President Calvin Coolidge
Illinois
Sex perversion makes headlines in the murder trial of former University of Michigan students Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. Fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks is abducted and killed.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were extremely wealthy and intelligent teenagers. Leopold, who graduated from the University of Chicago at age 18, spoke nine languages and had an IQ of 200, but purportedly had “perverse sexual desires” as the homosexuals were categorized. Loeb, also unusually gifted, graduated from college at 17 and was fascinated with criminal psychology. The two made a highly unusual pact: Loeb, who was a homosexual, agreed to participate in Leopold's eccentric sexual practices in return for Leopold's cooperation with his criminal endeavors. Both were convinced that their intelligence and social privilege exempted them from the laws that bound other people.
They each established false identities and began rehearsing the kidnapping and murder over and over. Loeb stabbed Bobbie Franks, who was his cousin, several times in the backseat of a rented car as Leopold drove through Chicago's heavy traffic. After Franks bled to death on the floor of the car, Leopold and Loeb threw his body in a previously scouted swamp and then disposed of the other evidence in various locations.
After the press helped to collect evidence related to the boys that couldn’t be denied Leopold and Loeb both confessed.
Loeb died in a fight in the prison's shower.
Leopold was released on parole in 1958. He lived out the rest of his life in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1971.
New York
First commercially produced play with a lesbian theme, “God of Vengeance,” opens on Broadway; theatre owner and 12 cast members found guilty of obscenity.
National
Glenway Wescott a gay writer releases his second book about coming of age in Wisconsin, “The Apple of the Eye”
State equality and discrimination bills
United States LGBT History for 1924
Illinois
Henry Gerber founds The Society for Human Rights in Chicago which becomes the country's earliest known gay rights organization. The society was chartered by the State of Illinois and published “Friendship and Freedom”, the first U.S. publication for homosexuals. The Society soon disbands in less than a year due to political pressures and what Gerber later describes as being “up against a solid wall of ignorance, hypocrisy, meanness, and corruption”.
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