American Honor Killings ─ Desire and Rage Among Men

"Utilizing an empathetic narrative nonfiction approach, novelist McConnell, co-chair of the Lambda Literary Foundation, casts a humanizing eye upon monstrous deeds?a journalistic tour de force made all the more impressive by jailhouse interviews?McConnell's unquestionable skill as a writer gives both literary helot and immediacy to the narratives."
--Publishers Weekly

"McConnell convincingly shows how fluid terms like 'gay' and 'straight' can actually be? The author's case studies reflect an intensive investigation into the economic and cultural backgrounds of a wide variety of extremist cultures, research that involved interviews with law enforcement officials, families of victims and the convicted criminals themselves. A shocking look at the subculture of violent crime, not for the fainthearted."
--Kirkus Reviews

"David McConnell has written with beautiful clarity and power about a very specific kind of murder. Not only is this book the best sort of true-crime writing, but it is also a stunning exploration of the concept of manhood in America. Refusing to judge or to gloss anything over, McConnell turns his impressive skills as a writer to a topic that all of us thinks about and few dare to discuss."
--Sebastian Junger, best-selling author of War and The Perfect Storm

"David McConnell's American Honor Killings is a masterpiece of reportage: engaging, deeply felt, and brilliantly imaginative. His subjects are heartland murderers driven by hatred of the Other--gays, nonwhites, Jews. But rather than take their crimes and ideologies at face value, McConnell dives into the killers' inner lives and emerges with shockingly intimate portraits of ordinary Americans gone horribly wrong. At turns heartbreaking and terrifying, American Honor Killings has the soul of a detective novel set in the darkest chambers of the human heart. If Truman Capote were alive today, he would die of envy. David McConnell has taken the mantle of great American nonfiction writer."
--Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill

"American Honor Killings is a spooky, addicting account of twisted sexual drives gone violently awry. McConnell's writing is as profound as Albert Camus's and as memorably chilling as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. The reader of this astonishing text is dared to set aside squeamishness and look right into the heart of American darkness, where bloody and horrifying acts are the tragic outcomes of lives gone from bad to worse, the murderers themselves victimized by neglect, abuse, and an atmosphere of racist, homophobic hatred, the ugly underbell, author of Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling and The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara: Reading Gay American Writers

In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York?based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin's death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.

Beginning in 1999 and lasting until the 2011 conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they're cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim's personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man's will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer's internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They're almost never that simple.

Together, the cases f