From Sanctuary to Safe Space

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on how the trajectories of gay and lesbian police-reform efforts in Los Angeles model a transition from a politics of sanctuary to the production of safe space. The production of safe space is conditioned by the multiplication of discourses of race, gender, and sexuality emblematized by the rise of identity-based neighborhood politics throughout the postwar period, and how these politics interface with the reterritorialization of the welfare state and the advent of community policing. The article historicizes several Stonewall-era gay organizations, showing how activists enacted a politics of sanctuary that helped to decriminalize gay and lesbian identity, and then arguing that this politics of sanctuary was drawn into the production of safe space. This writing invites possibilities for abolitionist organizing by demonstrating the life cycle of law and order that circumscribes urban, identity-based, antiviolence, and neighborhood-based politics.