A Rave Review of Alecia Long's "Cruising for Conspirators"

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.

Money quote from Martin Kelly's review:

"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."

Listen to Alecia Long discuss Cruising for Conspirators here.

I wrote my own review on Amazon:

Please take my advice and buy a copy today. Or buy two copies.