For many of my friends, I point to this good article in the local paper looking back on 50 years ago, just down the road.

On Feb. 4, 1957, a Guilford County grand jury emerged from its closed session and issued a bundle of indictments of a scope unlike any before or since — against 32 men accused of being homosexual.

After witnesses named the men during police interrogations, the suspects were tried one by one in a Greensboro courtroom for crimes against nature, almost exclusively with consenting adults.

The now-obscure episode, which some longtime residents came to call "the purge," was the largest attempted roundup of homosexuals in Greensboro history and marked one of the most intense gay scares of the 1950s.

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Some 32 trials in the winter and spring of 1957 would end in guilty verdicts, 24 of them resulting in prison terms of five to 20 years, with some defendants assigned to highway chain gangs.

Read the whole thing.  Hard to believe, but then again, not really.

FOOTNOTE:  Following the likes of Durham, Chapel Hill and other NC communities, Greensboro is moving toward granting domestic partnership benefits.