Sex-Crime Panic. (Bookmark: panic attacks: a chilling book unearths a real case of '50s antigay persecution).

Sex-Crime Panic * Neil Miller * Alyson Books * $14.95

In 1954 and 1955 in Sioux City, Iowa, two children, an 8-year-old boy and a 22-month-old girl, were sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. As a result a new law was enacted, and 22 gay men were arrested in the heat of a sex-crime panic. As Neil Miller writes in his compelling and chilling account of the events, the law amounted to a warrant for preventive detention, the logic being "Take the pervert off the street before he can strike."

Some of these men were entrapped while cruising rest rooms; others, in true '50s witch-hunt style, informed on each other and were brought in. Twenty were tried and convicted as "criminal sexual psychopaths" and locked away in a special ward of a mental institution.

Miller paints a rich backdrop of a McCarthy-era Middle America where child molesters, murderers, and homosexuals were interchangeable. And few works of fiction have offered a cast of characters or motivations more complex than those in this true story.

Best is the book's final section, in which Miller compares the 1955 Iowa law and its effects with Megan's Law and other sex-crime panic laws of today. He also brings us into the hauntingly familiar gay community of Sioux City today and updates us on the lives of the book's major players, many of whom, preferring to forget, would not grant him an interview about the nearly 50-year-old events. The children's murders remain unsolved.