Contents:
QUEER TE CRIME STORI OF THE PAST SHOW HOW THE PRS STOKED FEAR OF GAY MEN
Acrdg to Polch, a cultural historian and profsor of global liberal studi at New York Universy, the victim blamg evint acunts of Ivar’s murr was typil of the way the prs vered crim agast gay or prumed-gay men between World War I and the Stonewall uprisg 1969. In the early and mid-20th century, gay and bisexual men were pecially vulnerable to vlence. But crim agast gay men were rarely reported as such the prs.
What he found was a trove of what he lls queer te crime stori — some ont-page news at the time, some buried and long fotten — that chart a history of vlence agast gay men and of society’s attus toward that vlence. Crime stori, he told me, n reveal “a set of cultural anxieti and uncertati” — and the stori he read for Incent Advanc reveal Amerin society’s evolvg but ever-prent anxieti about gay men and their liv the s before Stonewall. ” We see their echo, he says, the murrs of trans women of lor, often unrreported by the mastream prs, and “the ntued e of gay nversn therapy, which replays post–World War II arguments that homosexualy is a ndn that n be (and should be) cured.