It was 10 years ago that television writer Tracy Dawson met with studio executives, sharing the shows that resonated with her and where she could see herself writing. The response was not what she expected: they had hired out spots for female writers and were not in need of more.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual freedom, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions.

Investigating obscure mysteries is often fun but not often rewarding. However, publishing information about one puts it out there and other armchair sleuths piggyback on the work you have laid out. That is just what happened with my July 17, 2019 investigation on the mysteries Allen Parsons, published in the South Florida Gay News. The statute of limitations on the case had run out and were no longer chargeable, but I still figured it would be a fun piece to read and thought it to be practically unsolvable after 40 years.

It’s hard to believe now but from the time South Florida began to grow in the 1890s through World War I in the 1910s, the land boom of the 1920s, the great depression in the 1930s, and World War II in the 1940s, the LGTBQ population lived in relative obscurity. There were always gay people, there were gay bars and clubs and even drag shows (known as female impersonators). It was just something that was there, something that was happening and nobody really talked about it or interfered and everyone was just fine with that…until 1954. The famous “Homosexual Panic” that battled gays from the 1950s through the 1980s and still has lasting remnants today in South Florida can be traced to one incident; the murder of Eastern Airlines Flight Attendant William T. Simpson in August of 1954 and Miami Daily News journalist Milt Sosin’s reporting of the incident.