Michael Nava Reviews INDECENT ADVANCES at Los Angeles Review of Books

"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

James Polchin Talks with Camille Leblanc at Crime Reads

“Both a social history and a true crime page-turner—a primer in the evolution of American thinking about sexuality as well as a compelling account of the murders that “equated brutal violence with homosexual encounters in the public imagination”—Indecent Advances opened my eyes to a history I didn’t know and pained me to learn. I read it slowly, letting the mosaic of tragedies take shape around me as I was immersed in a time and a national frequency, when the country vibrated with panic about the state of sexuality (the acceptable dose of testosterone was not a hair too macho or too feminine, for to waver—in either direction—was to suggest you fell somewhere beyond the constricted arena of “normalcy”). Queer men were trapped in a pocket of the oversized clothing assigned to society’s most feared composite: the sexual psychopath. Moral authority over the nature of homosexuality became a tug-of-war between the medical profession and the law, each responding to the perceived dangers that were seen as intrinsic to the queer experience. And across the country, men were murdered, killed in hotel rooms and back alleys, in parks and ports. “

Read more at Crime Reads.

Neda Ulaby Interviews James Polchin for HERE AND NOW on WBUR

“Riots at the Greenwich Village gay bar 50 years ago brought momentum and visibility to the gay liberation movement, after decades of discrimination and violence. James Polchin’s new nonfiction book takes a close look at a certain kind of violence: the murder of gay men in circumstances that allowed their attackers to claim their homicide was justified.

“The other man came on to me,” Polchin says, explaining how the perpetrators would testify in court. “I had to defend myself. It was an indecent proposal. I had to kill him.”

"Indecent Advances" traces the history of so-called homosexual panic, starting in the 1920s, when gay men were classified as sex criminals, and lumped with rapists and pedophiles. Just being gay could land a man in jail. “You have to remember sodomy was a criminal offense – a felony in 50 states at the time,” Polchin says.”

Listen to the interview at WBUR.

Article on Queer True Crime and Carl Van Vechten Scrapbooks in the Irish Times

“We find in the scrapbooks both small crimes and sensational headlines. Sensationalised accounts of the murder of a Nazi diplomat in his Brooklyn home in 1939 by a young boxer companion; the Riverside Park stabbing of David Kammerer by the university student Lucien Carr in 1944 (a crime that eventually drew in the likes of writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg); and the gruesome 1945 murder and mutilation of Solon Burt Harger by his boyfriend Walter Dahl in the Manhattan apartment the two men shared. Dahl hacked his companion into parts and dropped them into the New York bay off the Staten Island ferry.”

Read more at the Irish Times.

Excerpt from INDECENT ADVANCES in the Paris Review

The first time Jack Kerouac’s name appeared in the press was August 17, 1944, when he and William Burroughs were arrested as material witnesses to murder. While the headlines were consumed that day with news of the Allies’ successful landing on the southern coast of France, the murder was sensational enough to make the front page of the New York Times: “Columbia Student Kills Friend and Sinks Body in Hudson River.”

With noirish drama, the newspaper called the murder “a fantastic story of homicide”: a nineteen-year-old undergraduate had stabbed his older companion several times with his Boy Scout knife in the early morning hours in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Working with frantic haste in the darkness, unaware of whether anyone had seen him,” the article related, “the college student gathered together as many small rocks and stones as he could quickly find and shoved them into [the victim’s] pockets and inside his clothing. Then he pushed the body into the swift-flowing water.”

Read more at the Paris Review

Caleb Crain Reviews INDECENT ADVANCES at The New Yorker

“Indecent advances” is not only Polchin’s title; it’s a refrain, proffered by defendant after defendant. The legal strategy of claiming to have been enraged by a victim’s sexual overture was known as the homosexual-panic defense. One of the questions at the heart of Polchin’s book is whether the term “homosexual panic” described a real psychological response or was merely an ideological pretext. It’s easy to see how convenient the notion must have been to defendants, but it also would have been convenient to conservative elements in society who wanted to keep gay men in a state of fear, analogous to false claims of black-on-white rape that long contributed to threats of lynching and to the suppression of civil rights.”

Read more at The New Yorker.

Jason Tougaw on INDECENT ADVANCES at Electric Lit

“As with Stonewall itself, we know the outline of this history of violence, but we don’t always know the facts involved. Polchin pulls the lives out of the archives with relentless precision in his book. The particularity of Polchin’s accounts restores some honor to the memory of the men whose brutal stories tell. But it also makes it clear that the press turned the facts of these murders into mythology almost immediately.”

Read more at Electric Lit.

James Polchin Talks with Oxygen about Gay Panic and Queer True Crime

“The “gay panic” defense did not die off in U.S. courts after Stonewall, or even into the 2010s, as the full spectrum of sexualities and gender identities became widely accepted in mainstream society, however, according to Polchin.

“Straight panic is still a legal defense in most states,” he said.

According to a 2016 analysis by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, such defenses have been documented in court opinions in about half of the states, although the defenses are not enshrined in penal codes.

“The gay and trans panic defenses are rooted in irrational fears based on homophobia and transphobia, and send the wrong message that violence against LGBT people is acceptable,” the study’s authors wrote.

The act of gay sex itself also remains a misdemeanor, punishable by a $500 fine, in Texas, according to the Texas Observer.

And, the LGBT Bar Association says that the defenses have been used successfully as recently as 2018 to mitigate murder charges down to criminally negligent homicide. Even if juries are told not to listen to the “panic” defenses, the “implicit homophobic bias of hearing the defense at all can still influence the jury’s decision,” according to the association. “For example, in cases where perpetrators are not acquitted as a result of a gay and trans ‘panic’ defense, the jury may still deadlock because it is unable to shake the inherent homophobia of the defense.”

Read more at Oxygen.

Interview about INDECENT ADVANCES in the Advocate

“What can we learn about the victimization of queer men in history that we could apply to trans people today?
There are two thoughts that I have. One is that getting the stories right is really important, getting the visibility to these crimes is really important, that I think we still struggle with in the press. I wonder how many people [hear about] trans murders, beyond the folks who are on the feeds for the [LGBTQ] press.

And, also, just the kind of legal response, the criminal justice system and its response to these crimes, and how they’re taken seriously. One thing that came out of the research — I think that the Murrett case is another example of it — is ... I wanted to get to a national sense by looking at different crimes around the country, but often these are localized, too. And so to think about on the state and municipality level, how these crimes are dealt with, and it’s so uneven across the U.S., even now. And I think that’s something that we’re still trying to make an issue, still trying to protest against, in terms of having more consistency and more visibility for these crimes.”

Read more at the Advocate.

Jacqueline Cutler Reviews INDECENT ADVANCES for the New York Daily News

“James Polchin’s “Indecent Advances” tells the grim tale. Advertised as “A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall,” it focuses on what it meant to be a gay man in the first half of the 20th century: A target.”

Read more at the Daily News.