Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

by Anna Lvovsky
Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

by Anna Lvovsky

Hardcover(First Edition)

$113.00 
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Overview

In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors.
 
In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226769646
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 05/24/2021
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 360
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anna Lvovsky is assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School. Her website is https://www.annalvovsky.com/.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

INTRODUCTION

ONE / When Anyone Can Tell

TWO / Expert Witnesses on Trial

THREE / Plainclothes Decoys and the Limits of Criminal Justice

FOUR / The Rise of Ethnographic Policing

FIVE / Peepholes and Perverts

SIX / The Popular Press and the Gay World

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
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