Sex-crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s

Following the brutal murders of two children in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1954, police, in an attempt to quell public hysteria, arrested 20 men whom the authorities never claimed had anything to do with the crimes. Labeled as sexual psychopaths under an Iowa law that lumped homosexuals together with child molesters and murderers, the men were sentenced to a mental institution until cured. Their shocking story is brought to light for the first time by award-winning journalist Neil Miller, author "of Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present." Shedding a harsh light on 1950s attitudes toward homosexuality, Miller's carefully researched account shows how the paranoia of the McCarthy era destroyed the lives of gay men in the American heartland. Interviews with the formerly incarcerated men, law enforcement officials, lawyers, mental hospital staff, and relatives of the murder victims provides a vivid and disturbing glimpse of a town that betrayed its own sons and a mental institution where patients provided cheap labor and shock treatment was the therapy of choice. A gripping story of murder and antigay hysteria, "Sex-Crime Panic" presents a dark chapter in the history of postwar America.

Marketing Plans:

Advance reader copies.

Major media targets: NPR: Morning Edition, All Things Considered.

Regional media, "including Des Moines Register, Sioux City Journal, Iowa City Press Citizen, Quad City Times" and others.

Neil Miller is the author of "Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life From Buenos Aires to Bangkok, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, " and "In Search of Gay America, " the winner of the 1990 American Library Association prize for gay and lesbian nonfiction as well as the Lambda Literary Award. As a freelance journalist, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Advocate, and Out. He teaches journalism and nonfiction writing at Tufts University in Medford, Massachussetts.