Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge About Homosexuality, 1920–1970
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Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge About Homosexuality, 1920–1970 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Lvovsky, Anna. 2015. Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge About Homosexuality, 1920–1970. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17463142 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality, 1920–1970 A dissertation presented by Anna Lvovsky to The Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of American Civilization Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2015 © 2015 – Anna Lvovsky All rights reserved. Advisor: Nancy Cott Anna Lvovsky Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality, 1920–1970 Abstract This dissertation tracks how urban police tactics against homosexuality participated in the construction, ratification, and dissemination of authoritative public knowledge about gay men in the United States in the twentieth century. Focusing on three prominent sites of anti-homosexual policing—the enforcement of state liquor regulations, plainclothes decoy campaigns to make solicitation arrests, and clandestine surveillance of public bathrooms—it examines how municipal police availed themselves of competing bodies of social scientific information about homosexuality in order to bolster their enforcement efforts, taking into account such variable factors as the statutes authorizing their arrests, the humors of the courts, and their need to maintain public legitimacy. Lending the authority of the state to their preferred paradigms for understanding sexual deviance, and attaching direct legal penalties to anyone who tried to disagree, the police influenced whether—and when—new scientific research about homosexual men reached the mainstream public and was embraced as authoritative. Even as vice squads’ anti-homosexual campaigns allowed them to amass increasingly sophisticated and rarefied insights into the urban gay world, however, police officers consistently denied their reliance on any “expert” knowledge about homosexuality in court, legitimating their tactics on the basis of public’s ostensibly shared knowledge about gay men. Tracking the history of urban vice policing alongside the shifting landscape of popular knowledge about homosexuality, this project examines both the ambivalent place of “expertise” in public debates about sexual deviance in the iii United States, and the multifaceted origins and repercussions of the lay public’s evolving knowledge about gay communities in the twentieth century. iv Table of Contents List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….vi Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Part I. Before the Storm……………………………………………………………………….30 1. The Laboratory, the Stage, and the Popular Construction of the Effeminate Fairy.…………………………………………………………………….30 Part II. State Liquor Laws and the Unremarkable Visibility of the Homosexual Body.…95 2. “You Don’t Have to be an Expert to be Able to See a Homosexual”: Repeal and the Dawn of Identification-Based Policing…………………………….100 3. Sexual Psychopaths, Disorderly Conduct, and the Legal Battle over Expertise…………………………………………………………125 Part III. Decoy Enforcement and the Rise of Ethnographic Expertise.…………………..169 4. “Keeping up the Old Quota”: Plainclothes Decoys and the Problem of Entrapment in the Cold War.…………………………………………..176 5. “Passing as Deviant”: Gay Cruising Culture and the Rise of the Invisible Police Ethnographer………………………………………………………221 Part IV. Clandestine Surveillance and the Sufficiency of the Common View……………264 6. Cruising in Plain View: Clandestine Surveillance and the Eye of the Common Man, 1900-1962………………………………………………271 7. “The Peril to Innocent Youth”: Reasonable Expectations of Privacy and the Unique Publicity of the Deviant Body..…………………………………………….309 Part V. Policing and Popular Culture……………………………………………………….345 8. Queer Expertise: Rediscovering the Homosexual and the Vice Squad in the Popular Press……………………………………………………345 Epilogue.……………………………………………………………………………………….420 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………429 v List of Figures Figure I.1. Pansy entertainers in the popular press.……………………………………………..41 Figure I.2. Jean Malin at the Club Abbey………………………………………………………44 Figure I.3. Advertisement for Finocchio’s drag spectacles in San Francisco.………………….46 Figure I.4. Arthur Weil’s tabulation of shoulder and hip widths for homosexual men..……….63 Figure I.5. Advertisement for La Forest Potter’s Strange Loves.………………………………89 Figure II.1. Exterior of the Times Square Garden & Grill…………………………………….113 Figure II.2. Interior of the Times Square Garden & Grill.…………………………………….114 Figure II.3. The Black Cat Cafe on Montgomery Street, San Francisco………………………136 Figure III.1. Patrolman Frank N. Manthos of the Morals Squad..…………………………….201 Figure III.2. D.C. Municipal Court Judge Milton S. Kronheim……………………………….201 Figure III.3. Legal tutorial “Your Rights in Case of Arrest”.………………………………….208 Figure III.4. Note from San Francisco vice investigator “X.,” July 28, 1956…………………218 Figure III.5. Telltale cruising techniques in a vice manual……………………………………225 Figure III.6. A decoy officer “undercover” in jeans, cropped jacket, and tennis shoes……….229 Figure III.7. Louis A. Fochett and Robert D. Arscott in their later years with the Metropolitan Police Department.…………………………………….………….235 Figure IV.1. “Changing clothes and inspection,” from Pollens’s Sex Criminal……………….265 Figure IV.2. Police diagrams of the men’s room in Mansfield’s Central Park.……………….299 Figure IV.3. Bill Spognardi demonstrating his camerawork in the service closet…………….300 Figure V.1. Bill Eppridge’s photographs of urban gay life in Life…………………………….371 Figure V.2. Tracking a Los Angeles decoy officer on the job…………………………………381 Figure V.3. Illustrations from “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida”.………………….399 vi Acknowledgements One of the joys of developing a project over a period of years is the number of wonderful people one meets along the way, whose brilliance, kindness, and support are reflected in the final pages. I could not list each person who has influenced my thinking, enriched my research, or simply inspired me to keep writing over the last seven years. But I owe them all an immense debt of gratitude. First and foremost, I want to thank my extraordinary advisor, Nancy Cott. Nancy has been, quite simply, the most insightful, supportive, and generous mentor I could have wished for. From refining my theoretical arguments to sharpening my timeline and terminology to helping polish my prose, to simply emailing me primary sources that she thought might be of interest, Nancy has always made me feel both supported in my research and inspired, through her own formidable example, to try harder. More than simply a brilliant academic guide, Nancy has also been a personal and professional champion beyond graduate school—encouraging me to go to law school, near-singlehandedly procuring my fellowship there, and unconditionally supporting my legal endeavors since graduation. I know that I owe many of my opportunities in the past years to her trust and kindness. The lucky streak that led me to Nancy extends to my other committee members. Jeannie Suk, my law school advisor, helped me navigate the distinct world of law, both encouraging me to enjoy my time at law school and allowing me to best use that time for my research. An ally of my dissertation from the start, Jeannie taught me to see the bridge between history and legal vii academia, and to begin to cross it in my work. Much of my productivity since coming to law school is due to her. From the moment he read the first chapter, Andrew Jewett understood my ambitions for this project with near-uncanny prescience, and he has graced all subsequent sections with the same unwavering insight. From helping link my project to the broader literature on expertise to pressing me on the cultural context behind my chapters to doing a close read for last-minute edits, he has been an incredibly generous and discerning reader. I only regret that I did not meet him earlier in my graduate career. George Chauncey is, quite literally, the reason I decided to study history. George’s work both exemplifies the theoretical possibilities of archival history and sets an incredibly high bar to which future historians of sexuality may aspire. I was lucky to have a chance to learn from him during my last year in college, and I am honored to have gotten the opportunity to finish graduate school by sharing my dissertation with him. In addition to my committee, of course, I am profoundly indebted to numerous individuals who have enriched my research, writing, and thinking. A paper that I wrote for Lizabeth Cohen in my second year at Harvard became, for all intents and purposes, a near-fully formed preview of my prospectus. Once the prospectus itself was written, Liz and her twentieth-