Flutterby™! : True Crime & Queer Representation

Queer true crime stories of the past show how the press stoked fear of gay men:

“Neurotic,” James Polchin writes in his book Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, released earlier this month, “was code for a host of sexual and gender transgressions” at the time.

According to Polchin, a cultural historian and professor of global liberal studies at New York University, the victim-blaming evident in accounts of Ivar’s murder was typical of the way the press covered crimes against gay or presumed-gay men between World War I and the Stonewall uprising in 1969.