REVIEWS
"Lvovsky has written an important history of antigay policing in the US between 1930 and 1970. . . . Lvovsky dives into municipal archives, court records, and psychological literature to interrogate queer tropes, taking care to guide readers through this narrative. . . . Lvovsky deftly handles these topics with nuance and compassion. Those studying law, history, gender and sexuality, and political science will benefit from her work in terms of understanding queer life in the 20th century, the professionalization of policing, and how the two intersected to shape (mis)understandings about the other. This is a necessary title for all libraries at all levels. . . . Essential."
— Choice
"Anna Lvovsky’s Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall offers an exciting, novel contribution to the fast-growing field of police history in the United States. . . . Vice Patrol reshapes our understanding of the state’s regulation of gay life, and it complicates long-held assumptions about the relationship between police knowledge and police power."
— American Journal of Legal History
"With precise details and careful analysis, Vice Patrol tells a fascinating story about how the policing of homosexuality from the 1940s to the 1960s was far more contradictory and contested than we might think, and how courts of law played a crucial role in the emerging understanding and visibility of LGBT life."
— The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
"In Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall, Anna Lvovsky examines with both precision and breadth a time period during which litigants in queer society encountered considerably greater difficulty in the justice system... This important book casts new light on the legal intricacies and political realities of anti-gay legislation several generations before courts began looking with disfavor on laws stigmatizing or even criminalizing members of the queer community."
— Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
"Lvovsky chronicles the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life in the US from the1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. She finds that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of 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 LGBTQ community’s civil liberties, and that continue to be relevant today."
— Law & Social Inquiry
"In her stunning new book, Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky argues that, in the United States, the criminal justice system was disjointed on the subject of homosexuality and how it should be policed. . . In an elegantly written examination of state liquor boards, courts and police, Lvovsky demonstrates that individual agents and agencies of the criminal justice system, alongside same-sex desiring people and ‘experts’, shaped and reshaped the public and legal concept of the ‘homosexual.'"
— Journal of Urban History
"In 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. . . This textured and innovative study will interest legal and urban historians and scholars of gender and sexuality in the United States."
— Journal of American History
"In Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, Anna Lvovsky tackles a topic—the history of police abuses of queer people and spaces—that historians have long documented and gives it an impressive new spin. Histories of LGBTQ experience in particular cities, for example, always include significant attention to these anti-LGBTQ policing practices. Lvovsky, however, turns this topic on its head by approaching the issue from the perspective of the state regulatory, police, and judicial systems. . . . Lvovsky has produced a work of impressive and fascinating scholarship. . ."
— Contemporary Sociology
"Vice Patrol offers powerful lessons for today’s civil rights battles, both in the courts and online. The book uses a case study of state enforcement of anti-vice laws against gay people to tell a larger story about an epistemological struggle over facts and knowledge, as well as the limits, if any, they place on power."
— Michigan Law Review
"Visibility is the clarion call of LGBT politics, but Vice Patrol scrambles the signal. Lvovsky takes familiar moments of gay visibility as her starting point, showing how media attention hardened stereotypes about gay culture. Those stereotypes had a curious afterlife in the legal system, leading to 'epistemic gaps' between enforcement institutions. . . . By elaborating on this process, Lvovsky reveals the 'regulatory underside' to gay cultural visibility. . . [and] brings new insight to a question that has puzzled scholars across several fields: Why and how does cultural representation lead to increased state repression?"
— The University of Chicago Law Review
"Lvovsky’s sophisticated approach paints a complex portrait of the state apparatus aimed at regulating queer spaces . . . [Vice Patrol is] a crucial contribution to the scholarly literatures on LGBT communities and policing more generally. I expect it will be useful in part or in whole in courses for instructors in a wide range of disciplines, including history; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; criminology; and sociology."
— Journal of the History of Sexuality
“Lvovsky has done incredible detective work to take us deep inside the machinery of antigay policing during its peak years. Focusing on three distinct sites—the regulation of gay bars by state liquor agencies, the work of plainclothes decoys, and the policing of public restrooms through ‘peepholes’—Lvovsky shows that a legal system we assumed to be monolithically repressive was in fact internally divided about these practices. This subtle and smart book not only illuminates the boundaries around sexual difference but criminal justice as well. Revelatory in every sense of the word.”
— Margot Canaday, Princeton University
"Lvovsky takes the vice patrolman—the villain who lurks at the edges of virtually every work of the queer communities that flourished in twentieth-century U.S. cities—and insistently pulls him into the spotlight. Vice Patrol is ambitious, meticulously researched, exceptionally well-conceived, and startlingly original. It deserves a wide readership among historians of law and legal history, LGBTQ history, urban history, and the history of policing and punishment. It is, in fact, a tour de force that will be read and reread by every scholar in the field and will lead us to ask new questions of our sources in the years to come."
— Timothy Stewart-Winter, Rutgers University
“Lvovsky has written a splendid, insightful history of anti-gay policing in mid-twentieth century America. Vice Patrol shows how investigatory tactics evolved and how they prompted and were in turn shaped by debates about the nature and prevalence of same-sex desire, the appropriate limits on law enforcement, and the kinds of authority and expertise that should matter in answering those questions. It's a gripping read, combining rich, ground-level detail with sober assessments of what those decades-old struggles signified and what lessons they hold for us today.”
— David Sklansky, Stanford Law School
“’The 'police’ and ‘the gay community’ are often portrayed as monolithic entities. In Vice Patrol, Lvovsky shows how each entity revealed the extraordinary diversity of the other through their interactions in the pre-Stonewall United States. This is the debut of an important new scholar, who can etch a legal world in scrimshaw with strokes that are both bold and sure.”
— Kenji Yoshino, New York University School of Law
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0001
[police;courts;vice enforcement;homosexuality;gay life;expertise;lay knowledge;epistemology;legal history;cultural history]
This introduction lays out the book’s three core arguments. Departing from existing histories, this book contends that anti-gay policing at mid-century was a site of profound contestation within the criminal justice system, reflecting a range of political, institutional, and pragmatic disputes beyond the law’s proper treatment of sexual difference. Bringing together cultural and legal history, it argues that, at a time when lay and expert authorities espoused a range of views about the nature of same-sex practices, legal battles over anti-gay policing provided a powerful arena for shaping the standing and legacy of those competing accounts, invoking the weight of the law in choosing which epistemologies were authoritative and frequently transforming their political impact. Finally, it proposes that, amid these conflicting accounts of both the value of vice enforcement and the nature of homosexuality itself, the continuing success of the police’s campaigns rested on the coexistence, within the legal system, of multiple competing understandings of gay life, dividing how vice officers and judges understood the social practices they regulated. (pages 1 - 23)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
When Anyone Can Tell: Liquor Codes, Gay Bars, and the Politics of Common Sense - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0002
[liquor laws;gay bars;pansy craze;stereotype;public knowledge;gender norms;homosexuality;class;normalcy;deviance]
This chapter examines the history of liquor proceedings against gay-friendly bars after Prohibition, focusing on New York, New Jersey, and California. Tasked with proving that bar owners knowingly served queer patrons, investigators commonly drew on supposed widespread popular presumptions about homosexuality, from the effeminate stereotypes of the 1930s to a range of more ambiguous fashions and behaviors in the 1960s, to impute that owners must have recognized their queer customers. In response, bar owners vociferously challenged such evidence, questioning the significance of gendered stereotypes and protesting the classist, culturally-specific presumptions underlying the boards’ more ambiguous behavioral testimony. Complicating more strategic previous accounts, this chapter illuminates the role of stereotype in the liquor boards’ anti-gay proceedings as an inevitable consequence of a regulatory regime grounded on the public’s shared cultural knowledge. It reveals how seemingly progressive moments in gay history, like the pansy craze of the 1930s, directly fueled the states’ regulation of queer social spaces following Prohibition. Finally,it examines how the liquor boards’ attempts to identify some “shared” or commonsensical hallmarks of deviance at mid-century endorsed a hierarchy of cultural and class aesthetics as the threshold of normalcy for all Americans. (pages 24 - 63)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Expert Witnesses and the Struggle for Public Authority over Homosexuality - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0003
[liquor laws;expert witnesses;psychiatry;Kinsey Institute;police;expertise;lay knowledge;homosexuality;gay bars;medicalization of homosexuality]
This chapter examines the often-surprising role of expert testimony in liquor proceedings against gay bars following World War II. As a new cohort of medical and scientific professionals claimed sexual difference as the subject of their unique expertise, resourceful bar owners began engaging psychiatrists, psychologists, and Kinsey Institute researchers—as well as, sometimes, veteran policemen—to challenge both the significance of the boards’ evidence and the wisdom of their policies. Yet despite the growing authority of such professionals in other legal settings, liquor officials invested in a regulatory regime grounded on the public’s shared presumptions about homosexuality consistently denied the value of their expertise, defending the public’s own commonsense authority over the contours of normal and deviant sexual conduct. Driven by the unique evidentiary pressures of the liquor codes, proceedings against gay bars thus intervened in a live debate about the comparative status of lay and expert knowledge about sexual difference at mid-century. At the same time, those pressures transformed the political valence of seemingly familiar forms of expertise, turning the medicalization of homosexuality into a useful tool for resisting the regulation of queer social spaces and compelling liquor officials to downplay police officers’ often-celebrated insights into criminalized communities. (pages 64 - 97)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Plainclothes Decoys and the Battle over the Limits of Criminal Justice - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0004
[police;entrapment;plainclothes decoys;homosexuality;gay life;courts;psychiatry;police harassment;solicitation;disorderly conduct]
Focusing on Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C., this chapter examines police entrapment tactics against gay men following World War II and the often-surprising disagreements they inspired in court. Following the war, plainclothes decoys converged on cruising grounds across the country, providing courts with a steady stream of solicitation and disorderly conduct charges. Yet although judges rarely condoned homosexuality, they often balked at the realities of such enforcement, from the excessiveness of criminal penalties to the waste of government resources to the immorality of undercover enticement—objections fueled by their belief, cultivated by employees at state psychiatric clinics, that homosexuality was best seen as an illness. These judges adopted a range of informal mechanisms for frustrating the ensuing prosecutions, which often mitigated the law’s bite but also sometimes inspired officers to adopt new methods of harassment. Delving into the sometimes-unanticipated (and unsuccessful) sources of mercy in the law’s treatment of gay men, this chapter illuminates the vice squads’ anti-homosexual campaigns as a fractious battleground over not only the law’s proper treatment of sexual difference but also the character of law enforcement itself: the wisdom of criminal statutes, the limits of ethical policing, and the power of the courts. (pages 98 - 141)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Passing as Deviant: Gay Culture and the Rise of Ethnographic Policing - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0005
[vice squads;police;homosexuality;entrapment;courts;plainclothes decoys;gay culture;cruising;ethnographic study of homosexuality;ethnographic policing]
This chapter examines how vice squads developed a newly ethnographic form of policing to entice gay men in the late 1950s and 1960s. As gay culture in these years grew increasingly systematic and insular, vice officers seeking to maintain their arrest rates set out to master gay men’s often-obscure cruising customs as a tool of effective enforcement, relying on manuals, academy training, and field experience to learn to pass as gay among wary targets. Yet such officers continued to justify their campaigns, internally and in court, by denying the often-rarefied insights that facilitated their arrests, insisting that gay men’s indiscriminate sexual habits made such arrests inevitable. Tracing the vice squads’ evolving strategies, this chapter unearths the regulatory underside of the ethnographic study of gay life at mid-century, a seemingly progressive project that doubled as a powerful weapon of the police, and suggests the growing qualms inspired by the vice squads’ immersive undercover operations. Not least, it illuminates how, faced with the courts’ continuing ambivalence about police entrapment, vice officers avoided judicial disapproval of their increasingly manipulative methods by exploiting an epistemic gap within the justice system, separating how police officers and judges understood the nature of gay cruising itself. (pages 142 - 179)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Peepholes and Perverts: Clandestine Surveillance and the Enigma of the Cruiser - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0006
[clandestine surveillance;public bathrooms;cruising;vice squads;police;Fourth Amendment;gay life;courts;trial judges;character evidence]
This chapter examines the use of clandestine surveillance to arrest men engaging in sex acts in public bathrooms at mid-century. Frustrated by cruisers’ systematic codes for concealing sexual encounters, which prevented arrests through other means, vice squads devised a range of surreptitious tactics for observing those acts, from peepholes to fake air vents to two-way mirrors. The men arrested, in turn, mounted a range of defenses in court, questioning the reliability of police testimony, producing evidence of their good character, and challenging the constitutionality of clandestine surveillance itself. Moved by such evidence, trial judges frequently questioned the dangers posed by cruisers, minimizing defendants’ legal consequences. Yet appellate courts assessing Fourth Amendment challenges often defended surveillance as a necessary tool against predatory, exhibitionistic criminals—upholding that tactic, in effect, by ignoring the cultural conditions that necessitated it. This chapter illuminates how the different legal agents involved in regulating gay life, from vice officers to trial judges to appellate courts, developed distinct perspectives on the communities they regulated, fueling disagreements over the value of vice enforcement. It also confirms how, within that contested space, the justice system’s lingering disputes about the nature of same-sex practices sustained the vice squads’ most controversial tactics. (pages 180 - 219)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Popular Press and the Gay World - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0007
[media;gay culture;cruising;homosexuality;police;vice squads;social regulation;expertise;epistemic authority;taboo]
This chapter examines the popular media’s “discovery” of the gay world in the 1960s, which inspired a reappraisal of both queer life in America and the police’s anti-homosexual campaigns. Startled by gay men’s frequent departure from common stereotypes, newspapers and magazines took it upon themselves to introduce readers to the contours of modern gay culture, often turning to vice officers—those professional students of urban queer practices—as their guides. Yet while early journalists celebrated officers’ impressive fluency in cruising customs, that same fluency ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the vice squads’ campaigns, raising questions about the utility, morality, and psychology of a police force whose greatest professional talents consisted of infiltrating an illicit sexual subculture. Examining the regulatory underbelly of media curiosity about homosexuality at mid-century, this chapter illuminates the emergence of vice officers as epistemic authorities on sexual difference: professionals, not unlike more traditional medical and scientific experts, who produced and popularized new knowledge about gay life. At the same time, it unmasks the deeper social anxieties, beyond more ethical or practical concerns, that counseled officers against acknowledging their insights about gay life: the fraught politics of claiming “expertise” over a taboo subject like the gay world. (pages 220 - 256)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Epilogue - Anna Lvovsky
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.003.0008
[law and culture;policing;vice enforcement;homosexuality;gay life;expertise;regulatory knowledge;sociology of ignorance]
The states’ campaigns against gay life began decelerating in the late 1960s, reflecting a range of factors including newly vocal activism within queer communities, growing controversies over abusive policing, legal shifts toward protecting consensual sexual acts, and a growing countercultural movement. Not least, that trend reflected the public’s shifting understandings of same-sex practices, which led critics to reappraise both the value and the ethics of the vice squads’ campaigns. Reviewing this book’s core arguments about the often-unpredictable intersections between anti-gay policing and contemporary debates about the nature of queer life, this epilogue contemplates the broader ramifications of this story: the complex ways that public understandings about criminalized communities determine the possibilities of legal regulation; how legal institutions do not simply reflect but transform the significance of shifting cultural values and ideologies; the surprising contingency of police expertise as a tool of police authority; and how legal institutions may shore up their regulatory power not by accumulating or consolidating knowledge about policed populations, but by maintaining pockets of ignorance, selectively distributing knowledge among legal actors who might otherwise check each other’s power. (pages 257 - 266)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
