Anna North

What are some of the patterns you saw when you were reading these stories?

James Polchin

What fascinated me in the research was how these crime stories really did reflect the era’s anxieties. In the 1930s, the Depression, these stories of working-class men and wealthier companions were very prominent. The crime stories in that period also were about law and order, how the state was constantly on top of keeping law and order in a period that felt very unstable and very chaotic.

In the 1950s, and the postwar, Cold War period, you have the influences of [sexologist Alfred] Kinsey, and other newer theories of homosexuality that saw it more as an invisible threat. You see that in the crime stories. You see these ideas of homosexuals and communism: “You never know who might be a homosexual.” And the crime stories kind of play that out as well — we have a lot of stories of men who are married, men who are married with kids, seemingly normal men who had engaged in picking up men and taking them to a hotel room.

The crime stories really concentrated on a set of cultural values and beliefs around crime, or sexuality, or politics, in those decades before Stonewall.

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