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

by Anna Lvovsky

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, LGBT, Queer Studies, Gender and Sexuality, American History

360 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2021

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anna Lvovsky's Vice Patrol lays out a first-of-its-kind look back at the meticulous ways in which the police, courts, and media constructed and controlled gay identities from World War II through the Stonewall Riots.

Prohibition ended in 1933 and with its downfall the individual states ushered in a litany of liquor regulations enforced through state liquor boards. Included in these regulations were restrictions on serving alcohol to "perceived" homosexuals. And so began police department's attempts to map out what a homosexual looks like, acts like, and sounds like in order to police the behaviors of these homosexuals. What began as restrictions on bar owners would expand into an entire policing infrastructure meant to deter any form of homosexual expression from communal drinking to cruising in public restrooms. Over the decades, police departments themselves developed detailed and intricate methods of enticing, entrapping, and identifying homosexual men, methods that would be picked up by courts and the media and help develop perceptions of the modern homosexual.

Vice Patrol is a perfect example of Foucault's ideas on how institutions construct and shape identity. Lvovsky meticulously lays out how vice squads and homosexuals acted and reacted to one another, as homosexuals continued to develop new ways of dress, action, and language to evade the ever-increasingly accurate undercover behaviors of vice officers who learned how to act just like the homosexuals they sought to arrest. Though reading Vice Patrol is made easier with some understanding of legal jargon and court procedure, the book itself is essential reading for anyone with an interest in queer history, the history of policing, and the ways in which the two impacted each other.

[Meaghan Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book! I think it's far more of a legal history than a queer history, even than what one would assume from the introduction. It focuses on the methods of policing queer people in the mid-twentieth century. We read this in between Chauncey's Gay New York and Kate Redburn's article on trans laws for class, which I thought was a near perfect collection of readings. I also think this is a particularly important read now, and agree with the handful of reviews I read that wished it did more to connect to the present. I also wish she more explicitly discussed race and class divides. Overall great read! I'd recommend this, but it is an academic history book.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lvovsky looks at the contested nature of policing in relation to queer communities in the United States. The book complicates the usual narrative of police oppression illustrating how the judiciary & police often had different agendas which made policing more complicated.

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 anti solicitation laws to regulations against gay-friendly bars. Police officers and liquor investigators, it 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. 11

At heart, this book makes three interrelated claims. First, it contends that the project of antigay policing in the United States was, far from a monolithic or universally embraced endeavour, a site of profound contestation and struggle among the different arms of the criminal justice system, reflecting a range of political, constitutional, and pragmatic disputes well beyond the law’s proper treatment of sexual difference. Second, it argues that, at a time when public and professional authorities espoused a range of views about the nature of same-sex practises, 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. Finally, it 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 practises 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.” 12-13

This book centres on the mid-twentieth century, tracing an arc stretching roughly from the 1930s through the 1960s, when the regulation of gay life loomed especially large on the agendas of local police forces. It focuses on three sites of anti homosexual enforcement: liquor board proceedings against gay-friendly bars, plainclothes campaigns to entice sexual overtures, and the use of clandestine surveillance to uncover sexual acts in public bathrooms.13

By the mid-twentieth century, the law’s relationship with queer life had begun to shift. The reasons for this change were many, and they are difficult to disentangle. One catalyst traced back to the late 1930s, when a rash of publicized sex crimes spawned a panic about degeneracy in the nation’s cities. The reports almost invariably involved morbid attacks on young girls, but the ensuing outcry against “sex fiends,” fanned by enforcement officials like J. Edgar Hoover, often conflated gay men with a darker category of criminal. The shifting demographics of the city hardly helped. As a generation of soldiers flocked to urban centres following World War II, the country’s burgeoning queer populations, with their attendant bars and cruising ground, struck some citizens and politicians as a blight on the orderly city. 14-15

The demise of Prohibition ushered in a spate of specialized liquor boards, tasked with ensuring the orderly operation of bars and taverns. A campaign to professionalize the municipal police led most large and midsized departments by the early 1950s to form vice or morals squads focusing on sex-related offences. 15

At a time when the progressive legal community increasingly questioned the limits of police discretion and investigative power, plainclothes enticement in bars and bathrooms struck some courts as yet another iteration or the official misconduct they had a moral, if not legal, duty to monitor. 16

The story of anti homosexual policing in the United States is in large part a story of creative intervention: a tale of how individual judges vindicated their preferred outcomes in the face of harsh criminal laws, punitive policies by police departments, and unforgiving legal doctrines imposed by the higher courts. And it is a story, too, of how police departments accommodated those pressures-rarely to the advantage of the community they policed.18

That struggle began in earnest roughly in the mid-nineteenth century, when physicians on both sides of the Atlantic broke from the clergy’s long-standing grip on homosexuality as a moral failing and ventured to examine it as a disease, traceable to some degeneration of the flesh. By the turn of the century, their search for the physiological roots of same-sex desire gave way to a more disembodied theory of difference. 19-20

The history of the American public’s encounters with homosexuality in the twentieth century, in short, is a story of competing paradigms: a struggle among different understandings of the nature, origins, and social meaning of same-sex desire.21

Psychiatry first entered the state’s anti homosexual campaigns on a dark note, underwriting the draconian sexual psychopath was that proliferated in the early 1950s. 22

Prevailing historical accounts understandably tend to portray the medical model as a source of profound social stigma, legal discrimination, and personal distress for the men and women it pathologized -what John D’Emilio has described as a ‘millstone around [the] neck’ of the gay liberation movement. Yet in the daily legal battles over the policing of queer life, the medicalization of deviance-including, ironically, the institutional infrastructure erected by the sexual psychopath statues-often genuinely softened the had of the criminal system mitigating many men’s encounters with the law. 23

As the historian Christopher Agee has documented, most policemen in the postwar years came to the force with little knowledge about gay life. Drawn from a cross section of the community and subject to the same stereotypes that shaped broader public presumptions about sexual difference, many derided all homosexual men as the effeminate creatures of the popular imagination. Some harkened, more darkly, to the lingering spectre of the sexual predator, a trope commonly involved by vice squads to justify their ongoing campaigns. [23] 27

When the American media rediscovered the homosexual in the 1960s, it was policemen whom journalists most frequently credited as the source and model for their investigations - vice officers, rather than gay men or academic researchers, who most visibly introduced the American public to the modern gay world. 27

Starting with Michel Foucault’s seminal studies, historians of sexuality have examined the importance of defining citizens in order to control them-the extent to which state agencies establish power over deviant groups by promulgating their own preferred understanding of those populations, facilitating and legitimating their enforcement efforts. 32

Queer nightlife in the early twentieth century thrived in a period of minimal scrutiny by local authorities. Policemen kept an eye out for men loitering, among other activities, in public parks and bathrooms, and the effeminate fairies who openly flouted gender norms sometimes came to blows with officers on the street, but private clubs and restaurants were largely left to conduct their business as they pleased. At the height of the Prohibition era, when most nightclubs already bribed patrolmen to turn a blind eye to their stores of whisky, the presence of a homosexual (or several) on the premises failed to register as a police priority. 39

Far from simply ushering in a more tolerant public discourse on sexual deviance, or even entrenching reductive stereotypes about queer communities, such celebrated moments of queer visibility fuelled the states’ most literal uses of police power against gay men and women. 41

Others created specialized agencies to issue liquor licenses, including New York’s State Liquor Authority (SLA) and New Jersey’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC). Both types of agencies were responsible for implementing a host of rules, from prohibitions against serving minors to mandatory closing times and minimum food sales. Not least, they were responsible for ensuring that bars and restaurants did not become havens for certain undesirable elements: drug addicts, gamblers, prostitutes, and, certainly, homosexuals. 43

It should also be unsurprising because, both before and following Repeal, bars, restaurants, and taverns were among the most reliable sites of queer social life. Spaces defined by their ambiguous straddling of the public and private, simultaneously open to strangers and shielded from the eyes of passerby, bars provided an appealing setting for social practises that might have drawn more hostility on the city streets…
Tax boards like California’s BOE, in particular, were often more interested in maximizing revenue than patrolling the moral character of urban nightlife. But some agencies, including the liquor boards in New Jersey and New York, took the project of protecting the public order more seriously. 44

Before the hearings, of course, came the matter of gathering evidence. Almost all liquor boards had their own staff of specialized agents, paid exclusively to investigate violations of the liquor codes. 46

As a practical matter, uniformed officers were often the first line of defence against violations of state and municipal liquor regulations, patrolling neighbourhood bars, warning bar owners when they began attracting questionable patrons, and sometimes fielding complaints from businessmen trying to disperse their own unwelcome clientele. 47

Although state liquor agents were hardly immune to corruption, local police officers integrated into the neighbourhood economy often had more opportunities to extract payoffs from bar owners in exchange for official protection. It was unsurprising, in context, that policemen often adopted a more flexible interpretation of the liquor laws. 48

Sensitive to the risk of liquor agents looking for violations, bar owners did their best to keep any explicit erotic displays, homosexual or otherwise, in check. Bartenders and managers broke up dancing couples, prohibited patrons from visiting the bathroom together, and scolded men striking up conversations with strangers. 49

Other bar owners resigned themselves to their unsought clientele, recognizing a reliable stream of income when they saw it, even as they denigrated their ‘disgusting’ and ‘perverted’ customers to anyone who asked…
For that reasons, indeed, in cities like New York and Chicago operating gay-friendly bars would become a popular venture among criminal syndicates, happy to use their existing network of police protection to capture a profitable market. But many bar owners also developed personal relationships with their regulars, following their romantic exploits and coming to see them as a type of extended family-what some, and particularly older women like Helen Branson, referred to as ‘their boys.’ 51-52

At the Clock Bar in Dauphin County, investigators with the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board confiscated a copy of the Lavender Baedeker, an underground guide to gay bars across North America. (A sign hanging nearby, equally incriminating, read ‘Pickled eggs laid by gay roosters.’) Where bar owners implemented surreptitious alarms to help keep out the agents of the state-the secret locks, the bouncers, the coded lights behind the counter-those same mechanisms ironically doubles as proof of guilt once the agents got inside. [23] 53

The most prominent pansy spectacles were the drag balls held annually in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Beginning in the nineteenth century. queer men and women had sometimes subverted the aristocratic convention of the masquerade ball and organized their own private drag parties, but in the late 1920s that niche world erupted into a citywide pastime. 55

The fairy cabaret burst to the forefront of New York nightlife in the winter of 1930, when Jean Malin, a darling of the Greenwich Village nightlife, opened a new floor show at the Club Abbey in Times Square. Appearing each night in an immaculate tuxedo, his hair bleached and his eyebrows delicately contoured, Malin built his name less on female impersonation than on bawdy banter and double entendres. 56

Newspaper articles often described drag balls in jargon more closely associated with sexual transgression than female impersonation, abounding in coded references to the ‘twilight men’ and ‘lavender lads’ who ‘let their hair down at the Rockland Palace. 58

Crucially, however, entertainments like the pansy cabarets did not simply mark the homosexual body as available to the public eye. They also marked that body legible, marked by a series of conspicuous visual codes. 59

Through a combination of flamboyance and sheer repetition, in short, the permissive leisure culture of the early twentieth century, from slumming in the Bowery to the theatrical spectacles of the pansy craze, taught urban American to associate certain visual cues indelibly with the homosexual…
A 1931 novel about Manhattan’s homosexual underworld, Blair Niles’s Strange Brother, featured a character explaining his method in strikingly similar language: “Oh, I can spot ‘em! Can tell ‘em as far as I can see ‘em. Tell by the way they cock their hats…by their walk even…the way they swing their hips.’ In the coming years, patrons in the bars surveilled by the liquor boards-men and women alike-would commonly insist that they could ‘know’ simply ‘from [their] observation…a person known as a homosexual male.’ Indeed, Niles’s novel suggested identifying fairies was hardly an imposing accomplishment for a self-respecting urbanite. 60

Like so many urban Americans in these years, liquor agents were confident that they could spot queer men, immediately and infallibly, on the basis of the telltale mannerisms of the fairy. 62

In a decade when regulators at the federal level commonly broadened their anti homosexual campaigns by shifting their focus from illicit sexual acts toward identifiable homosexual ‘persons,’ the liquor laws might have seemed to move in the opposite direction. 71

Decades before progressive doctors moved to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, homophile activists had frequently made the choice to embrace psychiatrists as public ambassadors for the greater social tolerance of queer communities, accepting their stigmatizing theories as, in effect, the cost of their support. 91

More than simply a site of struggle over the contours of sexual difference, the liquor boards’ campaigns against gay bars in the mid-twentieth century thus emerged as a key battleground over the nature of public authority over same-sex practices: a contest over who precisely got to define the boundaries of normality and deviance before the law. 92

For the professional tensions that dominated these debates hardly originated after World War II. As far back as the late nineteenth century, warring camps of researchers embarked on what would become a lasting campaign to defend their superior insights into the subject of sexual difference-not only among themselves, but also against the less tutored presumptions of the public. 94

In 1924, the Germany physician Arthur Weil published a study of the ‘anatomical foundations’ of homosexuality, measuring the limbs, hips, and shoulders of 380 homosexual men. A decade later, George Henry and Hugh Galbraith, formally trained as psychiatrists, applied a similar methodology on the other side of the Atlantic, compiling measurements of bodily traits ranging from hair density to the girth of testicles, thighs, and buttocks. That investigative spirit soon led Henry to pursue a longer research project sponsored by the Committee for the Study Sex Variants, a private research coalition helmed out of New York City. Working alongside Jan Gay, a lesbian researcher who proved instrumental in recruiting subjects, Henry compiled over two hundred case studies of homosexual men and women in New York between 1935 and 1937, consisting of personal interviews as well as physical inspections, pelvic exams, and X-rays. [4. Arthur Weil, “Sprechen anatomische Grundlagen für das Angeborenen der Homosexualität?” Archiv für Frauenkunde und Konstitution Forschung 10 (1924): 23-40; George W. Henry and Hugh M. Galbraith, “Constitutional Factors in Homosexuality,” American Journal of Psychiatry 13 (may 1934): 1250-55…] 95-96

The military’s growing disillusionment with the physical hallmarks of sexual deviance deepened its reliance on another source of wisdom: professional psychiatry. The war effort ushered in a close alliance between the military and psychiatrists as national officials sensitive to the epidemic of trauma and combat fatigue among deployed soldiers, remembering the recent experience of the Great War, turned to medical professional for assistance. The result was a growing embrace of the discipline, both within and outside the medical profession, as a font of valuable insights into the science of human behaviour. As William Menninger, the psychiatric consultant to the surgeon general of the army, observed in 1948, ‘as a result of the war’ the ‘public interest in the problems of mental health…is at an all-time high.’ 102
Kinsey marshalled his findings in service of a very different conclusion than that espoused by most psychiatrists: that homosexuality was, far from a symptom of mental maladjustment, a natural and even common form of erotic experimentation. 104

In the spring of 1937, an apparent rash of violent assaults against young children, almost exclusively young girls victimized by older men, captured the attention of newspapers and magazines across the country. It is unclear whether the coverage reflected a genuine spike in crime or a self-perpetuating journalistic trend; as the economic dislocations of the Great Depression fuelled broader anxieties about undomesticated male sexuality, indeed, the focus on violent predators likely displaced deeper concerns about the shifting character of American manhood. 105

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile]]

Not feeling the writing style.

The introduction was literally 12 different ways of saying the same thing, but differently worded each time, and the first chapter had several different introductions and explanations of what it was going to cover on its own.

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an important contribution for understanding how institutions were far from monolithic. While undercover policing, relying on "common sense" identification of queer people, brought these individuals to the courts, these courts criticized the police's invasive spying and, with the rise of medical expertise on "sexuality," the strength of these "common sense" identifications. Personally, I liked the way we got to hear what police thought about their work including the one guy who liked patrolling the bathrooms since he got a chance to smoke.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars or thereabouts—academic but fairly readable look at how courts and cops functioned or didn’t function around entrapping gay men in vice stings

[Brett Burkhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic piece of queer and legal history.

[Pooja · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.7

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me a long time to read which is pretty unusual for me to tbh but it was worth it.

Using a variety of sources- court records, police procedural manuals and training materials, interviews, and secondary sources Lvovsky really explains how the court system is at once at odds with policework during the mid-20th century and also helped to assist in the prosecution and persecution of gay men in urban areas.

It also took me a long time to read because it was obvious the work was their doctoral monograph so it was very dense at time so I had to break it up in chunks.