Gay Panic: Stories of Straight Men Who Kill the Gay Men Who Love Them

by David McConnell

Here's the America that everyone, both gay and straight, needs to know about. Included among the true crime


Matt Williams and his brother were raised with peculiar beliefs. When they tried to start a racial holy war to clean up a sick society, they included a gay couple on their hit list. Joshua Cottrell's grifter family was so used to lies they didn't believe him when he said he'd killed a friend. After Richie Phillips' body was found stuffed in a suitcase at the bottom of a lake, his mother and aunts recalled how Joshua always said he didn't like fags. Terry Mangum claimed he went to a gay bar to find someone who'd pay for him to go to welding school. Later he said he'd planned the murder for six months after reading the Bible for thousands of hours. John Katehis, a sixteen-year-old who answered a Craigslist ad from "SmotherMe." A well-known New York radio personality, "SmotherMe" was later found stabbed on the bed in his Brooklyn apartment. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives all come breathtakingly alive. Researched from small-town Alabama to San Quentin State Prison, these stories play out before the reader's eyes exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of real events—grisly, touching, and disturbing.

David McConnell is the author of The Silver Hearted and The Firebrat , as well as a journalist.

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2010

About the author

David McConnell has been writing and thinking about the written word his entire life. Self-taught, he created his own curriculum of ancient literature. His fictionalized memoir, The Firebrat, came out in 2003 and was nominated for a Violet Quill Award.
He is now working on a true crime non-fiction project entitled GAY PANIC: True Stories of Straight Men Who Kill Gay Men. He is also continuing a twenty-year project, an unfinished poem in an invented syllabic form, The Square.

McConnell was born in 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, attended The Hawken School, Choate/Rosemary Hall, Shaker Heights High Schooland lasted a year at Columbia College in New York City.

While living in upstate New York, he published a literary magazine with Nora Wright, the poet Tory Dent and James Cheney.

Peripatetic for a while, McConnell lived in a white high rise overlooking Lake Erie, then sublet the painter Joe Brainard's Green Street loft in New York City, then moved to Hudson, New York, for a single year, then relocated to Paris, France, for five.

After returning to New York, he got a pilot's license and, for a short time, taught elementary math to prisoners on Riker's Island. He now lives with sometime Mississippi businessman Darrell Crawford in a West Chelsea townhouse where he has been the host of countless parties honoring his many literary friends and their works.

Read more about him at www.DavidMcConnell.com"