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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'A grisly, sobering, comprehensively researched new history.' - The New Yorker Indecent Advances is a skilful hybrid of true crime and social history that examines the often-coded portrayal of crimes against gay men in the decades before Stonewall. New York University professor and critic James Polchin illustrates how homosexuals were criminalized, and their murders justified, in the popular imagination from 1930s 'sex panics' to Cold War fear of Communists and homosexuals in government. He shows the vital that role crime stories played in ideas of normalcy and deviancy, and how those stories became tools to discriminate against and harm gay men. J. Edgar Hoover, Kerouac, Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal all feature. Published around the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, Indecent Advances investigates how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them. Polchin shows how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by gay rights activists before Stonewall, and explores its resonances up to and including the policing of Gianni Versace's death in 1997.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Praise for Indecent Advances
“Polchin’s extraordinarily well-researched account offers a valuable contribution to both social and previously neglected gay history.” —Booklist
“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 … Required reading. Highly recommended.” —Historical Novel Society
“Indecent Advances is a chilling, relentless catalog of murders of gay men in the decades of repression, when their killers could get off by alleging the titular phrase. James Polchin has done remarkable work in extracting their stories from the newspapers where they lay hidden in plain sight.” —Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snare of Old New York
“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.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In his revelatory and meticulously researched book, James Polchin has discovered a forgotten chapter of queer history hiding in plain sight: in sensationalistic newspaper articles documenting decades of anti-gay violence, often in coded terms. Looking at gay life through this novel lens offers an entirely fresh take on what previous generations endured. Like the best true crime stories, Indecent Advances is both brutal to read and impossible to put down.” —Wayne Hoffman, author of An Older Man
“Insightful … Will likely delight true crime fans and satisfy academics … Polchin’s investigation of several decades of queer American life is an intelligent but darkly voyeuristic experience.” —Publishers Weekly
“Excerpts from sources as stylistically disparate as tabloids, texts, novels, and the Physicians’ Desk Reference … enrich the scope of the book’s analysis to an extent otherwise impossible … Whether large or small, many of these stories function like mirrors, reflecting light onto one another or reflecting nearly identical images from today. James Polchin’s Indecent Advances inspires further exploration into the hidden histories of marginalized populations and how the violence they suffer might be the result of a system that excludes some people from its protections, exiling them to places where they are made more vulnerable.” —Foreword Reviews
“It is tempting to think of James Polchin’s Indecent Advances as the first noir queer history of the twentieth century. Its fascinating, vivid, case-by-case survey of violent crimes committed against gay men reads like a page turning clash of tabloid headlines and pulp fiction. Yet, beneath this shocking, unfolding narrative is a beautifully written, deeply researched examination of how this violence has been institutionalized, accepted, and excused. Polchin’s detective work on the crimes is thrilling – news stories, police reports, trial excerpts – and his decade by decade contextualization is astute and compelling. This is a history that has been waiting to be written, a splendid narrative that grips the reader as it illuminates its subject.” —Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States
“James Polchin has written a vital, masterful corrective on American sex crime that redefines who was the criminal. In Indecent Advances, it was often the arresting agents and biased reporters who conspired to abuse the rule of law. Polchin skewers the triumphalist narrative of LGBT+ rights – the notion of a long march to freedom – by excavating a lost record of atrocities. Ray Bradbury would call this ‘the terrible tyranny of the majority’ against a minority group. This book reveals, existentially, why queer Americans had to rise up.” —Robert Fieseler, author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
“Indecent Advances is fascinating, rediscovered history that reads like the best true crime murder mysteries. But in fact the stories it tells reveal a community under siege, a brutal era of violence against queer men in which society and the law often looked the other way.” —William J. Mann, professor of LGBT History at Central Connecticut State University and author of Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood
“Breathtaking and compelling, Indecent Advances is a history book that reads like a novel written by a historian who uncovers evidence like a detective. James Polchin rediscovers the heartbreaking stories of how gay men’s sexual desire often left them dead in empty hotel rooms. For too long, these harrowing accounts have appeared as fragments set against the backdrop of larger narratives of progress. Indecent Advances dares to say their names and to tell their stories, and refuses for them to be left dead and alone.” —Jim Downs, author of Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation
For Greg
Contents
INDECENT ADVANCES
Introduction
Criminalizing Queer Men
In January 1943, the thirty-one-year-old playwright Tennessee Williams wrote in his journal about the first time he was physically struck by another man:
Unhappily I can’t go into details. It was a case of guilt and shame in which I was relatively the innocent party, since I merely offered entertainment, which was accepted with apparent gratitude until the untimely entrance of other parties. Feel a little sorrowful about it. So unnecessary. The sort of behavior pattern imposed by the conventional falsehoods … Why do they strike us? What is our offense? We offer them a truth which they cannot bear to confess except in privacy and the dark—a truth which is inherently as bright as the morning sun. He struck me because he did what I did and his friends discovered it. Yes, it hurt—inside. I do not know if I will be able to sleep. But tomorrow I suppose the swollen face will be normal again and I will pick up the usual thread of life.1
Today we might describe his companion’s response as “homosexual panic,” that dubious psychological condition that had its origins among sailors and soldiers returning from World War I. If Williams’s attacker had been arrested for the assault, he might have claimed that Williams provoked the attack through a sexual solicitation; sodomy was then a felony punishable with prison sentences in every state in the country. In the press, editors would have reported that Williams’s bruised and swollen face was a result of his “indecent advance,” a euphemistic term that resonated with sexual deviancy and violence, and would have reminded readers of the specific kinds of criminal threats queer men posed to society. While the term was used to describe all manner of violent sexual assaults, editors were reticent to offer details given the journalistic standards of the day, which allowed for such references only through suggestion and innuendo.
Like many queer men of the era, Williams risked police arrests or attacks by would-be robbers while he went in search of sexual and social encounters on the margins of the city—along the docks, parks, and street corners where such encounters could be had. A few weeks after that initial violent incident, Williams would have another encounter that verged on the edge of violence. This time, it was not a case of homosexual panic, but rather one of intended intimidation and robbery. The man he brought back to his room began insulting and bullying Williams, threatening him with physical violence as he rummaged through his things. The experience “carried on for about an hour,” Williams wrote, and while he remained calm, he was fearful that his abuser would steal or destroy his manuscripts. Williams wrote: “He finally despaired of finding any portable property of value and left, with the threat that any time he saw me he would kill me. I felt sick and disgusted. I think that is the end of my traffic with such characters.” While this encounter lacked the physical violence of the earlier incident, it clearly had a stronger effect on Williams emotionally. The man’s threats of future violence, and even murder, stiffened him to the dangers of such encounters. Williams did not report either incident to the police, for to do so in 1943 would risk his own arrest for sodomy, disorderly conduct, or some other criminal offense. The next day in his journal, he described the night as “the most shocking experience I’ve ever had with another human being.”2
Williams’s two encounters, which left him with physical and emotional injuries, were fueled as much by the era’s social prejudices as by a long history of criminalizing queer men, making them vulnerable targets for violence and abuse. “The history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants,” writes the critic Heather Love. Queer history has often focused on narratives of progress in which sexual minorities prosper despite the social injuries done to them. This progressive and affirmative narrative has made injury and violence historical realities we often write against, through an emphasis on community building, cultural expressions, and political activism. Sexual minorities survived and flourished, the story goes, despite all they had to endure. But there is another story of queer experience, one that tries to recover encounters much deadlier than the ones Williams recorded in his journal. “Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage,” Love argues, adding, “paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.”3
This book offers one way into this record of such damage by recovering a lost history of queer true crime stories published in the press between World War I and the Stonewall protests of 1969. Most of these stories have never been read since their original publication; their documentation of injustices and discrimination has been buried for decades. In these stories, we encounter men found stabbed, shot, or strangled in hotel rooms, apartments, public parks, and subway bathrooms. We witness accounts of brutal violence between roommates, sailors and civilians, young men and older men, working-class men and wealthy companions. Many of the victims were married men, living their sexual lives in secret rendezvous, under false names to hide their identities. Others were clearly living as homosexual men, single or partnered, participating in the queer worlds that were emerging in many cities across the country with increasing visibility. Not surprisingly, such crime reports were mostly stories about encounters between white men. When men of color were present in the mainstream press, they were usually, if not always, the killers of the white men they met, reflecting how the crime pages embodied the broader racial segregation of the times.
In returning to these long-forgotten stories, we see how newspaper editors and writers shaped the human dramas with sensational appeal and cautionary concerns, furthering the era’s focus on the salacious and entertaining elements of crime. Not only did the press educate readers about the nature of crime and violence, giving insights into police investigations and the courtroom battles, it also reflected and shaped ideas of morality and immorality, particularly as homosexuality was increasingly a subject of public concern. In an era when queers were understood as despised criminals, the press did much to fan the fears about sexual deviancy with sensational headlines, suggestive details, and shocking accounts of crime scenes. Such fears were acutely evident in numerous sex crime panics, frenzied moments where violent crimes that simmered with a sexual undertone became front-page news, pointing readers to the problems of sexual deviants and often targeting homosexuals for increased arrests, vigilante violence, and new efforts to criminalize harmless sexual behaviors. While queer true crime stories reflected and amplified social prejudices and state-sanctioned discriminations, they also show us how queer men were forced to navigate such dangers in their search for sexual adventure and social life.
While readers encountered queer true crime stories in scandalous front-page headlines, they also found them in smaller, more mysterious accounts. Just a few months after Williams recorded his violent encounters in his journal, The New York Times published this account in its evening edition about the mysterious and fatal incident between two men in a rooming house on Manhattan’s west side:
A slightly built middle-aged man who registered yesterday afternoon at a rooming house on 608 Eighth Avenue with a sailor as a companion, was found dead in his room there an hour later, with his skull shattered. He had been stripped of his suit by the sailor who disappeared.
The civilian had registered at the rooming house as Harry Bowen of New York City, and his companion, about 19 years old, who was in the naval uniform, as C. E. Bowen. Shortly after they had gone to their room the sailor reappeared, carrying the older man’s suit, and left the house. Mrs. Rebecca Seligsohn, the housekeeper, decided to investigate and found the sailor’s roommate dead.
Buried on the bottom half of page thirty-eight, this was the entire article about the crime. The next day, the paper revealed “the elderly man found beaten to death Saturday afternoon” had used a false name. The murder victim was not Harry Bowen, but rather Charles Patterson, a sixty-nine-year-old postal worker who lived in the leafy suburban town of Summit, New Jersey, with his wife, Adelaide, in a large nineteenth-century Dutch colonial in the center of town.4
Patterson had taken the train into Manhattan to buy theater tickets to celebrate his upcoming forty-seventh wedding anniversary the following week.5 At some point he met a sailor—or a man dressed in a sailor uniform—and found his way to the rooming house just a few blocks from Bryant Park, an area known for its vagrants and queer cruising in the 1930s and 1940s. There the two men registered with oddly similar names, suggesting they might have pretended to be related to avoid problems with the manager. The mysterious details of the encounter were central to press reports as they circulated through the Associated Press wire service to newspapers in New Jersey and Delaware. Readers learned that Patterson was found “half-clothed,” and that police were searching for a “young, blond sailor.”6 But after the few initial stories, and, apparently no real leads in the case, the crime disappeared from the newspapers.
Many readers in the 1940s would have understood the sexual undertones of the crime that seem so apparent to us today. While a married man meeting a younger man in public and renting a hotel room together under assumed names may not easily fit into the history of queer experience, it is undeniably a part of that history. The press found in Patterson’s murder a familiar tragedy of urban crime, with a thinly veiled subtext of sexual deviance that coupled homosexuality with criminality. Although Patterson’s murder is horrific to us today, not only for its brutality but also for how the queer victim was targeted for robbery by the younger assailant, in 1943 Patterson’s harmless search for a sexual encounter with another man would have been considered a felony, punishable with harsh sentencing. While his murder was shocking, what led him into that hotel room with the younger man would have been equally appalling and criminal.
Even when they suffered such violence, queer men in the courts and the press were not always understood as victims. How the press defined these queer true crime stories—who were the victims and who were the criminals—was set within a constellation of cultural values, journalistic ethics, and political trends. In this sense, queer true crime stories give us much more than compelling headlines of dramatic and horrifying tales of murder and assaults. They also show us how violence and prejudice can take hold when you criminalize a group of people, harness the expertise of the medical and legal professions, and circulate these ideas through the press.
The true crime story was an invention of the nineteenth century, when the press increasingly offered frightful tales to eager audiences. Weaving intricate accounts of violent murders that were populated by unscrupulous men and defenseless women, the true crime genre in Victorian America offered both the pleasure of a murder mystery and the shock of a morality tale. Circulated through a growing tabloid press such as the National Police Gazette, a publication that appealed to its male readers with crime stories and burlesque images, or later the scandal-hungry newspapers of the Hearst empire, these stories of real-life violence were increasingly popular in the era, sitting alongside the new genre of horror stories and the other recently invented literary form: murder mysteries. From their origins, true crime stories in the press have never simply been about the crimes themselves. Rather, they take the shape of their era, embodying and educating readers on the nature of justice, the meaning of morality, the lines between rationality and insanity, and, most acutely, normality and abnormality.7 “By dismantling various narratives of murder,” historian Sara Knox reminds us, it becomes possible “to expose the cultural meanings given to murder, that irreplaceable taken-for-granted quality of a murder that, when narrated, says so much about what a culture knows and what it will not let itself know.”8
While the nineteenth century gave us true crime and murder mysteries, it also gave us scientific theories about the nature of deviant human behaviors. Central to these new theories was the notion that deviancy was a somatic condition, an inherited trait that could, if you looked closely enough, be easily read on one’s body. The French doctor Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the father of neurology, famously photographed most of his female patients who were suffering from the newly defined condition of female hysteria in the 1880s. Such visual evidence was meant not only to confirm the dire nature of the illness as evidenced on the body, but also to form part of the treatment itself.
It was in the field of criminology that such theories were actively explored. Cesare Lombroso, a well-respected Italian criminologist, pioneered an approach to crime that shifted older notions of punishment from a focus on the nature of the crime to a concern with the nature of the criminal. In his book Criminal Man, published in 1876, Lombroso proposed the radical idea that criminals were born, not made, arguing that some people were more prone to criminality than others. You could predict such criminal propensities, his theory went, by examining certain bodily features. As Lombroso was theorizing the nature of the criminal man, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon used the relatively new technology of the camera to photograph Parisians arrested on all manner of crimes, and recorded specific physical details of each on standardized forms, creating the first mug shots that could be easily shared with police across the city or the nation. At the same time, the English sociologist and eugenicist Francis Galton was also interested in the camera’s power to capture the criminal type, but he went even further, convinced that fingerprints could not only uniquely identify individuals, but might also reveal racial markings and criminal propensities, adding to his systematic categorization of racial types.9 While such approaches to crime had their detractors, their impact on modern criminology would be felt for decades to come.10
The nature of the criminal led also to the nature of the sexual deviant. Lombroso claimed that homosexuals were a class of moral criminals who should be committed to insane asylums, their sexual proclivities an inherent part of their being. As criminology developed new theories about the nature of the criminal, a newly formed field of sexology in Europe and the United States was investigating and theorizing about the nature of abnormal sexual desires. Like crime, sexual desire was increasingly understood as an inherent, biological propensity, offering a radical shift in the centuries-long understanding of homosexuality as a behavior.
Since the Middle Ages, much of Western history held to religious and legal dictates against the practice of sodomy. Enacted through church inquisitors, royal tribunals, or, later, parliamentary decrees, proscriptions against sodomy defined sexual and social impurities. While charges of sodomy were directed at sexual immoralities, they were also used as a vital weapon against anyone deemed a threat to social order or religious doctrines, such as foreigners, heretics, or political foes. By the Renaissance, the act of sodomy gave birth to the sodomite, and with it increasingly harsher penalties and tortures were imagined and enacted to control him. In the English colonies of North America, sodomy was punishable by death, a reality that did not change until after the Revolution. But charges of sodomy, like other notions of sin, had their own social order. Lower-class men were more likely to be charged with sodomy than their upper-class neighbors.11
The idea that same-sex desires were a biological fact of the person was most acutely defined in the radical new figure of the “homosexual.” Whereas the sodomite was a victim of sinful behaviors including such activities as masturbation or lustful desires, the figure of the homosexual was born with his sexual desires. First coined in the 1860s in a German-language pamphlet decrying a Prussian antisodomy law, the term “homosexual” was from its birth a defense against the criminalization of same-sex desires.12 In 1886, the German doctor Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, a large collection of first-person accounts of sexual deviances from a wide variety of men from different social classes. The accounts ranged from same-sex eroticism to transvestism and bestiality. These accounts made evident how sexual desires were inherent from an early age, however outside the social norms they may have been. Among the many terms he offered to categorize the various accounts of sexual activities were two recently coined words that for the first time entered Western medicine: “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” A decade later Havelock Ellis, an English physician, would draw on Krafft-Ebing’s work but define same-sex desire as a kind of “inversion” from normal heterosexuality, thus coining the term “sexual invert.” It was this idea that would buttress a number of English writers and artists of the era, who found in sexual inversion an empowering term against the social stigma and legal offense of sodomy. For Ellis, inversion was also aligned with another new term—“sexual perversion.” The two increasingly would be used interchangeably.
The idea that homosexuals were born and not made fostered all kinds of theories and opinions about who exactly was more prone to such sexual deviancy. One American doctor in the 1890s described how homosexuality was mostly practiced among “the lower classes and particularly Negroes,” while another expert pointed to foreigners and especially those “among the low and degraded” classes as the likely culprits of such vice. Few embodied these ideas more acutely than the infamous Anthony Comstock, who as a postal inspector and president of the Society for the Suppression of Vice wielded great power and influence in New York City at the turn of the century as he pushed his brand of Victorian moralism. Along with his crusades against books and magazines he found unseemly, Comstock also targeted sexual deviancy. “These inverts,” he intoned, “are not fit to live with the rest of mankind. They ought to have branded on their foreheads the word ‘Unclean,’” adding, “Their lives ought to be so intolerable as to drive them to abandon their vices.”13
The word “unclean” was a choice one, for it underscored how Comstock and other moral reformers of the era pushed a social purity in an antivice crusade that targeted sexual deviancy, prostitution, pornography, and other practices it deemed impure. These campaigns were happening amid a rapidly growing urban population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hastened by a huge influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who some believed threatened the racial purity of the country. At the same time, industrialization transplanted large numbers of single men and women to diverse cities and well beyond the social and sexual conventions of their small towns, allowing for anonymous experimentation with older codes of sexual and gender norms. Antivice committees were a common response to these social changes, as police and social reformers attempted to control the social and sexual deviancies that many viewed as a pervasive problem, especially among the working class. The Chicago Vice Commission, for example, reported in 1911 that homosexuality was among the worst problems the city faced.14
Within these social changes, a paradox about sexuality in the years leading up to World War I became clear: at the very moment that science and medicine were offering new theories of same-sex desire and new categories that proscribed sexual identities, sexual deviancy was increasingly viewed as a dire social and criminal threat.
Drawing on his experiences in Europe during the Great War and his studies of the work by German sexologists, Henry Gerber established the Society for Human Rights in Chicago in the early 1920s, a group that promoted the idea of homosexual rights. Gerber dared to imagine a world where homosexuals were not targeted by police arrests or harassment by vice wardens. While his organization was quickly suppressed by the police, Gerber continued to promote his radical ideas. In the early 1930s he wrote, “Homosexuals live in happy, blissful unions, especially in Europe, where homosexuals are unmolested as long as they mind their own business, and are not, as in England and in the United States, driven to the underworld of perversions and crime for satisfaction of their very real craving for love.”15
While Gerber’s words point to the prejudices directed toward homosexuals, they also underscore the central tension between public control and private freedom that defined homosexuality in the decades before Stonewall—and after. Nowhere did these tensions play out more acutely than in the crime pages of the press. This book argues, in part, that these long-forgotten crime stories were a vital way that the competing and contradictory theories of homosexuality circulated to the broad reading public in the years between World War I and Stonewall—making homosexuality a dire public concern. World War I marked a watershed for interest in sexual deviancy within the growing fields of criminology and psychology in the United States. At the same time, an expanding tabloid press and popular magazine industry offered true stories of sex and crime with unprecedented salacious and shocking details, giving shape to a compelling genre of the modern era. The image of the queer criminal came to define homosexuality in these decades, harnessing all manner of state and medical responses. By the 1950s, queer true crime stories illustrated for early gay activists how homosexuals suffered amid the injustices of random violence, courtroom arguments, and press biases.
We see in the crime pages an evolution of queer criminality. The Depression-era 1930s gave us the sex criminal, a vague character that included a big net of suspects, from child molesters and rapists to queer men. The FBI was active in promoting the problem of sex crimes, both in the 1930s and in the postwar years. Under its long-serving director J. Edgar Hoover, the agency expanded its private files of political subversives to include a new category called “sex deviants,” which included all manner of sex offenses and made homosexuality a national policing concern. The sex criminal would play a central role in the constant ebb and flow of sex panics in the press from the 1930s to the 1950s. In such fevered moments, queer men were often the targets of police surveillance and vigilante violence.
Another way that queer men were made targets of abuse was in the homosexual panic defense, which was increasingly used by defendants in the 1930s and would be a compelling argument for attacks and murders of queer men for decades. Crime stories of men killing their queer companions because of their “indecent advances” embodied the perceived threats that queer men posed to the sexual and social order. But homosexual panic was also part of the post–World War II psychologizing of homosexuality, in which sexual desire was not, as the nineteenth-century sexologists had deemed, an inherent biological imperative, but rather a factor of one’s environment and childhood sexual development. If homosexuality was not biological but developmental, so these ideas proposed, it could in fact be changed, giving rise to all manner of forced treatments and therapies to cure the condition.
The Cold War also gave us Alfred Kinsey’s famous study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948. The study was groundbreaking in what it revealed—occurrences of sexual experiences between men were much more common across different ages of men’s lives than had been previously acknowledged. The sexual practices that Kinsey and his researchers recorded confirmed the pervasiveness of private same-sex experiences. But the importance of the study also lay in what it made uncertain: that homosexuality was not an easily identifiable or a marginal characteristic that marked abnormal men.
Kinsey’s ideas went beyond the descriptive, as he also advocated against the imprisonment and institutionalization of homosexuals—seeing homosexual practices as causing little harm to society. One impact of Kinsey’s study was the idea that homosexuality should be viewed as a private concern rather than a social problem. That sexual experiences between two consenting adults should be a private right was a concept that was growing in the postwar years among the early homosexual rights advocates, who increasingly argued the radical concept that homosexuals constituted a distinct social minority. Critiques of the crime pages offered civil rights groups such as the Mattachine Society explicit examples of the prejudice and injuries homosexuals endured. These critiques fostered a growing collective awareness of how homosexuals were criminalized in the press, in the courtroom, and on the streets. This awareness would grow with ever-increasing urgency and confrontation in the sexual liberation movements in the late 1960s, exploding with determined force on a warm summer night in June 1969 when patrons resisted the violence forced on them by police raids at the Stonewall bar in New York.
Queer true crime stories show us this movement from criminalization to social protest in the history of modern homosexuality. In the process, these forgotten stories demonstrate how queer men navigated the prejudices around them when there was no recognition of the dangers they faced, nor much compassion for the violence they endured.
Notes
1. Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown, 1995), 476–77.
2. Ibid., 478–79.
3. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–2.
4. “Man Slain, Sailor Hunted,” New York Times, 18 October 1942, 38; “Slain Man Identified,” New York Times, 19 October 1942, 21.
5. “Sailor Sought in Death of Summit Man,” Bridgewater (NJ) Courier-News, 19 October 1942, 1; “Sailor Is Sought After Slaying,” New Brunswick Central New Jersey Home News, 19 October 1942, 2.
6. “Sailor Is Sought After Slaying,” 2; “Sailor Sought in Death of Summit Man,” 1; “Sailor Sought in N.Y. in Man’s Fatal Beating,” Wilmington (DE) Morning News, 19 October 1942, 10.
7. Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3.
8. Sara Knox, Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 17.
9. Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 109.
10. Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 13.
11. Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 14–15.
12. Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), xii.
13. Bryne Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2000), 349, 351.
14. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 119.
15. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 144–45.
1
When the Men Came Home
Sailors, Scandals, and Mysteries in the 1920s
“MURDERED IN HOTEL ROOM”
On November 4, 1920, the front page of the New York Daily News announced in large block letters a disturbing milestone in the city: the one hundredth murder of the year. The accompanying article detailed the fatal beating of Leeds Vaughn Waters in a room at the Plymouth Hotel on West Thirty-Eighth Street. The tabloid reported that police had found Waters slumped on the floor with “a fractured jaw and skull and a deep wound over his left eye, which was apparently inflicted by a blunt instrument.” Waters was the scion of a wealthy New England family who had made its fortune in piano manufacturing. Since his graduation from Columbia College in 1896, he had lived much of his life in London, England. The Daily News described the forty-eight-year-old victim’s life as “a series of kaleidoscopic glimpses of social activities in North and South America, in England, and on the continent.”
As there was no apparent robbery, New York City detectives were baffled by the motive for the crime. The editors, however, speculated about the murder by casting doubts on the character of the victim himself. “According to friends,” the newspaper reported, Waters “has never been engaged in industry and has never been known to exert himself to labor,” adding “riches and idleness are shown as powerful influences toward his tragic end.” The term “idleness” was often used in the press in the 1920s to hint at moral and criminal duplicities. “How he was lured from his usual haunts along the rosy path of luxury,” the newspaper asked, “to hostelry of the character of that in which he was slain is a point of mystery which no one has been able to solve.”1
In the coming days, newspapers in New York and across the country would pursue this question, with articles that detailed the last hours of Waters’s life. Readers learned he spent the evening at the Delta Kappa Epsilon Club, a thirteen-story, private gentlemen’s club on East Forty-Fourth Street, where he had been a member since his college days. News accounts referring to Waters as a “clubman” signaled his social standing. Inside the brick and stone building, DKE men enjoyed a gymnasium with squash courts, a mahogany-paneled taproom, a rooftop café, and five floors of guest rooms. Waters spent most of the evening playing cards, indulging his love of gambling. Around one in the morning he told his friends he was leaving to return to Bronxville, a suburb north of the city where he was staying with his mother at her hotel.
Instead of going north, however, Waters instructed the taxi driver to take him a few blocks west to Times Square, where, as The New York Times conjectured, he met a “swarthy,” “dark-skinned man, who was believed to be the one who shared the hotel room.” In 1920, Times Square still had the reputation of a genteel theater district, though queer encounters were common in the area. Its seedier nightlife would emerge in the 1930s during the Great Depression. A few blocks west of Times Square was the more notorious Tenderloin neighborhood, known for its overcrowded tenements, crime, and vice. The Tenderloin was also known for its queer men, particularly in the West Forties and Fifties, many of whom worked in the theaters. It was in the Tenderloin, at Ninth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, that Waters and his companion allegedly dined at a restaurant in the early morning hours. Witnesses reported that Waters bought a meal for his companion and an apple for himself.2
Eventually they arrived at the Plymouth Hotel at six in the morning as the yellow light of dawn filled the sky. John Carney, the night clerk at the Plymouth Hotel, would tell police that the two men made a strange sight as they entered the lobby. While Waters was “expensively dressed,” his companion “wore shabby clothes and seemed to be of a much inferior social standing.” In a front-page article headlined “Murdered in Hotel Room,” the New York Tribune, never shy in promoting a good crime or a good scandal, gave readers a more detailed image of the contrast between the two men. While Waters wore a “light overcoat, a fashionably cut blue suit, patent leather shoes, and carried a silver-headed walking stick,” his companion “wore a cheap cap which he kept well pulled down over his eyes.”3
At the front desk, both men registered under aliases. Waters claimed to be J. Talbot from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His companion signed his name James Dunn, also from Milwaukee. Carney assigned the men to room 805 on the top floor of the hotel with a view of West Thirty-Eighth Street. They didn’t need the service of a bellhop because neither man had luggage. But at the Plymouth Hotel, this was not unusual.
Within an hour, guests in an adjoining room called the front desk to complain about the shouting and loud noises coming from room 805. Carney and a bellhop took the elevator to investigate. When Carney knocked on the door, Waters’s companion opened it with a sudden rush and Carney asked if everything was all right. As one account described it, both men were then “bowled over by a man who dashed out and disappeared down the stairway.” Carney and the bellhop ran after him down eight flights of stairs and out the side entrance, chasing him eastward toward Seventh Avenue, where the assailant disappeared amid the early morning crowds.4
A doctor arrived minutes before the police and declared Waters dead. From letters and personal items found in the room, detectives learned his real identity. “Robbery was not the motive for the crime,” the New York Daily News declared, “as money and jewelry including a massive gold ring” were found in the room. The newspaper also noted that a friend of Waters claimed that he “knew of no acquaintance of Waters by the name of Dunn.”5
Lacking a clear motive, the mystery of Waters’s murder hinged precisely on the relationship between the two men. The press offered up a number of clues and speculations about why a shabbily dressed man and his well-dressed, wealthy friend ended up in room 805 at the Plymouth Hotel that day. “Silk Underwear Clew to Slayer” ran a front-page headline in The Washington Post, which related that a pair of underwear with the initials “W. H. A.” were traced “to a laundry in Fifty-ninth street, where it was recently cleaned.”6 Such a detail pointed to the fact that the companion must have been naked at some point in the early morning hours. “There are mysteries all around the crime,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch declared, hinting at the sexual subtexts of the encounter. “The act,” the article concluded, “was clearly the work of a person with an abnormal mind.”7
But as news accounts made clear, it was not only the killer who had an “abnormal mind.” The victim’s own normality was also put into doubt. Reporters had learned that Waters had been secretly married over twenty years earlier to a woman named Baroness Blanc. Born Elizabeth Nicholson in Philadelphia, Baroness Blanc was, by one account, a “woman who streaks across society once in a generation.” The press described her as charming and beautiful, an actress who had performed on stage in opera and vaudeville. In the late nineteenth century she had entertained in “unconventional sections of metropolitan society,” as one article noted, adding that she moved between bohemian circles and European royalty with ease. She also had a succession of failed marriages that began at the age of sixteen. Her second marriage, which conveyed with it the unofficial title of baroness—a title that most news reports placed in quotation marks—lasted only as long as the honeymoon in Europe. Her third marriage, to Waters, nearly a decade her junior, would also end abruptly. The two had wed secretly in 1896, the year Waters graduated from college. A Philadelphia newspaper reported that the two had “lived together thirty-one days. Mrs. Waters then went to France, returning to this country later. She obtained a divorce in Chicago.”8 Waters’s mother, either forgetting or deliberately ignoring the Baroness Blanc, told police and reporters that her son had never been married and lived as a bachelor.
One interpretation of the crime the press offered up concerned Waters’s love of gambling. The wealthy cosmopolitan bachelor might have been “lured to the scene of his death by the promise of a game of chance,” noted the New York Daily News. The Washington Post described Waters as having “suffered from heavy gambling losses.”9 The assistant district attorney furthered this explanation in a convoluted statement to the press, where he claimed that the murder was most likely not premeditated. Rather, he suggested, Waters, “who is said to have been a gambler and who might have been in a habit of picking up strangers, took the man who registered under the name of ‘James Dunn’ to the Plymouth Hotel; that this man became infuriated when he discovered Waters only had the change from a ten dollar bill and the fight which ended in murder followed.” As the Daily News speculated, Waters’s killer surely inhabited a “morass of gambling, thieving, and murder, the haunts of sin and crime.” Such speculations hinged on the image of the assailant as a working-class thief and killer. One report declared detectives were working on the theory the killer was a “notorious character of the Tenderloin district,” adding that he most likely was one of a gang of “leeches” who worked the “White Light district and are known to prey on wealthy idlers.”10
Two weeks after Waters’s body was found in the Plymouth Hotel, another violent murder made headlines in the New York press when a forty-eight-year-old chauffeur named Frank Barbor was shot and killed in Central Park near the West Seventy-Second Street entrance. Barbor visited the park nightly because of his “poor health,” wrote the Daily News, and on the night of his murder, he had been walking along a pathway with a sailor from the USS Arizona named Charles Becker when three men with “caps pulled down over their faces” approached them and one asked Barbor for a match. According to the newspaper, as Becker offered a match, “the tallest of the three drew the revolver” and shot Barbor. Becker added that he didn’t see any of the three men physically strike Barbor—a detail that would soon be questionable.11
Since Becker was the only eyewitness to the murder, his story would be central to the news reports of the crime, which varied in different publications. The New York Tribune reported that Barbor was not strolling along the pathway with the sailor, but rather Becker was walking by himself when he spied “Barbor sitting on a park bench and asked him for a match. He then walked toward the Central Park entrance, he said, and heard somebody yell ‘Hands Up!’” Becker turned back and “saw Barbor surrounded by three men. When Barbor shouted for help, Becker said, the three men ran and one of them fired a shot.”12
On the front page of The New York Times, Becker claimed he was leaving, not entering, the park when he saw three men approach Barbor. One of them asked him for a match. Barbor “began to fumble in his clothes,” Becker told the police, and he then intervened. “Never mind buddy; I’ll give them a match,” he claimed to have said. He explained how at that point one of the three pulled out a pistol and pointed it at Barbor’s head. Barbor, according to Becker, exclaimed, “I won’t let you rob me.” Becker saw a “flash from the pistol” and the man fall on the ground. After the shooting, the three men fled east into Central Park, and Becker ran to a nearby hotel to alert police.
The New York Times also reported that Dr. George Homan, the assistant medical examiner, determined that Barbor had “depressed fractures of the forehead and a compound fracture of the skull.” From such facts, Homan concluded that he died from a severe blunt force to the head. The shooting was after the fact. Any mention of the blunt force was absent in Becker’s account of events, presenting a contradiction in the news articles that was not resolved. Such discrepancies may have resulted from the reporting, or they may have reflected the different stories that Becker told the press. Either way, the facts of how Barbor was murdered were decidedly inconsistent in these accounts.
In early December, police arrested four men for the murders of Leeds Vaughn Waters and Frank Barbor. John Reidy, a twenty-four-year-old navy seaman, confessed to killing Waters. Twenty-five-year-old Charles Benner, who lived in the Tenderloin, was charged in the shooting death of Barbor. Two other men were held as material witnesses. The New York Daily News echoed its earlier description, calling the men “members of a gang of ‘leeches’ who prey upon rich men under the influence of liquor, robbing and often killing them.” The article included mug shots of Reidy and Benner, both wearing large, tweed newsboy caps. Another photograph depicted detectives standing near the spot in Central Park where Barbor was murdered. Edward Kohn, an ex-soldier and one of the men arrested as a material witness, stood next to the detectives pointing toward the pavement where the shooting occurred. All three men gazed at the ground with dramatic intention.13
To corroborate the confession, detectives took Reidy to the Plymouth Hotel, where the clerk identified him as Waters’s companion. There he wrote the name “James Dunn” to compare the handwriting with that of his hotel registration. Reidy told the detectives that he had met Waters at a Times Square subway station at four o’clock in the morning. Waters invited him to the hotel, where the two drank from Waters’s flask of whiskey. “After both had been drinking,” The Boston Globe reported, Reidy said he and Waters “had a quarrel and he hit the clubman with his fist and then struck him over the head with Waters’s cane. Waters fell to the floor, striking his head against the bed railing.”14 The nature of the quarrel remained unexplained.
Originally from Milwaukee, Reidy had served on the USS Arizona, the battleship which had led the flotilla that brought President Woodrow Wilson to France for peace talks at the end of World War I. In August 1920, Reidy deserted the ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The New York Times noted that Charles Becker, the sailor who claimed to have witnessed the killing of Barbor, had also been stationed on the Arizona, where he was now “confined to the naval brig.” He was charged with fraudulent enlistment for not informing the navy that he was an ex-convict.15 His role in the murders, if any, was left uncertain.
At his murder trial in the spring of 1921, Reidy wore his naval uniform to court, presenting the image of military wholesomeness. The judge cleared the courtroom of spectators as he “did not consider the evidence in the case proper for public consumption.” According to The New York Times, Reidy testified he did not intend to kill his wealthier companion, but Waters “had insulted him, and he struck him.” The press never detailed the nature of the insult, leaving readers to speculate all manner of possibilities. In Reidy’s home state, the Wisconsin State Journal offered a dire scene of the hotel encounter, describing how Reidy had defended himself after “Waters had attacked him.”16 Reidy’s defense proved persuasive. After two days of testimony, the jury found the sailor not guilty of second-degree murder.
Three weeks later Benner would stand trial for the murder of Frank Barbor. In contrast to the extensive coverage of Waters’s case, the press proved less interested in Benner’s trial. A small article in the New York Herald on page four reported that Benner, “a member of a band which operated during the crime wave last winter,” was found “guilty of murder in the second degree in the killing of Frank Barber.” The Herald’s editors misspelled the victim’s last name. Readers learned nothing more about the trial or Benner’s defense, and no other New York newspaper even reported on his conviction.17 This contrast to Reidy’s trial coverage most likely reflected the differences in social status between the two victims. As was often the case in the era, Waters’s wealth made his death more newsworthy, and the salacious subtext of the hotel room encounter more scandalous.
“RETURN TO NORMALCY”
The press coverage of the murders of Waters and Barbor was set within a moment of deep political and social change in the country. The same night that Waters met his killer, the nation was enthralled by the presidential election. It was the first time that election returns were broadcast through the strange and exciting means of radio transmission, relaying vote counts to listeners almost as they were being cast—though the listening audience was small in 1920. It was also the first time that women had the right to vote in the United States.18 The Republican Party candidate, Warren G. Harding, intoned in a campaign speech that “America’s present need is not to heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.” “Return to Normalcy” would become his campaign slogan.19 The neologism was a symptom of Harding’s well-known limits with the English language. It also conjured a political nostalgia that included a halt to immigration, controlling socialists and anarchist radicals, curtailing the spread of labor unions, restricting government regulations on the marketplace, and adopting an isolationist foreign policy that kept the United States free from European entanglements, specifically President Wilson’s internationalist vision embodied in the newly conceived League of Nations.
Harding was an unlikely candidate for the Republicans. His love of bootleg liquor just as Prohibition became the law of the land was well-known, as was his dubious circle of business friends, a group that would eventually be enmeshed in scandal. His extramarital affairs were an open secret, as was his disinterest in big ideas. One editor at the time characterized Harding as “almost unbelievably ill-informed” about most matters.20 Harding’s biographer termed it more generously: “Harding had a good mind but he simply made little use of it.”21 But as the son of an Ohio farmer and editor of a small-town newspaper, Harding embodied a rural wholesomeness that included good looks, modest three-piece suits, and an affable character.
Harding won in a landslide, beating the progressive Democratic candidate James Cox and his running mate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Republican Party also won both houses of Congress and a slew of state legislatures. The New York Times called the win a “startling electoral avalanche” that “astonished even the most sanguine Republican leaders.”22 In pointing to the deepening economic recession of 1920 and signaling a restored social order, the tabloid New York Daily News editorialized Harding’s victory with the headline: “Now Let’s Get Back to Work.” The editors’ opinion reflected the era’s rising spirit of nationalism, characterizing the election as “a win” for the country. Harding, the editors declared, was “elected because he believed in America first and Europe afterward.”23
Such nationalist rhetoric had been boiling since the end of World War I. Newspaper headlines about violent labor strikes, protests between radicals and self-described patriots, a virulent and active Ku Klux Klan in the South, and a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment were common. In the popular press, the image of the political radical was often that of an eastern European or Mediterranean immigrant, particularly Jews and Catholics. Descriptions of Waters’s killer as a “swarthy,” “dark-skinned,” and “slovenly dressed man” would have resonated with readers, interlacing the dangers of working-class and immigrant radicals with criminality and urban vice.
In the summer of 1919, several mail bombs targeting politicians and businessmen made headlines. The Washington, D.C., home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was bombed twice in as many months. Some in Washington feared that a Communist revolution, not unlike the upheaval taking place in Russia, was looming. The government took unprecedented action. Enlisting local police forces, officials from the Justice Department executed raids across the country, targeting Communist Party members and others deemed progressives and political radicals. Known later as the Palmer raids, the actions threw out a wide net, searching businesses, private homes, and political and community organizations. Files and records were confiscated, all without search warrants. Thousands were arrested. Many who were arrested were immigrants, over five hundred of whom were deported.
The Palmer raids were immediately criticized by journalists and congressmen for the broad overreach of government powers and an assault on individual rights. “America,” wrote a columnist in Harper’s Magazine, “is no longer a free country,” adding “liberty is a mere rhetorical figure.”24 Most of the men and women hauled up in the raids were eventually released for lack of evidence.25 But Attorney General Palmer remained steadfast in his actions, claiming that “alien filth” who professed “unclean doctrines” needed to be suppressed and deported.26
