Sex-Crime Panic * Neil Miller * Alyson works * $14.

Sex-Crime Panic * Neil Miller * Alyson works * $14.95

In 1954 and 1955 in Sioux City, Iowa, sum of two units children, an 8-year-old boy and a 22-month-old girl, were sexually assaulted and brutally homicide ed As a result a strange law was enacted, and 22 gay men were arrested in the heat of a sex-crime panic. As Neil Miller writes in his compelling and chilling account of the facts the law amounted to a warrant for preventive detention, the logic being "Take the misinterpret off the street before he can strike."

a certain number of of these men were entrapped while cruising repose rooms; others, in true '50 witch-hunt manner of writing informed on each other and were brought in. Twenty were tried and convicted as "criminal sexual psychopaths" and lock-uped away in a special ward of a mental institution.

Miller paints a rich backdrop of a McCarthy-era Middle America where child molester slayers and homosexuals were interchangeable. And hardly any works of fiction have proposeed a cast of characters or motivations more complicate than those in this veracious story.

Best is the book's final section, in which Miller compares the 1955 Iowa law and its consequences with Megan's Law and other sex-crime panic laws of today. He also brings us into the hauntingly familiar gay community of Sioux City today and updates us in succession the lives of the book's major players, many of whom, preferring to forget, would not grant him an interview about the nearly 50-year-old facts The children's murders remain unsolved

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