Allusions: LGBTQ Writing

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Intelligencers: men and women from all walks of life and from all sections of society, servants of the Crown who work for the Home Office gathering information vital to the security of the nation.

London, 1855. While Great Britain is at war with the Russians in the Crimea, a cadre of disaffected seditionists and insurrectionists, made up of members of the aristocracy and wealthy industrialists, have set a plan into action that’s been decades in the making—a plan that aims to overthrow the Queen and to install a puppet king on the throne in her place. With the war raging and disquiet in the industrial north and in Ireland, their perfidious plot, unless stopped, threatens to bring about anarchy and revolution.

Aware of the imminent danger, Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, has tasked The Brothers, a band of four men, friends of over twenty years, to root out the source of the infection, destroy the clique, and track down and eradicate its foreign pretender by any means necessary. From molly houses to state banquets, from hospitals to steam baths, from aristocratic households to the meanest of slums, the friends find themselves in a succession of increasingly perilous situations.

Like the mighty Thames, undercurrents flow swift and deep as they uncover plot after plot and treachery and treason in abundance.

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Stories of murder have never been just about killers and victims. Instead, crime stories take the shape of their times and reflect cultural notions and prejudices. In this Edgar Award–finalist for Best Fact Crime, James Polchin recovers and recounts queer stories from the crime pages―often lurid and euphemistic―that reveal the hidden history of violence against gay men. But what was left unsaid in these crime pages provides insight into the figure of the queer man as both criminal and victim, offering readers tales of vice and violence that aligned gender and sexual deviance with tragic, gruesome endings. Victims were often reported as having made “indecent advances,” forcing the accused's hands in self–defense and reducing murder charges to manslaughter.

As noted by Caleb Cain in The New Yorker review of Indecent Advances, “it’s impossible to understand gay life in twentieth–century America without reckoning with the dark stories. Gay men were unable to shake free of them until they figured out how to tell the stories themselves, in a new way.” Indecent Advances is the first book to fully investigate these stories of how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.

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It’s 1994, an election year when violent crime is rampant, voters want action, and politicians smell blood. When a Latino teenager confesses to the murder of a pretty-boy cokehead outside a gay bar in L.A., the cops consider the case closed. But Benjamin Justice, a disgraced former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, sees something in the jailed boy others don’t. His former editor, Harry Brofsky, now toiling at the rival Los Angeles Sun, pries Justice from his alcoholic seclusion to help neophyte reporter Alexandra Templeton dig deeper into the story. But why would a seemingly decent kid confess to a brutal gang initiation killing if he wasn’t guilty? And how can Benjamin Justice possibly be trusted, given his central role in the Pulitzer scandal that destroyed his career? Snaking his way through shadowy neighborhoods and dubious suspects, he’s increasingly haunted by memories of his lover Jacques, whose death from AIDS six years earlier precipitated his fall from grace. As he unravels emotionally, Templeton attempts to solve the riddle of his dark past and ward off another meltdown as they race against a critical deadline to uncover and publish the truth.

Awarded an Edgar by Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel on initial release, this 25th Anniversary edition has been revised by the author. A foreword for the 2020 edition by Christopher Rice (Bone Music) is included.

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