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Meet Me in Pervert Park: Epistemology, Positionality, and Praxis in the Queer History of Policing and the Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2023
Extract
Just a stone's throw from the campus of the university in Kingston, Ontario, where I teach, is a small park. Hugging a rocky stretch of Lake Ontario shoreline, Macdonald Park, named after Canada's first prime minister, is better known by locals as “Pervert Park.” Since at least World War II, Pervert Park has been the primary cruising ground in Kingston for men searching for sex with other men, a meeting place for a mix of mostly working-class men, men stationed at the nearby military base, and the occasional intrepid university student. For women, the park's name references a different kind of pervert and signals the potential danger of walking alone in the park at night. Two of the park's main features are the Newlands Pavilion, a bandstand built in 1896, and the Richardson bathhouse, which is really a public washroom and changing facility, and which, when it first opened in 1919, boasted lockers, hot-water showers, and a list of “rules that would be enforced to maintain decorum in the bathing house.” A paved path, punctuated by park benches, connects the pavilion and bathhouse, which, after dark, conveniently becomes an oval track for men cruising around and sometimes having sex behind the pavilion and bathhouse.
- Type
- Forum: Anna Lvovsky's Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History
References
1 “Bathing House Opened,” Daily British Whig, June 11, 1919, 2.
2 Lvovsky, Anna, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Maynard, Steven, “Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994): 207–42Google Scholar.
4 See, for example, Hanhardt, Christina B., Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; and Stewart-Winter, Timothy, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 2.
6 I say the “local state” to distinguish Vice Patrol from the work of queer historians who focus more on the big institutions of the state, such as the federal government or the Supreme Court. See, for example, Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Marc Stein, Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
7 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 17.
8 Ibid., 144. The emphasis on the productive rather than the repressive nature of police power/knowledge is just one of the book's fully Foucauldian formulations, despite the fact that Lvovsky mentions Foucault only once in passing (18) and distances her work from Foucault-inspired scholars on the project of governing. On the latter, see Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
9 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 179, 183.
10 Ibid., 145.
11 Ibid., 145.
12 I am drawing here on the work of a local lesbian artist-activist and community-based historian. Marney McDiarmid, “From Mouth to Mouth: An Oral History of Lesbians and Gays in Kingston from World War II to 1980” (MA thesis, Queen's University, 1999), 50–55, 61–62.
13 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 3.
14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 5. Sedgwick also had a few things to say about the notion “it takes one to know one,” which, as Lvovsky points out, was frequently used to cast aspersions on vice officers’ uncanny ability to attract the sexual interest of gay men. Sedgwick's comment that the phrase's disciplinary dimensions “are all tuned to the note of police entrapment” (100) seems especially apropos. This is also a roundabout way of posing a persistent question in the field: how does Vice Patrol, a work of queer history, speak to queer theory, old and new? See also, Sedgwick, “Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot's The Nun,” in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23–51.
15 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 221.
16 In her discussions of how liberalization also encompassed relations of ruling, I again read Foucault between Lvovsky's lines. See, for example, Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003).
17 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 47–48.
18 Ibid., 222.
19 Ibid., 262.
20 Ibid., 120.
21 Ibid., 121.
22 David M. Halperin and Trevor Hoppe, eds., The War on Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
23 See, for example, Roger N. Lancaster, “The New Pariahs: Sex, Crime, and Punishment in America”; Scott De Orio, “The Creation of the Modern Sex Offender”; and Regina Kunzel, “Sex Panic, Psychiatry, and the Expansion of the Carceral State,” in The War on Sex. See also, Scott De Orio, “The Invention of Bad Gay Sex: Texas and the Creation of a Criminal Underclass of Gay People,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, 1 (January 2017): 53–87. For a Canadian history of the postwar purge of lesbians and gay men from the federal civil service and military that employs the trope of a “war on sex,” see Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). For an application of the “war on sex” in the more recent legal context, see Corey Rayburn Yung, “The Emerging Criminal War on Sex Offenders,” Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review 45 (2010): 435–81.
24 Fred Fejes, “Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic: The 1954 Media Campaign against Miami's Homosexuals and the Discourse of Civic Betterment,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (July 2000): 305–47; and John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
25 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 195.
26 Ibid., 262.
27 On medico-legal power as a shifting strategy of normalization in punitive society, see Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry,” in Power, vol. 3, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 2000), 176–200; Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003); and Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
28 Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 2–3.
29 On queer reflexivity, see Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim, “Queer Methods: Four Provocations for an Emerging Field,” and on positionality, see E. Patrick Johnson, “Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea: Oral History as Quare Performance,” both in Imagining Queer Methods, ed. Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 16–17, 50–55. In fact, many of the contributors to this collection make the case for reflexivity and positionality.
30 See Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004).
31 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 379, 382.
32 On the sex police, see Pat Califia, “Sexual Outlaws v. the Sex Police,” part 1 of Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2000). See also, Dangerous Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1996); and William L. Leap, ed., Public Sex / Gay Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
33 Roger Lancaster, “The Magical Power of the Accusation: How I Became a Sex Criminal and Other True Stories” and “Appendix 2: Notes on Method,” in Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
34 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 3, 262.
35 Ibid., 99, 118–19.
36 Ibid., 99.
37 Ibid., 261.
38 Bernard E. Harcourt, Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Actions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Harcourt aims to reframe the praxis imperative by turning the question “What is to be done?” on oneself to ask, “What more am I to do?” I see parallels between turning the question on oneself and the practice of queer reflexivity.
39 See, for example, George Chauncey, “‘What Gay Studies Taught the Court’: The Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas,” GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 (2004): 509–38.
40 Harcourt, Critique & Praxis, 12.
41 See, for example, the work of Lancaster, De Orio, and Kunzel cited previously. On Foucault's political practice, see Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, eds., Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970–1980, trans. Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), particularly Thompson and Zurn's introduction, “Legacies of Militancy and Theory,” 1–34.
42 I'm not suggesting that this formulation can account for all approaches to the subject. In Sexual Injustice, for example, Stein furnishes a left history of the Supreme Court's so-called sexual revolution, fully attentive to “liberalization's limits,” without once mentioning Foucault.
43 Dean Spade, “Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer,” an introduction to “Prisons Will Not Protect You,” part 3 of Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, ed. Ryan Conrad (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 173. See also, Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, revised and expanded ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, see: https://srlp.org/, accessed February 3, 2023.
44 I pull these three examples from the author bios of Mogul, Joey L., Ritchie, Andrea J., and Whitlock, Kay, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
45 See, for example, Trevor Hoppe, “Afterword: How You Can Get Involved,” in The War on Sex, 461–64.
46 See, Steven Maynard, “Lust in the Lavatory: Washroom Sex and Police Surveillance Have a Long History,” Xtra!, June 27, 2012 (https://xtramagazine.com/power/lust-in-the-lavatory-3368, accessed February 3, 2023); Maynard, “Six Nights in the Albert Lane, 1917,” in Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer, ed. Stephanie Chambers et al. (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2017), 93–95; Maynard, “Park Cruisers Feel Slap of Sex Sting: Cop Cars Have Become a Familiar Sight,” Xtra!, May 15, 2002 (https://xtramagazine.com/power/park-cruisers-feel-slap-of-sex-sting-45512, accessed February 3, 2023); Maynard, “Is the Queer Community Ready to Defend Public Sex?” Xtra!, November 30, 2016 (https://xtramagazine.com/power/is-the-queer-community-ready-to-defend-public-sex-72546, accessed February 3, 2023); Maynard, “Police/Archives,” Archivaria 68 (2009): 159–82; Maynard, “Bill C-66: Political Expediency Is Producing a Flawed Bill,” Globe and Mail, December 12, 2017 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/bill-c-66-political-expediency-is-producing-a-flawed-bill/article37303098/, accessed February 3, 2023); and Maynard, “Pride and Prejudice: With Only 9 LGBTQ Criminal Record Expungements, What's To Celebrate?, The Conversation, June 17, 2021 (https://theconversation.com/pride-and-prejudice-with-only-9-lgbtq-criminal-record-expungements-whats-to-celebrate-161308, accessed February 3, 2023). Steven Thrasher calls the moving back and forth between journalism, both community-based and mainstream, and academic writing “discursive hustling,” and he argues for it as a queer method to “ferry knowledge between two worlds.” See Thrasher, “Discursive Hustling and Queer of Color Interviewing,” in Imagining Queer Methods, 230–47.
47 Lvovsky, Vice Patrol, 183.
48 Lvovsky concludes that the “mid-1960s were in many ways the high-water mark of anti-homosexual policing in the United States. In fits and starts over the latter half of that decade … the pervasive surveillance that hung over gay life following World War II began to wind down,” Vice Patrol, 258. In the Canadian context, the 1969 partial decriminalization of homosexuality in private was followed not by a winding down but by the intensification of policing in public, including plain clothes cops in parks and clandestine washroom surveillance, up to and beyond the infamous 1981 police raids of Toronto bathhouses, one of the largest mass arrests in Canadian history. See, for example, Hooper, Tom, “Queering ’69: The Recriminalization of Homosexuality in Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 100 (2019): 257–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Steven Maynard, “1969 and All That: Age, Consent, and the Myth of Queer Decriminalization in Canada,” The Abusable Past, the online platform of Radical History Review, September 6, 2019 (https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/1969-and-all-that-age-consent-and-the-myth-of-queer-decriminalization-in-canada/, accessed February 3, 2023).
49 For a historical exploration of what I mean by “working across diverse identities and communities,” see Leighton, Jared, “‘All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons’: Gay Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts against Police Brutality in the Bay Area,” Journal of Social History 52 (2019): 860–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of course, another name for “working across identities and communities” is “solidarity.” See Hobson, Emily K., Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.