• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

3. BROKEN WINDOWS AT BLUE’S: A QUEER HISTORY OF GENTRIFICATION AND POLICING Christina B. Hanhardt On September 29, 1982, over thirty New York City police officers raided Blue’s, a bar in Manhattan’s Times Square. The following year, activist James Credle testified at congressional hearings on police misconduct, describing the brutal beatings of the Black and Latino gay men, and trans people who made up the bar’s main clientele.1 The event galvanized lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists for whom police violence was a primary concern. Although one mention of a rally made it into the New York Times, Credle noted in his testimony that the incident itself had been ignored by major media outlets, an insult certainly made worse by the fact that the bar sat across the street from the Times’s own headquarters.2 Gay activist and journalist Arthur Bell wrote a front-page story about the raid for the alternative weekly the Village Voice. In it, he quoted Inspector John J. Martin, commanding officer of the Midtown South Precinct, who described Blue’s as “a very troublesome bar” with “a lot of undesirables” and “a place that transvestites are drawn to … probably for narcotics use.” Bell also noted the striking contrast between the raid and another press-worthy event held that same night: a black tie dinner, $150 a plate, sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF), a gay and lesbian political action committee, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with a keynote by former vice president Walter Mondale.3 Years earlier, Bell had written about a much more famous police raid and response, which had taken place at the Stonewall Inn bar on June 28, 1969. At the time, police raids of gay bars were common, and bar owners often sought protection through payoffs to the police. On June 28, however, the Stonewall patrons and others socializing outside the bar responded to the unexpected raid with a three-day rebellion that is now credited with spurring a more militant and visible LGBT movement. In the decade following the Stonewall uprising, police abuse remained a problem for many LGBT people, but it was joined by growing concerns about general street safety. In response, many activists attempted to convince the public that gay life was far from “undesirable” and could even be seen as a valuable asset in a city in which the discourses of crime and economic crises had become tightly intertwined. In September 1977, for example, the gay magazine Christopher Street featured a cover story titled “Can Gays Save New York City?” that included a picture of two men embracing a miniaturized image of Lower Manhattan and asked, “How many neighborhoods in Manhattan would be slums by now, had gay singles and couples not moved in and helped maintain and upgrade them?”4 The magazine often addressed itself to the question of how gay men were reshaping the landscape of New York, regularly featuring New Yorker–style cartoons that poked fun at gay men who were developing niche businesses or at the supposed value of gayness to new forms of industry.5 In another issue, the editors celebrated urban scholarship highlighting the leadership of gay men in “revitalization” efforts, describing their creativity, adaptability, ego, and openness to risk-taking as key features for achieving success in a speculation-based economy.6 For many commentators, new gay investment in the central city was understood to be part of a broader process of middle-class reinvestment in urban areas—what became known as the “back-to-the-city” movement. Often called “gay gentrification,” the phenomenon of new, concentrated gay investment was debated not only by gay journalists but also by city boosters and developers, scholars, and activists, many of whom linked the rise of gay social movements with the growth of gay neighborhoods. These gay neighborhoods, they argued, provided a kind of protection for those escaping the presumed anti-gay sentiments of non-urban areas. Cast in such general terms, though, these arguments primarily described a professional class of white gay men, assumed, unlike LGBT people in general, to be free of the obligations of family, territorial, and suited to the so-called new service economy.7 But as the raid on Blue’s attests, there were many other people— including many white gay men—pursuing same-sex intimacy, non- normative kinship arrangements, and gender expressions that did not conform to mainstream expectations who did not profit from restructuring real estate markets. Liberal and conservative policy makers alike condemned what they saw to be the erosion of traditional family values and gender roles as a sexual zeitgeist gone too far and among the key causes of the “social disorder” that threatened urban cores. They invoked still- popular “culture of poverty” arguments that blamed Black low-income mothers and praised new zoning restrictions that targeted public spaces and businesses in these areas. Disorder as a category would be crafted through the very strategies used to contain and curtail it, in policing philosophy as well as models of municipal governance, and in attacks on not only social uprisings but also the daily lives of those increasingly cast as a “permanent underclass.” In fact, at the same time that gay people’s affirmative role in real estate was being praised by the mainstream and alternative press, journalists and social scientists were also publicizing theories about the need for police practice to target disorder and the “discovery” of an often amorphously defined sector of the supposedly intractable poor. In 1982, the year of the Blue’s raid, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson introduced the ethos of “broken windows” policing to the broader public via the Atlantic magazine, and journalist Ken Auletta published The Underclass based on a series of articles from the New Yorker. Broken windows theory emphasizes the problem of disorderliness on residents’ sense of safety and in particular the effect of destabilizing, unfamiliar elements, including “loiterers,” “rowdy teenagers,” “drunks,” “prostitutes,” and the “mentally disturbed.”8 Similarly, Auletta explained that the contemporary underclass consisted of the “hard-core unemployed,” which he summarized in the pages of the New Yorker as “criminals, drug addicts, or pushers, alcoholics, [and] welfare mothers.”9 The HRCF’s event committee for its fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria included senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Edward Kennedy (who did not, however, appear in person). Unlike the politically conservative architects of broken windows theory, Moynihan and Kennedy were liberals. Yet their respective ideas about a culture of poverty and a permanent underclass were easy fits with broken windows theory, insofar as all three revolved around diagnosing cultural pathology and regulating the social norms of the poor.10 In these shared contexts, then, disorder functioned as a catchall for poverty in general as well as for specific forms of unregulated street life. It was also a convenient description for those seen as obstructions to the urban improvements promised by a new middle class. Since then, gentrification has proven to be ongoing and global, and policing approaches based on broken windows theory—also known as “order maintenance” policing—have been central to the cycles of devalorization and revalorization that have reshaped New York City and cities around the world.11 In 1993, William J. Bratton was appointed New York City’s police commissioner for the first time. Empowered by a decade of broken windows policing in New York’s transit system (including under his own leadership), Bratton quickly crafted a city-wide police strategy of “zero tolerance” for “quality of life” infractions, escalating the enforcement and punishment of misdemeanor crimes, particularly in public spaces. Bratton’s approach was first tested in Greenwich Village, home to the famed Stonewall riots and one of the world’s best-known gay enclaves.12 Among its key targets were nonresident LGBT people of color who enjoyed the neighborhood’s abundance of LGBT-oriented services and reputation as a safe haven for LGBT people. As the strategy expanded across the city, it was governed by the logic of its different spatial contexts: taking aim at homeless people and workers in the informal economy in tourist zones (such as Times Square); at unregulated street life in newly gentrified areas; and, in the form of “stop and frisk,” at Black and Latino men, especially in parts of the city devalued long enough to become new hot spots for speculative investment. In this way, it is clear how queerness—both as an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities and as a lens for examining the operation of power via normalization, stigma, and kinship regulation— offers a helpful analytic for understanding the intersection of gentrification and order maintenance policing. The celebration of gay investment alongside attacks like the one at Blue’s demonstrates the often bifurcated function of marginalized identity and social non-normativity in postwar urban development policy. Here certain lesbian and gay claims of vulnerability and calls for safety, especially those paired with or perceived as amenable to redevelopment, are celebrated at the same time that those who stand outside of white, middle-class heterosexuality (including many lesbians and gay men) continue to be targeted by police strategies that pave the way for that selective reinvestment. This framework also allows for a more complex play of identity in urban political economy more generally, refusing to substitute individual choice in the marketplace for a structural critique of capitalism or dismiss the functions of race, gender, or sexuality in ordering the city. Most important, it is an argument that has been developed by a variety of activists, then and now.

Load more

  15

Copy Link