Before the Revolution: Mary and Max

Forty years ago this April, The Salt Lake Tribune ran an interview reporter Clark Lobb conducted between a University of Utah student and a 45-year-old Salt Lake City vice squad officer. The topic: homosexuals. This article on homosexuality was daring and provocative for its time. It was the first in depth exposé on homosexuality printed in Utah’s media.

The university student’s identity is not known. She was called Mary X even though when asked if she was a homosexual she answered, “No I am not.” She stated that as a student in San Francisco and in Salt Lake City she had completed research on the nature of homosexual men. It is indicative of the times that, even though she was not a lesbian, she felt that simply defending homosexuals required anonymity.

Mary X may have been a sociology student at the U because she stated that her research was exclusive to male homosexuals: “I know little or nothing on Lesbians.” In her interview she used the 1948 Kinsey Report’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and believed that “nurture” instead of “nature” was the causation of homosexuality.

“It’s a learned patterned of behavior stemming from influences through life particularly during childhood,” she told Lobb. “It’s a family situation. A family, in which the mother is particularly closed to a son, binds him to her, and the father is either detracted, or hostile towards the son, very, very frequently results in a homosexual boy, according to studies done on the subject.” She also reported that homosexuals “are a product of their family environment through no choice of their own.”

Sergeant Max Yopse was a World War II veteran who, while stationed at Tooele, converted to Mormonism from Judaism. He joined the Salt Lake City police force and later was appointed chaplain in 1975. Two years later, he organized a chaplain corps at the Salt Lake police department at the suggestion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His religious bias against gays was revealed towards the end of piece, when he claimed homosexuals were “abnormal in that they are non productive and have no Godly satisfaction.”

Max Yorpse comes across in the interview as a man empathic to the family men arrested for public homosexual conduct, but not to homosexuality in general. “Most men homosexuals are sympathetic — that is they respond to sympathetic approaches and sometimes are seeking help,” he said.

He told the news reporter that homosexual activity had been a problem for years in Salt Lake City and was growing because “many of the homosexuals from the coast have moved in — the hippie movement as we call it for example.” He contrasted them to the homegrown variety of homosexuals saying, “We have a lot of bisexual men who are apparently happily married, are staunch pillars in their community, have families, have respectable positions, and are active in civic and church affairs. Every couple of months they have this tremendous urge to get out and get involved in homosexual activity.”

As a law officer Sgt. Yopse emphasized, “We are sworn to uphold the law and as far as the law is concerned, the law is the will of the people.”

“We do not break into people’s homes seeking homosexuals but our problem is the law states any time a man has a sexual relationship with a person of the same sex, that it’s against the law,” he continued. “It’s called sodomy in its various degrees.” Yopse explained that sodomy was a felony and that homosexuality was not a victimless crime.

His view was that homosexual men were primarily pedophiles. “They’re generally — and we find this to be the ever prevalent thing — that these men tire of their relationships with other males of their own peers and they seek out — we call it “cruise” — and indoctrinate youthful victims to this type of thing. It’s not uncommon to have male homosexuals spend countless hours of seductive way to get young people recruited.”

Playing on this theme that homosexual men were pedophile predators, Sgt. Yopse argued, “Homosexuals have to be screened out on jobs such as scout masters, life guard — male and female. You’d be surprised how many times overt homosexuality occurs among adult-youth groups generally respected and believed to be strictly above board and beneficial to youth. … I think it’s time we realize there may be something wrong with that nice young unmarried boy down the street who’s taken such an interest in my little boy and wants to take him on fishing trips and sleep with him in a pup tent. People would think it terrible to say, a 13-year-old girl go with a 20 year old man under these circumstances, but they think nothing about it with a boy. By the time many of them find out how wrong they were, it’s too late.”

The disdain the vice officer felt for lesbians was also evident in the article. Overall, he found them to be menacing: “Women homosexuals are a horse of another color. A Lesbian is something else. She’ll challenge anyone who suggests she’s a Lesbian. She’ll fight to the bitter end that her relationships with other women are more meaningful and longer enduring then they are with the male.” He also saw lesbians as predatory. “[T]he majority of female homosexual cases brought to our attention involve Lesbians who have recruited — and I use the word deliberately — female companions who are married and may be disillusioned with married life, problems of finances, maybe with an indifferent husband and a brood of children who are rather confining to her.”

He also added that Salt Lake City’s lesbians “maintain their activities under a cloak,” which was the reason city residents didn’t hear too much about them. But he added, “we do maintain a file” on them because “they’ll go after women of younger and more tender years.”

While not contesting Sgt. Yopse’s views, Mary X did feel that laws against homosexuality “didn’t do much good” and were unfair. She noted the fact that the law against assault was one to 10 years in prison, while the law against sodomy was three to 20 years. She also suggested that laws against private consenting sodomy should be eliminated as “doing no good and oppressing people.”

However, Sgt. Yopse mocked that idea saying, “That would be lovely wouldn’t it? To have it abolished — as it has been in England — to have a homosexual couple move in next door to you — perhaps a married woman with a family — and begun to make their amorous approaches on the patio, to have children look out of their windows and see this type of activity going continuously.” He added that he was worried that children exposed to this conduct would, as they grew up, “think there is nothing wrong with it.”

Finally, Yopse belittled Mary’s opinions in pre-feminist fashion by saying, “You say you feel … We’re not interested in your feelings, Mary; we are interested in facts, in documentation in statistics. You say you don’t feel the laws keep homosexuality from going on. Sure there are lots of things that go on, but how much more prevalent they would be if we relaxed the laws. You talk about homosexuals who’ll be honest with you and he’ll soon tell you that he’ll go out to the public rest rooms, to the libraries, and to rest rooms in parks, and solicit activity with younger men and boys.”

And that’s the way it was on April 25, 1970.