Tom Cardamone

James Polchin’s Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, excavates garish true crime headlines to reveal the forgotten murders of gay men. In pursuing these trails and trials of blood and ink, Polchin exposes American society’s exploitative misunderstanding of gay men, as well as the initial cultural shifts that fueled the revolution that was Stonewall.  One tragic story after another charts reportage of a shocking crime transmogrified into sympathy if not outright support for the perpetrators -once the victim’s sexuality becomes decoded. Killers are “cherubic cowboys” provoked by the supposed shock of a homosexual advance. Unasked […]

The rock ‘n’ roll spirit–imported by Britain in the 50s and 60s and made that country’s own—infuses every page of House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row. The Beatles, the Stones, and Elton John, all dance through this delightful and compelling book, and though they’re the music makers here, all were styled by Tommy Nutter. Nutter, the book shows, cut the vibrant cloth of the zeitgeist. From the Beatles’ suits for the iconic Abbey Road album cover (except George, in jeans of course), to the bespoke beauties worn by the flamboyant-yet-then-publicly-closeted Elton John, Tommy Nutter came of age […]

As the consummate memoirist, you would think Edmund White (My Lives, City Boy, Inside a Pearl) had left no page unturned, but then this diamond surfaces: The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading. Here is a multi-faceted account of superlative literary reflection, borne from the earthquake (life-quake?) of a heart attack. Here we have memories and discourse on a lifetime of books read, the texts that have influenced White’s art and thinking–books savored, books turned over again and again as new aspects reveal themselves, and most important: the people, the friends and colleagues who delivered these books into his life. […]

  Fernando Rios was a twenty-six-year-old Mexican tour guide lured to his death by a group of Tulane students, who beat and robbed him in a shadowy French Quarter alleyway in 1958. Clayton Delery, the author of Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice, unearthed this crime while researching another travesty in his hometown, the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge. The fire, a monstrous act of arson, was, for decades, the largest single act of terror against LGBT folk in the US–that is, until the massacre at Pulse nightclub. News […]