Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.

Edgar Award finalist, Best Fact Crime American Masters (PBS), “1 of 5 Essential Culture Reads” One of CrimeReads’ “Best True Crime Books of the Year” “A fast–paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look–see into the systematic criminalization of gay men and widespread condemnation of homosexuality post–World War I.” —Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle 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.

THE STORY: In early 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at Wilde's club bearing the phrase posing somdomite. Wilde sued the Marquess for criminal libel. The defense denounced Wild

When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, got caught forging Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 check, it seemed, at first, like a simple case of embezzlement. It wasn't. The incident was the tip of the iceberg, the first hint of a scandal that shook Hollywood and rattled Wall Street. Soon powerful studio executives were engulfed in controversy; careers derailed; reputations died; and a ruthless, take-no-prisoners corporate power struggle for the world-famous Hollywood dream factory began. First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's post-Columbia career as he continued to dazzle and defraud . . . until his last hours in a Hollywood hotel room, where his story dramatically and poignantly would end.

Indecency--arguably among the most provocative and incendiary issues in today's media--is speech at the edge of social tolerance. This timely volume examines broadcast and Internet indecency from legal and social perspectives, utilizing current cases and well-publicized examples. In exploring the issues associated with this highly controversial area, author Jeremy Harris Lipschultz makes headway toward an understanding of how indecency, as communication on the fringes of social norms, functions in defining free expression through specific types of speech. He contrasts conceptualizations of indecency and obscenity, synthesizes case law and social research, and develops theoretical generalizations for future research and study. His work provides a comprehensive examination of broadcast and Internet indecency issues and cases that serve to test generalizations about freedom of expression and one's ability to define free speech.

This book explores broadcast and Internet indecency from social and legal perspectives, using current cases and examples. Case law is used as a starting point from which to explore the social and legal boundaries of speech. Lipschultz argues that broadcast and Internet indecency reflect the outer boundaries of acceptable speech, and "understanding the limits of free speech in a free society allows us to theorize about the nature of communication." With indecency in the news every week, this volume is likely to get much critical and popular attention in the media discipline.

An exploration of the history of "indecency" laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth ranges from Plato's argument for censorship to modern battles over sex education in the schools and violence in the media.