(This is the 5th of 8 posts celebrating Chanukah from the queer perspective. I’ve gotten some other voices in, but there’s three more days of Chanukah and I would still love to hear from a lesbian or transgendered Jew on their personal experience. Heck, even if you don’t get it to me till after the holiday I’d be pretty excited. You can send submissions to Zack@thenewgay.net.)

I was going to do a post here on some famous gay Jews, but I feel like blog posts on famous Jews are dime-a-dozen. Even narrowed down to the queer ones, you probably wouldn’t be too interested in reading anything more about the cultural contributions of, for example, comedian Sandra Bernhard, X-Men director Bryan Singer or rockers Peaches and Lou Reed.

So instead (and because I’m getting sick of holiday cheer) I thought I’d treat everyone out there in TNG-ville to a nice primer on Leopold and Loeb.

Arguably the most well-known queer Jews in American history, if not necessarily for the right reasons, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb made national headlines in 1924 for murdering a 14 year-old boy named Bobby Franks. The two most notable facts of the case were that the two young men were lovers and that their motives for the murder were to prove themselves as Nietzschean supermen of superior intellect who were capable of committing the perfect crime.

The crime was obviously far from perfect, as the two were quickly apprehended and placed under a trial that was one of our countries first to be dubbed “Trial of the Century.” Most of this had to do with the sensationalism inherent in the story of gay Jewish child-killers. Scopes Trial veteran Clarence Darrow successfully defended the pair against capital punishment and instead won them life sentences in jail.

I have always nursed an odd fascination with this case. I’m a young gay Jew from Chicago. In fact, Leopold and Loeb were members of my synagogue. If I was alive, we might have even been friends. I can’t even imagine what kind of power dynamic would have to be at play in my relationship that I plotted murders in my free time- its enough of a struggle for my boyfriend and I to agree on a place to eat dinner- but what would it be like spending time with a person who could?

There is something so unromantic in their romance that I can’t help but be fascinated by it. I know I’m not the only one. Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rope was based on the crime, as was the 2002 Sandra Bullock movie “Murder by Numbers.” Last year, D.C.’s Source Theater housed a production of “Never the Sinner,” an actual Leopold and Loeb musical.

If enough time has passed to make a musical about the boys, has enough time passed for me to take a weird sort of pride in them? When going through the key figures in a minority’s history, its easy to vaunt the heroes while pushing villains under the rug. If I’m going to take credit for Allan Bloom or Tony Kushner, I have to admit an attachment to Leopold and Loeb too. They might have cast an extremely negative shadow, and committed a heinous crime, but they’re just as central figures in gay Jewish history as any politician or painter. You have to accept a canon, no matter what its makeup.

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