Cruising for Conspirators
How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime
- 256 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Cruising for Conspirators
How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime
About this book
New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s decision to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, set off a chain of events that culminated in the only prosecution undertaken in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the decades since Garrison captured headlines with this high-profile legal spectacle, historians, conspiracy advocates, and Hollywood directors alike have fixated on how a New Orleans–based assassination conspiracy might have worked. Cruising for Conspirators settles the debate for good, conclusively showing that the Shaw prosecution was not based in fact but was a product of the criminal justice system’s long-standing preoccupation with homosexuality.
Tapping into the public’s willingness to take seriously conspiratorial explanations of the Kennedy assassination, Garrison drew on the copious files the New Orleans police had accumulated as they surveilled, harassed, and arrested increasingly large numbers of gay men in the early 1960s. He blended unfounded accusations with homophobia to produce a salacious story of a New Orleans-based scheme to assassinate JFK that would become a national phenomenon.
At once a dramatic courtroom narrative and a deeper meditation on the enduring power of homophobia, Cruising for Conspirators shows how the same dynamics that promoted Garrison’s unjust prosecution continue to inform conspiratorial thinking to this day.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dramatis Personae
- Introduction
- 1. Murder in the Gaslight Lounge
- 2. You Know Them by Sight Mostly
- 3. The Commission Has Investigated Rumors That Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald Were Both Homosexuals
- 4. Those Areas of My Private Life I Would Like to Keep Private
- 5. Confessions of a Guilty Bystander
- 6. Dr. Jekyll—or Mr. Hyde—or Both?
- 7. Death Delights to Serve the Living
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Back Cover