Queer Justice: The Retrials of Leopold and Loeb

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Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the ways in which homosexuality is constructed in the homophobic imagination as dangerous and deadly. Indeed, anti-gay rhetoric positions homosexuality not as a sexual orientation or even a lifestyle, but as a "deathstyle."1 The homosexual is seen as a sinister threat? to individual health (Sontag), to families and children (Edelman), to the bonds of community (Bersani), and to the strength of the nation (Miller). This "threat" often implies actual violence, realized in its most extreme form as murder, and the fantasy of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender killer has proved remarkably enduring. Seen in plays and movies over the past …