Vice Patrol

Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Anna Lvovsky

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226769783, 9780226769646
• eBook ISBN: 9780226769813
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Law

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.

Notes

Introduction

1. Field Report 31075, March 22, 1957, 3.

2. Murphy’s Tavern, Inc. v. Div. of Alcoholic Beverage Control, Supreme Court of New Jersey, A-8, No. 5433 (1967), Appendix, 562–563a.

3. Max K. Hurlbut, “Presentation,” January 1965, 12, ONE Subject Files Collection: “Los Angeles Police Department—Entrapment & Vice,” Coll1012.001, item 88, ONE Archives; UCLA Law Review Study, 694 and nn. 47 and 53; Paul Welch, “The ‘Gay’ World Takes to the Streets,” Life, June 26, 1964, 72; “Playboy Forum,” Playboy, February 1965, 37–38.

4. For general histories, see John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic, 2006); Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), chaps. 1–2; Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Genny Beemyn, A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C. (New York: Routledge, 2015); Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Gary Atkins, Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin, 1993). For histories of regulation, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Stacy Lorraine Braukman, Communists and Perverts under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990); Douglas M. Charles, Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” Program (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015). Two notable, if brief, exceptions are Christopher Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), chap. 6; and Emily Hobson, “Policing Gay L.A.: Mapping Racial Divides in the Homophile Era, 1950–1967,” in The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific, ed. Moon-Ho Jung (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 188–212.

5. On censorship, see Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (January 2001): 78–116; Craig M. Loftin, ed., Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 121; Whitney Strub, “The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles,” American Quarterly 60 (June 2008): 373–98. On the military, see Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire; Canaday, Straight State.

6. William N. Eskridge Jr., Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003 (New York: Viking, 2008), 1–6, 13–23.

7. Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions, 14–23; Stephen Robertson, “Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the American History of Sexual Violence,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (May 2010): 223–42; Chauncey, Gay New York, 2–3.

8. On the sex crime panic, see Estelle Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 83–84, 92–93; Andrea Friedman, “Sadists and Sissies: Anti-Pornography Campaigns in Cold War America,” Gender and History 15 (August 2003): 213–39; Stephen Robertson, Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), chap. 10; Chrysanthi S. Leon, Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles: Understanding Sex Crime Policy in America (New York: New York University Press, 2001). For rising urban communities, see Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 244; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 31–33. On the Lavender Scare, see Johnson, Lavender Scare; Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

9. Marketing Laws Survey, State Liquor Legislation (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1941). On professionalization, see Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 177–79. For statutory expansions, see Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions, 57–59, 94–99; Steven A. Rosen, “Police Harassment of Homosexual Women and Men in New York City, 1960–1980,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 12 (1980): 159–90; Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires,’” 97–98; Marie-Amelie George, “The Harmless Psychopath: Legal Debates Promoting Decriminalization of Sodomy in the United States,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25 (2015): 225–61. On the use of loitering laws, see Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 5.

10. Gerald J. Levie, “Vice and Victim (Police Entrapment)” (1975, typescript), 46, ONE Archives Manuscripts Collection, Coll2012.175, ONE Archives.

11. The emphasis on the legal system’s antipathy toward gay men and women characterizes most of the social and legal histories noted above, including especially Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics; Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A.; Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout; Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves; Johnson, Lavender Scare; Atkins, Gay Seattle. Legal scholars have also argued that the law’s treatment of gay men reflects judges’ overwhelmingly sinister view of queer practices. See Larry Cata Backer, “Constructing a ‘Homosexual’ for Constitutional Theory: Sodomy Narrative, Jurisprudence, and Antipathy in United States and British Courts,” Tulane Law Review 71 (1996): 529–96. A notable exception is David Sklansky, “‘One Train May Hide Another’: Katz, Stonewall, and the Secret Subtext of Criminal Procedure,” UC Davis Law Review 41 (February 2008): 875–934.

12. The story told here thus echoes the work of legal scholars like Malcolm Feeley and Lawrence Friedman, who have examined courts as complex institutions guided by their own incentives, norms, and culture. Malcolm Feeley, The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court (New York: Russell Sage, 1979), chap. 1; Lawrence Friedman, The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective (New York: Russell Sage, 1975), 1–24.

13. This story, too, echoes seminal sociological work on courts as creative problem solvers. Feeley, The Process Is the Punishment, 283–84; Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 13. It also joins a line of valuable histories examining how lower-level public actors use their discretion to shape legal policy. Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• introduction
• one  /  When Anyone Can Tell
• two  /  Expert Witnesses on Trial
• three  /  Plainclothes Decoys and the Limits of Criminal Justice
• four  /  The Rise of Ethnographic Policing
• five  /  Peepholes and Perverts
• six  /  The Popular Press and the Gay World
• epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index