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

Anna Lvovsky

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2021 by Anna Lvovsky

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76964-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76978-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76981-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226769813.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lvovsky, Anna, author.

Title: Vice patrol : cops, courts, and the struggle over urban gay life before Stonewall / Anna Lvovsky.

Other titles: Cops, courts, and the struggle over urban gay life before Stonewall

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045745 | ISBN 9780226769646 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226769783 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226769813 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Male homosexualityUnited StatesHistory20th century. | GaysLegal status, laws, etc.United States. | Vice controlUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Law enforcementUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC HQ76.3.U6 L96 2021 | DDC 306.76/60973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045745

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper)

A plainclothes decoy with the Los Angeles Police Department waiting on a street corner in 1964.

A peek inside a Greenwich Village gay bar in Call Her Savage.

Helen Morgan Jr. and Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey, in Vanity Fair.

Officer Max K. Hurlbut outside Ferndell No. 9 in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

A policeman in tight-pants disguise, per Life magazine in 1964.

A Los Angeles Police Department decoy speaks with a suspect in Hollywood.

Playing footsie in a tearoom, in Denny Paces Handbook of Vice Control.

A toilet snipe looking for a date, in Denny Paces Handbook of Vice Control.

The interior of the mens room in Mansfields Central Park, as printed in the FBI Enforcement Bulletin.

A diagram of the Central Park mens room, drawn by Lieutenant Bill Spognardi of the Mansfield Police Department.

Lieutenant Bill Spognardi manning a hidden camera in the Central Park mens room, as printed in the FBI Enforcement Bulletin.

The frantic hour on Los Angeless Main Street, in Life.

A homosexual sits on a rail in Los Angeless Pershing Square, in Life.

Urban gay street life in New York City, in Life.

A decoy and his partner arrest a suspect in Hollywood, in Life.

The cover of the Purple Pamphlet.

In the spring of 1957, a researcher in Detroit interviewed a judge on the Recorders Court about the local vice squads undercover campaigns: the practice of plainclothes officers idling in bars, parks, and bathrooms, hoping to entice suspected gay men into making sexual advances. The judge, the researcher reported, grew red in the face. The vice squads tactics, he decried, were atrocious, miserable, horrible, and appalling.

Some years later, a bar owner accused by New Jerseys Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control of catering to gay patrons in his Newark tavern found himself in a surprising disagreement with the agency. Hoping to disprove the charge that he had knowingly served gay customers, the owner called a special witness, a respected psychiatrist, to explain the difficulties of identifying anyone diseased with the sickness of homosexuality, when the liquor boards own prosecuting attorney leaped in to object. Counsel takes it for granted that homosexuality is a disease, Edward F. Ambrose protested. There is not a human man that can give an [expert] opinion on that point.

0.1. A plainclothes decoy with the Los Angeles Police Department waiting on a street corner in 1964. Photograph by Bill Eppridge Estate of Bill Eppridge. All rights reserved.

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was struggling with a different type of special insight into queer life. Charged with the task of infiltrating an increasingly complex gay world, the department had begun to offer all new vice officers a formal course of instruction on how to dress, act, and talk in order to blend into the citys cruising cultureas well as, in theory, what not to do to avoid public criticism or embarrassment. Perhaps that advice was embarrassing in its own right, because after an excerpt from the departments instructional materials leaked to the press in the summer of 1964, the LAPD promptly denied the manuals existence. The idea that vice officers received deliberate training on the customs of the gay world, it insisted, reflected a simple misunderstanding.

The laws confrontations with gay life in the twentieth century are a core part of any history of sexuality in the United States. Over the course of that century, legislatures across the country enacted and reaffirmed a host of laws aimed at suppressing queer communities, from sodomy statutes to antisolicitation laws to regulations against gay-friendly bars. Police officers and liquor investigators, in turn, developed a range of intrusive tactics to enforce those laws, spending late nights at bars watching for potential violations, flirting with men in parks to entice propositions, crouching behind peepholes and one-way mirrors in public bathrooms to catch sexual encounters in the act. All this aside from the less formal abuses and indignities, the bouts of harassment and bursts of violence that hung over the states attempts to repress what it regarded as a deviant social practice.

This story may sound familiar. It is a part of essentially every history of gay life in the United States, a key backdrop for the many rightfully celebrated tales of community building and political empowerment unearthed by scholars over the past several decades. Most writers, however, have kept that story on the peripheries of their accounts, focusing more on the gay communitys responses to legal repression than on the operation of the law itself. Scholars who have examined the regulation of gay life have looked primarily at the federal government and the military, and especially at the formulation of legal policy. Few have delved into the daily realities of urban policingthe types of interactions that most commonly defined gay individuals encounters with state power in the mid-twentieth century.

This book brings that story into the center, tracing the shifting priorities, investigative tactics, and legal disputes that shaped the gay worlds confrontations with the law. And it reveals that the typical account of antihomosexual policing, as a tale of the states painful, ultimately unsuccessful attempts to repress nonnormative social practices, is both true and incomplete. As the anecdotes offered above suggest, the project of policing gay life at midcentury was not simply a contest over the limits of permissible sexual practice in the United States, or even over acceptable social conduct in the public sphere. It was also the site of an institutional struggle over the boundaries of the criminal justice system itself: the wisdom of the criminal law, the limits of proper policing, and the power of the courts to intervene in either. At the same time, it was the site of an epistemic debate over the very meaning of sexual difference: what homosexual desire meant, who homosexual people were, and who ultimately had the authority to answer those questions. Two sets of controversies that were, it turned out, often intertwined.