Abstract
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. Much of the recent literature on American policing quite appropriately historicizes the current moment, exploring the criminalization of Blacks and Latinos and the nation’s turn towards mass incarceration. Vice Patrol, by contrast, concentrates on ‘a regulatory bubble’ that began in the 1930s and was largely over by the late 1960s (259). During that period police department vice squads warred against a cruising culture in which gay men made sexual advances in bars, parks, bathroom stalls , and other urban spaces. This policing was unusual in that it frequently targeted white, middle-class men. The discrete, ‘historic nature of antihomosexual policing’ ultimately allows Lvovsky to reveal important lessons for all policing scholars (266). Vice Patrol reshapes our understanding of the...
Published Version
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