Introduction: Rethinking the Policing of Homosexuality in Modern America

Abstract

In 2021, Anna Lvovsky published Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall with the University of Chicago Press. The book studies gay communities’ confrontations with criminal law in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Lvovsky, a professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University, pays particularly close attention to law enforcement practices that aimed to police homosexuality, as well as “the gay world's confrontations with the law.” What results is a complex story of regulation and contestation that spans several decades, which is poised to not only influence how historians understand the policing of sexual difference, but also push forward understandings of the United States war on crime and the inter-related rise of the carceral state.