Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall

by James Polchin

A hybrid of true crime and social history that examines how popular culture, the media, and the psychological profession portrayed crimes against gay men in the years leading up to the Stonewall Riots.

In his skillful hybrid of true crime and cultural history, James Polchin provides an important look at how popular culture, the media, and the psychological profession forcefully portrayed gay men as the perpetrators of the same violence they suffered. He traces how the press depicted the murder of men by other men from the end of World War I to the Stonewall era, when gay men came to be seen as a class both historically victimized and increasingly visible.

Indecent Advances tells the story of how homosexuals were criminalized in the popular imagination—from the sex panics of the 1930s, to Kinsey study of male homosexuality of the 1940s, and the Cold War panic of Communists and homosexuals in government. Polchin illustrates the vital role crime stories played in circulating ideas of normalcy and deviancy, and how those stories were used as tools to discriminate and harm the gay men who were observers and victims of crime. More importantly, Polchin shows how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall Riots of 1968.

A cast of noted public figures—Leopold & Loeb, J Edgar Hoover, Alfred Kinsey, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal—is threaded through this complex subject. Politicians, law enforcement officials, and psychologists weigh in to explain the dangerous relationship between homosexuality and violence.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, True Crime, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Crime

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2019

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early 20th century homophobia rose to a fever pitch in the US. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that homosexuals were a class of “moral criminals who should be committed to insane asylums” (10). Newspapers fanned the flames of this trope of the ‘gay criminal’ with sensationalist stories and headlines that depicted all gay men as dangerous. The narrative went that gay men had “neurotic” desires that they could not restrain and therefore posed a threat to society. The Coronet magazine wrote in 1950 that homosexuals “often throw off all moral restraints” and “descend through perversion to other forms of depravity, such as a drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder” (127).

The creation of the “gay criminal” trope was a strategy to “translate the social and economic turmoil of the 1930s into problems of gender and sexual nonconformity” (63). In the past, sex panics had most often been focused on women – especially sex workers – as a way to pathologize women’s desire for economic mobility and confine women to the domestic sphere. In the early 20th century, sex panics were more focused on controlling male sexuality: images of “transient men, out-of-work men, and men who lived beyond traditional family structures were of particular concern” (64).

Conservatives scapegoated gay people as the crisis to distract people from economic suffering. With the economic collapse of the Great Depression and its mass unemployment, traditional binary gender roles became upended. Psychologists argued that this unemployment caused neurosis among men, similar to shell shock for veterans of WWI. “I guess we’ll all be wearing skirts pretty soon,” one subject told a researcher in the 1930s, adding that seeking government assistance was the “last resort in a losing battle to remain normal” (91). Increasingly, concerns about unemployment were described as problems of gender and sexual normality. Suddenly: the reason people didn’t have jobs is because they weren’t masculine enough, not because of structural inequality.

Framing homosexuality as an attack on straight people has long been a strategy to encourage homophobic violence and erase the ongoing violence against gay people. Despite being targets or relentless homophobic abuse, gay men would exclusively be depicted as perpetrators of violence. When gay bashing was covered, the press would use the term “indecent advance” to suggest – with absolutely no evidence – that gay men were worthy of the abuse they received.

Police would criminalize gay men simply for existing in public, arguing that their mere visibility constituted solicitation. In NYC arrests for “homosexual solicitation” increased from 238 in 1918 to over 750 in 1920. In 1923 the New York State Legislature explicitly criminalized “degenerate disorderly conduct” a vague phrase the police used to criminalize queer people. This law was effectively used to ban the assembly of gay people in public space (40). Because gay men were keenly aware of this homophobic media sensationalism, most did not report hate violence in fear of being fired from work, or even being charged with a felony or facing prison time (43). This is why it’s difficult to accurately account for the history of homophobic violence and murders.

The diffusion of economic precarity into gender and sexual anxiety continues to be a conservative strategy today.

[Robert Sheard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covering the fifty years from the end of World War I to the Stonewall protests in 1969, this is a history of how the media, the medical profession (psychiatry specifically), and the legal system handled cases of violence against queer men. It's a hugely important topic, given the rise in recent years of violence against transgender people. Unfortunately, the book itself is deadly dull. It's written in a dry-as-dust academic tone and is mostly summary after summary of extremely similar newspaper accounts of queer crime stories. Such a shame because the topic in the hands of a storyteller, could have created a much stronger impact on the lay-reader.

[Carley Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for lovers of American history, teachers, print scholars, and anyone who is queer or cares about queer people!

Polchin uncovers a lost archive through a close-reading of newspaper accounts of violence against queer men in pre-Stonewall New York. The results are fascinating and disturbing.

I love this book and think everyone should read it. It's going to win big prizes because honestly there is nothing like it. It's historical, but a page-turner and makes you care deeply (if you already didn't) about the lives of queer men who dared to love, cruise, and try to find community, when there was very little. Polchin weaves research from the era about sexuality and the made-up "homosexual panic," newspaper accounts that turned murder into lurid stories designed to sell copies, and well-known queer literary figures like James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and the often problematic Carl Van Vechten.

Lastly, this is a perfect read for the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. It helped me understand why so many queer people rose up at this moment. They were tired of being policed, killed, and having their stories taken from them in service of a homophobic narrative.

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read, packed with case after case of killers trying to get away with their crimes -- sometimes successfully! -- using the "homosexual panic" defense. The author did the opposite of what I expected here. Instead of starting out with a statement about what he believes and using the cases to support that thesis, he simply describes what he was able to find out about every situation, letting the sheer number of killings, and the innuendo and hatred swirling around each case, finally speak for themselves. This doesn't read like a true-crime compilation, either, which is what I was expecting when I went in. I came away with the feeling that there must be hundreds more murders like these that the author couldn't fit into his book...

[Bob Nadal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable and disturbing look at the oppression of homosexuals from WWI through the 60s. James Polchin did an amazing job gathering together the psychiatry, journalism, entertainment and true crime stories from the era. He shows how they reinforced the rigid stereotypes, fears and hatred that continue through today.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engrossing, well-researched look at true crime and prejudicial treatment of gay men in the decades leading up to Stonewall. I found this book incredibly interesting but also very disturbing. The term "indecent advances" was often used in earlier decades as a defense in court by murderers of gay men; justification for why they acted out and killed as they did (by saying the victim made "indecent" or "improper advances" on them). All too often, the perpetrator/killer thus got off with a lighter sentence for their crime, as courts almost saw them doing society a bit of a service by getting rid of those whom they deemed "sexual perverts". There were all manner of sneaky, creative crimes and set-ups during these earlier decades to ensnare LGBTQ people. Did you know that, after WWI, there were actually "stings" where straight members from the Navy/service were sent out to flirt with, then trap gay men in the cities? I did not know about this... insane and troubling.

Polchin also delves into psychological studies and views of the time, where researchers and psychoanalysts would look at photos of young men and point out specific feminine features which could suggest the male was highly prone to being gay, or acting out on homosexual tendencies. In today's light, these observations seem ludicrous, but nonetheless, these were widely held tenets.

As a member of the LGBTQ community, this was a troubling read for me occasionally. I love reading about true crime, but this felt like it hit close to home at times. It is important we understand and are aware of this shocking history so we are not doomed to repeat it. Despite how much I got into this, it was a touch dry at times, which is why I can't quite bump it to 4 stars, but anyone interested in both true crime and LGBTQ history might find this read worthwhile. (I did round it to 4 stars for Good Reads, which does not allow 1/2 stars.)

[Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am Amazed in Polchin's dedication to telling queer history and including the crimes aganist gay men in a time where LGBTQ rights did not exist to right before stonewall. A must read for those who love history and true crime.

[Charlott · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "Indecent Advances" James Polchin looks at US news reports on crimes between the end of World War I and Stonewall in order to unearth queer (his)stories. I think it is always so interesting to create queer archives out of archives which were never meant to document queer lives.

In going through these news reports Polchin illustrates how queerness was criminalized (and conceptualized through a criminological lense) and how queer victims of crimes were targeted. He shows how the "gay criminal" was invented to target gender and sexual nonconformity in times of societal upheaval and how "gay panic" was developed as concept and used to further victimize the queer victims of crimes - the title "Indecent Advances" refers to a common defense brought forward by men who murdered other men ("He made indecent advances and I has to defend myselfe/ I panicked/ etc."). Through many examples it becomes clear how the general public consumed violence against queer people and how stereotypes were forged. Polchin also tries to point to how queerness, class, race, etc are all categories which shape in their interconnectedness what and how was reported.

The renarration of many of the crimes did get a bit repetetive at some point. Of course, it is helpful it show certain patterns but I feel this could have written and discussed better. In general, I always felt there were options to have analyses going even deeper and being more precise. For example, Polchin uses the term "queer man" throughout without any distinction even when some of the descriptions of what we can know about a person might make you question if this term really captures them best. I just would have liked to see some reflections on that.

[Michael Kerr · Rating 3 out of 5]

LGBTQ+ history is mostly invisible and largely lost. Here, Polchin uses an ingenious method to recover some of that history by analyzing American crime reports from the end of WWI to Stonewall. The result, however, is a somewhat harrowing litany of murder and mayhem, with the perpetrators frequently getting off, or getting reduced sentences, by claiming the victim made "indecent advances" toward them--and therefore the victim is the one to blame. Thank God this isn't the whole story, but it is definitely a part of the story and Polchin deserves recognition for highlighting the underlying state of terror LGBTQ+ people had to endure in our recent past.

[Sineala · Rating 2 out of 5]

I somehow assumed from the title of this book that it would provide focus on, say, one specific instance of a gay hate crime and go through all the evidence and all the newspaper coverage and build up some kind of biography of the people involved. Not so. It's basically a survey of a bunch of similar crimes from the same pre-Stonewall era; I hesitate to call them "gay panic" because a lot of them involved what looks like stalking and premeditated murder.

The book feels really haphazard and unfocused, a list of whatever crimes the author could find. They're all very similar and they're not sorted or categorized; this book really has no organizing principle. It's not until the conclusion that the author explains why this is so haphazard, namely that a lot of these crimes weren't reported, at the time, as having any particular gay connection, so a lot of this seems to be just what he could turn up in the newspaper archives about men who died mysteriously in hotel rooms after a male stranger visited them. So this is nowhere near a complete or exhaustive catalog of any of these crimes, and there's not, say, discussion of how these are different (or not) from more modern hate crimes, so it's basically just a spotty and depressing list of murders with no real discussion or analysis.

The conclusion also namedrops the documentary Tearoom, which I have seen; I thought it was incredibly sad and incredibly powerful and did a good job of very viscerally making its point. It's an hour of basically raw footage of a police sting operation in a public restroom in 1962, with no commentary. I feel like if this is a topic you're interested in at all you might as well just go watch Tearoom instead of reading this book because you'll definitely understand the situation emotionally much better, and this book is scattershot enough that you're not going to get more than a vague emotional understanding of the situation anyway.

[Corey Ledin-Bristol · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am sorry to say it but this book was dull. You would think that such a topic would elicit some kind of emotions but the book us written in such a sterile, efficient style it comes across as someone just reading news articles.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a surgeon’s precision, Polchin excises “ripped from the headlines” stories of violence against gay men between the 1920s and 1960s, focusing heavily on the "what" but rarely the "why."

[Aislinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only indecent thing about this book is how criminally boring it is.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Polchin looks at the history of true crimes that relate to homosexuality and how they were represented in media prior to Stonewall. He places these crimes in a larger historical context allowing the reader to understand how representations of homosexuality changed over time.

“The history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants,’ writes the critic Heather Love. 19

“Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage,” Love argues adding, “Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage we that we live in the present.” 20

Within these social changes, a paradox about sexuality in the years leading up to World War I became clear: at the very moment that science and medicine were offering new theories of same-sex desire and new categories that proscribed sexual identities, sexual deviancy was increasingly viewed as a dire social and criminal threat. 27

The Depression-era 1930s gave us the sex criminal, a vague character that included a big net of suspects, from child molesters and rapists to queer men. 28

While the problem of homosexuality had been a concern for doctors and moral reformers for a number of years, World War I marked a watershed in both the understanding of homosexuality and the policing of it, as the legal and medical professions increasingly focused on sexual deviancy as a dire social problem…
Among its other revelations, the inquiry illustrated the different ways that sexuality was understood across classes. For many of the working-class enlisted men, sexual activities were viewed through gender roles, such that a homosexual encounter was acceptable if the man played the ‘masculine’ role during sex. However, middle-class officers tended to view same-sex sexual contacts with the language of the era’s social reformers-a troubling, unhealthy vice and a threat to social purity, regardless of the sexual position. As the historian George Chauncey notes, the Newport scandal ‘brought so many groups of people-working, middle-class gay and straight-identified enlisted men, middle-class naval officers, ministers, and town officials-into conflict, it revealed how differently those groups interpreted sexuality.’ 45-46

In 1921, Kempf published Psychopathology, an exhaustive 762-page study that detailed a range of psychological conditions and treatments, including anxieties, neuroses, and personality disorders, to name a few. Chapter 10 of the study outlined Kempf’s theory of ‘acute homosexual panic.’ Based primarily on his work with nineteen young soldiers and sailors who suffered a number of mental trauma resulting from their experiences in World War I, the theory pointed to a tension between sexual desires and social interaction. “The mechanism of the homosexual panic (panic due to the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings),” wrote Kempf, “is one of the utmost importance in psychopathology, because of the frequency of its occurrence wherever men or women must be grouped along for prolonged periods, as in army camps, aboard ships, on exploration expeditions, in prisons, monasteries, schools and asylums. For Kempf, type problem of homosexual panic threatened the functioning of highly gendered spaces, particularly those where masculinity and U.S. empire building converged, such as the military and exploration. In this sense, acute homosexual panic was as much about national readiness as it was about individual psychology. 52-53

Kempf’s use of photographic evidence was not new in medical studies of mental illness or sexuality. During World War I, the military used photographs of naked recruits to weed out possible sexual abnormalities. 55

While Psychopathology was met with a mixture of criticism and praise when it was first published, Kempf’s theory of acute homosexual panic found its way into clinical practices for the next several decades and would, in the coming years, become a common defence in the murder of queer men in the crime pages and in courtrooms. 122-123

With their emphasis on urban vice and police Authority, queer crime stories like this reflected a new reality of American life: for the first time more Americans lived in cities and in rural areas. During World War I, African-Americans move north and large numbers to work in factories that supported the war effort-a migration that would increase through the 1920s. For over three decades, cities had been bulging with an influx of immigrants, creating diverse and often overcrowded neighbourhoods. Bohemian neighbourhoods of arts and writers were also expanding and becoming more visible in the 1920s, not only for speakeasies and arising popularity of cabarets and jazz clubs, but also as spaces were young men and women, independent and unfettered by the social memo of values of family and rural communities, found new expressions of social and sexual life. 75

As if such a rest numbers were insufficient, in 1923 the New York State legislature revise the disorderly conduct statute to criminalize “degenerate disorderly conduct”-a vague freezing that police in courts would use for all manner of queer associations. But the statute would have a more powerful use in the years to come. As historian George Chauncey notes, the law “became one of the underpinnings of new state regulations after the repeal of prohibition in 1933, that for the first time, specifically and formally banned the assembly of gay people in a public space.” 76

Such mysterious newspaper accounts were familiar enough by the early 1930s that they formed a key part of the plot of Niles Blair’s 1931 novel Strange Brother. Described by its publisher as ‘a brave and daring story about the dilemma of an intermediate man in modern society,” it was one of many gay novels published in the late 1920s and early 1930s during what George Chauncey has termed the “pansy craze”-an era when homosexual cultural expression, including drag balls, campy cabaret performances, and serious novels and plays about gay experiences, were in vogue. In Blair’s novel, the queer protagonist, Mark Thornton, navigate his desires am made a hostile and unsympathetic society. In a letter to his friend Peggy, Mark recount his aimless cruising around the city at night seeking to find “someone suffering like myself,” adding, “I get so worn out with thinking of sex.” For Mark, homosexual desires are “not a phase of life, as it ought to be, but life itself.” 81-82

These tensions were hasten by the rise of “new psychology” in the United States through health self-help books, films, popular literature, and confession and romance magazines bringing theories of psychoanalysis to the broader public in the 1920s and 1930s. Central to these new ideas was a focus on the psycho sexual aspects of personality development, and how childhood development was a key influence on adult behaviours. The reviewer of two new text about abnormal psychology declared in The New Republic in 1922, “everybody who is anybody, or wants to be, has a ‘psychology’ today, and makes knowing remarks about other people’s.” 101

Embodying a number of anxieties about aberrant masculinity, the sex criminal translated the social and economic turmoil of the 1930s into problems of gender and sexual non-conformity. In state houses, newspapers, and psychiatric journals, the sex criminal was most acutely defined in a neologism of the era: the sexual psychopath. Such a figure and body to wide range of mental and physical characteristics and exhibited such harmless behaviours as voyeurism, masturbation, and sodomy to the more violent offences of rape, Child sexual assault, and murder. By the late 1930s, newspapers and magazines, such as Collier’s, The Nation, Christian Century, Newsweek, and Literary Digest, we're offering readers all manner of commentaries and discussion about the problem of sex crimes and sexual psychopath. While criminologists, psychiatrists, and lawyers with debate the origins of and responses to the sexual psychopath for decades, at its core was an understanding that sexual and gender deviance caused violent criminal behaviour.
Though the figure of the sexual psychopath embodied the broader public debates about decency and normality, it also fuelled a sex crime panic that took cold in the press in the late 1930s. Sex panics had ab and slowed in the press since the late 19 century, often directed to the bodies of women and the problems of female prostitution. Sensation lie news accounts of the murders of young women were coupled with commentaries about female purity, the dangers of women in public spaces, or moral outrage about the scourge of prostitution. In reporting such murders, newspaper is not only shaped the meanings and interpretations of the crimes, but also, in more subtle ways, convey ideas of female virtue and the dangers of women going out alone. These panics, with their definitions and prescriptions about femininity, had the effect of controlling the behaviours and boundaries of women's bodies in public.
In the 1930s and 1940s, however, sex crime panic were more often focussed on controlling abnormal forms of male sexuality. The the images of transient men, out of work men, and men who live beyond traditional family structures were of particular concern, of subject of interest for social scientist and criminologists. Increasingly, the contrasting attributes of either feminize men or overly masculine ones reviewed the symptoms of violent criminality. Often these panics were prompted by sensationalized accounts of sexually motivated child murders or, like Walter’s killing of the young Blanche Cousins, the violent murder of women-crimes that found the fears of a broader threat of sexual perversion in the community. The arrest of Albert Fish in New York in 1934 for the murder of twelve-year-old Grace Budd, for example, captured headlines for nearly two years, until his execution in January 1936. Accused of murdering and cannibalizing Budd, the sixty-four-year-old Fish confessed to other child killings, details of which filled the press. With the public preoccupied by his case, fuelled by sustained news coverage, Fish came to embody the monstrosity of the sex criminal, linking in the popular imagination the horrors of sex offenders with child killers. 107-109

The abduction and murder of ten-year-old Charles Mattson in Tacoma, Washington, in December 1936 continue to stoke these fears. While initially the investigation involved only the local police, it quickly enlisted the help of J Edgar Hoover's FBI and soon garnered national headlines. Within weeks, Mattson’s body was found in a wooded area fifty miles outside of Tacoma. Press account of the crime offered gruesome details, including how Mattson was found naked with his hands bound, his skull crushed, his teeth knocked out, and his face and body badly bruised. The coroner also noted that there was a non-fatal stab wound in his back. President Franklin Roosevelt called the murder “ghastly” and pledged a relentless search by the FBI for the killers. Employing the help of a psychiatrist, FBI agents developed a profile of the killer as a “sexual pervert” with “sexual abnormalities.” Despite a drug that involve detaining and a limiting nearly 24,000 suspects, the killer was never found. Nonetheless, the FBI use the search to expand the growing archive of political radicals and subversive that Hoover had begun in the 1920s to include sexual degenerates, homosexuals, and others detained or arrested for sex crimes. 110

In contrast to such dire criminal justice approaches, others argued for stricter medical treatment. In 1937, the well-known and respected science journalist Marjorie Van De Water published a series of syndicated columns entitled “Sex Crimes” suggesting several reforms. Drawing on the increase of sex crime stories in the newspapers, Van per Water claimed that “murder is adding its horrors to the attacks upon little boys and girls and are [sic] daily becoming more numerous.” 112

As Van de Water’s Collins were finding eager readers in the fall of 1937, J Edgar Hoover called for his own “War on the Sex Criminal!” In the pages of the Los Angeles Times. Hoover stoked the fears of readers by claiming that the “sex fiend, most loathsome of all the vast army of crime, has become a sinister threat to the safety of American childhood and womanhood.” 113

Born into a wealthy Chicago family, Loeb, along with his friend Nathan Leopold, was serving a life sentence plus ninety-nine years for the 1924 kidnapping and murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks-a “thrill kill” that generated national and international press coverage in what newspapers deemed the “crime of the century.” Leopold and Loeb-who, when they killed Franks, were nineteen and eighteen, respectively-possessed exceptional intelligence and social privilege. 120

The professional class struggled to respond to this conundrum. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Benjamin Karpman, the chief psychotherapist at Saint Elizabeths hospital in Washington, DC, advocated for a view of homosexuality as a social problem rather than a mental disease. Karpman would become one of the leading advocates for the need for psychological treatment of sex criminals and a harsh critic of the criminalization of homosexuality in the years after World War II. 133

Queer men referred to the bathrooms in the Times Square Subway station as the “sunken gardens” for the many sexual adventures that could be had in them. While the police were vigilant in their surveillance, routinely arresting men for solicitation, the intrigue and danger of the bathrooms held sexual possibilities for many men. This reputation extended beyond queer circles, as men who lived much of their lives as heterosexual could find quick and anonymous sex underground. But the bathrooms were no utopia. Not only were men susceptible to police arrests, they were also victims of violence and robbery by “lush workers” targeting those who were cruising for sexual encounters. 142-143

As notions of masculinity lost their moorings in work life during the decade, concerns about joblessness and transiency among working class men were offering describe has also problems of gender and sexual normality.
A study based on the ongoing work of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants in New York City, published in the academic journal Mental Hygiene in 1938, was one of the first of its kind to look at homosexuality among working class men, albeit only those who had been arrested or sentence for criminal offences. Such studies illustrated how researchers of homosexuality often turn to places linked to criminology, like prison, courts, and mental hospitals, to find subjects and research respondents. Drawing on court records and individual interviews with men convicted of a range of felonies and misdemeanours, the study to find three types of homosexuals: the orderly homosexual, the exhibitionist fairy, and the hoodlum. 148

Such violence in the 1930s was not new. Queer men, particularly effeminate queer men, in earlier decades were often vulnerable to robbery and rape by Irish and Italian gangs in New York City, and by groups of young men looking to “Roll a queer.” While fairies, notes historian George Chauncey, may have been tolerated, they were often regarded as women, and as such “they were subject to the contempt and violence regularly directed against women.” Middle class urban queers were particularly susceptible when they ventured into working class neighbourhoods, slumming for thrills and pleasures…
In 1934, Robert Coates published the first fictional story of a queer bashing in American literature…
His story, “One Night at Coney,” was initially rejected by The New Yorker, but eventually it was published in the more daring American Mercury magazine, and republished in The American Mercury Reader in 1944.
“One Night at Coney” begins with the image of two boys-one mulatto and one white-“dancing for pennies” in front of an evening crowd gathered at the boardwalk midway on Coney Island. Their movements, the narrator tells us, hint at the "sexual margins” of their play, but it is the “fairy” in the crowd that the story centre is on. This nameless “thin-bodied” man has an “abnormally round soft face and wide mouth” and wears a “deliberately shabby and disreputable looking” raincoat. He watches the dancers with an uncontrolled enthusiasm, his body “rocking convulsively” while his delight "greased his face.” Moved by the spectacle to seek a connection, he turns and speaks to a young “slick haired and sharp featured” Italian boy with the skin colour of mahogany. “let's do things together,” the man says to the boy. "let's wander down to Feldman's and sip a beer.” The boy replies with an enthusiastic grin and a short heart punch to his face. The man is left to “twist and turn as he might” as the boys pursue him “towards whatever dark Alley they might corner him in at last.” The story’s narrator expresses a feeling of empathy in his recognition of the man’s “terrible aloneness… nowhere, not even in the thickest crowd, could he find a comrade, nowhere where could he make a stand.”
At the end of the story we are presented an image of a bruised and battered victim in the sad state of dissolve: 150-152

…published in 1941 in the Journal of Criminal Psychopathology. In “A Note on Homosexuality, Crime, and the Newspapers,” sociologist F.A. McHenry argued for more explicit references to the queer subtext of crime stories-particularly when those crime stories involved working in class men. 158

For example, in one crime story about nine youths who robbed a man on a train platform, McHenry noted that the article “was sent me by a western colleague with a pencil marginalia: ‘Red between the lines!” The indication that McHenry and his network of colleagues were engaged in such reading practises, aware of the queer subtext simmering in the crime pages, illustrated how common such detection practises were. 160

“Once a man assumes the role of homosexual,” wrote the editors of Coronet, a widely circulated magazine, in 1950, “he often throws off all moral restraints,” adding that such men "to send through perversion to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” This progressive model of perversion, in which antisocial behaviour spirals toward ever increasing, dire forms of violence, was a prevalent idea in popular magazines and newspaper articles about sex crimes in the late 1940s. 199-200

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grateful someone wrote this: important. But the coherence/readability of the writing style was not super engaging. More college thesis than popular Pinker-esque treatise. Again, important.

[Pete Bottiglieri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is must read! I can see it being a hard read for some, somewhat on the subject matter, and for the fact that it is written accounts of incidents. What shocked me the most is how much each story sound familiar and how similar they are to accounts of today. This is also an account of the "Gay Panic" became a popular defense in some murder trails. It's also infuriating is the news accounts and the victim blaming the stories and public did. Regardless of sexuality, these were murders and robberies, as well as hate crimes.
It is also sad how slow things are changing in regards of this. It made me flashback to Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena who were murdered in a similar fashion as a lot of these cases, and how the people who murdered them ( straight white males) attempted to use some form of the gay panic defense. In Shepard's murder the said they murdered him because he came onto them, even though they picked him up. Teena's murder was because he was trans, and even though his girlfriend knew, his murders did it because it "wasn't right ".

[John Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How many more times must the innocent die and the guilty go free before the unsubstantiated claim of an 'indecent proposal' ceases to be an alibi for robbery and murder?"
One magazine 1959

"There is no Negro problem except that created by Whites; no Jewish problem except that created by Gentiles; To which I add: and no homosexual problem except that created by heterosexual society."
"The Homosexual in America" 1951 by Donald Webster Cory

This is a brutal but important read. Society has traveled a long road to acceptance of LGBTQ people with several miles to go. The author cites many cases where the suspected murderers lured their victims and then claimed self defense because the victim acosted the,

[Katie]

"Queer history has often focused on narratives of progress in which sexual minorities prosper despite the social injustices done to them. The progressive and affirmative narrative has made injury and violence historical realities we often write against, through an emphasis on community building, cultural expressions, and political activism. [...] But there is another story of queer experience, one that tries to recover encounters much deadlier than the ones Williams recorded in his journal. 'Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage, [...] paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.'"

[Noemi Lynch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important book, talking about the history of criminalizing being gay(from WWI to Stonewall). Covered the legal defense of homosexual panic, the way the news reported different aspects and what they didn't report. However, it was so boring. Went over so many newspaper accounts that were so similar they were starting to blur. It was more of a list which made it lose emotional impact. I often felt I had trouble remembering what year we were talking about which wasn't helped by the author's habit of saying "In that same year,".

[Chris Cangiano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Polchin has crafted a powerful narrative concerning the public and legal status of gay men in the period from Post World War I up to just prior to the Stonewall riot as seen through the perspective crime reportage in newspapers in those periods and following up key court records concerning some of the more shocking and unfortunately prevalent cases. He uncovers a clear cycle of legal persecution, public opprobrium and media frenzy that led to decades of simultaneous demonization and victimization of gay Americans. A sad testament but an important read. Highly recommended

[Matthew Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man in the park asks another man for a match. The two strike up a conversation and head to a hotel room, giving false names at the desk because it's the 1900s and they ask for names at the desk. Cards are played, pants are removed, and one or the other is beaten to death. Times infinity.

I like how Polchin compares salacious big city headlines with the headlines of the hometowns that these murderers and victims came from.

[Marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before this book, I had not been too familiar with this part of US history, and it was interesting to read about through analysis of related news articles. The tone is meticulously researched, but that also means it feels academic - more like reading a textbook. A worthwhile read.

[Sarah - All The Book Blog Names Are Taken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books like this make my heart hurt because these crimes are still being committed against the LBGTQIA+ community. Here’s the deal: God doesn’t make mistakes, so if someone is gay, that is how He intended them to live, the end.

Review to come.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

A study on the ways the criminal justice system and the media coded and approached crime against gay men in the years after WWI through the early 1960s. Polchin combed newspaper accounts and crime records to look at the different ways victimized gay men were described in the media, and how the court system (you couldn't really call it the justice system), with the support of some psychologists, protected their abusers and killers. Think of the "gay panic" defense.

The stories get a bit repetitive, sadly, and the parade of violence is a bit much to take. Polchin not only looks at the media in the cities where many of these crimes took place, but looks at how the victims' fates were reported in their hometown papers, where terms like "bachelor" and "artist" and "handsome young man" might mean something to those who knew what to look for. In the worst cases, reporting on these crimes turned entire gay communities into scapegoats for concerns about "sex maniacs," where any sexual crime at all was laid at the feet of the local "perverts." It all seems so medieval and depressing, and unfortunately, is a mindset that still exists.

A very interesting book with a lot of detailed research, but kind of hard to read.

[Derek Kreider · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am just starting to learn how prolific and longstanding the violence and discrimination towards the gay community has been. I mean, it's not surprising, it's just that you don't really realize the depths until you dig into it.

The author of this book did a tremendous amount of work to piece all of this historical data together. I can't imagine searching for these stories, not only because of how old some are, but because they're shrouded in obscuring language. Because of that, I found the author's plethora of examples to be vital to his case. I mean, you know there are people out there who do abuse others, so finding a case here or there where someone claims that they killed in self-defense because of "indecent advances," you'd expect that to happen. But the investigative insight of the author is great in making the case that this whole indecent advance thing was often just an excuse to get away with robbing or killing gay people. It's a compelling case that illuminates a history I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

[rhae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes what we don't know or understand can become sensationalized and oppressed beyond comprehension. The way that these hidden histories are only the surface of what the press considered to be "worthy" of putting on paper and not the countless other crimes committed without reports. The way that only certain cases were brought to light if they were both white males in conflicting social classes or if it happened to be a man of color, then he was the aggressor no questions asked. The racism, the transmisogyny, the misogyny, and the homophobia are so interwoven in how these stories were told. It is the way that these acts of violence are within the last century - these are not so far into the past to be forgotten. Yes, we have come far in our efforts to get a seat at the table, but in light of recent events, we still have much more left to do.

[Luka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pride Month 2021

incredibly well researched. very engaging to read and the way the author drew the connections between the crime cases and the attitude towards queer people was exceptionally well done imo. my heart just breaks for all the people who didn't even get the little mention in the newspaper, mostly black people and people of colour. the author also did a great job explaining the ways race and sexuality intersected in the cases, how in the media poc were mostly portrayed as the perpetrator of the crimes. also loved the discussions on the role class and age played in those crimes and the way the police handled the cases. would also totally recommend listening to the audiobook, for people who enjoy true crime podcasts.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3-1/2 stars) The point the author makes here is interesting and important, about the way crimes against gay men were treated in the press, and how that accusation of "indecent advances" was used as an attempt to justify assault and murder. But much of the book is simply a presentation of case after case of these crimes. A little less of that and a little more context and/or theory, especially more coverage of the idea of "homosexual panic" as a defense--which continued at least into the 1990s--would have made this an even more interesting read.

[Laura Coulton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very informative book, and an interesting read, however it is unfortunately so very dull. Quite repetitive in the story-telling, I was really hoping for a lot more information on stonewall and how that changed the history of the queer community, but it was a lot of the same thing. I did learn a lot, but it took me a hang of a long time to read due to it not being overly stimulating.

I will have to give it to the author though, this was obviously very thoroughly and intensely researched. There is a wealth of knowledge here and was quite clearly a labour of love.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly well-researched; Polchin has exhaustively mined American newspapers of the first half of the 20th century for the countless instances of homophobic violence that were either glossed over or weaponized against queer life. The prose isn't particularly moving and the book feels a little unfinished in its conclusions and interpretation. Still a very interesting read if you're after true crime that's not pro-cop/voyeuristic/otherwise evil.