Into Law's Artifice: Postwar Policing, Sexual Difference, and the Epistemic Gap

Abstract

Vice Patrol analyzes how reconfigurations in postwar gay public life, psychiatric research, and policing surveillance technologies recast Americans’ chimerical commitments to purging sexual vice. Before a more radical, visible queer liberation movement emerged after 1969, vice enforcement was not a monolithic project but rather a conglomeration of newly empowered post-Prohibition liquor agents, policing units, and judicial institutions. Enforcement practices and institutional priorities generated inconsistencies over policing sexual difference, creating conflicts that became embedded in judicial processes, themselves fraught with institutional pressures and contradictions. These legal and administrative configurations did more than enforce existing law regulating sexual deviance; they actively produced identifiable targeted groups believed to be predisposed to sexual criminality. Vice Patrol’s insights are urgent; they reveal and explain the historical, institutional, and political processes of negotiating human expression into criminal acts requiring state policing intervention. The intrusive tactics that Lvovsky chronicles did not disappear; they were redirected, which is best articulated in the liberal disillusionment with “urban renewal” and with the Nixon administration's “War on Crime” that targeted “high crime” areas in urban communities of color, propelling forward racialized mass incarceration.