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

Abstract

In 1962, police officers in Mansfield, Ohio, closed the men’s bathroom in the city’s Central Park for a weekend of “renovations.” The bathroom was a suspected site of queer sexual encounters, but after an undercover officer loitering outside the facility failed to entice any would-be solicitors, the police changed tactics. While the bathroom was closed, officers installed a one-way mirror and a secret camera in a paper towel dispenser, brighter light bulbs to improve the film footage, and an exhaust fan to drown out the camera’s hum. Within two weeks of reopening the bathroom, the Mansfield Police Department possessed hours of film featuring sixty-five men engaging in queer sexual practices, along with dozens of men using the toilet. This astonishing scene showcases the elaborate decoy operations, outright espionage, and breaches of privacy that characterized the midcentury law enforcement project to identify, regulate, and punish same-sex practices. In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky centers the antigay police violence that haunts the twentieth-century history of gay identity formation and activist mobilization. This work alone would have been a valuable addition to the growing literature on sex and the carceral state. But Lvovksy’s important innovation is demonstrating how—though perhaps contrary to the experience of those being policed—this law enforcement project was not a monolith. Rather, it was the site of institutional contests among police, state liquor enforcement agents, psychiatric and medical professionals, lower-court and appellate judges, and the policed men themselves over the boundaries of sexual privacy and state power, and the very meaning of homosexuality itself. Focusing on the evolving strategies and disputes in three realms of antigay law enforcement—state liquor agency regulations targeting bars that allegedly served gay patrons (chapters 1 and 2), plainclothes policing to bait suspected cruisers (chapters 3 and 4), and “peephole” police surveillance to capture the queer men who eluded such decoy operations (chapter 5)—Vice Patrol delivers a powerful account of the contested relationship between the legal system and the production of cultural, medical, and social scientific knowledge. By illuminating the ways the legal system shapes and is shaped by the social context in which it is embedded, Lvovsky persuasively argues that state repression of marginalized people reflects “the legal system’s many ways of understanding—and misunderstanding—the nature of queer life” (184).