Perry and Dick come up with a plan to break in and steal the cash.
#White pages kansas hickock full#
It all begins in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, where Perry and Dick are inmates, and where they get a tip from Dick’s ex-cellmate, who once worked for a rich Kansas farmer named Herb Clutter, who supposedly keeps a safe full of money in his house. Rereading In Cold Blood from this perspective can, I think, teach us a lot about who we are now and how we continue to think about marriage equality, gender roles, homosexual panic, homophobia, the association of homosexuality with pedophilia, sexual behavior in prisons and the military, and the ways in which homosexuality intersects with race and class.Ĭapote tells the story of how Perry’s desire for Dick rubs up against his own self-hatred, his resentment of heterosexual and middle-class orthodoxy, and his internalized homophobia, all of which explodes in a night of terror that leaves four people dead, and western Kansas stunned. In Cold Blood is about Perry Smith and Dick Hickock and what went wrong between them, or at least that’s the reading I’m giving it here. Returning to it recently for the first time in years, this being the 50th anniversary of its publication (to all kinds of controversy and acclaim), I was struck most of all by its gayness. It is other things, of course: an account of the hollowness of the American Dream, a classic of true crime, and, a true genre-buster, arguably, the first “nonfiction novel.” But, finally, it’s a book by a gay man about a gay man.
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