"JAMES POLCHIN’S FORMIDABLY RESEARCHED Indecent Advances is an account of three decades of horrifying acts of homicidal fury directed at gay men, as culled from newspaper reports from the 1920s through the 1950s. Beyond recovering this tragic history and its forgotten victims, Polchin’s book explores the context and significance of these murders. Most broadly, he connects them to the association of homosexuality with criminality that characterized this period of American life, caught between the glittering lights of the Roaring Twenties, the cultural gag order of the Hays Code, and the postwar Red Scare. Polchin also writes about the medicalization of homosexuality in the first half of the 20th century — the ways in which a new industry of therapists and doctors accounted for homosexuality as disease and disorder. Finally, quoting critic Heather Love, he argues that “‘[m]odern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage,” so that “‘[p]aying attention to what was difficult in the past […] makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.’” This raises important questions about the origins and meaning of the concept of “gay pride,” which has become the more-or-less official motto of the LGBT community.”

Read more at the Los Angeles Review of Books