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    Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
    Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
    Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Written by James Polchin

    Narrated by Michael Crouch

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A skillful hybrid of true crime and social history that examines the relationship between the media and popular culture in the portrayal of crimes against gay men in the decades before Stonewall.

    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 Indecent Advances, 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.

    What was left unsaid in the 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.

    Published in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising on June 28, 1969, Indecent Advances investigates 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 4, 2019
    ISBN9781978684751
    Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
    Author

    James Polchin

    JAMES POLCHIN, PhD, has taught at the Princeton Writing Program, the Parsons School of Design, the New School for Public Engagement, and the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. A clinical professor at New York University, he lives in New York City with his husband, the photographer Greg Salvatori. Indecent Advances is his first book.

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    • 4/5
      Being an account of murders of homosexuals during the period between WWI and the Stonewall riot, with considerable emphasis on how they were covered in the press. The book is very interesting and informative, to a point. However, readers who are not fans of true crime writing surely will eventually find the endless litany of gruesome killings pretty monotonous, and this is not helped by the samey modus operandii, viz., bind and strangle, with occasional pausings to bash a skull or offer up a gunshot. The author does attempt to bring in some tangents, but generally they consist of literary criticism, another genre I'm not too fond of. The book was at its best when it finished off the crime narratives and recounted the breathless tone of the newspaper accounts and, to a lesser extent, the courtroom arguments and reactions of judge and jury. It might be useful to add that this is perhaps the first book I have read which was published in this century which is free from errors typographical, syntactical, grammatical, and there are even no homonym errors. Congratulations to author, editor, and publisher!