Indecent Advances
A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Edgar Award finalist, Best Fact Crime
American Masters (PBS), “1 of 5 Essential Culture Reads”
One of CrimeReads’ “Best True Crime Books of the Year”
“A fast–paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look–see into the systematic criminalization of gay men and widespread condemnation of homosexuality post–World War I.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
Stories of murder have never been just about killers and victims. Instead, crime stories take the shape of their times and reflect cultural notions and prejudices. In this Edgar Award–finalist for Best Fact Crime, James Polchin recovers and recounts queer stories from the crime pages―often lurid and euphemistic―that reveal the hidden history of violence against gay men. But what was left unsaid in these crime pages provides insight into the figure of the queer man as both criminal and victim, offering readers tales of vice and violence that aligned gender and sexual deviance with tragic, gruesome endings. Victims were often reported as having made “indecent advances,” forcing the accused's hands in self–defense and reducing murder charges to manslaughter.
As noted by Caleb Cain in The New Yorker review of Indecent Advances, “it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth–century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.” Indecent Advances is the first book to fully investigate these stories of how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful but somewhat gruesome debut work, cultural historian Polchin teases out details of the lives of urban, mostly white gay men from the 1920s through the 1960s via an analysis of newspapers' high-profile, "moral outrage and fascination" driven true crime reports. As he writes, these stories "reflected and amplified the era's social prejudices and state-sanctioned discriminations" and showed the dangers, such as opportunistic thieves and police entrapment, that "queer men were forced to navigate... in their search for sexual adventure and social life." He looks at cultural trends, such as the courtroom defense of "acute homosexual panic" in response to "indecent advances" from the victim, but also digs deeply into individual high-profile cases, often quoting the most lurid details from the original reporting, which will likely delight true crime fans and satisfy academics but deeply disturb other readers. Polchin finishes by recounting the beginnings of progress, as the 1948 Kinsey Report began to influence the understanding of sexuality, the Mattachine Society promoted the idea of homosexuals as a social minority, and ONE magazine looked critically at newspaper reports of crime and highlighted a "collective experience of injury and abuse." Polchin's investigation of several decades of queer American life is an intelligent but darkly voyeuristic experience.
