Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
James Polchin
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
James Polchin
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Polchin...presents a reflective, thoughtful first book that perfectly blends true crime and the history of discrimination against gay men in the 20th century.
...a grisly, sobering, comprehensively researched new history. The subject matter doesn’t make for light reading; Polchin admits to feeling 'haunted' by what he discovered in archives. But it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth-century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.
Although excerpts from sources as stylistically disparate as tabloids, texts, novels, and the Physicians’ Desk Reference curb the fluidity of the prose, they enrich the scope of the book’s analysis to an extent otherwise impossible. Tracing the journey of viciously persecuted people necessitates traveling treacherous, unmapped roads where the final picture is more of a mosaic in progress than a complete work of art.
Compact and powerful, Polchin’s social history of crimes against queer men in the first half of the 20th century coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. An important book for an important anniversary.
... formidably researched.
...original and revealing.
Polchin exposes American society’s exploitative misunderstanding of gay men.
For readers searching for a fast-paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look-see into the systematic criminalization of gay men and widespread condemnation of homosexuality post-World War I, cultural historian James Polchin’s first book is a smart bet.
Thoughtful, accessible and well-researched, Polchin’s book offers useful insight into some of the lesser-known cultural currents that gave rise to the gay rights movement. An enlighteningly provocative cultural history..
...insightful but somewhat gruesome.