be spared justice. Adult offenders would be pursued to the limit of the law, and minors would be handed over to the juvenile courts, “Let the chips fall where they may.”

“We see this over and over again,” says Mills. “We get a moralist in charge blowing up a story to get attention. I can tell reading it over that the prosecutors didn’t have as much to back it up as they claimed to.”

Soon, a third man was apprehended, and police announced they had captured the leaders of the “gang.”

John Hose was 31 years old and married with two young daughters at the time of his arrest.  He’d been pastor of a prominent church in Zanesville, Ohio, and by his late 20s was already an important figure in that community.  Leading fundraising and scrap metal drives for the war effort, he was active in Kiwanis, president of the high school athletic boosters, and chaplain of the Optimist Club.  On D-Day, he led a prayer for the troops at the local college baseball game.

Hose had abruptly resigned his pastorship in September 1944 when his interest in men was discovered. Moving his family to Lima, he was hired as the lead announcer at WLOK radio using the broadcast name John Daniels. His daily show quickly gained a following, and he became a sought-after speaker at community events.

Harry Green, 22, was born and raised in Lima. He’d been president of the Science Club at South High School and hoped to attend nearby Findlay College but after graduating he was inducted into the U.S. Army. His service record was spotless but letters written to a friend back home disclosed his sexuality, and someone—likely his friend’s parents—sent them to his commanding officer.

After 16 months in the Army, Green was released on an undesirable or “blue” discharge. It was a common means of getting rid of soldiers deemed unfit for service, typically used for mental cases, drug addicts, and homosexuals. He contacted a psychiatrist in Chicago for help overcoming his “problem” but balked at the fee of $25 per hour (about $350 today). Instead, he abstained for six months until one night at the movies he ran into an older gay man he’d met before going off to war, and his social life resumed.

Richard Henderson, 19, had grown up just a block down the street from Harry Green. He’d also attended South High but dropped out before graduating. He was unemployed and lived with an older brother who’d recently been divorced.

Henderson admitted to having same-sex relations for a number of years. He was characterized as a predator who cruised the bus station, the streets, the theaters, and urged his teen friends to bring others into the group. Investigators seemed to relish that when asked if any females were involved, he replied with an indignant “No!” His home had become the go-to-meeting place while his brother was away at work, and was dubbed ground zero of the “vice ring.”

In those days, a group of gay men was viewed as a criminal gang, the same as a communist spy ring or a gang of racketeers. Kinsey’s report on male sexuality would not be published for two more years. Homosexuals in a place like Lima were believed to be very abnormal and very rare.

It was unthinkable that a teen who engaged in sodomy had grown up that way on his own. He must have been recruited and indoctrinated into the life by an older queer, much as organized terrorist groups radicalize Islamic jihadists today. When gay men banded together, it was assumed to be for the purpose of plotting their assault on innocent, American boys.

The three defendants obviously didn’t have a hand in all the homosexual activity in town; some offenses were said to have taken place inside the school building. But, they were nonetheless held responsible for the disease infecting Lima’s youth.

About 20 teenagers were summoned to testify before the Allen County grand jury. Four admitted having sexual contact with the men. The most active of the group was a longtime buddy of Henderson’s who’d grown up two houses away; they’d spent summers in the same activities program as kids, attended parties together, and played as doubles partners in a citywide youth tennis tournament.

The four teens were all South High students, either from the very same neighborhood or connected through school activities—drama club, choir, sports.  The “vice ring” was beginning to look like nothing more than a circle of friends. Two were 18 years old. The youngest was 16 when he’d first been with Green six months before.

But then, as now, 16 was the legal age of consent in Ohio. The men could not be charged with statutory rape or corruption of a minor. Had the teens been female, there would have been no crime to prosecute at all.

Hose, Green, and Henderson were assigned, court-appointed attorneys. The counsel assigned to Green had been practicing only four months; he’d graduated law school back in 1941 and spent the next four years in the Army. Hose alone had the means to hire his own attorney but couldn’t find anyone in Lima willing to defend him.

When the indictments were handed down, Hose and Green were charged with three counts of sodomy apiece.  Henderson was charged with four.

At first, each man entered an insanity plea. The trial was postponed as the three were sent for a 15-day period of observation at the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, an enormous, aging complex that was home to more than a thousand certified psychopaths. It had a bad reputation as a place where dangerous criminals were “warehoused”—locked away and forgotten with no attempt at rehabilitation.

The men returned to court in mid-June and were judged competent to stand trial. With no other defense, Hose and Green changed their pleas to guilty. Henderson maintained his innocence and immediately another indictment was issued, adding three more counts of sodomy with the same teens as before but on different days. It seemed the prosecutors were pressuring him to admit his guilt, or maybe punishing him for insisting on his right to trial. Eventually, he changed his plea to guilty as well.

By law, a psychiatric exam was required before passing a sentence on a sodomy conviction, and all three were sent back to the state hospital for twenty more days.

As the weeks passed with no further arrests and no more witnesses summoned, the Lima News began to suspect something was wrong. The crime ring had failed to materialize and testimony so far suggested only a few were involved. It was discovered at least two of the teens had been caught up in similar “trouble” three years before; that time the matter was kept quiet and no arrests were made.

But prosecutors refused to give updates or back off from their early statements, claiming publicity would only hinder the investigation.  The paper complained that the news blackout was even stricter than it had been during the war.

With a hysterical public clamoring for more action and more information, the News printed only an occasional blurb saying the “Sodomy Probe” appeared to be stalled. It’s unclear if that was an unfortunate choice of words or a jab at the prosecutor’s office.

Eight weeks after the story first broke, Bob Barton, wrote a blistering editorial calling out Landis by name for whipping the town into a frenzy, casting “a cloud … over virtually every boy in the community” and then going silent.

“The public is entitled to an explanation,” he wrote, charging that prosecutors had either lost interest in the case or realized it was much smaller than they’d claimed and were unwilling to admit their mistake. “We are not asking that names be named, but the facts are long overdue.”

As usual, there was no official response but court records may give a clue as to why the investigation abruptly halted and the four teens who’d taken part in the vice were not brought to justice as promised. One was the star halfback of the South High football team. Another was a leading scorer in basketball. Each had one more season yet to play.

Says Mills, “High school sports are big here now. They were sacred back then.”

When the psychiatric evaluations were complete, Hose, Green, and Henderson were returned to court.  All three were pronounced to be “sexual psychopaths,” the clinical term for homosexuals currently in vogue. The reports were full of antiquated notions common to the mental health community of the day; the doctors seemed especially fixated on whether their interest in sodomy was innate or had been acquired “voluntarily.”

Hose was described as bisexual on the basis of his marriage. It was stated that “no doubt” he would benefit from psychotherapy and injections of male hormones. Green’s outlook was less favorable, as his sexuality stemmed from “organic or constitutional” factors; he displayed an “absence of true heterosexual aspects” and was unlikely to respond to treatment.

Henderson seemed to perplex the doctors. While free of mental disorder, “he manifests a marked defect as he is definitely homosexual.  This homosexuality, while apparently acquired, presents some organic aspects and altogether is quite deep-seated.”  The prognosis was “not at all good, as glandular therapy would not influence favorably his sex perversity, and he is not a good subject for psychotherapy.”

For the first time since their arrest, the men were called to the witness stand.  All rejected the idea that they were “ringleaders.”

“I never tried to make a homosexual out of anybody,” said Green.  “I wouldn’t call it a ring, and I wouldn’t say there were 150 involved.”  His sexual contacts had mostly been older men.

Hose admitted to having relations with ten men since arriving in town, all but one of whom were 17 or 18 years old.  He maintained that all had prior homosexual experience, and he had never initiated others into the life.

Ordered to make a list of every gay man and boy they knew in Lima, the men could come up with only 20 names, including themselves, three who had since left the state, and two who had been to Henderson’s home but had not engaged in sex there.

Hose told the court he presumed there were many more homosexuals in the city, but he didn’t know them.

The News was satisfied that the men had been upfront about the extent of their activities. They reported the “sodomy ring” had consisted of only 20, and the larger number first claimed was the result of rumor and hearsay—in other words, a bunch of high school kids pointing fingers at each other.

The investigation went no further. After five months of courtroom hearings and public distress, despite an initial claim that vice had crept into “widespread walks of life” and a vow to bring all offenders to justice, the prosecution was content to lay the blame on three hard-luck cases: a high school dropout, a disgraced soldier, and an outsider who had fled to Lima from another town.

The men drew sentences of one to 20 years for each count of sodomy, two to be served consecutively and the rest concurrent, so that each man faced a minimum of two and as much as forty years in the Ohio Penitentiary.  First, however, they were sent to the Lima State Hospital until such time as they were no longer psychopathic—in other words, no longer gay.  Ohio and twenty other states had enacted laws in the postwar years that prescribed the commitment of sex offenders to a mental institution indefinitely.  At the psychiatrists’ discretion, they could be kept there for life.

In California, the average homosexual offender was institutionalized for over 14 years.

Ironically, as their sentences were pronounced, the Lima News was also reporting on the war crimes trials in Germany. America cheered as the commandants and staff of the Nazi death camps—where somewhere between five and fifteen thousand homosexuals had been interned—were executed by hanging.

The men were lucky. The doctors at the state hospital saw no reason to hold them and in the spring of 1947, they were transferred to the penitentiary.  All three were paroled after five or six years in custody, over the objections of prosecutor Landis, who wrote to the parole commission that they had “left a trail of evil consequences in this community.” Apparently, he still blamed them for every act of sodomy that had occurred in Lima since.

They reentered a society that was even more hostile than the one they’d left. Homophobia had become a national obsession, thanks to J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy fanning the flames. Another infraction could send them back to prison to serve out their forty-year terms.

Richard Henderson returned to Lima and moved in with his mother. He found work as a custodian at the Church of God. Remarkably, he was not a social outcast. Soon, he was assisting with the Youth Fellowship group, and twice, he served as best man at the weddings of friends.

In August 1954, while attending a church camp in Springfield, Ohio, he was suddenly stricken with abdominal pains. He was taken to Springfield City Hospital, where he died that night of acute hemorrhagic gastritis. Richard was 27 years old.

Harry Green’s parents had sold their home in Lima and moved to an outlying community shortly after he was sentenced. Their address had been published in the newspaper and had attracted unwanted attention.

Harry joined them for a short time, then moved to a small town forty miles away, where the former Science Club president found work operating a drill press, a skill he’d learned in the state pen. He married a local girl, raised a large family, and passed away in 1998 at the age of 74. His grave marker proudly displays his military service.

John Hose’s wife had divorced him and moved to Kansas with their two daughters. He returned to his hometown of Massillon, Ohio, and soon was leading the choir in the church where he’d grown up and been ordained.

John found work in advertising sales and for several years bounced from job to job in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, working his way up the ladder, eventually landing a position as manager of marketing for a machine tool company. Somewhere along the way he also found a long-term partner.

In 1969, Hose returned to the clergy. He moved to Los Angeles with his partner and joined Reverend Troy Perry’s Metropolitan Community Church, a recently founded Protestant denomination devoted to the LGBT community. John became Perry’s assistant pastor and was instrumental in developing the theology and organizational structure of the church. He led congregations at new MCC locations in San Diego, Tampa, and Atlanta, where he passed away in 1988 at the age of 74.

Perry wrote for the MCC History Project, “Rev. John Hose was gifted as a pastor. He brought a new measure of maturity, stability, and wisdom to our ministries.”

Lima is now a somewhat smaller city of 36,000. It’s gone through many stages over the years, from industrial powerhouse to Rust Belt disaster to a phase of gradual rebirth. Seventy-five years later, the panic of 1946 is long forgotten by one and all.

But, to Glee fans, Lima is still known for its population of sexually diverse teens. Through the course of six television seasons, it has come to symbolize the archetypal, Middle-American, small town, where nonconformists may face challenges but can find a way to get along.  A place where being different doesn’t have to mean being alone.

The people of Lima have learned to accept that role without too much public alarm.