Sometimes the police could identify a gay man by his red tie. In other cases, it could be his tennis shoes. Or maybe they just knew one when they saw one.
As preposterous as it may seem, the police once relied on such seemingly innocuous clothing choices or even a man’s perceived feminine look to target “suspected homosexuals,” as detailed in the new book “Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall” by Anna Lvovsky ’13, assistant professor at Harvard Law School. The book, which focuses on the roles of the police and judges in policing gay life in the mid-20th century, originated as her thesis topic (she received her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard in 2015). During her research, she was struck by policing manuals she discovered from an era that focused on visualizing the “deviant body” as a way to stop sex-related offenses, particularly those of gay men.
“There has long been a certain instinct to contain and redress … the possibility of deviance by essentially mapping deviance onto something that’s conspicuous and visible and therefore easily distanced from the self,” she said in an interview. “There’s something deeply reassuring about being able to both distance oneself from the deviant body and to assert that one can understand and grasp and therefore contain — conceptually at least — the figure of the ‘deviant.’”
The book begins after Prohibition ends, when laws were enacted to regulate how drinking establishments could operate their businesses and how their customers behaved. Enforcement often turned on whether or not bar owners knew that the patrons they served were gay, as shown in administrative proceedings detailed by Lvovsky featuring police testimony on “rouged faces,” or the “effeminate” way a customer spoke. She includes details about the cat-and-mouse game bar owners played with the police: One owner implemented secret signals to alert customers upon police entry to act “in a normal well-behaved manner,” while another signaled an accepting atmosphere with a sign advertising “Pickled eggs laid by gay roosters.”
When cited for violations, bar owners contended that they couldn’t reliably “recognize a homosexual” or questioned the police’s qualifications to do so. In time, the owners enlisted expert testimony that framed homosexuality as a disease best addressed by medical authorities — ironically using rhetoric often remembered for its harm to LGBT communities.