The Misery Machine - Jeffrey Dahmer & The Effect on the Milwaukee LGBT Community

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

It's our anniversary! Thank you so much to all of our listeners that have been with us on this crazy ride. We appreciate all that you do and cannot wait to see what this next year brings. To help celebrate, this week we are releasing the heavily anticipated "Dahmer Episode" guest starring the one and only Eddy! Jeffrey Dahmer and his crimes in the late 80's and early 90's shook the US. The murders of almost 2 dozen men and boys, many gay men of color, sent waves of fear through the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; in particular the LGBT community, which was already suffering through the turmoil of the AIDS epidemic, as well as prejudicial violence.  Rather than discuss Dahmer and his crimes as a whole, Drewby and Yergy do a deep dive on how his crimes affected the LGBT community, and if there was any lasting effect today. We shed light on how Milwaukee for the time was something of an unexpected beacon for the community, developing progressive policies that became the model for anti-discrimination legislation that we see today across the United States.  Eddy gives an invaluable first hand account of LGBT life in Milwaukee, as well as his own Dahmer connection, and how natives - both in and outside the LGBT community, view Dahmer's crimes and the effect they have on Milwaukee today.  This week's episode is sponsored by True Crime by Indie Drop-In: https://pdsh.re/p/true-crime Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM Source Material: https://www.wuwm.com/post/how-did-jeffrey-dahmer-harm-milwaukees-gay-community#stream/0 https://www.wuwm.com/post/walkers-point-gathering-space-milwaukees-lgbt-community-75-years-and-counting#stream/0 #podcast #documentary #truecrime

Hi, we're the Misery Machine. I'm Yergy. And I'm Drewby. And happy one year podcast anniversary to us. Yes. Happy anniversary to us. It was technically last week, but we're celebrating this episode. And this is an episode that we've been talking about doing for a long time.

And it is the Dahmer episode. This is not on the entire breadth of what Dahmer did. We're focusing on a tiny little part. And we're doing it with the help of our friend and our patron, the wonderful Eddie. Yes. And thank you, Eddie, for coming. on the show and being a literal and valuable resource for this. Yes.

We could not have done this without you. And thanks for being patient and waiting a while for us to do this because I had a million sound issues with the interview, but we will get to that. So if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. Yes, bell notification. If you want to be updated when we release new videos and share this with somebody that you think will appreciate it, we're almost at 600 subscribers. This is happening really fast.

I'm very excited. And it would be a very good one-year birthday present to us if you liked and subscribed this video. And shared with the friends. And if you already have, get somebody else to do it. That would be a big birthday present to us. And we'd appreciate that. But, but that out of the way, this is Jeffrey Dahmer and his effects on the Milwaukee gay community. So this might be a little all over the place.

I apologize for that ahead of time. And we're going to try to not cover the stuff that is covered in our interview with Eddie later. But it is important to give a little bit of background on Milwaukee before Jeffrey Dahmer came in. And if you're listening to this, I assume that you have in the very least a basic understanding of what happened with Dahmer. There's been a million podcasts and documentaries on Dahmer. We don't need to rehash Dommer's story again. So if you're here, I assume you at least have a basic understanding. So Milwaukee, why is Milwaukee so important to the Jeffrey Dahmer case?

well. It happened to be a very progressive place and a time when it shouldn't have been progressive based on the rest of the United States, really. Yeah. So everybody thinks of San Francisco as the gay capital of America. But at that period of time, Milwaukee might have been giving it a run for its money. There were a lot of gay bars there, even in the 60s and 70s. In fact, they had a incident there that was pre-stonewall. If you're familiar with the Stonewall riots, that was when the cops were raiding a gay bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan and the LGBT people there fought back. That was like a major turning point for gay rights in general. Well, Milwaukee had something similar.

In 1961. Now, it wasn't the cops rating it, but being a gay bar was a secretive thing because you could get rated. It was illegal. We'll go into that a little bit more. But basically, four Navy servicemen went there and got in. into a fight with people there when the bar was just opening. And a couple of them got the shit beat out of them. And they were sent to the hospital.

So they ended up gathering more people to come back. Well, by the time they came back, it was packed full of 70 people. And it was just a giant brawl where they took out every single person. Cops came. Cops arrested. Everyone but the patrons. But the whole bar was like in the shambles. Yeah.

The bar was wrecked. The police were surprisingly supportive of the time. The judge ended up acquitted. all the Navy servicemen saying that there wasn't enough evidence that they started the fight, which is ridiculous to think about, but you have to think of just how laws and society were slanted against queer people at the time. So fast forward, a lot of people tend to forget this. Gay bars were rated by police fairly regularly. It was illegal to serve alcohol to people that they deemed were homosexual. It was a law in the books. This was very common nationwide. You could not serve

alcohol to queer people. And not only that, it was illegal to have queer people congregating in a space. A group of them could not gather. And we saw this here in Maine with a place called Pickle Park. It was basically a parking lot that wasn't used where day people used to meet and hook up. Yeah, what it is is if you're, I don't know, other states have things like this, but along highways and routes, it's sort of a rest stop. We don't have in Maine a lot of the highway systems that go off the interstate that larger cities would have. We have just these routes that go through both rural areas and suburban areas and it's all just one straight thing. So this is kind of what you would consider like a little rest stop off of that. It was a cruising spot for many, many, many years. And I I know for a fact, one sheriff that's now deceased used to go to Pickle Park and would have dispatch look up the license plate numbers of whose car it was there and would start calling out people's names on his loudspeaker and telling them to come out of the woods. Like, I have firsthand knowledge that this is correct. Yeah, I've heard stuff like that as well. And there was things like that.

And rather than just, I mean, even today, that spot is gated off. Yeah, it has not been open since, I believe, the early 90s. Yeah, very early 90s was the last time. Over at Lake Auburn, which is probably about a mile from that, it became a cruising spot as well, but... But it was a more visible cruising spot, so it was harder to do. Not to mention, I don't know if there's cruising laws on the books here, but cruising laws are a common thing, too.

There's still places that have them where police are supposed to take notice if you drive by an area one too many times in a certain period of time if they think that's what you're doing. Well, we're going to get trouble. We cruise around all the time. And it's not for cruising for sex. It's cruising for gay sex. That is what's illegal. It's just so strange to me. How could they even prove that? How could they prove that's what you're doing? Well, again, the laws against queer people in general. You know, when you look up funny laws, like if you ever did that as a kid, you'd see that oral and anal sex is illegal in many states. And in some states it still is. These are called sodomy laws. We heard about that in the Mr. Hans episode.

This was to target queer people. So think about these things when we're heading into late 70s and the 80s where Dahmer started to operate. I mean, he had one murder in 78 and then didn't start again until 87. But think about this. The world is very different between now and the 80s. You have a community that grew up being told they had no right to exist. There was a large sense of shame, disenfranchisement. A lot of people could lose their jobs. It's not like now where there was protection acts. You could lose your job if your employer knew you were gay. It didn't have to be an at-will state or not. That was a legally protected reason to fire somebody. And even if there wasn't, like there's large family rejections coming out, you would be disowned by your family. Okay? And yes,

that still does go on nowadays. It's a little bit different. I know there's some queer activists that kind of shame people for not coming out. That's a whole other bag entirely. But this was basically a guaranteed thing back then. So because of that, people were largely just known by nicknames in gay bars. You didn't know people beyond that. You know, it was a place to hook up or just to get away from it all. It was a place to live a secret life.

And because of that, people would go in and out of the community sometimes showing up a year later and nobody would think twice of it. So gay people disappearing at that time didn't cause concern. That and another thing that I want to kind of add to something we were talking about a little bit earlier and Eddie gets into it a bit in his interview but gay bars you wouldn't know that they were gay bars necessarily back then

That's true They had to hide what they were So a lot of these bars either didn't have windows They'd have the windows blocked out There'd be signage over the windows They seemed really ambiguous They'd be on the outskirts of the city or town The name sometimes wouldn't kind of fit

What was actually going on there Like for example The bar that I kind of grew up going to. My bar was called the sportsmen's, and it was at one point a private member's sports club, but that's not what it was. It was definitely a gay bar, but it was the last building in a very industrial part of Lewiston. It was like in an industrial park down by a bunch of power lines. There's almost nothing else there besides some parking garages for the hospital. There was no windows inside whatsoever. The only window was in the front. It was blocked up by a bunch of

signage. You'd have no idea it was going on in there. It made it look like it was some sort of sports bar. But it wasn't into the late 90s into 2000s that they actually had a rainbow flag outside. But like many different bars from that time, it's been bulldozed now. So even when running a gay bar wasn't a criminal act, this still carried on because a lot of people, if they went to the gay bar, wanted to do it in secret, had to do it in secret. You know, I stress again, Gay bars were relentlessly rated in the 80s, 40 years ago, less than 40 years ago. Laws prohibited businesses from allowing gay people to gather. So what happened was some bars, and this was also true in Milwaukee from what I read,

some bars had to employ the help of the mob. If the mob took some sort of investment in your bar, they would offer protection from the police. Some bars bribed key members of the police force to stay operating, And as long as they wouldn't make too much noise or nothing crazy was going on, the police would look the other way. But again, this was a difficult time to operate under where there were significant legal and personal and career backlashes that could happen to you if you were caught. There was stories of how some people would only drink at the very back entrance of the gay bar so that way they could watch people coming in. On top of that, the AIDS epidemic was going on. An HIV diagnosis was the death sentence back then.

There was no treatment. And queer people were just kind of looked at as these diseased carriers to an extent. I remember even when I was a child in the 90s, that's how they were looked at. Yes. I remember being young and reading the Ryan White story. And that was a whole disaster. And I basically was told growing up that if you did bad things or did drugs, you just end up with AIDS. Yeah, you deserve this.

Like, that was the thing. And even into my teens, if you had HIV, you got what was coming to you. That was the narrative. So think of this, all of this playing together. And the HIV thing particular, if somebody disappeared from a gay bar, it wasn't an uncommon thing because being a part of the queer community, you'd be like, oh, where'd such and such go, oh, well, they're in hospice or they're dead. This was something you were used to.

People either moved out of town in secret or they just died. I remember one interview I was looking up. This person went to 19 funerals in a year, like one year particular in the 80s. Yeah, that was the bartender at Club 219, which was the gay bar that Dahmer frequented. Yes, yes, that was correct. And that person did serve Jeffrey Dahmer, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about Jeffrey Dahmer because it's tough to pick out anyone acting weird at a gay bar because people are... People were acting weird because they didn't want to be known.

Yeah, you're taking a huge risk. there. So of course people are going to be sketchy. People are scared and for good reason. So because of this, this is the perfect time for Dahmer to flourish. Right. It wasn't even a situation of, oh, we're scared of Dahmer or anything. I don't think people even knew that was happening until it already happened. They were scared of getting beaten, being arrested, getting AIDS, being found out. That's the thing I want to talk about. Yeah. They were afraid of dying, but not because of somebody like Dahmer existing. Queer murders and murders of trans people have gone on. for a very, very long time.

Unfortunately, those murders absolutely astronomically dwarf the number of Dahmer's murders. However, the difference here is that those murders don't ever make it to the media. They don't make it to the papers, nothing. If a queer person was killed, silence. And that had been going on for a very, very long time. So however you want to look at this, Dahmer killing gay people, this was one of the first major things to hit the media about queer people being killed. It had to come on the back of a very grotesque story and that's what drew people in.

Oh, here's a cannibal, you know, a cannibal serial killer of gay people who is gay himself. All these things made perfect headlines. That's why it was picked up. I think this predated the Matthew Shepard killing. Matthew Shepard was what was 94 or 96. I was in middle or high school. You were, okay. Yeah.

I was a teenager when Matthew Shepard died. So it was like late 90s. Yeah. Okay. And Dahmer was caught in 91. 91. So Dahmer then was probably the first. I mean, obviously you could talk about the Harvey Milk assassination.

But of regular people, Dahmer was the first major headline of something like this that I know of. And prior to that, you never would have heard of anything like this. So because of that, what happened with Dahmer, there was a big push for the police force to reform and to handle these things. better. So I can talk a little bit about Conorax and Thasophon. I can't say to his last name very well, but he was a Laotian boy, and he was 14 years old, and Dahmer picked him up when I believe he was either on the side of the road or waiting for a bus stop or something of that nature. And Dommer actually had molested his brother years earlier. So it was a very strange coincidence. But long story short, he had taken him back to his apartment. He had done an experiment on him, which he did to a lot of

people, which was a kind of a crude lobotomy where he was drilling holes into their heads and inserting acid or boiling water to try to turn their brain to mush so that he become a willing sex slave for him. He was obsessed with this whole zombie's idea. Well, a lot of times it either killed or actually did turn whoever into sort of a zombie and he left him alone and he ended up escaping the apartment and going out into the streets. Well, some women found him down there. He was about. incoherent in Laotian. He was naked. He was bleeding from his anus. And pretty much, Domer was trying to get him back into the apartment. Conorak was fighting him. And police and paramedics ended up there. And the police ended up believing Domer that it was a domestic dispute that this was his 19-year-old

boyfriend. And because the police didn't want to get involved with gay drama, basically. They let Conorat go back to the apartment with Domer. And he was. was literally killed hours later. And they even joked about how they were reuniting lovers. Yeah. And there was a big backlash recently in Milwaukee over this because that particular officer lost his job. And was reinstated by Wisconsin Supreme Court, I believe, four years after the fact. Yeah, it was in 1994.

He was, I believe, reinstated. Or that's when he was dismissed. Either way, he was dismissed and then reinstated. And they did a big tweet not too long ago. congratulating him on his years of service because he finally retired. And everyone was like, wait a minute. Yeah. Like this is not a great thing.

You basically killed a boy and then folks after him because you didn't do anything about it. And this one, John Balcerzac. Balcerzac was him, yes. Yes. They always talked about these two officers, how their careers were ruined. Well, Balcerzac, I believe, got into some high ranking position in the Milwaukee Police Department. whereas the other one, don't quote me on this, it was Joseph Gabrish, I believe, was his name.

He transferred to another city's police department. And if I'm correct, he became the chief of police. So neither of these people's careers were ruined. But I guess the point we're trying to make is that if you were a queer person and you were the target of violence, they weren't going to do anything. No, they didn't really care about you. And domestic disputes, this is why gay, queer, trans, domestic violence is, is underreported. We don't have great statistics of it. Even today, there's not great representation

because of it. The police just don't know how to handle it or they're just very hands off. They don't care. Or they'll make fun of you. Or they'll make fun of you. Like domestic disputes to them is cis man, cis woman and that's it. I mean, and yes, it's gotten better over the years. But in general, I don't think police are very great at handling domestic disputes, period, but that's a whole other conversation. They tend to handle them pretty well when it's lesbians. Do they? They tend to I know a lot of examples where things have gone to court. Like personally? My aunt got in trouble for a domestic.

She poured bleach all over her girlfriend's clothing. Oh, good Lord. And then when I was at court for the protection of abuse order that I had against somebody, there was a couple who was seated in front of me. Well, one part of the couple was sitting in front of me. And it really, really seems like a lot of the times when they get involved, there's destruction of property because this was another destruction of property type of situation as well. And not like violence.

Yeah. Also, I mean, we've mentioned this in the Charlie Howard killing how lesbian relationships are sexualized by men, so therefore they're more accepted or accepted earlier on than two gay men. But again, we're kind of getting off topic here. I hope this is painting a picture of what was allowing Dahmer to operate so perfectly. Now, I don't believe that. And really not that he wasn't even that good at what he was doing. No, he wasn't. He wasn't in a physically imposing person.

He was an attractive person, but he was. wasn't physically imposing, nor was he that calculating. He just basically drugged people and brought them back. I'm not going to go too deep into Dahmer's psyche, but I mean, he seemed to want to have people around, and then when they'd try to leave, that's usually when he'd strike. Right. And another thing to kind of note on top of this, not only the fact was he targeting gay men, nine times out of ten, he was also targeting people of color.

Yes. And one thing that we haven't mentioned yet is a lot of the gay bars were, districts in Milwaukee that were more neighborhoods full of people of color, predominantly black neighborhoods from what I understand. Eddie talks about that in the interview. Yeah, that's why I didn't want to get too much in it, but it should be noted as well. Most the people he was killing were black people. Yes. I think a couple were homeless or were at least very poor. Yeah. Or were criminals themselves. I think one was or later became a criminal. Yeah. And I don't think that he really... Or not later became a criminal. He's passed, obviously. But I

think we were reviewing something early, someone that had gotten away or something later. Became homeless. Yeah, it's one guy that got away from Dahmer, became homeless, and then later was charged with murdering another homeless person and just basically lost his mind from the whole ordeal. I would too. It's just a sad situation, but Dahmer is and was looked at as a few things that I think need to be cleared up. It's a disservice to understand. serial killers. People look at Dahmer as the self-hating homophobe, and I disagree with that thoroughly, or somebody who was racist. He, you know, was a gay man, and he went after people he found attractive. Yeah, this is the difference. He is not a homophobe. He is a gay man who is a serial killer. You can

divide these things up. He has his sexual preferences. His sexual preferences were men, and there were largely men of color, though Jeffrey Dahmer claims that he didn't have a particular attraction to race. So I don't know if that was true, not true. Or just convenient. Yeah, it could be convenient. Maybe there were a lot of like black gay men. It's possible. It's hard to say, especially in those bars that he was frequenting. Right. I do know that later on in life, he was accused of raping people in the army where he was stationed. And if I'm correct, those men were both white. There was rumor that he had killed people in the army, but that wasn't really substantiated. Also, he had been charged with indecent exposure twice.

One was for exposing himself to a group of women and children. The second time was masturbating in front of two 12-year-old boys, but hard to say. Either way, I want to really stress. And there was the molestation charge when he was working for Ambrosia. Yes. It was Conorak's brother. Yes, okay, thank you. Yes.

Although Jeffrey Dommer, claims that he does not have preference of race. I believe that it's likely that he does have preference of race, but I do not believe that he was somebody racist out to kill people because he hated people of color. No, I think he really likes darker skinned people. Yeah, I think that this is somebody who was very sexually attracted, the idea of cannibalism and dismemberment. This is well-documented sexual attraction. He is just trying to fulfill a sexual urge. And he's a compulsive person, you can see this by his longstanding alcohol abuse. It is not out of the realm of possibility to think that Dahmer was somebody with strong urges that later became too great for him to

handle. And when you watch interviews with him and you read literature about him, it really paints the picture of somebody who was compulsive. People talk about how he tortured animals growing up. Well, actually, he didn't. He was actually very good to animals. However, He was very interested in dead animals and dead things. And this later extended to people. And when he would go in frequent bathhouses, even when having consensual sex, he would try to drug people because he was very turned off at people moving during sex.

He wanted them to lay very still, which then got towards necrophilia. So I don't like this idea that Dahmer is just somebody that wanted to kill gay people and people of color. This was somebody that was a true necophile. So one other thing that we can talk about a little bit with his mental health. Of course, we don't want to get too much into this. There's many different resources for you to check out Dahmer's stuff if you want to. Dr. Todd Grande does a good video.

Absolutely. But again, there's been argument, is he schizophrenic? Is he schizotipel? Is he borderline? These things are argued. They're not proven. Dahmer is dead now. He can't be evaluated by today's knowledge of psychology.

We only have to work with what we have. at this point. Right. So one thing to kind of be noted with this is everything seemed to go somewhat relatively safely until whomever it was wanted to leave. That's when he would start killing. He did a lot of weird obsessive things with keeping parts of the bodies, which you don't normally see. And it wasn't even a trophy thing. It was he just really wanted them with him, which is kind of, I believe, a borderline attribute. We're not saying that people with borderline personality disorder will kill people and keep their body parts. The attribute is that borderline people have an abandonment issue. Yeah, they have intense fears of abandonment. I'm not diagnosing Domer.

I'm not a psychologist. This is purely just conjecture from our opinions that this can come across as a borderline trait. And it could lend to the theory that Domer has borderline personality disorder where I'm not convinced either way, nor am I interested in what personality disorder Domer has? No, it's just interesting, like what he did, because it's so unlike other people. So he, I mean, if you go through just based on what we have for public information, if you review the Polaroids, he would keep just strange parts of the body. He would keep hands, severed penises, heads and skulls. I believe at one point they had found some bones and some sort of effigy that he was using to try to get, what was it? He was doing some sort of witchcraft, I guess you could call it, to try to get favor in financial dealings with real estate.

Yeah, he had very interesting beliefs. He'd take certain body parts and he'd prepare corpses or basically pieces of corpses in certain ways because he had these strong beliefs that. It's not like he was studying voodoo or anything like that. No, he was just kind of, and I say witchcraft very vaguely. That's not really what he was doing, but he was just doing this kind of ritualistic in his own way. Yeah, just the belief came from him. He had nothing to take this from. So that is a very psychotic thing to have these beliefs that stem from nowhere. He would arrange the bodies in different positions. There's one that's fairly famous where the head is removed and the body's put in this arched position where it's basically kind of crab walking like the exorcist. Someone actually made a sculpture of it later.

Did they really? Yeah. But it's just very, very interesting what he was doing. He would save, I believe there was a total. of seven human skulls they found throughout the apartment. He saved a heart. He was eating people in order to keep them with him, which we see that in a lot of different things. I believe, what was it? So Tumo Miyazaki was snorting ashes to kind of keep his grandfather with him. I mean, there's even old beliefs from, I don't want to misattribute, the army that used to do it or the cultural practices that was, but this belief that you eat a piece of somebody you killed,

you gain their powers. So we saw that when we were. watching the vice special on African warlords. Ah, yes, that is true. That is true. They were drinking the blood in the heart of the enemy children to go into war. Yeah, it was vitality and things of that nature. So yeah, anyone could be raised from birth to believe this, but this came from Dahmer and Nateley was not something he was taught. I guess that one of the last things I want to go over is how Dahmer in essence set queer people back as far as their image. So I I remember one of the first things, when I heard about Dahmer as a kid, the first thing I found

as he was gay. And the belief that was being perpetuated through this was that, I mean, we're only what, at this point, 15, 20 years removed from being gay, no longer being considered a mental illness by the APA. We're right in the AIDS epidemic. Right in the AIDS epidemic. So people are already looking at gay people as, oh, if a gay person coughs on you, you're going to get AIDS.

Like this was a common thing that people thought growing up. This was a thing even into my adult life. The aunt in particular that I was referencing that got in trouble for domestic with her girlfriend. He used to tell me not to go to the sportsmen or if I did to drink my beer with the straw because I was going to get AIDS from the glasses there. Yes. There were so many misconceptions about HIV and AIDS. And this is an LGBT person being an asshole about gay men, basically.

That could be a whole other episode talking about toxicity. within the queer community at the time towards different members of the community. But when this happened with Dahmer, it pushed the belief that gay people were sick and extreme deviance. And that Dahmer was just one of many. Obviously not true.

But when you grow up in a small town, you have no real internet, when you have no access to people who are gay because people are still in the closet at this point in the 90s, these are the stereotypes that are perpetuated. and it makes coming out like that much harder. This was really damaging for the image of queer people, at least where I grew up,

and at least how it was discussed and how I remembered it being put across in the media. This was not just one person. This was gay people. Dahmer was gay people to an extent. And looking back on it, what a frightening thing. Hey guys, for this episode, our sponsor is True Crime by Indie Dropin. It's a podcast that features episodes from independent true crime

creators. Each week, you'll explore a different aspect of the true crime genre. You'll hear episodes about serial killers, violence, conspiracies, celebrities, white collar crime, and much, much more. You will hear creators from all over the world, including our Junco Furuda episodes, so please go check it out. Now you can get your true crime fix from many other independent podcasts just like us. Search for true crime by Indie Dropin on your favorite app or click the link in the show notes to get started. So Domer as heinous and horrendous as everything he did was one thing that happened after his killings is that the whole nickname thing, the fact of being anonymous at a gay bar basically dropped. And some people wonder, okay, well, was this just Domer? Is this just the world going

towards a more inclusive place? Is it both? It's uncertain. But after he was caught, there was maybe two months where people were afraid that there were multiple domers out there, but then things just went back to normal. And at this point, the community started to get to know each other as people. There wasn't nicknames. There was first and last names. And there started becoming more accountability, I guess you could say, about other people and their whereabouts. And it brought the community together. And even brought families into the bars, because a lot of times, families kind of new. And they would go in there looking for their loved one. So it brought families into the mainstream, I guess you can say as well. Yeah. And during Dahmer's Rampage, family would come in and put up missing posters because they

wanted to know where they went. They didn't think they died or anything. Or at least where they lived. Families didn't even know where their loved ones lived. Yeah, or didn't know like anything like that. And so I think this also pushed some people to be like, wow, my relative could be murdered and I would never know. Do I really want that? Is that worth this to me? Is being. gay a roadblock to where I don't care to know anything about them. And I think that caused some people to overcome that. And I think that really kind of ends there with it because as much as some people want to try to search for this long lasting mark that Dahmer left on the gay community. A lot of them want him just gone. Yeah, they don't want that association there. I think it's a disservice

to try to say that Dahmer wasn't gay. I think it's a disservice to try to paint Dommer as a racist. Dahmer is and was an individual who was sick and twisted, who committed heinous acts, and it left a lot of damage the family of his victims, and it damaged the image of the queer community. But beyond that, Dahmer should be left in the past. Yeah, and I think a lot of what he does in bringing him up quite a bit in conjunction with the gay community, it does a lot of disservice because, like you were saying earlier, Milwaukee was pretty progressive for the time. So you have a city in the Midwest, which is normally conservative. It is generally a red state.

It was the first state to allow queer protection. So. Queer protection. They had anti-discrimination laws. Yeah, which became the first state, which became the model for the entire country that we are afforded today. Yeah. You had some of the very first pride parades and gay movie festivals.

You had some of the earliest gay bars there. There were at least eight of them in the early 80s. And this isn't the Midwest. This isn't New York. or anywhere like that or San Francisco. This is in the Midwest where that's generally seen as not okay. So I think Dahmer just casts a shadow that doesn't need to be there. They have a pretty vibrant community without him.

I think people are trying to understand Dahmer or trying to look for something that Dahmer did there that isn't there, but are overlooking the things that should be understood about Dahmer or should be understood about the Milwaukee LGBT community. And this was hard for us to find a lot of research. research for. This was crazy. So I figured this was something that was probably done more often than this. No, nobody did. Yeah, nobody really wanted to touch this. There was somebody who contributed to an article on this on Milwaukee's NPR just a couple weeks ago. It came at almost a perfect time. This is also our anniversary episode, but we wanted before our anniversary episode, due the Dahmer

episode that we had been planning with Eddie for months now. And amidst that time, we had done the interview that you'll hear coming up with Eddie was done in March, I believe. There was just one, I have to apologize because the audio levels are all over the place. I've spent a lot of time trying to cut out random noises because I was using a mic I don't normally use. It's a very sensitive condenser mic. And then I was having issues. Yeah, and Yergy was having issues with trying to connect to the conversation. Her mic was cutting out. So I ends up having to go into the office with you with this condenser mic. Yeah. So everything's off. I see. spend a lot of time trying to remove the noises, the bumps, and boost Eddie. You'll be able to

understand it. Just there's going to be a little bit of bumps and noises here and there. It's just not the great audio that we have normally. It's not what I was intending as far as audio quality, but the content is very good. And by this time, I was hoping that we had been able to go to Milwaukee and visit Eddie, but the coronavirus had happened. We were supposed to see some of these places so that way we could give you some firsthand experience when doing this episode. The first week of June, we were supposed to go to Milwaukee Pride. Yeah, we were. And it is what it is. The world changed. And here we are right now, but we still wanted to get this out. I still wanted to use this. Eddie offered some very invaluable insight. But the article Yergi found on Milwaukee

NPR, the person contributing to it, Michael Takash is the curator of the Wisconsin LGBTQ history project and he has a book out. There's some stuff on the website. There's a lot of history and stuff that he's compiled old newspaper articles and things of that nature. He seems to be one of the few people that is really trying to keep some sort of history record of what's gone on in the Milwaukee queer community. But he did a extensive interview with Milwaukee's NPR about Jeffrey Dahmer and the gay community. And this was such an invaluable resource. So we should definitely link this in the notes. We will link that in the notes if you're interested in hearing it.

I very much enjoyed it. It was really nice. Yes, it was very, very good. But let's get to the Eddie interview. So let's just say our goodbyes and you can listen to the interview until the end. So if you're listening on YouTube, please like and subscribe. We're one year now. We're almost at 600 subscribers.

I can't believe that in a year we have done this. I want to keep doing this for you guys. We have no plans of stopping. We want this to be an even. better year than this year. I know a lot of you have been coming around the past three months. Like, it's only going to get better. So hitting like and subscribe, sharing this video, all these things go a long way. Put a comment in the YouTube video if you're watching on YouTube. If you're from the area and we might have missed something. Also, this is one of the first

times we've done really specific thing on a serial killer instead of covering the entire case. So if there's something specific about Dahmer you want us to cover in the future, leave a comment or hit us up, we can certainly do that in the future. Or even any other serial killer. Like, I'm not really down with doing just serial killer documentary thing on any of the big ones. Because it's been done to death. It's done to death. We did Henry Lee Lucas. It wasn't very fun. Of course we're going to do Ed Kemper because it's Ed Kemper. But. Well, plus Ed Kemper was, okay, I take that back. Ed Kemper was the first one where we drilled down certain things about his case that were interesting that I didn't feel were covered in other

cases. Yeah, we did like a nature versus nurture type of episode. Was Ed Kemper able to flourish because of the time period? Would he have done what he did nowadays? I really like diving into specific things like that instead of covering cases. I want to cover smaller, lesser known cases. I want to cover certain phenomenons, but these big cases. Yeah, just give us something specific because that I think is a little bit more interesting than hearing the same thing everybody's done to death. So many people do the same case over and over and I want to add something new here. Let's shout on our patrons. Eddie Eddie, the super fan who's with us from the start. We're so happy to have Eddie's interview here. I've been looking forward to this for such a long time and I'm so, so happy that Eddie gets to play a part in this. Me too. This episode is definitely dedicated to Eddie for sure.

And also our other patrons who have been supporting us as well. We're very thankful for Holly, Rowan, Marky, Voo, Ashley, Karen, Anna. Anna, who's fabulous. Anna, who's fabulous. And Lauren, who's also fabulous. You're all fabulous. We love you all so much.

And thank you for just being here with us for this ride. Yeah, being here, talking with us daily on the Discord, just supporting us and believing in us. It means so much. If you want to help us out with this, everything we get goes back into the podcast. Patreon.com slash the misery machine. Or if you don't like Patreon, PayPal.m.m.

slash the misery machine. This year is going to be even better. I swear to you right now, we're going to hit monetization on YouTube. And whether YouTube decides to monetize us or not, we're going to take it the next step further. We're going to make videos. It's going to be wonderful. All right, I'm not going to ramble on too much. This is the interview with Eddie. I hope you guys enjoy. At the time, most of these people were coming over from the north side. And north side still today, I don't know if you guys know this, but Milwaukee is pretty segregated. The north side is, predominantly people of color and at the time this was going on it was still pretty ghetto over there so in order to make ends meet you'd have people coming over uh sex workers coming over into that area

so that's why there were these kids 15 16 17 years old it was pretty easy for him to get them to come to his house yeah that really makes a lot of sense i know yurgy and i talked about this in a previous podcast how the most successful serial killers go after prostitute or go after the homeless. And it sounds like in this scenario, a lot of the people that he was going after were poor people of color and sex workers. It's basically just the less dead,

the ones that cops aren't really going to look for. And it really sucks to say that, but. I mean, that's kind of the state. I was always wondering why there were so many, why he had killed so many kids, but that makes sense if there was child sex workers. Yeah, I don't know. That's all I could think of, really.

I mean, I know that, like, My dad used to hang out kind of over on the north side. Currently, I live like four blocks, four or five blocks away from his grandmother's house. And while this was going on, I lived 10 blocks away from where I do now. Same street, just 10 blocks north. I didn't realize how, at the time, how close this was. You could have told me it was in like California. And it would have made no difference because it felt so far away.

So nuts. So was he just at Club 9-2-19? Was that his only hangout? but I think you like the Phoenix, too. Yeah, 219 and the Phoenix. Those were, those are down on, let me, because they were like basically right next door to each other on the same street.

Second, it's right over by the, it's like an industrial area nowadays, but it's right over by the Milwaukee River right off of the first street. First street's kind of like a big main street. But yeah, 219 permanently closed and Phoenix are both permanently closed. And like I was telling you,

During this time, there was a huge shift from that area to about 10, 12 blocks south. We have a big street called National, and that's kind of where everybody went, which is La Cajage. People seem to think that La Cajage was one of his hangouts, but it really wasn't. He didn't really go there a whole lot. Maybe he was there once or twice, but that wasn't his spot. Why is that so commonly attributed to him, though? Because if you know any of the gay clubs in Milwaukee, that is the gay club everybody knows about, is Lacage, because it's probably one of the oldest that's still around. Okay, that makes sense.

I also found out that, like, at the time, people weren't out at the time, so I feel that kind of added to him being able to, like, kind of stay low-key and, like, not have people, like, ride him out. Oh, yeah, we saw that guy go home with Jeffrey last night and not around anymore, so people didn't want to say... Oh, I was at the gay bar. So there wasn't really a gay borough or a gay neighborhood. There was just these bars scattered around, and people kind of went to them quietly. Well, I think that where 219 and where Phoenix were was kind of like underground the gay scene, but we didn't really have a gay district until probably late 90s or even early 2000s. And it basically sprang up around La Caj.

Now we got Dix, Fluidien. I get a dix. It's actually a pretty great bar. I like it. My favorite cruise is just down the street from all them. Yeah, there's a bunch that I'm missing Woody. The one that has the fireplace outside? Oh, yes.

I'm telling you, you'd love that one. Which one was the bar that you sent us pictures where someone went urban spolunging? That was 219, I think. I'm pretty sure that was 219. I don't think anybody's been inside of the Phoenix. Oh, let me see. Yeah, it is 219.

I just found it. Not that I want to like talk about crimes on the recorded line, but, uh, you know, forever out that way. I've done some, uh, urban exploring in the past. I'd always be up for it again. There's like so many old mill buildings around here and just like abandoned places that when I was a teenager, that was the only fun thing to do around here. Well, I mean, welcome to Milwaukee, too. Like, that's basically here. Like there's so many like, I can walk. down several different parts of Milwaukee and West Alice and there's just these huge buildings that I'm pretty sure have nothing in them that I've never seen anybody going in or out of I've lived here for you know 33 years and I've never seen anybody going in or out of these buildings and they'll just they look exactly like if I looked up pictures from like the 60s 70s 80s they're the same so it's just like especially down over there in that little industrial area right by the river there's a lot of that I'm all about that shit yeah one of one of the the guys that I talked to goes by Leviticus. He's just getting of age the time that Dahmer was around. He's a professor. He does a lot of like architectural stuff. And so he knows all about like certain

buildings around Milwaukee and shit like that. And he goes urban exploring, but I wouldn't say spalunking. Like he doesn't go into places. That's really cool. So oh yeah, what I wanted to ask you earlier. So do you think Dahmer's rampage, did that lead to the eventual closing of Club 219 in the Phoenix or did they close way later? I can't remember when you said either of them closed. I'm pretty sure that they closed after he got arrested. I'm pretty sure that, like I said, once people started noticing that people were missing and that they weren't coming back, that everybody kind of scooched and went down south. But once he was convicted and once they found out his crimes, I'm pretty sure that I basically sealed the fate of both Club 219 and the Phoenix.

I know that someone tried to bring one of them back. It might have been Phoenix, but it just, it didn't work. It's just kind of crazy because you think, like, nowadays, somebody reopening something like that would be very well received, but fuck, what do I know? Like, all the gay bars in Maine are practically closed. We only have one, and it's for older bear types. Like, we had a really popular one in Portland,

and we had a really popular one in Portland. where basically all types went to and that got shut down which was crazy to me because it was getting mobbed every weekend. You're talking about a spectrum? Not spectrum. Sticks.

Yeah, there was a little snippet in here about Dahmer from a Jamie Taylor who seems to be somewhere around here still. No, that was 2014. He, and it was the last time he was mentioned. mentioned 2015. I don't know if Jamie's still around. I've never met him, but he also took a bunch of

pictures at the Phoenix back in the 70s, it looks like. He said he was at, um, uh, dude, he was at 219. He says, after I left Sala V, I went in there more often. One night a guy said hi to me. I walked away because he stunk. That person I later learned was Jeffrey Dahmer. Goodness, if it didn't seem like bodies. That's probably what it was. So it also looks like Club 219 kind of stuck around until 2005, which is kind of weird. But it says by the mid-90s, Club 219 had been eclipsed by other several bars and popularity. As the 90s came to a close, the area was struggling as development began to encroach on the area, limiting parking and whatever. A DJ tried to bring it back, but it just didn't put new.

new lighting, new music, new entertainment in there, but it just didn't. So they closed it down in October of 2005. It tried real hard. I don't know. It's a shame because, like, this, I'm looking at the pictures right now. The Phoenix reminds me so much of this bar we had in town, the sportsmen, that was around for a really long time. They leveled it and made it into a parking lot.

And that place was my jam. The Phoenix looks pretty cool. Club 219. I mean, if you're looking at the Club 219, you can see the erotic Santa. pictures they have. Wonderful. I'm looking here. It says there was more. There was something called Circus and Sele V and the ball game.

So I know about Selah V. I don't know. Let me. Sela V. Yeah, Sala V. Wow, that closed in 2008. That was a long run. December, 1974, May of 2008. Wow. Where was that one?

Yeah. just small bar it looks like roughly the same area 231 second street and club 219 was 219 219 2nd street so they were just down the street from each other it bums me out when all these clothes like I heard a bit druby talking about it while my microphone was giving an issue but in Maine everything like that is closed for the most part well I think these were gay bars of the time because like you got to remember you couldn't be very out and open about that kind of stuff at that time so if you look at the outside there's no windows there's you know you can barely tell which door is the right door to go into you'd basically have to be shown where to go to get in there

the sports was the same way like it was same way there's no windows in there nowadays like if you look at um lacage has just giant windows just right out and You can just clearly tell it is like the gay bar. But I mean, it definitely still has that same look. Cruise is definitely out and open. They are always pumping music. You can always hear people outside wandering around and whatnot. It's just a fence surrounding us, but it's completely different feel nowadays.

That looks like an old state building. Yeah, we keep a lot of the old buildings here, which is kind of cool. I like that, but... Yeah, if you just remove the logos, I would have thought it was like town hall or something. Right. Yeah, so that one that I was talking about was sportsmen's, like, on the sign, it didn't say anything that was a gay club. It said the sportsman's athletic club, and there was no, like, windows whatsoever or signage

to, like, tell you what was going on in there. And it was at the end of this dead ends by an industrial part. It was beautiful. What I thought was funny about Cruz is when I first read reviews about it, people were like, oh, yeah, this is a great sports bar. Like, you know, I go, I go in there and, like, there's dudes watching sports. And I'm like, you know, I'm kind of like iffy about going to a fucking like sports bar, even though it's a gay bar. And then I go there and it's not a fucking, there's not even a TV in there.

Like there's no TV period. Goodness. This goes to the like side of cruise. You can see there's that, uh, there's that smoking area. If I had to guess, I would have thought that was New Mexico or something. Right. They definitely updated it. But apparently there's like a hot tub and stuff upstairs.

I've never been upstairs. Pretty. I want to go there. Oh my god, seriously. If you guys show up for Pride Fest, the whole parking lot, like they have two bars. They have one inside and they open another one outside in the parking lot. They put a huge tent over and like it becomes a massive party. So basically what we do is we meet up at my place. We pregame here. We take an Uber down to Cruise. Drink more there. And then they have a complimentary shuttle from Cruise to Pride Fest where we get more drunk. And then we just shuttle back to Cruise at the end of the night and then take an Uber home. It also just saves on parking because let me tell you parking is fucking price gouging and ridiculous. Yeah, I'd imagine. It always is for things like that. Yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous.

We can just get like an Uber XL and get everybody in there. I'm just skimming through the notes real quick. And I don't know how long, I guess you've been here for a long time. But Revere High School, is that the only high school in Milwaukee or were there several? Because that's the one he went to. Oh, God, there's so many. I don't even, what was it? What did you say?

Revere. Shit, I don't even see that. That must have been switched to something else. Yeah, and then he went away to Ohio for a while. Then after he... Supposedly to Florida. Let's see. He killed one dude, did his army service.

Then he went back to West Dallas. The Ambassador Hotel. Yeah, that's a big hotel. That's right over by where he picked up a couple of people at the Grand Avenue Mall, and that's basically right over in that same area. Grand Avenue is... Was that actually near you at all? Um, probably about 10 minutes.

I've been inside the Ambassador Hotel. It's really nice. It's got really unique elevators. Like, you have to like pull these sliding doors to get into the elevator. The elevator door opens and you have to like slide this door to get into the elevator still. Wow. That's cool. I like shit like that. So here's the ambassador and it's actually right across the street from the Rave Eagles Club,

Club, which is another historic building over here. I mean, everything around it is pretty grungy. If you go a couple blocks east, you're going to be in Marquette University, which is right down there, right across the street. So behind where that picture was taken is the Rave Eagles Club. It's like the main. Nothing good really goes there, but then there's Grand Avenue Mall, which is literally just down the street.

Oh, 924 North 25th Street. That was his last known address before his arrest. That was the apartment. Isn't the one that's bulldozed now? That's bulldozed. Oh, okay. Yeah. 924 North 25th Street.

Let me just get a good bearing on where that is. Yeah, because I hear people, I think we've talked about this before. People were selling like little pieces of the rubble, like online. Yes, yes, that's true. Yeah, it's gated off and there's like nothing there right now. The rubble is gated off. Go to Street View. The fence cuts out to like where that building would have been it looks like.

All right, I'm going to Street View right now. See, I see the fence. Yeah, look at it. Because there's those apartment buildings next to it, but it like comes out to the sidewalk. I guess they don't want kids doing seances or fun. fucking on the fucking land. There's gonna be a bunch of edgy teenagers because they're like, let's fuck on

Dahmer's last known residence. You know you would do something like that, so don't even. I would rather fucking summon a demon there. I'm not about all this fucking blood sugar sex magic shit. That's fucking hilarious. It's next to an alley.

Yeah, this is like, I don't know what to make in this neighborhood. It looks like one part projects, and then one part, okay, not so bad. Is that like a fucking hospital across the way? I don't know, man. What is this across the street here? It's literally two blocks away from where he ended up living.

So yeah, that's exactly where I thought he had lived in that apartment. So when I visited Lovecraft's grave, there was always like a bunch of people milling about and leaving things there. I wonder if people would just do the same thing in his last known address. Maybe not because it's not a grave site, but I just imagine all the, the like people making pilgrimages to it and shit. And like the thing is, is this is a predominantly black part of Milwaukee. So I guess he got, he kind of freaked the neighbors out enough that they just kind of left him

alone. I'm not going to mess with that crazy white boy. I wonder if he picked that part of town because, again, going back to his victims of choice, that he thought if he lived in a black neighborhood, it'd be a lot easier for him to kill. Probably. And where was, I believe. I believe Embrosia chocolate is still around. Yeah, because that's where he worked for a little bit.

Yeah. Okay, so that's the warehouse. I have the map up finally. Is this little gated area that's by like an apartment complex? Yeah, that's where he lived. No, rubble. It's just grassy. I can go do cartwheels there if I wanted to.

I can go do cartwheels there all the time. I just think it's hilarious how they put the gate out as far as they could on that spot. So crazy. You were alive, obviously, when, like, the whole aftermath and him getting arrested and all that, I'm sure that was all over the fucking news, right? That's literally all we heard about. There was, uh, I don't remember any of the jokes, but there were jokes going on.

That was, uh, Jesse Anderson. So is this something that's, like, still talked about in town at all, or is it kind of, like, gone? Um, people don't really bring it up because it's, uh, we all know about it. So it's not like it's something that we can teach other people about in our city because we all know about it. It's kind of like why I don't necessarily hate the brewers, but I'm really kind of sick of hearing about the brewers because that's literally all I hear about in this city because it's Milwaukee. I can look out my front door and see Miller Park. So it's just kind of like when it's basically part of where you live, it's just too much it's not like it's like, oh, we don't talk about him. It's more just like, yeah, we all know.

Yeah, what's there to say about it basically. Yeah, essentially. When this was all going on, I get this was like a while ago, do you feel like, because obviously it came out quickly that he was gay and he was praying on other gay people, did that hurt the gay community and people's perspective? of the queer community? I don't necessarily know that I knew he was gay at the time, but I'm pretty sure it had a negative impact, because that was still probably when we were trying to, like, I say we, but when the gay community was trying to,

we were just trying to, like, come out and be who we were, and that was kind of like when things started to happen, but I feel that beat it back immediately. Yeah, because you were younger at the time, so I'm sure you weren't around to experience this, but like, I'm really curious if gays at the time received a sort of backlash or retreated with like, oh, you're like, you're probably like that domer dude. Do you all eat people? Like shit like that, you know what I mean? I haven't heard anybody talk about that, but at the same time, maybe it's just the group I knew weren't out at that time and came out later. Do you feel like Milwaukee in general was, I know there was different areas in the U.S. that, like, being gay in the 90s, it was a little more accepted in certain cities compared to others. San Francisco was definitely a big one. Yeah, absolutely. So would you say that Milwaukee at that period of time wasn't the easiest place to be out in comparatively?

Um, if you have another question, I can think about some people to ask, and I can get a more definitive answer about that. I don't know, it could be hard to say as well, because, like, thinking about it, I kind of followed this case as close as I could as a child back then. And I knew what gay people were. I grew up with, like, tons and tons of gay people, and I had never even heard that he was gay or anything to that effect until I was much older. Really? Because that was something that I, like, again, it was a long time. ago and he was the quintessential serial killer. He was probably the first one that I had ever heard of, but I'm almost positive that I immediately was informed that he was gay. I'm sure that my mom would know 100%. I'm sure she's going to see that immediately. And I'm also, Leviticus is online, so I can ask him to about whether or not they did get backlash.

at the time or not. Okay. But like I said, he's about 50 and some change now. So he was still pretty young at that time, just about to be legal drinking age. So that my head. Mom got back to me. So I don't know if we're recording right now.

I left it running. It's still hot. Okay. So I asked her, did it come out immediately that Dahmer was gay? She says yes, yes, because it was reported that he had found most of his victims at gay bars. My aunt Nancy

actually went to prom with one of his victims. It remains a very hard thing for her to talk about. That's something that I'm just learning. Oh, wow. Shit. Was it? Wow. Okay, so that's my connection, I guess.

A goddamn, small world. Wow. The more old I get, the more and more I realize how fucking tiny this world is. Or, you know. Right. Yeah, I asked my mom if she remembers the guy's name. And she said,

uh, don't remember his name, but he went to Milwaukee High School of the Arts. Look for a black guy about 17 from Milwaukee High School. You're not narrowing it there, tell him there, mom. I did not see anybody 17 years old. Try to see if anyone, like,

every time I type in arts into the... Wait, wait. Curtis Stratter? Let's see. Yeah, Curtis Stratter, 17-year-old. Yeah. Your Marquette University. Yeah, okay, so they don't give Strotter.

Everybody else has, like, a whole paragraph. He has, like, two sentences for Curtis Strawer. Yeah. I just realized, like, the one dude that got away was in his 30s and everybody else. Oh, yeah. But, I mean, age, you can... I've seen people who are that... old and definitely look younger.

Oh, true, true. It's a good point. I mean, I'm one of them, so. My mom says that Curtis Strouder probably is the guy. Yeah, I think that Curtis Strouder was the one that my aunt went to prom with. And I don't

really want to pry because Nancy is definitely the youngest of the sisters, and she's very, I don't want to say soft, because she's a very strong person, but she's an emotional person. Yeah.

I think Curtis Stratter is probably a decent assumption. It's the most. It really sucks because, like, this thing, find a grave. Curtis Durel Stratter, the whole thing is about Dahmer. Murder victim. Stratter was the 10th murder victim of cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dommer was obsessed with young men and boys. It's like, you know, we're talking about a victim here.

Could we like be more, uh, could you tell me about who he was? This just sums up the true crime community here. Yeah, it's never talk about the victims, only talk about the perpetrator.