LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Good evening, faithful LGBTQ Literature readers. Again, apologies for the delay in publishing this diary. It’s not often that I take an extra two weeks to complete something, but in this case, I really needed it. Your patience and your continued dedication to the series are appreciated. As I mentioned in the last diary, October is a twofer—you get this diary tonight, and on October 31, Clio2 will publish the regular October diary.
In August 2013, just a couple of years after I moved to Houston, there was a big bust in the city’s Memorial Park. I remember this police operation specifically because I thought at the time how antiquated it all seemed. At that point, I was studying LGBTQ history in a graduate program, and much of what happened could be taken from the pages of a book on midcentury gay life. Memorial Park had long had a reputation (still does) as a gay cruising ground, and the Houston Police Department’s sting operation targeted those men—many of them middle-aged, middle-class, and in heterosexual marriages—allegedly going to the park for sex. Legendary Houston gay rights and criminal justice reform activist Ray Hill (RIP) was immediately on the case. From the OutSmart article on the arrests:
A total of twenty-two arrests were made by the Houston Police Department (HPD) during the sting operation that took place on August 1 in Memorial Park, according to activist Ray Hill. HPD is currently reporting only seven arrests.
Hill told OutSmart on Friday that seven arrests were made on the south side of the park, but an additional fifteen arrests were made on the north side. Hill believes that HPD is choosing to only report the seven arrests from the south side.
[...]
Hill, who said he has been in contact with one of the men arrested, explained that eight to ten male vice officers dressed in Speedos and suggestive T-shirts, were along the jogging trail during daylight hours, attempting to beckon male joggers and walkers into the bushes. “[My source] tells me that one of their shirts had what resembled a chrome penis on the back, and some of the other T-shirts looked to be gay pride affiliated,” Hill said.
Incredibly (I don’t remember this part), Noel Freeman—the president of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus at the time—announced his support for this and similar stings in a local media interview:
These folks are people who have gone out and they have done something inappropriate and illegal and public. They don’t represent those of us who abide by the law and are responsible.
Hill, on the other hand, connected the arrests to the larger history of vice officers policing queer people:
It is clearly about shaming gay people. We haven’t dealt with shit like this since the 1950s.
The 2013 Memorial Park sting operation was notable, as Hill points out, for its unusual similarities to anti-gay vice operations of the distant past. But to LGBTQ people, of course (and much more so for LGBTQ people of color), policing is the water in which our communities have always been swimming. I remember when I was in college and first dipping my toes into gay life. I met a guy about my age online, and because neither of us was in a position to have the other one over, we arranged to meet at a downtown adult bookstore. The morning we were supposed to meet, my excitement turned to fear as I pondered the possibility that this guy was a cop. I really don’t think that’s how these kinds of vice operations worked, but I didn’t know for sure, and I imagined myself getting arrested, kicked out of school, outed to everybody, life ruined at age 19 (catastrophic thinking). I stood him up, something I still feel bad about all these years later. At that point in my life, I didn’t know much of anything about the long history of policing queer communities, but I knew enough to know that the possibility of arrest loomed over gay people engaging in discreet, consensual sex outside of the bedroom. And I didn’t really question it, either. Much like Noel Freeman above (I’m still amazed by that quote from 2013), I even accepted it as just how a society with laws operated. I internalized it: The kind of activity I was planning to engage in was dirty, immoral, maybe even depraved. Of course I should fear arrest, in that case.
[Side note: As I write this rather longwinded introduction, I’m realizing that this diary is sort of a sequel, in some ways, to my previous LGBTQ Literature diary on the book Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. So if you haven’t read that diary, I’d encourage you to check that out, as well.]
Policing is a constant in LGBTQ history. It’s always there, even if it just lurks in the background. It’s the backdrop to almost every book written by LGBTQ historians. In this sense, it’s kind of like violence (and, indeed, policing can be violence). My own upcoming book on that subject was originally inspired (back when it was my dissertation) by the fact that, even though anti-LGBTQ violence is in the background of almost every episode in our history, it is rarely examined by historians on its own. We see the same thing with policing. It’s there, we know it’s there, but we don’t (as a field) often stop to talk about it, to examine it, to investigate how it operates. So I was really intrigued when I saw Anna Lvovsky’s new book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall. From the blurb:
In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors.
In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.
Vice Patrol is rich, and it is dense. It’s one of those books I feared in grad school—the kind where every single sentence matters. So if you pick this book up—and I do recommend that readers of this series pick up Vice Patrol, because it is a vital addition to (and correction of) LGTBQ historiography—keep in mind that this is not exactly going to be a quick, easy read. But if you spend the time with it that it deserves, you’ll certainly be rewarded.
That being said, because it is so rich, it is also one of those books that is quite difficult to unpack in an LGBTQ Literature diary in a concise way. So I am going to focus on three things in this diary: the main arguments of the book, a brief overview of what each chapter covers, and the contributions this book makes to the larger historiography.
Lvovsky begins Vice Patrol by noting, as I have above, the ubiquity of policing in accounts of queer history. To be sure, other historians have explored policing in some detail, but they have approached the subject of policing in a top-down sort of way, which obscures the complicated nature of the daily interactions between queer people and the police in the twentieth century.
The law’s confrontations with gay life in the twentieth century are a core part of any history of sexuality in the United States. Over the course of that century, legislatures across the country enacted and reaffirmed a host of laws aimed at suppressing queer communities, from sodomy statutes to antisolicitation laws to regulations against gay-friendly bars. Police officers and liquor investigators, in turn, developed a range of intrusive tactics to enforce those laws, spending late nights at bars watching for potential violations, flirting with men in parks to entice propositions, crouching behind peepholes and one-way mirrors in public bathrooms to catch sexual encounters in the act. All this aside from the less formal abuses and indignities, the bouts of harassment and bursts of violence that hung over the state’s attempts to repress what it regarded as a deviant social practice.
This story may sound familiar. It is a part of essentially every history of gay life in the United States, a key backdrop for the many rightfully celebrated tales of community building and political empowerment unearthed by scholars over the past several decades. Most writers, however, have kept that story on the peripheries of their accounts, focusing more on the gay community’s responses to legal repression than on the operation of the law itself. Scholars who have examined the regulation of gay life have looked primarily at the federal government and the military, and especially at the formulation of legal policy. Few have delved into the daily realities of urban policing—the types of interactions that most commonly defined gay individuals’ encounters with state power in the mid-twentieth century.
In other words, previous accounts of the machinery of anti-gay policing have portrayed it more as one big blog (“the state”). This is what happens when something is in the background. The familiar story is one of “the state” repressing queer people, and queer people fighting back. Which isn’t wrong, but as Lvovsky notes, it is incomplete and an oversimplification. One of the most interesting aspects of Vice Patrol is that it uncovers that the machinery of the state was actually at war with itself, in some ways. Some arms of the state, such as sympathetic trial judges who had profound doubts about the tactics used by vice officers, clashed with other arms of the state, such as the virulently anti-gay vice officers themselves.
[T]he project of policing gay life at midcentury was not simply a contest over the limits of permissible sexual practice in the United States, or even over acceptable social conduct in the public sphere. It was also the site of an institutional struggle over the boundaries of the criminal justice system itself: the wisdom of the criminal law, the limits of proper policing, and the power of the courts to intervene in either. At the same time, it was the site of an epistemic debate over the very meaning of sexual difference: what homosexual desire meant, who homosexual people were, and who ultimately had the authority to answer those questions. Two sets of controversies that were, it turned out, often intertwined.
Lvovsky makes three distinct (but connected) arguments in Vice Patrol. The first revolves around the complicated and sometimes contradictory interactions between those different arms of the state:
First, [the book] contends that the project of antigay policing in the United States was, far from a monolithic or universally embraced endeavor, a site of profound contestation and struggle among the different arms of the criminal justice system, reflecting a range of political, institutional, and pragmatic disputes well beyond the law’s proper treatment of sexual difference.
The second argument revolves around public knowledge of and expertise about “the homosexual” in the twentieth century. She makes the point that the courts themselves were arenas in which the public attempted to grapple with who the homosexual was, what the homosexual looked like, and who was qualified to be an expert on homosexuality.
Second, [the book] argues that, at a time when public and professional authorities espoused a range of views about the nature of same-sex practices, legal battles over antigay policing provided a powerful arena for shaping the standing and ultimate legacy of those competing accounts—both a site that brought the weight of the law to bear in choosing which bodies of knowledge were deemed authoritative and one in which the impact of those bodies of knowledge was often unexpected.
And finally, the third argument, which connects the previous two:
Finally, [the book] proposes that, amid these warring accounts of both the value of vice enforcement and the nature of homosexuality itself, the continuing success of the police’s campaigns rested in key part on the coexistence, within the legal system, of multiple conflicting understandings of gay life, dividing how vice officers and judges understood the social practices they regulated. The rights and freedoms of gay men and women at midcentury, that is, did not simply reflect the legal system’s internal disputes about the merits of antihomosexual policing. They often reflected its deeper disagreements about the very thing being policed.
These arguments, presented in the introduction, made my head spin at first. They made much more sense to me when I revisited them after finishing the book. At its core, this book really is all about the internal struggles of “the state” when it came to defining and policing homosexual behavior.
Of course, you might be wondering if a book released in 2021 that deals with policing has anything to say about race. It does, and this, too, is a really interesting contribution made by Vice Patrol.
From the birth of the urban police department, the brunt of law enforcement in the United States has typically fallen on poor and nonwhite communities, and in many ways the vice squads were no different. Reflecting both the biases of many officers and the economic pressures structuring queer life, patrols in public cruising sites often posed a special risk to socially and economically underprivileged individuals, especially black and gender-nonconforming suspects. Following an arrest, too, “respectable” men could often expect preferential treatment, from greater courtesies at the police station to dropped charges ahead of any court appearances.
This was the part that made me stop and think, because I’d never looked at the history of anti-gay policing in this way:
At the same time, however, the vice squads’ antihomosexual campaigns are notable precisely for the extent to which they complicate this familiar story. Among the rare forms of urban policing that targeted conduct prevalent among wealthier men, the vice squads’ operations consistently captured white, middle-class suspects who otherwise rarely crossed paths with the police. In some cities, indeed, political pressure focused officers’ attention on that demographic. This trend, in turn, was instrumental to fueling the ambivalence that often greeted homosexuality-related arrests in court, and the epistemic battles that such ambivalence frequently inspired. Tracing these institutional disputes, the story told here can be seen as a complement to the eye-opening histories of racialized policing published in recent years: a study of the very different project of enforcing a largely white-identified morals offense.
Vice Patrol is very much a bottom-up history of anti-gay policing, something that is usually presented as a top-down, national story. It focuses, in particular, on three states: New Jersey, New York, and California. As far as timeframe is concerned, the book covers the period from the late 1930s to the early 1970s, when the prevalence of anti-gay vice operations started to decline.
This diary is already getting a little bit long, so I’m going to keep my description of each chapter as concise as I can. The book consists of six chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 delve into liquor laws and their enforcement in each of the examined states from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Chapter 1 looks specifically at the relationship between anti-gay policing and popular understandings of homosexuality. These “popular understandings,” of course, were often stereotypes and old gay tropes. When an establishment was threatened with liquor board enforcement for serving homosexuals, liquor boards would rely on these tropes to make the point that there was no way these bar owners didn’t know they were serving homosexuals. There was an assumption that gay people were visibly different, to such an extent that it was unthinkable that they could accidentally be served at an establishment. This chapter provided me with another “oh shit” moment when it comes to how we look at certain “liberal” moments in LGBTQ history:
[T]he boards’ reliance on the public’s shared understandings of homosexuality complicates the legacy of certain celebrated chapters in the history of queer life in the United States: those brief moments of visibility, like the permissive urban culture of the 1920s and especially the pansy craze of the 1930s, that helped defined public understandings of homosexuality to begin with. Developments like the pansy craze are often remembered as short-lived bursts of liberality in an otherwise hostile culture, times when the public’s aversion to sexual deviance gave way, however briefly, to a relatively open, even objective discourse about queer life. But in the legal realm, the legacy of such progressive moments proved to be far more complex. Familiarizing much of the urban public with the nation’s queer subcultures, the permissive entertainment culture of the early twentieth century emerged as a core building block in the states’ campaigns against gay life following Repeal [of Prohibition], underwriting a regulatory regime based on a presumption of public intimacy with a marginalized community. Far from simply ushering in a more tolerant public discourse on sexual deviance, or even entrenching reductive stereotypes about queer communities, such as celebrated moments of queer visibility fueled the states’ most literal uses of police power against gay men and women.
When I say this book is rich, this is what I mean. This happened quite frequently as I read Vice Patrol—these passages would jump out, shake me, and make me reexamine what I thought I knew about LGBTQ history.
Chapter 2 looks at the use of expert witnesses in the courtroom. Liquor boards used stereotypes and tropes to make the claim that bar owners knew they were serving homosexuals, but the bar owners themselves enlisted their own experts to make the argument that homosexuals were far more complicated than the trope of the “fairy.” This was all in their own legal defense and not some kind of broader defense of gay people, but it still made the courtroom an arena in which the public argued about who the homosexual was.
Chapters 3 and 4 cover the use of plainclothes decoys and enticement tactics from the 1940s to the 1960s. Chapter 3 delves much more into the disagreements that often took place between the various arms of the state (vice officers, prosecutors, judges) when it came to anti-gay policing. Judges are not often understood as an integral part of the struggle over gay rights, but Lvovsky finds that they had a very important role to play in beating back the worst excesses of the vice operations, even if they were not exactly friends of the gay community.
To be sure, even the most lenient judges rarely accepted homosexuality as a functional lifestyle or questioned the state’s right to discourage it. Yet they sometimes balked at the reality of antihomosexual enforcement, whether owing to a libertarian impulse against prosecuting consensual activities, an incrementalist concern with excessive punishment, a pragmatic objection to wasting government resources, a self-serving interest in clearing their own dockets, or even personal sympathy for the men involved—especially the middle-class defendants who otherwise rarely appeared before the criminal courts. Not least, some struggled with an abiding squeamishness over the unsavory enticement tactics often used by decoys in the field—tactics that struck some courts as more immoral than the practices they aimed to suppress.
Chapter 4 covers the extent to which vice officers became “experts” on homosexual life, from the subtle language used by homosexuals to the complicated signals used when cruising. The importance of the ethnographic study of homosexuality in the midcentury is well understood by LGBTQ historians. However, Lvovsky makes the argument that this ethnography wasn’t just something sociologists did—vice officers themselves engaged in ethnographic study of homosexuality. Indeed, much of what the public knew about homosexuality came from the vice officers themselves, who were “experts” on the subject (even if they were very squeamish about publicly embracing this expertise).
Chapter 5 deals with clandestine surveillance of gay people, particular in men’s restrooms. This was truly the dark underbelly of anti-gay policing, the ultimate intrusion into the public’s privacy (the privacy of gay and straight men alike). This tactic, perhaps even more than the others, really exposed how divided the criminal justice system itself was when it came to how gay people were policed (these tactics, as you can imagine, pushed the limits of how comfortable judges were with vice enforcement). One of the cases examined in this chapter was the famous surveillance of the Mansfield (Ohio) Central Park restroom, in which cameras were installed and men in the restroom were surveilled and video-recorded. This grainy footage, by the way, still exists and was actually turned into a film called Tearoom. (The Mansfield operation was something I discussed in more detail in the LGBTQ Literature diary on Cruising.)
Finally, Chapter 6 covers the importance of the popular press in shaping public knowledge about gay people. This is a process well known and understood by LGBTQ historians—the “discovery” by the press of gay life in the 1960s helped move the larger public away from the old disease/deviance model and toward an understanding that gay people were a minority culture. Lvovsky, however, places vice officers at the center of this story, making the argument that the things the popular press was writing about gay people came, in many ways, directly from the vice officers themselves (who, again, were deemed to be “experts” on homosexuality). But, at the same time, this more complicated public understanding of homosexuality meant that the vice officers’ tactics would no longer be widely accepted as necessary, since the public was moving away from the idea that homosexuals were criminal deviants who needed to be policed. This, in part, helps explain why these kinds of far-reaching anti-gay vice operations began to decline by the 1970s.
Vice Patrol complicates the LGBTQ historical narrative in very necessary ways. I learned a great deal of new things about anti-gay policing, but what will really stick with me are the ways in which Lvovsky has forced me to look at familiar events and time periods from LGBTQ history through a different lens. She persuasively makes the case that anti-gay policing was not monolithic, was extremely important in its own right, and does not deserve to stay on the peripheries of LGBTQ history. She ends the book with a connection to our present moment, when we are once again faced with large questions about police power:
The immersive policing of gay communities depicted in this book has, for the most part, remained a twentieth-century story, with mercifully little place among police departments today. Parts of it, such as the unique social anxieties hovering around gay life in the 1960s, might be specific to that tale. Yet the broader project of enforcing contested laws against marginalized populations, with all the intrusive tactics it entails—the surreptitious surveillance posts, the reliance on plainclothes officers, the pervasive infiltration of communities—is far from a remnant of history. It remains a mainstay of policing against a range of criminalized conduct, including but not limited to narcotics, prostitution, criminal solicitation, terrorism, and gang activity. Here, too, tactics like enticement have inspired qualms among judges and commentators. And here, too, critics have questioned the courts’ limited cultural understandings of the communities involved, which sometimes lead them to rely unquestioningly on representations offered by the police.
It is worth asking, then, how far the trends examined in this book may extend beyond the vice squads’ antihomosexual campaigns, into the work of policing today—even if those trends might not immediately be obvious. [...] The painful, contested tale of the state’s attempts to regulate gay life in the United States may be a classic case of history not simply showing us a shameful past but also casting light into the hidden corners of the present: a study of how, in a system administered by multiple agents of the law, the repression of marginalized social practices reflects the legal system’s many ways of understanding—and misunderstanding—the thing being policed.
LGBTQ Literature Schedule (2021):
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 31: Chrislove
February 28: Chrislove
March 28 April 4: Chrislove
April 25: rserven
May 30: Chrislove
June 27: Chrislove
July 25: Clio2
August 29: Chitown Kev
September 26 October 17: Chrislove
October 31: Clio2
November 28: OPEN
December 26: OPEN
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE