True crime writing has always been a bit queer. Take Capote’s In Cold Blood, the book that set the stage for the modern genre. When it appeared in book form in 1965, critics couldn’t ignore its queer undertones. One reviewer pointed to the story’s concealed “homosexual attachment” between the killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. “Perhaps the key to Capote’s failure is the muting of the homosexual theme,” wrote the New York Times reviewer. Such critiques suggested that homosexuality itself explained the killers’ gruesome murder of a Kansas farm family on a November night in 1959. This idea was well suited for Cold War America where homosexuality was a constant threat to social life. While today we read the book’s simmering homosexual undertones in more nuanced ways (particularly those between Smith and Capote himself), at the time Capote had to let them linger in the margins and between the lines, somewhere between facts and fictions. Or as Capote termed his book, “a nonfiction novel.”
In researching and writing what I termed “queer true crime” for my book Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice before Stonewall, reading between the lines in newspaper crime pages became its own kind of skill. In the decades before the Stonewall uprising in June of 1969 when queer citizens pushed back against police harassment at a bar in Greenwich Village, newspapers didn’t index anti-queer crimes, and often only hinted at the queer subtext of a murder. While some queer crimes were sensationalized on the front pages, they were usually stories of violent, psychopathic, killers with homosexual tendencies. The stories of queer victims, of men found murdered in parks, hotel room, and private apartments by the men they brought home, were much more muted and coded in the press. The stories I found in my research, buried and forgotten in the pages of the daily newspaper, was a broader history of how queer men were criminalized in the courtrooms, on the streets, and in the press.
Queer people have always had a relationship to crime—often by force rather than choice. Our very existence has been outlawed, criminalized, medicalized. Our status as citizens put into question, or made a subject of legal debate. Which is why the contemporary popularity and evolution of the true crime genre opens up new possibilities to recount queer experiences and histories.
Either recovering long forgotten crimes, or creating inventive forms of storytelling, here are seven contemporary books that unsettle, illuminate, and define a queer aesthetic in true crime.
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
by Emma Copley Eisenberg
When Eisenberg relocates to West Virginia after college to teach writing at a camp for girls, she hadn’t expected to find herself writing about a decades old double murder case. The victims were two women who had travelled to West Virginia in the summer of 1980 to attend the Rainbow Gathering, a counter-culture group focused on peace, freedom, and respect. A third woman among them left the trip early and survived. Part memoir, part true crime, the book draws a poignant picture of Appalachia, its beauty and contradictions, through two interwoven stories: the compelling and complex mystery of the double homicide, and Eisenberg’s own coming of age as a young, queer women and an outsider in a world far removed from her upbringing.
Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
by Robert Fiesler
In June of 1973, a disgruntled patron of the Up Stairs Lounge, a LGBTQ social space in New Orleans, doused the entrance steps with lighter fluid and lit a match. The ensuing inferno trapped and smothered the patrons, killing 32 people. Combining the eye of a journalist with the talents of a novelist, Fiesler recovers the history of this forgotten tragedy, the people who perished, and the prejudiced response by the media and political leaders. Central to the story Fiesler tells is the historical arc of queer activism that emerged in the aftermath of the fire, mobilizing the city’s LGBTQ population in the decades that followed, and the eventual decriminalization of homosexuality in the state in 2003.
Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood
by William J. Mann
Set in the early 1920s, Tinseltown is a gripping story about the cold-case murder of silent film director William Desmond Taylor. Taylor was a mysterious figure even before his death, supporting an estranged wife and child, but also a well-known figure among the shadowy queer spots of Los Angeles. His queerness became central to the media scandal that erupted after his murder. But his death was never solved until Mann started to dig into the archive. In his richly researched pursuit of Taylor’s killer, Mann also tells a broader story of early Hollywood, from silent film legends to young hopefuls, from blackmailers to drug dealers, from ambitious studio moguls fearful of scandals, to equally ambitious religious reformers set on controlling the decadence and immorality of the growing film colony.
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
This lyrical and moving memoir by nonbinary Marzano-Lesnevich draws us into two gripping stories: one of the child murderer Richard Langley and that of the author’s own trauma of childhood sexual abuse. “No one story is simple. No one story is complete,” Marzano-Lesnevich writes, framing the book’s key theme about the lines between facts and fiction, memory and experience—an exploration that has prompted comparisons to Capote’s In Cold Blood. In its almost uncanny mirroring between the Langley’s crime and the abuse that her family kept secret, the book reckons with the private and public nature of trauma.
Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice
by Clayton Delery
In the fall of 1958, Fernando Rios, a Mexican tour guide visiting New Orleans, was lured from a French Quarter bar into an alleyway by three Tulane University students who planned to “roll a queer.” After robbing and beating Rios, they left him to die on the street. As so often happened in such cases of the era, Rios murder provoked a backlash by local leaders and citizens who advocated for a crackdown on queer residents in the city. In detailing this forgotten crime, Delery illustrates intersecting prejudices of homophobia and anti-Mexican racism on the local and national level in Cold War America.
The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives
by Dashka Slater
On a bus in Oakland California, two teenagers ride home from school in the fall of 2013. One, a nonbinary white student from a private school, is set on fire by an African-American teen. In this YA true crime account, Dashka describes the aftermath of this event in precise, gripping prose. She captures both the personal experiences of both the teens, but also the larger racial and class divides in one of the most diverse cities in the country. The book asks us to consider the nature of gender differences, adolescent crimes, and the failures of our criminal justice system.
Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story
by Gary Indiana
Originally published in 1999 and reissued in 2017, Indiana recounts the frenzied media attention and FBI manhunt that erupted in the spring and summer of 1997 as Cunanan murdered three men in three states, including the fashion designer Gianni Versace outside his Miami home. The book navigates a wealth of evidence including witness interviews, FBI documents, and media reports. Experimenting with the complicated intersections and contradictions of the evidence, Indiana calls the book a “pastiche” of story and reflection without any “pretense to journalistic ‘objectivity.’” At its heart the book questions the authority of any story we may have of Cunanan and his crimes.
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