Martin J. Kelly, Jr. has written a terrific review of Alecia Long's new book, Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime.
It's rare to see important new books on the JFK assassination, but Alecia Long has come up with an innovative way of examining Jim Garrison's so-called investigation. She uses the lens of homosexuality, and as any reader of this blog knows, Garrison had an inordinate interest in homosexuality.
"Professor Long navigates through the capricious human contingencies that launched and supported the action against Clay Shaw. She intensifies the previous revelations of Garrison’s rash crusade as a kind of “Emperor’s New Clothes” by meticulous documentation and a fresh look at homosexuality as a factor in Clay Shaw’s prosecution. Her historical analysis of homosexuality in the Garrison context creates an indelible impression of the complexity of a case that turned out to have no evidentiary foundation. While she makes no psycho-historical leaps about Garrison, or his personal psychology, a salient attitude about sadistic gay men as perpetrators of baroque violence is unmistakably present in identifying Clay Shaw as a suspect and persists until his acquittal by a jury in 1969. And, in the course of her exposition, Professor Long sketches out the perilous atmosphere enclosing gays in New Orleans in the ‘60s: because homosexuality was illegal, all sorts of options for defense against charges were more difficult to muster."
Please take my advice and buy a copy today. Or buy two copies.