Publishers Weekly Talks with James Polchin

“What sparked your interest in true crime reportage involving queer men?

Years ago, I came across these scrapbooks by Carl Van Vechten at the Yale archive. He was a pretty big character of modernism in the 1920s and ’30s in New York and Paris. He collected all sorts of books and records and ephemera. One of his scrapbooks was homoerotic material—photographs he’d taken, drag ball flyers. Interspersed with all these materials were true crime clippings. It was the first time I’d encountered small articles that were coded in their queer subtext. They were clearly important to Van Vechten as part of this world, and this period, that he wanted to memorialize. That started me thinking about how true crime played a role in, or was important to, queer sensibility.”

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