The Incomplete Horrors of "Indecent Advances"

The highly praised 2019 study of pre-1960 violence against gay men leaves out some important facts about twentieth century American media.

As part of the research for the rewrite of my new book, I’ve been reading James Polchin’s Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall (Counterpoint, 2019), an analysis of “true crime” reporting about crimes against gay men “before Stonewall,” though, really, it primarily covers the years 1920 to 1959. Through a series of brief chapters, Polchin, a creative writing instructor at Princeton, examines how murders involving gay men were reported in the media, highlighting how the frameworks and lenses used to describe these crimes reflected anti-gay prejudices of the times. The book is at its best when unearthing forgotten newspaper stories and analyzing how the media grappled with a topic editors considered unsavory.

It’s a worthy, sad, and important book, but it has some huge methodological flaws.

I will leave aside the problem of equating “true crime” solely with murder. Polchin chose the subject, not me, though the choice to limit investigation to murder distorts to record a bit. Many other crimes occurred. In the interwar and postwar years, when sodomy was a crime and prosecutions for euphemisms like “disturbing the peace” and “lewd conduct” ran high, there were plenty of police actions designed to entrap gay men, and the category of “indecent advances” hardly fell only into murder. Rape, forcible and statutory, was ever-present, as were the popular crimes of “fag bashing” and “rolling” queers—leading men on thinking they’d get sex and then beating and robbing the hapless victim. Polchin omits such crimes to focus entirely on murder, though bashing and rolling were sometimes preludes to the murders he discusses.

Nevertheless, confining ourselves to murder, I can’t entirely agree with the enthusiastic reviews of the book, which praised Polchin’s “comprehensively researched new history,” in the words of the New Yorker. The first thing that struck me was that Polchin’s methodology was highly unsystematic, not “comprehensively researched.” This can’t entirely be helped since nobody has done systematic classification of old news reports, but he researched the subject by hunting newspaper databases for keywords. As he discusses in the book, his primary research method was to search for words like “homosexual” and “murder,” and when that failed, to look for murder stories with male victims involving bondage and nudity, or which involved stereotypical language about decorating and fashion. While this turned up a large number of forgotten crimes, it also potentially overlooks crimes that don’t include gay stereotypes.

His research sources are also incomplete. Using a university library’s access to newspaper databases is convenient, but it isn’t complete. That’s problematic because these databases capture a narrow part of the news spectrum of the era. By focusing only on newspapers indexed in major databases, he reaches some incorrect conclusions.

For example, he discusses how papers used coded language for homosexuals and details about decorating, clothing, and color to hint at homosexuality without saying it. References to expensive clothes (especially silk underwear), well-decorated bachelor apartments, and the colors pink and lavender were often hints of homosexuality.

An actual 1960s tabloid headline.

While it’s true that newspapers often used coded language for gays, newspapers were not the only outlet for these kinds of stories. Much “true crime” reporting occurred in pulp magazines and tabloids, which aren’t indexed in scholarly databases. Titles like Police Gazette did brisk business in grisly tales of crime, and men’s magazines were never shy about reveling in tales of violence. I’ve read them. They were not coded. They explicitly identified people as “fags” and “homos.” Omitting these important sources, which had vastly higher circulation than any one local newspaper, is to leave out one of the vital ways that American attitudes toward homosexuals took shape in the interwar and postwar years. Polchin brings in references from academic journals and highbrow literature—again, things catalogued in a university library—but omits the popular, but harder to find, sources more people actually read.

This is an actual speech delivered on the floor of Congress in 1950, published in the Congressional Record.

There are places in Washington where they gather for the purpose of sex orgies, where they worship at the cesspool and flesh pots of iniquity. There is a restaurant downtown where you will find male prostitutes. They solicit business for other male customers. They are pimps and undesirable characters. You will find odd words in the vocabulary of the homosexual. There are many types such as the necrophilia, fetishism, pygmalionism, fellatios, cunnilinguist, sodomatic, pederasty, saphism, sadism, and masochist. Indeed, there are many methods of practices among the homosexuals. You will find those people using the words as, “He is a fish. He is a bull-dicker. He is mamma and he is papa, and punk, and pimp.” Yes; in one of our prominent restaurants rug parties and sex orgies go on.

Note there is nothing coded about it.

Another major weakness of Polchin’s book is his choice to write a polemic. He explicitly states that he wished to write a counter to the traditional queer history that emphasizes activism and struggle against injustice, a narrative that applied to only a small minority of queer people before the rise of the gay rights movement. Though Polchin doesn’t say it, we can measure this to a degree—While the media (mis)used Alfred Kinsey’s survey data to estimate the number of queers in that era in the tens of millions (likely an exaggeration by a factor of ten), no activist group had more than a few thousand members and the leading queer magazine, One, had only 2,000 subscribers. Even the most generous reading counts activists as something short of one percent of the queer population.

There is certainly value in crafting a narrative designed to have a specific effect on the audience, and it’s important to inform modern readers of the atrocities of the past. But in creating a narrative of gay men victimized by straight men or closeted, self-loathing queers, he distorts the historical record in service of promoting the victim narrative. For example, he leaves out a different set of murders—those in which queer men, or those perceived as effeminate, sissy, or queer, became murderers to reassert their masculinity or assert control over their lives.

There was a quite famous 1953 case about a queer man, Harlow Joseph Fraden, who murdered his homophobic parents and spent their money on a massive gay orgy. He was judged insane, and the story made headlines not just in the newspapers but also in the tabloids and pulps, which were not shy about playing up the gay orgy angle. Another infamous case involved two teenagers, a gay boy and a lesbian girl, who were angry that they were unable to live their lives openly (the boy preferred women’s clothing, for example), so they posed as a straight couple in order to lure victims to their deaths.

It might not make gay men look good, but those driven mad by homophobia and prejudice are as much a part of the “true crime” story as the gay men murdered by predatory straights. Polchin’s narrative, while powerful, is only part of the story, and misleading for being incomplete.

Anyway, I wanted to get that off my chest because the reviews of Indecent Advances make pretty clear that very few people have done any research into the topic or fact-checked his conclusions.