James Polchin is the author of Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall.At CrimeReads he tagged "seven contemporary books that unsettle, illuminate, and define a queer aesthetic in true crime," including:
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley EisenbergRead about the other entries on the list.
When Eisenberg relocates to West Virginia after college to teach writing at a camp for girls, she hadn’t expected to find herself writing about a decades old double murder case. The victimswere two women who had travelled to West Virginia in the summer of 1980 to attend the Rainbow Gathering, a counter-culture group focused on peace, freedom, and respect. A third woman among them left the trip early and survived. Part memoir, part true crime, the book draws a poignant picture of Appalachia, its beauty and contradictions, through two interwoven stories: the compelling and complex mystery of the double homicide, and Eisenberg’s own coming of age as a young, queer women and an outsider in a world far removed from her upbringing.
The Page 99 Test: The Third Rainbow Girl.
--Marshal Zeringue
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