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. Lvovsky thus introduces much-needed nuance to the broader history of the surveillance and prosecuting of same-sex desiring people. 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’.
Vice Patrol is organized thematically into six chapters. The first two chapters focus on the state liquor boards and the courts, the next two on the police and the courts, the fifth on the accused and the sixth on the media's response to these tensions. By the 1950s, judges insisted on evidence of illegal conduct, while liquor board agents sought to establish that the mere presence of a homosexual in a bar was grounds for arrest and penalty. The expert witnesses brought for liquor boards testified that there were clear ‘signs’ of a homosexual that anyone could identify, while bar owners used experts to say that you could not identify a homosexual by dress, wrists or affectation. Lvovsky argues that these competing interests were bolstered and complicated by the medicalization of desire in the 1940s and 1950s, the sexual psychopath legislation of the 1950s and the 1948 Kinsey Report.
As elsewhere at mid-century, urban police departments across the United States employed a range of tactics for catching suspected homosexuals. Plainclothes officers haunted popular gay cruising spots, learned the language and secret codes of same-sex desiring men and women, dressed in the fashions of the modern homosexual and ‘enticed’ men into compromising sexual situations. As Lvovsky demonstrates, police ‘knowledge’ and effective enticement efforts were not accidental. Urban police departments created manuals for training plainclothes decoys in homosexual subculture. Though sometimes cobbled together from stereotypes and misinformation, works like the Los Angeles Police Department's Vice Control in California included information gleaned from gay rights groups’ publications, field observations and suspect interviews. Lvovsky untangles this ‘ethnographical policing’, and draws connections to simultaneous policing of communities of colour. Significantly, in many cities, Lvovsky notes that the ‘vice squads’ were made ineffectual by judges. Though few judges disagreed that homosexuality was immoral, many still disapproved of undercover vice squad tactics.
Some men and women accused of sex crimes were able to use the disconnect between these arms of the criminal justice system to their advantage. By questioning the nature of surveillance as a perversion in and of itself, providing character witnesses (which was particularly effective for white, middle-class men and women) and, after 1961, challenging the constitutionality of anti-homosexual policing, men and women battled the charges levied against them. In the final chapter, Lvovsky argues that these tensions were reflected in the media. Judges were not always private in their condemnation of vice patrol surveillance tactics. As the medicalization of homosexuality was popularized, the public became less willing to persecute same-sex desiring people. Accordingly, the media put pressure on the criminal justice system to recalibrate.
Lvovsky pulls together an impressive array of sources to construct this narrative. She introduces case-studies from a wide range of cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Denver, Washington DC, Miami, Lake Milton OH, Minneapolis and many more. Having all of these municipalities’ records to draw from enriched the analysis immeasurably. But in discussing New York City and San Francisco alongside much smaller cities like Mansfield, Ohio and Tallahassee, Florida, I wondered how a city's size impacted its criminal justice systems’ intersection with same-sex desiring communities. Undoubtedly, most of the small and even mid-sized cities of the United States at mid-century did not have the resources to outfit a vice squad, but clearly there were some that did. Why? How many more simply fell outside the scope of this research project? And how did these shifts and tensions in the ‘big city’ of a state impact policing of same-sex sex in rural and small-town areas? These are questions that Lvovsky's work raises, a testament to the thought-provoking nature of this book.
Though Lvovsky presents familiar touchstones in the queer historiography of the twentieth century – the medicalization of sexuality, homophile movements, the ‘pansy craze’ – she reframes these in a fascinating analysis of the mid-century criminal justice system. In delving into the tensions between prosecutors, judges, officers, bar owners, medical experts, the accused and the media/public, and the way those entities pushed the criminal justice system away from persecuting same-sex desiring people, it is clear that reform was possible, and that those with the power to make those changes were in every arm of the system.
