Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing

Emma K. Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351131612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Gender & The Law
• Index: Law

Despite ongoing challenges to the criminalisation and surveillance of queer lives, police leaders are now promoted as allies and defenders of LGBT rights. However, in this book, Emma K. Russell argues that the surface inclusion of select LGBT identities in the protective aspirations of the law is deeply tenuous and conditional, and that police recognition is both premised upon and reproductive of an imaginary of' 'good queer citizens'—those who are respectable, responsible, and 'just like' their heterosexual counterparts.

Based on original empirical research, Russell presents a detailed analysis of the political complexities, compromises, and investments that underpin LGBT efforts to achieve sexual rights and protections. With a historical trajectory that spans the so-called 'decriminalisation' era to the present day, she shows how LGBT activists have both resisted and embraced police incursions into queer space, and how—with LGBT support—police leaders have re-crafted histories of violence as stories of institutional progress.

Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing advances broader understandings of the nature of police power and the shifting terrain of sexual citizenship. It will be of interest to students and researchers of criminology, sociology, and law engaged in studies of policing, social justice, and gender and sexuality.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Queer histories and the politics of policing

Introduction

On 17 May 2016, police forces in several Australian states and territories held rainbow flag-raising ceremonies to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT). In Melbourne, the flag-raising ceremony was organised out of the newly formed ‘Priority Communities Division’ of Victoria Police.¹ This division is the latest iteration of a community policing and public relations agenda from an organisation often accused of over- and under-policing marginalised populations, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people.² The rainbow flag stunt took place just six months after a damning independent review found that women and gay men experienced an entrenched culture of sexual harassment in the force (Victorian Equal Opportunity & Human Rights Commission 2015). In publicity for the 2016 IDAHOBIT flag-raising ceremony, Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton cited increasing community confidence and trust in police as key goals of this gesture. He stated that ‘for police, every day of the year is IDAHOBIT’ (Akersten 2016).

This example is drawn from a growing archive of efforts made by the police to achieve a queer-friendly image. From a history marked by state violence, queer criminalisation, and conflict, police organisations across the globe appear ‘increasingly visible and ceremonious in efforts to demonstrate their opposition to homophobia’ (Rao 2015, p. 38). From anti-hate crime campaigns to large police contingents present at pride marches, Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officer (GLLO) promotions and recruitment stalls at LGBT festivals and events, significant police resources are being dedicated to ‘rainbow makeovers’ of the police image. Often explained as attempts to build trust among a marginalised group, these police initiatives also have wider-reaching effects. As I argue elsewhere, they contribute to a rebranding of police ‘as protectors and defenders of gay liberties and homonormative life’ (Russell 2018, p. 332). Marshalling both ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ symbols of police authority to profess support for LGBT rights, this strategic communication marks a significant departure from the prior police rhetoric of queer criminality that accompanied waves of raids on gay bars, violent repression of LGBT protest, and entrapment schemes across Australia, North America, and Western Europe, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. In fact, it was in 1958 that the New South Wales (NSW) Police Commissioner made the infamous declaration that homosexuality was Australia’s ‘greatest menace’ (Wotherspoon 1989). In marked contrast, a contemporary stocktake of LGBT–police relations would suggest that limited formations of sexual and gender diversity are being brought ‘into the fold of the state’ (Agathangelou et al. 2008, p. 122).

My research into policing and queer histories in Australia began with questions about the new visibility of police as ‘rainbow allies’, much like the anecdote above, and sought to understand its local and historical conditions of emergence. Early in 2011, I attended Melbourne’s Midsumma Pride March as a young queer spectator. Although this was not my first time at a pride event, this was when I really paid attention to the jarring militaristic aesthetics of the marching Victoria Police officers amid a parade of loosely assembled LGBT community groups and lively corporate-sponsored contingents handing out ‘freebies’ to the assembled crowds. The paradoxical celebration of uniformed police in a march that evolved, however loosely, from historical queer resistance to police oppression prompted my search for the local ‘backstory’. I wanted to understand the context of this peculiar alliance and its historical trajectory. In particular, I was concerned about the political story. I had been involved in various social justice movements as a student activist, some of them explicitly queer, and I wanted to understand how this performance of ‘police pride’ came to align with the politics of a ‘mainstream’ LGBT movement.

Given their systematic role in upholding the ‘acceptable’ boundaries of sexuality and gender, police organisations cannot achieve a gay-friendly image alone. Institutional legitimacy has a dialogic nature, involving claims by power-holders and audience receptions (Bottoms & Tankebe 2012). Accordingly, police need active support from some of the largest and most visible LGBT organisations to project their desired image and effectively engage their constituents. They also need authorisation and cooperation from LGBT organisations to participate in anti-homophobic campaigns, to attend and recruit at gay pride events, and promote the force as pro-LGBT. For example, Melbourne’s gay radio station Joy 94.9 FM hosts a regular time slot for Victoria Police GLLOs to promote police news and initiatives, including a ‘crime stoppers’ segment. In 2016, NSW’s peak gay health organisation ACON named the Australian Federal Police (AFP) as the highest-performing public-sector organisation for LGBT inclusion as part of its national ‘Pride in Diversity’ initiative. The AFP came in ninth position overall, behind a number of major banks and ahead of the Department of Defence. Evidently, the renovation of police image requires queer resources and labour as well as access to queer spaces. In these contexts, police come to occupy queer spaces by invitation, rather than by force or stealth—as they have done historically. Yet many queers are intimately familiar with the coercive power of policing.

Historically, queer lives and spaces have been located distinctly outside of—and often antagonistically to—the nation state and its promise of protection. Policing and law have been central to the production of non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities as threatening ‘others’ epitomised by the designation and treatment of queer subjects as sick, dirty, diseased, devious, and criminal (Raj 2015; Warner 1993). Despite persistent constructions of queer threat—especially to ‘the children’ (Angelides 2008; Thompson 2019)—the ways in which sexual and gender diversity are articulated in relation to the state and mainstream culture have significantly shifted in recent decades. Conventional representations of LGBT subjects now frequently rely upon tropes of ‘respectability’ (Skeggs 1997) and ‘neoliberal citizenship’ (Bell & Binnie 2000), which are premised on notions of sameness: that is, appearing ‘just like’ our straight counterparts. These normative representations are particularly pronounced for white, middle-class, able-bodied, and cis lesbian and gay subjects (Niccol 2001). In this new paradigm of ‘sexual citizenship’ (Richardson 2017), sexual politics are articulated through the register of citizen rights, and LGBT people are recast as domestic couples, successful entrepreneurs, and prolific consumers (Ammaturo 2015; Duggan 2004; Harris 2006). The legitimacy that has gradually accrued to a specific class of LGBT people has partially undermined an entrenched notion of ‘homocriminality’ (Dalton 2007). By approaching heteronormative ideals of respectability and ‘investing’ in the ‘institutional structures of punishment’, as Lamble (2013, p. 232) describes it, more privileged members of the LGBT community have been able to accrue enough ‘social, cultural and financial capital’ to cross the tenuous threshold between ‘criminalisation and protection’. In other words, select LGBT people are now more likely to be viewed as victimised subjects, worthy of state protection, rather than as an undeserving and inherently criminal class.

To understand these recent shifts in sexual citizenship and how they have been mediated by LGBT engagements with policing and law, we need to explore much longer histories of police preoccupation with sexual and gender deviance, and LGBT campaigns against police harassment. Indeed, sexual and gender identity-based movements have had to consistently negotiate and respond to police power.

‘We Treat Homosexuals Like Any Other Criminals’: local histories of policing sexuality

While certainly new and somewhat novel, the symbolic condemnation of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia by Victoria Police described previously in this chapter did not happen spontaneously or overnight. Rather, it was a product of a number of institutional pressures and social forces. At times, anti-homophobic initiatives and LGBT visibility within police organisations have been driven by LGBT police employees themselves. In Victoria, the Gay and Lesbian Police Employees Network (GALPEN) was formed in 1995, stressing the importance of being ‘out’ as lesbian and gay police by not only marching in pride events and challenging homophobic workplace cultures, but also pressuring police leadership to publicly demonstrate support for LGBT rights.³ However, this internal advocacy is significantly predated by a much broader network of LGBT activists in the community who drew public attention to police targeting and created pressure for homosexual law reform.

During the summer of 1976–1977, when male homosexuality was still formally criminalised, Victoria Police orchestrated a homophobic blitz targeting ‘sexual deviants’ at Melbourne’s Black Rock Beach. In a page-three article titled ‘Police go gay to lure homosexuals’ in the Age, it was revealed that police officers had ‘posed as homosexuals’ by using a ‘particular walk’ to apprehend 68 men for ‘soliciting with homosexual intent’ (Rentsch & Carman 1977). By studying ‘homosexuals through binoculars’, police attempted to ‘imitate their mannerisms’ to entrap ‘likely offenders’ on the beach, and confessions were allegedly extracted with threats of imprisonment (Rentsch & Carman 1977). The surveillance and arrests at Black Rock Beach prompted activists to escalate their efforts in campaigning for homosexual law reform. The Homosexual Law Reform Coalition (HLRC), described as ‘representing seven Victorian homosexual groups’ (Rentsch & Carman 1977), wrote a letter to the state government, opposition party, police, and civil rights groups arguing against illegitimate police actions at Black Rock Beach. In an excerpt of the letter printed in the ‘Police go gay’ news article, the HLRC argues:

These practices constitute a gross abuse of police power and resources. It is not the legitimate function of the police force to entrap people into committing an offence—albeit an ‘offence’ which has no victim—and it is certainly not their right to prise confessions from people by threats and intimidation.

(Rentsch & Carman 1977)

The following weekend, a ‘picnic rally’ was organised at Black Rock Beach ‘to protest against alleged police harassment and to call for law reform’. News reports suggested that ‘about 50 people attended the rally’ and due to the terrible weather, ‘people sat huddled under black brollies, amid black and pink flags and banners’ (Age 17, January 1977, p. 10). Three years later, homosexual law reform was passed in the Victorian Parliament.

The example of Black Rock Beach illustrates that mistreatment of LGBT people by police has been the subject of activism in Melbourne since at least the 1970s. For the past four decades, LGBT activists have consistently drawn attention to police harassment and ‘over-policing’, as well as the problem of ‘under-policing’, or the lack of accessibility of police aid to queer victims (Iveson 2007). Some of this activism took place under the banner of groups such as the Gay Legal Rights Coalition (GLRC, known as the HRLC from 1976 to 1981) and the Police Lesbian and Gay Liaison Committee (PLGLC), which operated sporadically between 1981 (when the amendments to the Victorian Crimes Act came into force) and 2000. Along with others such as the Gay Business Association (GBA), these groups were concerned to delink homosexuality from criminality and deviance. In some ways, they built upon the anti-police harassment campaigns of gay liberationists in the 1970s, who conceived of policing as a key site and a form of queer oppression. But in other aspects, they departed from radical politics and extended the legacy of earlier iterations of what David Eng (2010) terms ‘gay liberalism’, such as Society Five in Victoria.⁴ In short, LGBT activists have often taken a liberal reformist approach to legal and institutional change, adopting a normative claim to citizenship as a basis for rights (Boucher & Reynolds 2018). Accordingly, much of this activism has not questioned the fundamental role of policing in society—to protect, for instance, settler colonial and capitalist interests—but rather has sought to improve its functioning by working with those in power to correct misplaced police focus upon the homosexual community. Despite the largely cooperative, conciliatory, and reformist approach adopted by groups such as the GLRC, the PLGLC, and later the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (VGLRL), police leadership has historically been dismissive and often outrightly hostile to LGBT attempts at engagement.

A dialogue between two senior Victoria Police officers in the mid-1980s offers a useful contrast to the queer-friendly police performance with which I opened this book. An internal police memo compiled by Chief Inspector Frame to the then-Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, Mick Miller, dated 6 November 1985, discusses a letter received from the GBA. In the letter, the GBA called for an ‘effective liaison committee’ with police, referring to similar requests made by the GLRC since 1981. Following the removal of explicit homosexual offences from the Victorian Crimes Act in 1981, the GLRC continued to alert senior police and government officials to ongoing issues of police harassment, the enforcement of repealed statutes, and ‘the need to “educate” members’ of the force. In 1982, Miller had refused GLRC’s repeated requests for meetings, stating that there was ‘no point in a philosophical discussion’ (Gardiner 2016). The GBA’s follow-up letter in 1985 reiterated concerns about ‘unusual police attentions’, which in the words of Chief Inspector Frame amounted to ‘some sort of conspiracy theory re[garding] police activity’ and ‘a complete lack of knowledge of our operational procedures’. As such, Frame concluded that ‘a “Gay/Police Liaison Committee”’ was not justified (Gardiner 2016). In another instance, Jamie Gardiner (2016), the then-President of GLRC, recalls the police commissioner reinforcing the lack of a need for community liaison by simply stating: ‘we treat homosexuals like any other criminals’. In the early to mid-1980s, then, homosexuality was still firmly wedded to criminality, at least in the eyes of police. Yet 30 years later, as the opening of this book indicates, the common-sense association of queerness with deviance has been recalibrated. This raises important questions about the nature and extent of this shift from outlaw to rights-bearing citizen. What are its preconditions and limits? And how did it come to take place? These are some of the questions that this book interrogates.

The protection of homonormative life in settler states

In Australia, the rise in mainstream visibility of queer culture and formal advancements in LGBT rights are often associated with a national ‘journey towards tolerance’ and ‘equality’ (Niccol 2001, p. 191; Willett 2013, p. 207). However, political theorist Wendy Brown (2006, p. 46) reminds us that state tolerance discourse is conditional upon the ‘difference’ in question being lived and practiced in a ‘depoliticized or private fashion’. This rings true for queer beneficiaries of tolerance discourse. Carol Johnson (2002) argues that the dominant terms for LGBT rights encourage a form of ‘passing’, which involves privatising and representing our relationships as ‘just like’ heterosex...