Confession (TV series)

Confession
Genre	Crime/Drama Reality show
Starring	Jack Wyatt
Country of origin	USA
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	ca. 30
Production
Location(s)	Dallas, Texas at WFAA-TV studios
Cinematography	Black and white
Running time	30 minutes
Release
Original network	ABC
Original release	June 19, 1958 – January 13, 1959
Chronology
Preceded by	Naked City (9:30 p.m. Eastern)
Followed by	John Daly and the News (10:30 Eastern)

Confession is an ABC crime/police documentary which was broadcast from June 19, 1958, to January 13, 1959, with interviewer Jack Wyatt questioning assorted criminals. The program was recorded by videotape from WFAA-TV, the network affiliate in Dallas, Texas.

Criminals contacted included prostitutes, drug abusers, sex offenders, and murderers. A 22-year-old transvestite named Darrell Wayne Kahler was interviewed late during 1957, when the program was local in scope, was broadcast late Sunday evenings by WFAA, and had not yet been included in the ABC schedule. According to a news article in the magazine Time, on December 30, 1957, Kahler was supplied to Confession by the police, who had arrested him as a drunken woman being molested by three men. The officers did not discover his gender until he was in the station house. The police permitted Kahler to get into a cocktail dress for a filmed re-enactment of his arrest. Wyatt used the film and then placed the camera on Kahler in a jail uniform behind bars.

In a contralto voice, Kahler said that he earned his living as a nightclub B girl. Kahler said that he had never known his father and that his mother had "a lot of marriages." He said that schoolmates had long taunted him and that he was a chain smoker who used large quantities of alcohol in despair. The program was shocking by the television standards of the 1950s.

Methodist minister Walter Underwood joined the program to say that his denomination does not condemn transvestites but offers "its sympathy, its help, its counsel." A psychiatrist, John C. Montgomery, said that Kahler's conditions "can be helped if it can be gotten to soon enough. He's been trying to be like his mother all his life. Physically, organically, there's no reason in the world why this should be. He has all the attributes of the male—- except for the fact that he doesn't want to be." Montgomery said that the "problem can be laid at the parents' doorstep."

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Wikipedia