Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaac412
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoIn this sophisticated and original work, Anna Lvovsky interrogates the policing of queer sexual and cultural expression in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s. Without trivializing the harm perpetrated through such efforts, she persuasively demonstrates that midcentury antivice policing “was not a monolithic enterprise” (p. 100). Rather, it represented “a complex, deep-seated struggle among multiple branches of the legal system, a contest about the proper boundaries of law enforcement as much as about the law's treatment of sexual difference” (ibid.). In other words, Vice Patrol probes the institutional, popular, and epistemic struggles occasioned by antigay policing during the mid-twentieth century. The book's first two chapters explore the policing of urban night life following the repeal of Prohibition. The rise of liquor boards in the mid-1930s brought liquor agents and police officers into gay-friendly establishments where they scoured for “proof that a bar owner not only served queer patrons but also did so knowingly” (p. 25, emphasis in original). Court proceedings against allegedly gay-friendly bars thus revolved around popular (and distorted) conceptions of homosexuality forged in “the permissive urban culture of the 1920s” and the 1930s “pansy” craze (ibid.). For many observers and authorities, specific gestures and codes provided tell-tale signs of sexual deviance. Others harnessed the insights of Alfred Kinsey to deride those “claiming to identify [homosexuals] by their ‘effeminate’ appearance” (p. 78). Here and elsewhere, Lvovsky examines “the politics of knowledge underlying the administration of the criminal law”—or what she calls “the epistemology of law enforcement,” perhaps a subtle nod to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (p. 17).
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