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Towards a politics of perfect disorder: carceral geographies, queer criminality, and other ways to be

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Content TOWARDS A POLITICS OF PERFECT DISORDER:
CARCERAL GEOGRAPHIES, QUEER CRIMINALITY , AND OTHER WAYS TO BE
by
Treva C. Ellison
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of
University of Southern California
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
August, 2015
© 2015
Treva Ellison
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This writing is in many ways an archive of many conversations; late night conversations
sandwiched between deadlines, leisurely Sunday afternoon pontifications, hurried updates,
frantic lamentations, dusty, sneeze-inducing encounters in the archives, and break time chats that
always continued past break time. This work is also an archive of missed conversations, things
that didn't happen so that this could, words not spoken so that these could be written. The process
of completing this dissertation and the lessons I have learned from the research presented herein
underscore how relationality both drives and challenges the creation of life-affirming
infrastructure. Working through this contradiction as a scholar and simply as a human living in
the world we live in, has taught me what love and compassion look like as a modes of
intellectual production, as political praxes, and as ways of being.
The first teachers who showed me how to approach learning as an act of love were my
parents, Thomas and Helen Ellison. Thank you Mommy and Daddy not only for supporting me
as a student and learner but for modeling what compassionate and loving study looks and feels
like. Your insistence that knowledge should always act beyond the glorification of one's own
selfhood has served as an invaluable intuitive compass for navigating academia. I love you both
so much.
My advisor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore invited myself and my entire cohort during our first
year of graduate school to employ compassion and generosity as analytical hermeneutics, to
understand what a text or piece of information offers before rushing to criticism. This lesson has
proved vital to how I've approached this project and tried to think through and beyond how the
logic of exclusion has been applied to race and queer historiography in Los Angeles. Thank you
iii
Ruthie for all of your support throughout the process and for your intellectual work, which
pushed me to think really hard about how the socio-spatial production of surplus flows through
LGBT political formations in Los Angeles.
It is a privilege to be able to look back on the past and deconstruct it; one that depends
on the imagination, planning, effort, and action of many people, most of whom do no get
enshrined as archival or historical subjects. I am grateful to the organizations, activists, and
people whose lives and living form the subject of this work and who have taught me so much
about the difficult choices made in the process of imagining and articulating an identity. I also
want to acknowledge those people whose lives appear in the work as fleeting images, as stories
with no neat endings, whose presence is so clearly outlined as a critical absence. These glimpses
have pointed me towards the epistemological blind spots in the work and insist in the present,
that the past is always a site of struggle.
One of the strongest chains of conversation that forms the skeleton architecture of this
work has been those that I've had with Kai Green, Freda Fair, Ren-Yo Hwang, Surafel Tesfaye,
Stephanie Murphy, Christine Knight, Byron Jose, Natalie Havlin, Analena Hope, Amee Chew,
Bo L., Sammy Lyon, and Sofia Rose Smith. Thank you for being such generous and thoughtful
interlocutors, intellectuals, friends, and pillars of support. I love and appreciate you each in ways
that exceed the what is possible to enumerate here. C. Jerome Woods, community archivist and
founder of the Black LGBT Project, invited me in to participate in an art exhibit on Black LGBT
life at the William Grant Still Arts Center in 2012. The installation I helped create for the exhibit
on postwar policing of Black and Brown gay bars and gatherings in Los Angeles directly
inspired the conceptualization of this project. Jerome, thank you for being a third parent, for all
iv
the work you do, and for checking my tendency towards being a side-seat driver! Michele
Welsing, head archivist at the Southern California Library for Social Research has a detailed
knowledge of grassroots political activism in Los Angeles and deep understanding of and
dedication to study as a radical and transformative practice of struggle. Michele, thank you for
making the library a truly communal space and for all the time we've spent talking about the life-
cycle of liberal reformism and the limits of identity politics. These conversations have been
invaluable to the writing process and a welcome relief from the sometimes isolation of archival
research. Michael Oliveira, Kyle Morgan, and Loni Shibuyama, the archivists at the ONE
National Lesbian and Gay Archive have also supported the research for this project in so many
ways, from allowing me do research beyond regular hours, directing me towards relevant and
interesting people and documents, helping me make connections between different people and
organizations, to kindly allowing me to store my lunch in the staff refrigerator. I appreciate each
of you for the time and care you spent talking to me about the project and for your thorough and
detailed knowledge of ONE and other local archival collections. Michael Holland, head archivist
at the Los Angeles City Archives and Records Center, taught me so much about Los Angeles
municipal history and helped me search through the un-indexed records of the Los Angeles
Police Commission to find the investigators report that documented the LAPD's attempt to
prevent Sir Lady Java from performing in Los Angeles. Thank you so much Michael for your
time and penitence, I look forward to working with you to digitize the Police Commission
records.
Coming from Hollywood, Florida, I had, and continue to have, much to learn about Los
Angeles and its complex political history. A great deal of learning about the history,
v
relationships, and developments over time that constitute Los Angeles' and Southern California's
carceral geographies has happened outside the classroom, in town hall meetings, at protests, and
in meetings with city and county officials. People who I have worked with in community
organizations in Los Angeles have been my unpaid, often over-worked professors. I want to
acknowledge the unwaged educational and training labor that community organizers do, teaching
people, including graduate students like me, how to facilitate large group meetings, put together
agendas for meetings with City Council members and County Supervisors, among many other
skills. I want to thank and acknowledge the members of Dignity and Power Now, including
Patrissee Cullors Brignac, Monte Cullors, Mark-Anthony Johnson, Jayda Razberri, and Carla
Gonzalez. Thank you all for teaching me what it looks like to build a trauma-informed
movement against state sanctioned violence that understands relationality both “the work” as
well as the gift we all get from and give each other. I would also like to thank the members of
Critical Resistance Los Angeles, especially Mary Sutton, David Chavez, Jasmine Guerrero, Jolie
Chea, Marlene Ramos, Melissa Burch, Jules Gochez, Kevin Michael Key, Hans Kuzmich, and
Cristine Wang for welcoming me into Los Angeles and for bearing with me as I got to know and
understand Los Angeles and Southern California. Thank you all for pushing and stretching my
own imagination and understanding of what is possible.
I have been fortunate to be a part of a vibrant intellectual community in the Department
of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, where the ideas and work of the graduate students
and professors I have had the privilege of working with, really pushed the conceptualization and
framing of this work. My cohort: Analena Hope, Jolie Chea, David Stein, Jessi Quizar, Jennifer
DeClue, Amee Chew, May Alhassen, and Celeste Menchaca, has been a wonderful group of
vi
people to be on this journey with. I appreciate you all for the incisive intellectual work you each
do and for the time that we've given each other: reading each other's work, bouncing ideas off of
each other, sharing meals, excitement and heartaches. These have been the practices that have
made the process feel lively and life-affirming. I also appreciate Nic Ramos, Jih-Fei Cheng,
Umayyah Cable, for all their helpful and careful feedback on chapter drafts and job talks; I feel
really excited to me thinking and working alongside you all in the future. ASE Faculty, including
Kara Keeling, Laura Pulido, Nayan Shah, have all provided invaluable feedback, encouragement,
training, and intellectual work, that has been so instructive to this project. I would like to
acknowledge the American Studies and Ethnicity staff: Jujuana Preston, Kitty Lai and Sonia
Rodriguez and the work they do make everything that happens: from our course assignments,
funding packages, off-cycle checks, travel funding requests, departmental meetings and forums,
mock job talks, to holiday celebrations, happen. I appreciate each of you for the innumerable
ways that you have helped me navigate the institutional maze of graduate school.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge that this project could not have been completed
without various sources of funding and support for research, writing, and living, including the
Dornsife Doctoral Fellowship, which supported study and research, USC Graduate College
Travel Grants, which allowed me to present my work at academic conferences, and a Ford
Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, which supported the final year of writing. This kind of
support is needed and deserved by all intellectual laborers, and is yet distributed scarcely and
unevenly. I am grateful and fortunate that this project has been supported with grants and
fellowships. Completing this project, however, has also made me keenly aware of the
exceptionalizing and devastating force that uneven distribution of resources and opportunities
vii
has had on even the most egalitarian and oppositional organizations of people, ideas, and
resources.
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract................................................................................................................................ix
List of Abbreviations...........................................................................................................xi
List of Figures.....................................................................................................................xii
Introduction:
Litany for a New World Dis/Order...................................................................................1
Chapter One:
Carceral Boosterism, Constructing Queer Criminality, and Early
Homophile Responses to Policing.....................................................................................44
Chapter Two:
Gay Police Reform Activism and Making Gay L.A.......................................................101
Chapter Three:
Bridge Work: Building an Anti-Racist Lesbian and Gay Left
in Los Angeles...................................................................................................................148
Conclusion:
Perfect Disorder and Other Ways to Be..........................................................................185
Bibliography........................................................................................................................196
Appendix A: List of Archives...........................................................................................201
Appendix B: Maps of Sex Crimes Arrests
and Prostitution Arrests in Los Angeles, 1950-1969.................................202
ix
ABSTRACT
Towards a Politics of Perfect Disorder considers the dynamic interplay between political
subjectification and spatial re-organization by examining the shifting relationship between LGBT
political formations and the Los Angeles Police Department. Towards a Politics of Perfect
Disorder draws on municipal and organizational archives, periodicals, and quantitative data in
order to historicize the production of queer criminality in Los Angeles and give an account of
how homophile and LGBT activists made sense of and responded to law enforcement campaigns
to contain gender and sexual deviance.
I examine the Los Angeles Police Department from its founding in 1896 to the early
postwar period of the 1950. I track the transformation of the LAPD from an ancillary force in a
War on Labor, to an institution of of public safety in a War on Crime. Placing the production of
queer criminality in context of the transformation of both policing and city politics reveals how
both interwar and post-WWII campaigns to contain queer criminality were driven by the
prevailing order of racial and economic spatial segregation in Los Angeles and helped to resolve
a political crisis in city governance.
I also give an account of organized LGBT responses to criminalization in Los Angeles
beginning with homophile era campaigns against policing and ending in the late 1980s. I chart
how LGBT subjectivity, in the context of the struggle against criminalization and policing, is
rendered through and alongside racialized, gendered, and classed ideas and relations of precarity
and risk. The violence of policing induced some activists and organizations to understand and
articulate sexuality as a relational category in productive tension with race, class, and gender.
The demand for self-determination that was pushed by both the Civil Rights, Black Power, and
x
Third World liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s proved a salient and productive one
for homophile and LGBT movements. However, the intersection of LGBT police reform
activism and the growth of voluntary sector governance tended towards re-constructing race,
gender, and class hierarchies within LGBT political organizations in Los Angeles.
I demonstrate how scalar transformations, or re-negotiations of the boundaries of
different kinds of places, like the State or the gay neighborhood, rupture processes of social
subjectification and vice versa. That is to say, the re-organization of different kinds of places
exerts a force on the possibilities and permutations of political subjecthood, while the articulation
of political subjecthood both challenges and constitutes the spatial differentials that drive uneven
development. This dynamic, which I term scalar intersectionality, reframes how we understand
and interpret ruptures between the multiple lived experiences of uneven spatial development,
illustrated by criminality and police violence, and the translation of those experiences into a
politics based on identity. Scalar intersectionality invites us to consider identity as a scalar
category, meaning that the project and politics of identity participate in the creation of different
kinds of places, whose development over time can facilitate and/or disorganize the very aims and
claims of identity by channeling them into manageable socio-spatial formats.
xi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union
BPP – Black Panther Party
CAPA – Coalition Against Police Abuse
CCOE – Citizen's Committee to Outlaw Entrapment
CIVIC – Citizen's Independent Investigating Committee
CP – Communist Party
CRC – Civil Rights Congress
GCA – Gay Community Alliance
GCSC – Gay Community Services Center (Now the Los Angeles LGBT Center)
GLCSC – Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center (after 1975)
GLF – Gay Liberation Front
GRS – General Revenue Sharing
HELP – Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated
ILWU – International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union
IWW – Industrial Workers of the World
LAPD – Los Angeles Police Department
LAPC – Los Angeles Police Commission
LGPATF / “the Task Force” – Lesbian and Gay Police Advisory Task Force
LRU – Lavender and Red Union
xii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: “Personnel”
Figure 2: “Lewd Vagrancy Arrests 1933 – 1949”
Figure 3: “Sex Perversion Arrests 1933 – 1949”
Figure 4: “Prostitution Arrests 1933 – 1949”
Figure 5: “Sir Lady Java Protesting Rule No. 9 at the Redd Foxx”
1
INTRODUCTION
LITANY FOR A NEW WORLD DIS/ORDER
The recent upsurge in attention and organizing around police violence, particularly police
shootings of unarmed Black civilians, has returned to national and international attention, an
ongoing conversation about whose existence is inherently justified, and whose existence requires
constant justification. Criminalization undeniably constitutes a crucible of subjectification, in
which the boundaries, meaning, and function of identity and place are imagined, articulated, and
struggled over. As a social relation and a mode of spatial management, criminalization is
fungible; criminalization creates and is driven by the uneven spatial distribution of racialized,
gendered, and classed vulnerability and precarity. However, it also takes on a generalized set of
spatial forms and practices: surveillance, policing / law enforcement, and incarceration, to name
a few. That is to say, criminalization underscores how the scale of the prison industrial complex
is cohered through differentiation and homogenization as simultaneous reflexes. The ability of
criminality to adapt to shifting social, political, and economic crises makes it an apt angle from
which to study the interplay between identity and political representation in place. Political
struggles against criminalization are often undergirded by subjective and spatial practices such as
inventing or renovating a social categories and/or modes of identification that attempt to
illuminate abstracted differentials of power, as well as making claims on and about particular
kinds of places in an attempt to change death-dealing spatial orders.
For example, during the 2012 California Prisoner Hunger Strikes, strikers mobilized
“prisoner,” as a subjectivity in order to bring into relief the abstracted violence of legalized
incapacitation. Prisoner solidarity was mobilized to enact identification across the racial,
2
gendered, and classed hierarchies that inform the modes of hyper-criminalization inside of
prisons, such as the gang validation process, that in many cases lead to long-term solitary
confinement. Strikers and strike organizers leveraged the scale of body, through denial of food,
to expose the routine of premature death, bodily harm, medical neglect, and administrative
disorder in the dungeons of so-called law and order. The Hunger Strikes underscored how
criminalization enacts a death-dealing mode of organizing space that depends on constant rounds
of socio-spatial differentiation: guilty vs. not guilty, gang-member vs. unvalidated, general
population vs. the hole, even within a kind of place that already exists as a socio-spatial dividing
line between freedom and unfreedom.
To be ensnared in the crosshairs of criminalization in the United States' carceral
geographies is to have your existence called into question. In many cases answers to this
question have culminated in displacing particular clusters of identity from criminality, either
through the extension of rights of reforms, rather than displacing the criminal as a permanent
social status. When groups and individuals attempt to dis-affiliate themselves from criminality,
they make a statement about, or justification of, their own existence, one that is always already
mired in the existing terms of social and spatial organization and the extant modes of legal
redress and political representation. Because these terms of order and modes of representation
aren't primordial, to answer to criminality, is also an act of constituting them as well. These
statements are always more than speech acts; they are acts of discursive construction,
subjectification, social organization, and place making. In that way, political subjecthood also
exerts a force on the socio-spatial architecture of criminalization. The expansion of rights and
reforms even when they fail to displace or descale criminality, indeed re-organize it. Political
3
activism renders new social and legal categories, re-organizes the terrain of rights and legal
protections, changes the procedures of law enforcement, and re-organizes the relationship
between existing social categories of difference. This study is concerned with the interplay
between place-making, subjectification, and criminality. How does criminalization generate or
incite subjectification and place-making? How do people and groups of people craft
subjectivities in response to being criminalized and how are claiming space and place-making
routed through identity formation and vice versa?
In this study I examine the this interplay by historicizing the relationship between LGBT
political formations and the Los Angeles Police Department. I give an account of the local
production and containment of gender and sexual deviance and of the formation of LGBT
identity politics in response to policing and criminalization from the late 1930s to the mid 1980s,
to understand how attempts to de-criminalize homosexuality were rendered through the existing
racialized, classed, and gendered terms of socio-spatial organization. I argue that the articulation
of sexual and gender deviance, sexual identity, and LGBT political subjecthood have both re-
imagined and re-inscribed the relationship between race, class, gender, and sexuality. These re-
orderings and re-inscriptions of difference are in productive tension with spatial differentiation.
The articulation of both queer criminality and gay and lesbian space, acted as an abstracted lever
of social differentiation, both challenging and reifying existing racial, gender, class, and sexual
hierarchies. At the same time, categories of social difference like race and class periodically
functioned as the abstracted criteria of difference that coheres the spatial fixity of both queer
criminality and gay and lesbian identity, creating relations of surplus to people and places
mapped outside of the socio-spatial terrain of LGBT politics.
4
I place the production of queer criminality in context of the advancement of policing in
Los Angeles during the early to mid 20
th
century, noting how law enforcement arrests for sex
crimes were driven by the prevailing order of racial and economic spatial segregation in Los
Angeles. Policing in this study, functions as both an apparatus of social differentiation and a
method of managing space. I show how the production of queer criminality, which multiplied
existing discourses of racialized, gendered, and classed pathology, always exceeds its translation
into a politics of identity. LGBT political formations tended to only recognize and politicize a
subset of the embodiments and enforcement practices that constituted the scope of law
enforcement efforts to contain gender and sexual deviance. I examine the production of LGBT
politics in response to policing, beginning with the 1953 establishment of the Citizens'
Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment, and follow the multiplication of LGBT political
formations through the late 1960s and 1970s, to the mid 1980s. I chart how LGBT subjectivity,
in the context of the struggle against criminalization and policing, is rendered through and
alongside racialized, gendered, and classed ideas and relations of precarity. I demonstrate how
shifts in spatial politics, intersect, or rupture processes of social subjectification and vice versa.
That is to say, the re-organization of different kinds of places exerts a force on the possibilities
and permutations of political subjecthood. Both LAPD capacity and the capacity of homophile
and LGBT activists are conditioned by scalar transformations. The capacity of the LAPD to
contain gender and sexual deviancy was upended by several scale-making projects, including a
War on Labor, a War on Crime, and a rupture in the traditional circuitry of political power, a
result of a growing Middle-class and the flourishing of radicalism and organized labor during the
1930s. When LGBT politics and / or queer criminality succeeds through the re-organization of
5
racialized, classed, and gendered precarity, it is not just a consequence of social co-option or
exclusion but also of scalar transformations. This dynamic, which I term scalar intersectionality,
asks us to consider how scalar transformations, which re-solve and re-organize place and the
boundaries between different kinds of places, intersect with the assertion and advancement of
political subjecthood.
For example, during the 1970s, the internal fracturing of LGBT organizations like Gay
Liberation Front, along lines of race, class, and gender, conditions the scope of law enforcement
reform. The kinds of demands and claims made on and about policing reflected middle and
working class White masculinity, but more importantly, they were themselves shaped by the
existing hierarchies of difference that constitute various scales of political representation and
political subjecthood. At the same time, scalar transformations like the expansion of voluntary
sector governance, which was a re-organization the capacity of the welfare state, as well as a
shift in the composition of city government, gave activists and community organizations in Los
Angeles an unprecedented opportunity to build institutions and enhance their operating capacity
by providing social services that were already critically lagging. Such institutions in Gay Los
Angeles served as congealments of political power, that were crucial in the struggle of dis-
affiliating gay and lesbian identity from criminality. However, the structural forms that such
opportunities took on, ruptured attempts within LGBT organizations to enact anti-racist and anti-
classist politics through the articulation of LGBT political subjecthood. When these ruptures get
historicized solely as a continuity of racial, class, and gendered social exclusion, we miss out on
how the production of scale, or the production and re-organization of different kinds of places,
intersects with political subjectification, channeling visions and constructions of alterity into a
6
set of legible and manageable forms. This dynamic imposes a normalizing pressure on the
contrarian impulses and intentions of oppositional political formations. In short, as identity
politics attempt to claim space: material space, a place in the landscape of rights and legal
protections, a place in the milieu of local governance and service provision, the infrastructures
that these claims are routed through, themselves shape the magnitude and directionality of
identity politics. In the context of criminality, an examination of LGBT political formations and
their responses to policing underscores how the infrastructure of carcerality has tended to refract
categories of social difference into even more atomized differential status groups, more often
than the advancement of identity politics has tended to denature the fungibility and endurance of
criminality as a permanent social status and spatial relation.
Recently, a remarkable volume of academic texts and policy oriented studies have been
produced on the topic of LGBT, especially transgender and gender non-conforming peoples'
experiences within the prison industrial complex. These studies emphasize the particular
vulnerabilities that transgender and gender non-conforming people face both inside and outside
of prison. In a 2010 survey on transgender interactions with Los Angeles police officers released
by the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, 40% of the 147 respondents reported that
they make less than $10,000 per year and 20% reported being unemployed. In prison,
transgender people are more likely to experience sexual violence and harassment from other
detainees and prison guards, are more likely to be held in solitary confinement or administrative
segregation, and are routinely denied access to competent health care. This project engages local,
state, and national carceral geographies as sites of gender's emergence and contestation and is
animated by the literature that understands violence against transgender and gender non-
7
conforming people as both a product of, and productive of, the logics of imprisonment, policing
and surveillance. Given the increasing calls for queer abolition, or a politics that centers the
experiences of LGBT, queer and gender non-conforming people of color in order to pursue
viable alternatives to the practice of caging people as a response to crises, one question this
project considers is: why queer abolition, why now? I examine the changing orientation of
LGBT activism in Los Angeles towards policing to understand to what extent progress for LGBT
people, including increased visibility, recognition as a “market,” and the expansion of legal rights
and protections, has been one avenue through which state apparatuses have been re-calibrated.
In the case of police reform in Los Angeles, gay and lesbian activists casted gay and lesbian
identity as a “victimless crime” at a time when ideas of criminality and violence were being
affixed locally to poor and working class Black and Brown people. The particular practices that
got folded into the articulation of mainstream gay and lesbian politics were only a subset of all
the practices that were criminalized in the efforts to contain queer criminality. Therefore, gay and
lesbian reform efforts towards policing tended towards reifying certain embodiments of sexual
selfhood: white, gay, cisgender, and male, even when other people including people of color,
lesbians, and transgender people did participate in mainstream efforts against policing. While
gay and lesbian leftists in Los Angeles were interested in bridging anti-racism into gay and
lesbians politics, the long history of suppression of Communism and disciplining of radicalism
and organized labor in Los Angeles constrained the ability of activists to actualize their visions of
building an anti-racist, anti-sexist LGBT left in Los Angeles.
In March of 2015, I participated on the safety team in a protest action called “Spring into
Love,” that blocked off the intersection of Third St and La Cienaga Blvd, in front of the Beverly
8
Center. The action was organized by Bamby Salcedo, of the Trans Latina Coalition in response
to several recent murders of trans women in Los Angeles. On the day of the action, supporters
formed a line in the crosswalks, stopping traffic while several trans women activists, some
donning fake scars, gashes and bruises, laid down in the middle of the intersection. The LAPD
liaison who was called to the scene after the intersection was shut down, instructed organizers
that the sixty LAPD officers equipped in riot gear, were here to protect our safety, that they
understood the importance of transgender issues and were here to protect our right to free
assembly. Officers allowed activists to close off the intersection for about an hour and once the
action was complete, protestors and officers went their separate ways.
A few weeks earlier, at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Los Angeles, several
protestors, assembled in smaller numbers, were arrested for refusing to leave downtown police
headquarters. Protestors were at LAPD headquarters demanding information about the autopsy
report for Ezell Ford, who was recently murdered by LAPD officers. These disparate orientations
of local police forces towards two different identity-based subgroups: LGBT and Black
underscores the challenges of neoliberal multiculturalist management: that the success of identity
based political representation for some people always advances alongside the unprotectability of
others.
Mainstream LGBT organizations in Los Angeles and beyond have also remained notably
silent about the recent string of police murders of unarmed Black people, while some of those
same organizations have criticized Black voters for the passage of Proposition 8, the ban against
same-sex marriage, in 2012. One of the concerns animating this project is how this tension
between racial difference and sexual citizenship has evolved historically. As this work will show,
9
race, gender, and class differences provided a reservoir of meaning for early articulations of gay
and lesbian oppression. Later, when white-male-led gay and lesbian organizations did routinely
exclude poor people, women, and people of color from political work, such exclusions occurred
often simultaneously with attempts to manage risk populations, which always included poor
people, women and people of color. The simultaneity of exclusion and inclusion was not just the
result of choices individuals made, but also of larger developments and changes over time. I
believe that understanding these changes over time can enable us to imagine different ways of
being in and enacting political struggle in the present.
Scalar Intersectionality
My analysis is guided by an inter-textual dialogue between the theories of scale
developed by geographers and the notion of intersectionality, developed by Black and women of
color feminists. This inter-textual staging helps us to understand how race, gender, and sexuality
operate in the production of space. Intersectionality was a term coined by legal scholar
Kimberlee Crenshaw in her 1991 essay “Mapping the Margins.” Crenshaw uses the spatial
metaphor of the intersection to theorize how racial and class difference disorganize the assumed
terrain of feminist and anti-racist politics.
1
Intersectionality also refers to a political-intellectual
project that theorizes and practices race, class, gender, and sexuality as co-constituted categories
of difference; such projects predate Crenshaw's coining of the term.
2
Intersectionality is vital to
1 Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of
color." Stanford law review (1991): 1241-1299.
2 See Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the crossroads: African American women activists in the Cold War. (New
York: NYU Press, 2011) and McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism,
and the Making of Black Left Feminism. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) for a detailed account of
intersectional politics and intellectual production that pre-dates Crenshaw's coining of the term as well as post-
1970s articulations of intersectionality.
10
this project because it models how race, as a set of socially embedded economic, political, and
ideological practices “works” in relation to class, gender, and sexuality during episodes of
political and economic restructuring. Intersectionality has been critiqued for the ways that its
deployment can tend to render the combination of race, gender, class, and sexuality as solely
indexing an escalation of social, political and economic exclusions (double oppression, triple
oppression, quadruple oppression), thus supporting static identity configurations that don't
change over time or across space. The most incisive and helpful of these critiques comes from
scholar Denise da Silva who provides the critical impetus to think about what a spatial analytic
can do for the study of gender and sexuality. Da Silva argues that race has developed as a modern
spatial signifier, a vehicle of meaning that constitutes the idea of the global and the modern
subject. Da Silva argues that the invention of the modern subject was accomplished through the
differentiation of space, which created divisions: human/other free/ unfree, that accrued through
colonial genocide, slavery, and the birth of modern rights, and modes of knowledge production
such as the humanities and social sciences. If race, class, gender, and sexuality, are co-constituted
as feminist theorists have argued, and race is spatialized as da Silva suggests, then isn't a spatial
analytic critical for the study of gender and sexuality?
Scale is a spatial analytic that guides this work because it provides a conceptual
representation of the multiple and contradictory forces that constitute different kinds of places in
a capitalist political economy. A simpler definition of scale is that it is a level of representation or
resolution. The choice of scale, analytically delimits what patterns, trends, and relationships are
viewable. In the discipline of geography, scale has been articulated to understand how social
relations and processes produce different kinds of places (spatial differentiation), and in turn how
11
the production of different kinds of places influences social relations and processes of
subjectification. In the discipline of geography, scale has been theorized as a way of
understanding how different kinds of places (nation, region, globe, neighborhood, etc.) are
organized in the context of uneven development. Uneven geographical development refers to the
way geographic space is organized via a dialectic of differentiation and homogenization.
3
For
example, the urban scale can be read as representing the homogenizing tendency the
centralization of capital has on labor, but is internally differentiated into types of land use:
commercial, residential, recreational, etc.
4
Such differentiations reflect cooperating and
competing forces and interests. That is not to say that scale is an index of how space is ordered or
determined by 'the economic' but instead that scale is a way to represent the “resolution of the
contradictory processes of competition and coercion,” in place, in the context of capitalist
development.
5
In this sense, scale is not ontologically given but instead an epistemic construction
whose purpose is to provide an analytical tool and political strategy for understanding how space
is organized in relationship to political, economic, social, and cultural formations.
For Neil Smith in particular, scale is a framework that is all about difference and
differentiation. Smith argues that scale is the criteria of difference between different kinds of
places.
6
Any kind of place, in Smith's formulation, like the body or the community, is not
discrete, but exists as a spatially and temporally contingent snapshot of multiple social forces and
process that are often in conflict. For example, the state, as a kind of place, at any given moment
3 Smith, Neil. Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space. (University of Georgia Press,
2008), 175.
4 Smith, Neil. "Contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the production of geographical
scale." Social Text (1992): 55-81, 73.
5 Smith, Neil. "Contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the production of geographical
scale." Social Text (1992): 55-81, 64.
6 Smith, Neil. "Contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the production of geographical
scale." Social Text (1992): 55-81, 64.
12
is an instantiation of the competing interests that lay claim on and struggle over it. In the United
States, political subjectification and political representation are primary strategies used to make a
claim on the state. Thus, while political infrastructure and sites of power like the state change,
the endurance of the state as a form, as a kind of place, differentiates, or mitigates the production
of different kinds of places, both through the state's relative monopoly on legitimate violence,
and through the consent and participation of those governed.
Anna Tsing's work is also helpful in thinking about scale not just in terms of a time-
space resolution but also as a collection of multiple spatial re-orderings that over time, constitute
the fixity or disorganization of different kinds of places. She writes, “economic projects cannot
limit themselves to conjuring at different scales—they must conjure the scales themselves.”
7

Tsing is concerned with scale-making projects, or projects that enable us to envision or imagine a
scale like the global, local, or regional, such that we can see how it might succeed. She argues
that scale, “must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, evaded, as well as taken for
granted.”
8
This formulation is helpful because a scale-making project helps us think about how
scales cohere materially and ideologically. Any given spatial scale then, is not self evident, but is
constantly coming into being through practices, that include political subjectification.
Kevin Cox applies the concept scale to the study of politics in order to theorize, the
“questions of content and form in the politics of space.”
9
Cox distinguishes between spaces of
dependence, which he argues are defined by, “those more-or-less localized social relations upon
7 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. (Princeton University Press, 2005),
57.
8 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. (Princeton University Press, 2005),
58.
9 Cox, Kevin R. "Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: looking for local
politics." Political geography 17.1, (1998): 1-23, 2.
13
which we depend for the realization of essential interests,”
10
and spaces of engagement, which he
defines as spatially more extensive sets of relationships, modes of representation, and centers of
social power that political activists must engage in. Cox notes that while these centers of power
are sites of opportunity to expand the scale of localized political formations, spaces of
engagement often threaten to dissolve or unravel the spaces of dependence activists articulate to
realize essential interests in the first place. In the political arena, the state is one primary space of
engagement. While meanings and practices are constantly shifting, the spatially fixed form of
politics, the state, has remained constant as a form, despite experiencing periodic
transformations. Modes of representation, like the law also constitute spaces of engagement. The
law changes over time the law as a mode of enacting political interests has remained a relatively
fixed form over time. Political activists have to interact with spaces spaces of engagement
whether they want to or not. However, the state itself is also a space of dependence, thinking
over a long arc. The state itself is a constructed social relationship, a kind of place, that was
crafted to realize the essential interest of order, or of the social contract. There have been
moments in history where the constitution of spaces of dependence have upended the fixity of
spaces of engagement, like the state. For example, the abolition of slavery disorganized the
political economies of the South, a space of dependence that rich Southern whites constituted
through an economic system of plantation capitalism and the racialized alienability. However, as
DuBois outlines in detail in Black Reconstruction, the entry of abolition into the space of
engagement constituted by Northern capitalist interests, and the U.S. federal government,
dissolved some of the most radical impulses and instantiations of abolition democracy into
10 Cox, Kevin R. "Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: looking for local
politics." Political geography 17.1, (1998): 1-23, 2.
14
capitalist democracy. The transition of enslaved Black people from a property relation to capital
to a wage relationship to capital limited the realization of the most radical interests of the
abolitionist movement, such as the notion of freedom as the re-expansion of the commons.
Insights from geographers on scale ask us to consider the extent to which governance and
dissent, cooperation and coercion, and other opposing forces are spatially co-constituted. As a
theoretical framework, scale suggests that the organization of space imposes an organizing force
on the trajectory of identity and identity politics. In a political context, this means that opposition
and order are always in dynamic and dialectical interplay.
Scalar intersectionality, then, asks us to think about what happens to the meaning and
function of categories of social difference and identity, which both constitute spaces of
dependence, as they are realized through spaces of engagement like city governments, electoral
politics, the law, the federal government. How do identity politics themselves constitute spaces
of engagement that can threaten or cohere the fixity and endurance of such spaces of
engagement, which themselves constitute spaces of dependence? I argue throughout this work
that this scalar dimension of politics, re-frames how we should understand and interpret ruptures
between the multiple lived experiences of uneven spatial development, and the politicization of
those experiences through the framework of difference.
Carceral Geographies
I use the term carceral geographies to describe the set of places that produce and are the
result of policing, incarceration, confinement and surveillance. De Certeau describes place as, “a
place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in
15
relationships of coexistence...A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It
implies an indication of stability
11
,” Considering de Certeau's notion of place, we can think
about carceral geographies as relational, historical, and material. Carceral geographies are also
contradictory spaces that are produced through practice, and therefore have a certain degree of
mutability. Seemingly non-carceral places can at any given time take on a carceral texture
depending on human activity and spoken and unspoken codes of conduct. Carceral geographies
are also composed of practices and social relations that can imbue seemingly benign places with
multiple meanings or produce similar outcomes, like premature death, in geographically
disparate places. In Los Angeles, the containment of queer criminality, which became an LAPD
directive beginning in the late 1930s, attempted to turn everyday places like bars, parks, and
public restrooms into sites of containment. It wasn't that this had never happened in Los Angeles
before; regulating working class and racialized cultural and social spaces including bars, saloons,
gambling, nudity, and the like has been an ongoing struggle between Middle-class and elite
Protestant reformers, workers, and politicians in Los Angeles since the beginning of the
twentieth century. Examining the trajectory of LGBT identity from a site of containment to a site
of civic and public engagement asks us to consider how sexuality as a category came into the
purview of law enforcement alongside other categories of difference like race, class, and gender.
Carceral geographies also describes a newly developing subfield in geography and in
geographical security studies that is concerned with: “the nature of carceral spaces and
experiences within them; spatial or distributional geographies of carceral systems; and the
relationship between a notion of the carceral and an increasingly punitive state.”
12
Published
11 De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life: Third Edition. (U of California Press, 2011), 117.
12 Moran, Dominique, and Anssi Keinänen. "The ‘inside 'and ‘outside' of prisons: Carceral geography and home
visits for prisoners in Finland." Fennia-International Journal of Geography 190, no. 2 (2012): 62-76.
16
work in this field primarily focuses on prisons, jails, and detention centers as sites of
investigation as well as post-release surveillance and challenges to re-entry. Judah Schept, for
example has advanced the concept “carceral habitus,” which he describes as, “corporal and
discursive inscription of carcerality into individual and community bodies,”
13
to understand the
contradictory positions and discourses held by local anti-prison activists and city officials.
Schept concludes, “The present research suggests the need for examining the locally situated
ways in which the logics and practices of hegemonic carcerality take shape, at times in contrast
to its more familiar forms at the level of the State and nation.”
In 2006, Governor Schwarzenegger proposed a plan to build new prisons, called
“community correctional facilities,” to house 4,500, of the 5,900 women prisoners that had been
identified as low-security inmates, mostly sentenced to prison for non-violent property crimes
and drug-related offenses.
14
Instead of releasing these people, the governor decided to endorse an
initiative to build low security prisons in which women could live with their children for three
days a week. In their report on gender-responsiveness, commissioned through the U.S.
Department of Justice, Bloom, Owen, and Covington noted:
Women offenders are disproportionately women of color who are undereducated and
unskilled, with sporadic employment histories. They are less likely than men to have
committed violent offenses and more likely to have been convicted of crimes involving
drugs or property. Often, their property offenses are economically driven, motivated by
poverty and by the abuse of alcohol and other drugs.
15
13 Schept, Judah. (2013) “A lockdown facility...with the feel of a small private college: Liberal politics, jail
expansion, and the carceral habitus.” Theoretical Criminology: 17(71): 71-88. p. 73
14 Braz, Rose. "Kinder, Gentler, Gender Responsive Cages: Prison Expansion Is Not Prison Reform, WOMEN,
GIRLS &." Crim. Just (2006): 87.
15 Bloom, Barbara, Barbara Owen, and Stephanie Covington. "Gender-responsive strategies." Research, practice
and guiding principles for women offenders(2003): 31-48, 14.
17
The report emphasizes that most women “offenders” are non-violent, have had histories
of abuse and mental illness, and details the types of abuses they suffer while incarcerated due
largely to inadequate health care infrastructure and services, all compelling arguments for release
and commuted sentences. However, the report then outlines a number of reforms in arrest,
processing, and incarceration procedures as a solution. Gender-responsiveness has now become
an official operating paradigm of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,
16

and the construction of “gender-responsive beds,” has already been slated in AB900, a bill that
authorizes $7-12 billion for construction of prison beds in California. Gender-responsiveness is
an example of carceral habitus. Knowledge production on women in prison is generative of
carceral geographies to the extent that enhancing quality of life for women in prison is
articulated as being tantamount to prison expansion. Overall this strategy exemplifies the
confusion of the radical demand for self-determination into the liberal praxis of self-help. Gender
responsive incarceration as a site of reform and locus of knowledge production does little to
displace the trope of criminality that is applied to shifting groups of people, over time, and
becomes itself the always rationale of policing. The appeal for gender responsiveness, instead of
demanding the restoration of de-funded social services, affordable housing, or the mobilization
of the social wage for life affirming activities, reproduces the common sense of incarceration and
policing as a sustainable strategies for dealing with economic and social instability.
An ethnographic study of 315 transgendered people in men's prisons in California,
produced by Lori Sexton, Valerie Jenness, and Jennifer Sumner of UC Irvine, reveals that most
incarcerated transgender people were unemployed before incarceration, sentenced to prison
16 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “Female Offender Master Plan,” 2008. Accessed
online, http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Adult_Operations/FOPS/docs/Female-Offenders-Master-Plan-2008.pdf.
18
primarily for non-violent property crimes, have histories of mental illness and drug addiction,
and face acute violence in prison due to their gender identity.
17
While studies of transgender and
gender non-conforming people's interactions with law enforcement and prison officials document
similar patterns of abuse, harassment, denial of access to competent healthcare, and lack of
formal grievance procedures, only one report, released by the Sylvia River Law Project (SRLP)
in 2007, articulates violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people as a product
of the logics of policing, incarceration, and surveillance. SRLP recommends adopting measures
that reduce processes and practices of criminalization that lead to incarceration, funding non-
correctional programs and services, and eliminating profiling and false arrest.
18
The SRLP report
is a part of a growing body of literature that recognizes the limits of legal protection and
expansion of individual rights as a tactics to ensure safety for those whose vulnerability to
premature death is in part organized by shifts in the political economy characterized by rising
poverty rates, high unemployment, upward distribution of social wages, the expansion of debt,
and the contraction of a social safety net.
19

In Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore explores how prison expansion in California
during the 1980s was a scale-making project that attempted to resolve crises at a variety of
spatial scales that produced surpluses in land, labor, capital, and state capacity. For example, the
emerging post Keynesian military state that directed surpluses in private finance capital into
17 Sexton, Lori, Valerie Jenness, and Jennifer Macy Sumner. "Where the margins meet: A demographic assessment
of transgender inmates in men’s prisons."Justice Quarterly 27, no. 6 (2010): 835-866. Report funded by CDCR
and UC Irvine School of Social Ecology.
18 Sylvia Rivera Law Project, (2007). “Its a War in Here: A Report on the Treatment of Transgender, and Intersex
People in New York State Men's Prisons” New York, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Gehi, Pooja S., and
Gabriel Arkles. "Unraveling injustice: Race and class impact of Medicaid exclusions of transition-related health
care for transgender people." Sexuality Research & Social Policy 4, no. 4 (2007): 7-35.
19 Spade, Dean. Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. (Brooklyn, NY:
South End Press, 2011), Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. Queer (in) justice: The
criminalization of LGBT people in the United States. (V ol. 5. Beacon Press, 2011), and Stanley, Eric A., and Nat
Smith, eds. Captive genders: Trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex. (AK Press, 2011).
19
lease revenue bonds for prison construction represents a resolution of a crisis of legitimacy, or its
ability to act as a state. The state of California was being re-organized by transformations in
capital accumulation at the global level signaled by the financial meltdown of 1973-1975, and at
the regional / local level by several waves of tax revolt that marked the de-legitimation of
military Keynesianism and the welfare state.
The coming into being of the post-Keynesian military state in California entailed a scale-
making project that is encapsulated in Gilmore's term “forgotten places,”
20
. Forgotten places are
sites of convergence of multiple and contradictory scale making projects: “places that have
experienced the abandonment characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state
reorganization.”
21
Understanding that organized abandonment produces similar kinds of places,
in different geographic locations creates a political and intellectual opportunity (and imperative)
to link localized efforts to “scale up” or expand the terrain of struggle. Joao Costa Vargas
reminds us that in Los Angeles, these places are also sites of regulation in which the disorder of
state divestment, de-industrialization, and unemployment are individualized through the tropes of
crime and punishment. This study furthers the argument that abandoned places and people are
central to the reproduction of capital and state capacity by examining how abandonment works
alongside the articulation and incorporation of minoritarian discourse into the work of the state.
22
Towards a Politics of Perfect Disorder contributes to the field of carceral geographies by
looking at how and why the logics and practices of policing are both locally situated and
spatially over-determined. I explain why the current local orientation of poor LGBT people,
20 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "Forgotten places and the seeds of grassroots planning."Engaging
contradictions: Theory, politics and methods of activist scholarship 2008: 31, 38.
21 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "Forgotten places and the seeds of grassroots planning."Engaging
contradictions: Theory, politics and methods of activist scholarship 2008: 31.
22 Melamed, Jodi. Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. U of Minnesota
Press, 2011.
20
people of color, lesbians, and trans women towards both policing and mainstream LGBT politics
is a product of both gay and lesbian activism and the way policing queer criminality abstracted
its translation into a politics of identity. The point in doing so is to provide further clarity on the
relationship between the reproduction of the carceral state and the production and management
of categories of difference like sexuality, race, gender, and class.
Queer Criminality
In the past decade, an increasing number of studies have addressed the criminalization of
LGBT and queer people in the United States.
23
These studies have focused on how notions of
sexual and gendered deviancy are embedded in legal and discursive definitions of criminality.
Among these works, Queer Injustice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States,
provides a detailed account of the various ways that policing deviant gender and sexuality is
central to the production of crime and how histories of sexual and gendered deviance are
inextricably linked to legacies of conquest, genocide, and racism. The authors give a detailed
account of legal and extralegal discrimination of LGBT people including: laws regulating sex
and sex work, gender representation, sexual entrapment, raids of LGBT clubs and social spaces,
and the use or threat of physical or sexual violence during arrest and detainment. These studies
emphasize how poor LGBT people, LGBT people of color, trans women, and LGBT youth have
been particular targets of criminalization. Other studies have theorized the limitations of hate
23 Stein, Marc. City of sisterly and brotherly loves: Lesbian and gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. (Temple
University Press, 2004), Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. Queer (in) justice: The
criminalization of LGBT people in the United States. (V ol. 5. Beacon Press, 2011). Manalansan, Martin. "Race,
violence, and neoliberal spatial politics in the global city." Social Text (2005): 84-5, Stanley, Eric A., and Nat
Smith, eds. Captive genders: Trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex. (AK Press, 2011), Spade,
Dean. Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. (Brooklyn, NY: South
End Press), 2011, and Kunzel, Regina G. Criminal intimacy: Prison and the uneven history of modern American
sexuality. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
21
crime legislation and reforms centered around inclusion and state protection. In Normal Life,
Dean Spade uses the term “administrative violence,” to describe the ways that transgender and
gender non-conforming people are regulated and surveilled through social institutions and
structures, including, gender-segregated bathrooms and shelters, identity documents, and clinics
and healthcare facilities. In Captive Genders, Eric Stanley and Nat Smith argue that the reliance
on punitive structures to produce safety for LGBT and queer people produces increased
vulnerability for LGBT and queer people of color. These works argue for a transformative and
coalitional approach to LGBT and queer activism that centers sites of vulnerability instead of the
procurement of rights and single-issue struggles. This project contributes to ongoing
conversations on LGBT and queer activism and administrative violence by accounting for how
ruptures around race, class, and gender get re-organized through the interplay between LGBT
political formation and the re-organization of the state.
In this project, queer criminality is understood as a contradictory, as well as a spatially
and temporally contingent project of racial, sexual and gender management. Omi and Winant's
define racial projects, are ones that, “...mediate between discursive or representational means in
which race is identified and signified on the one hand, and the institutional and organizational
forms in which it is routinized and standardized on the other.”
24
In this way racial projects link
culture and ideology to institutions and structures. Queer criminality helps us link concerns and
discourses about sexual and gender deviancy to the modes of representation, like the law, and
political organizing. This project is guided by the idea that queer criminality is always indexing
a racial project. As such, I explain how racial difference factors into the production of gender and
24 Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. (New
York City: Routledge, 1994), 60.
22
sexual deviance, and how race, gender, and class challenge the production of LGBT politics.
Queer in this sense, instead of only describing a given or self-selected identity category, also
accounts for how the regulation and production of non-normativity has historically occurred
through both the aggregation and disaggregation of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
This work is also guided by queer and LGBT historiography and Queer Studies
scholarship that understands sexuality and gender identity as being historically and spatially
contingent. That is to say that what we understand today as LGBT identity, has been imagined,
practiced, struggled over, contained, and transformed over time. The entry of homosexuality into
the purview of the US state and social and civil institutions during the 20
th
century was not
occasioned by the arrival of a homosexual subject but rendered through the interaction of the
scales of social life and apparatuses of subjectivity. For example, in The Straight State, Margot
Canaday traces the development of gender and sexuality regulations through welfare,
immigration, and citizenship policies in the U.S. between 1900 and 1983 arguing that the
category of homosexuality in the U.S. context was produced through a dialectic of creation and
discovery. That is to say, homosexuality was produced as a category for regulation that made use
of existing racist, classist, and sexist logics and installed sexual and gender non-normativity onto
racialized bodies. For example, Canaday discusses how notions of degeneracy were used by
immigration officials to deny gender and sexual non-conforming immigrants entry under the
public charge clause: “Degeneracy was a racial and economic construct that explained, 'the
immorality of the poor,' and this helped to give the public charge clause some of its power over
sexually deviant aliens.”
25
. The public charge claus, according to Canaday, was most commonly
25 Canaday, Margot. The straight state: Sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century America. (Princeton
University Press, 2009), 22.
23
used to bar entry to single women, women suspected of prostitution, and people immigrating
from southeastern Europe and Asian, especially Chinese women. The public charge clause in
Canaday's formulation represents an early attempt to regulate homosexuality in lieu of an official
policy against homosexuality or a visible and/or institutionalized homosexual identity.
Chandan Reddy's reading of the 1986 Family Reunification Act explores how race,
gender, and sexuality are regulated through the trope of family by the U.S. state to reproduce
itself in the context of global capital's demand for an increasing source of low-wage labor. Reddy
argues that in the 1986 Family Reunification Act, and the Immigration Act of 1990, which
increased family-based immigrant visas, and capped visas for unskilled workers we can read
several enactments: 1) the recruitment a low-wage workforce for capital through family
reunification visas in centers of surplus labor extraction like New York City, while attaching the
social welfare of all incoming immigrants to petitioning family members, 2) externalization of
the disorder of unemployment on poor immigrant of color communities, and 3) the projection of
the state as, “a benevolent actor reuniting broken families or an overburdened and effete agent
unable to prevent immigrants’ manipulations of its (mandatory) democratic and fair laws,”
26
.
Further, Reddy argues, this re-formulation of the family as the (limited) legal point of entry for
immigrants into the U.S. has, “increased immigrants’ exposure and structural dependence on
heteropatriarchal relations and regulatory structures.” Many queer immigrant interviewees spoke
about the impossibility of “being gay” in a context in which one’s dependence on “family”—
broadly defined—is definitional to living as an immigrant in the City.”
27
In this instance the
disaggregation of race from gender and sexuality is a strategy that the state uses to resolve the
26 Reddy, Chandan. "Asian diasporas, neoliberalism, and family: Reviewing the case for homosexual asylum in the
context of family rights." Social Text 84 (2005): 101, 102.
27 Reddy, Chandan. "Asian diasporas, neoliberalism, and family: Reviewing the case for homosexual asylum in the
context of family rights." Social Text 84 (2005): 101, 111.
24
contradiction between capital's need for a surplus population, high unemployment rates, and
xenophobic anxieties about unchecked immigration. The Family Reunification Act exemplifies
how the production of scale fractures identity based claims to rights. By, “instituting
heteronormative community structures as a requirement for accessing welfare provisions for new
immigrants,”
28
the Act fragments immigrant into differential status groups based on the ability of
individuals to meet the requirements of eligibility.
Discourses that attempt to render homophobia as a particularly immeshed cultural
phenomenon within immigrant and people of color communities miss the ways homophobia
and/or the incitement to heterosexuality is materially and discursively organized as an exercise of
state power. Reddy's analysis alongside Canaday's is helpful because it shows how aggregating
race, gender, and sexuality and disaggregating race, gender, and sexuality are both (and often
simultaneous) strategies of state power.
The corollary to the constructed heterosexual legal immigrant subject instituted through
policies like the Family Reunification Act, is the queer / homosexual subject of liberal
democracy. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar tracks the discursive formation of what she
terms homonationalism, or U.S. nationalist homosexuality in which particular queer subjects
appear as subjects to the state, contingent on the “segregation and disqualification of racial and
sexual others,” both in and outside of the U.S.
29
Puar traces the discursive construction of non-
normative racialized sexualities through the figure of the terrorist to argue that the military,
political, and economic interests of the U.S. state are reproduced on a global scale through the
disaggregation of race from sexuality and gender. Puar's analysis is helpful because she traces
28 Reddy, Chandan. "Asian diasporas, neoliberalism, and family: Reviewing the case for homosexual asylum in the
context of family rights." Social Text 84 (2005): 101, 110.
29 Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. (Duke University Press, 2007), 2.
25
how queer social movements and progressive activism participate in the proliferation of violence
through the contingent incorporation of particular (in Puar's formulation, white) queer bodies
into legible subject hood through the extension of rights to render the U.S. as a state of sexual
exception. Puar reads the 2003 Lawrence and Garner vs Texas ruling, which overturned a
previous ruling that made sodomy illegal alongside the 2004 Abu Ghraib torture incident to
demonstrate how the production of sexual citizenship occurs alongside the institution of “racial-
sexual Others.” In the Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas ruling, sodomy was overturned on the
grounds that gay couples had the same rights to privacy in the domestic sphere as heterosexual
couples. Puar notes that this production of sexual subjecthood is limited given the historical and
material unevenness of poor and non-white peoples' access to a private domestic sphere.
In the Twilight of Equality, Lisa Duggan outlines the shifting cultural politics of
neoliberalism to argue for a more organized left opposition to neoliberalism that takes into
account both economic and class politics, as well as identity and cultural politics. Duggan traces
the discursive development of conservative gay politics, which she argues articulates an equality
rhetoric centered on the attainment of individual rights and protection of private and domestic
spaces. Duggan notes that gay conservative rhetoric hinges on the disaggregation of gay politics
from those centering on an implicit connection between race, class, and gender.
30
Duggan's
account underscores that the disaggregation of race from gender and sexuality is not just imposed
by the state but circulates as a mode of subjectification and identity formation.
In the article “Butterflies, Whistles and Fists: Gay Safe Street Patrols and the New Gay
Ghetto, Christina Hanhardt focuses on two gay street patrols, one in San Francisco and one in
30 Duggan, Lisa. "The twilight of equality." Neoliberalism, cultural politics and the attack on democracy. (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2003), 55.
26
Chelsea, in the 1970s. Hanhardt writes, “these patrols took urban policies such as street cleanups
and heightened policing, which a decade earlier had placed 'sexual deviants' at odds with
redevelopment and law and order and cast them as the very insurance of lesbian and gay
visibility.”
31
Hanhardt also notes that gay urban enclaves, while traditionally being situated near
racialized enclaves, have also become the index of “economic competitiveness in a global
marketplace for business location.”
32
Hanhardt also traces the circulation of the culture of
poverty thesis and the construction of violence as a symptom of racialized pathology. Hanhardt
argues that the emphasis on violence as a threat to gay visibility, coupled with articulation of men
of color as the figures of homophobic threat, aligned with speculative interests that sought to
displace poor residents of color. Gay space was rendered as putatively non-white, and non-white
LGBT people as existing outside of the protection of gay space. Hanhardt's work calls attention
for the need for increased attention to the historical transformation of LGBT politics and identity.
Towards a Politics of Perfect Disorder builds on the fields of LGBTQ historiography and
queer studies by tracing the production of LGBT subjectivity in relation to criminality and
policing. In doing so, we see how the conditions that were generative of gay and lesbian
political formations in Los Angeles from the 1950s to the mid 1980s, also impacted the
polarization of legible LGBT and queer identity along the lines of race and class. Just as for
DuBois the color line functions as key spatial and historical contradiction of U.S. democracy, I
argue that the shifting “line” of criminalization is a generative metaphor to think about the ways
that the expansion of legal rights and protections for some LGBT and queer people has stabilized
existing racial and class hierarchies.
31 Hanhardt, Christina B. "Butterflies, whistles, and fists: Gay safe streets patrols and the new gay ghetto, 1976-
1981." Radical History Review 2008, no. 100 (2008): 61-85, 64.
32 Hanhardt, Christina B. "Butterflies, whistles, and fists: Gay safe streets patrols and the new gay ghetto, 1976-
1981." Radical History Review 2008, no. 100 (2008): 61-85, 63.
27
Perfect Disorder and Other Ways to Be
“There wasn't enough for Indigo in the world she'd been born to, so she made up what she needed.” - Ntozake
Shange, Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo
33
In Blood in My Eye, when George Jackson calls for a politics of perfect disorder, he
writes: “the enemy culture, the established government, exists first of all because of its ability to
govern, to maintain enough order to ensure that a cycle of sorts exists between the various levels
and elements of the society. 'Law and Order' is their objective. Ours is 'Perfect Disorder.' Our aim
is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own revolutionary culture.”
34

For Jackson, “Law and Order” is a both a culturally embedded logic as well as a method of
organizing and producing space and subjectivity. Jackson's words here are interesting; he says
that the point of law and order is not exclusion, or to ensure that one group is always outside the
life cycle of governance or civic life. Instead he emphasizes the importance of maintaining a
flow between the “various levels and elements of the society,” a cycle of movement between
inside and outside, citizen and criminal. I take Jackson's call for perfect disorder, as a query into
the kinds of social relations and spatial arrangements that sustain the life cycle of carcerality.
Law and order relies on criminality as a permanent status, while changes in the political
economy and social attitudes can shift the demographic occupying the position of criminality. In
Jackson's analysis, we can understand a politics of perfect disorder as that which disrupts the
coherence of criminality as a status. A politics of perfect disorder understands inclusion and
exclusion as distinct operations that can work simultaneously to maintain the life cycle of racial
capitalism.
In this moment of fractured affinities, in which neoliberal multiculturalist logics have re-
33 Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: a novel. (Macmillan, 1996).
34 Jackson, George. Blood in my eye. (Black Classic Press, 1972).
28
calibrated categories of struggle like race, class, gender, and sexuality, in order to reproduce the
United States as a place of perpetual progress existing alongside an ever-expanding global
capitalist carceral network, identifying and squelching so-called “enemy culture” is a fraught
task. The act of naming and organizing around an enemy has tended historically towards
constituting the very politics of in/humanity that criminality upholds. Refracting George
Jackson's words, through Shange's proposal for self craft, healing, and ingenuity in Sassafras,
Cypress, and Indigo, we can think of perfect disorder as a politics of transformation, a method
for locating the unofficial and feeling the unknowable, a recipe for imagining, planning and
practicing livable, life-affirming geographies.
How does one organize a political organization, campaign, or effort grounded in feeling
the unknowable? Black and women of color feminist scholars, writers, and activists have argued
that mainstream, oppositional, and revolutionary US political formations have developed in ways
that render the ontology and phenomenology of the lives of Black women, women of color, and
Third World women unknowable.
35
Black and women of color feminism exists as one political
intellectual formation that emerged both as a response to the re-organization of the US political
economy in the transition from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism, and as a
method of politicizing across the ruptures of both globalizing capital and U.S. anti-racist and
35 Several Black and women of color feminist scholars have argued that dominant paradigms of knowledge
production tend to abstract the lived ex experiences and material and immaterial conditions of oppression of
Black women and women of color. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic grounds: Black women and the
cartographies of struggle. U of Minnesota Press, 2006, argues that the dominant discourses and paradigms of
geographic knowledge do not treat black women as sites of spatial knowledge, thereby rendering them
“ungeographic.” Hong, Grace Kyungwon. "'The Future of Our Worlds': Black Feminism and the Politics of
Knowledge in the University under Globalization.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 8, no. 2 (2008):
95-115, argues that the very claim of totalizing knowledge functions in a political economy that supports the
premature death of Black women scholars even as Black feminism expands as a university recognized, or
legitimated site of inquiry. Richie, Beth. Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered black women.
Psychology Press, 1996, argues that the criminalization of Black women is underscored by a system of gender
entrapment, in which the phenomenology of Black women's lives is abstracted through state-sanctioned and
communal violence.
29
anti-sexist political formations.
Chela Sandoval describes consciousness as the capacity to “identify, develop, and control
the means of ideology.”
36
Oppositional consciousness is a means to intervene on and transform
hegemonic power relations. Sandoval identifies five categories around which oppositional
consciousness is organized and theorizes differential oppositional consciousness as a specific
strategy developed and enacted by U.S feminists of color between 1968 and 1990 that, “permits
functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominant ideology.”
37
In Sandoval's
formulation, differential oppositional consciousness is a method used by Black and women of
color feminists to balance the need to speak about the particular material conditions of
oppression that women of color face while also critiquing a liberal-pluralist multicultural frame
that, “says in effect, that our theories are plausible and carry explanatory weight only in relation
to our specific experiences, but that they have no use value in relation to the rest of the world.”
38

The formulation of Black and women of color feminism then is meant to take seriously
material conditions and social forces that create particular contexts from which scholars write
and mobilize, while also being able to articulate the value of black and women of color feminist
theory in relation to the rest of the world. One value of Black and women of color feminist
praxis is a strident critique of capitalism that pays particularly close attention to how changes
and ruptures in capital accumulation work alongside the unstable categories of race, gender,
class, and sexuality.
39

In her 1970 essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” Frances Beale writes:
36 Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed.(Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press, 2000), 44.
37 Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed.(Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press, 2000), 43.
38 Alexander, M. "Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic
futures.(New York: Routledge, 1997), xvii.
39 Hong, Grace Kyungwon. The ruptures of American capital: Women of color feminism and the culture of
immigrant labor. (U of Minnesota Press, 2006).
30
“The system of capitalism (and its afterbirth—racism) under which we all live has attempted by
many devious ways and means to destroy the humanity of all people, and particularly the
humanity of black people.”
40
Beale goes on to outline how high rates unemployment for Black
people in the U.S. and Black women's limited and declining work opportunities as exploited
domestic workers coupled with U.S. nationalist articulations of proper manhood and womanhood
ideologically produced the Black family as a site of non-normative gender relations. The
discourse of unemployed black men as “lazy,” and exploited Black women workers as
matriarchal castrators, in Beale's estimation, tore interpersonal relationships between Black
people asunder. Beale likens the demonization of Black women under U.S. capitalism to a
psychological wage
41
that attempts to misdirect a critical alliance between Black people, across
gender lines, against capitalism.
Beale also links colonial gendered violence in Puerto Rico in the form of forced
sterilization to sterilization programs targeted towards poor black women which sometimes
made welfare benefits contingent on receiving sterilization. She names one organization, the
Association of V oluntary Sterilization Inc. which was headquartered in New York City. The
emergence of sterilization clinics as an alternative to free contraception, during a period of
public spending roll backs underscores how shifts in role and work of the state to keep up with
contractions and expansions of capital accumulation create the material conditions that attempt
to constitute racialized genders as knowably pathological through sexual regulation and
40 Beale, Frances. "Double jeopardy: To be black and female." in The black woman: An anthology. ed. Toni Cade
Bambara (New American Library, 1970), 90.
41 In Black Reconstruction, DuBois describes psychological wages as public deference, titles of courtesy, voting
rights, the ability to inhabit public spaces such as schools and parks, and the ability to participate in the ranks of
law enforcement. The psychological wage allowed poor whites to constitute a sense of place and form social
relationships in society that distinguished them from Blacks. Beale argues that similarly sexism abstracts the
ways that capitalism forms the material conditions that attempt to organize gender and sexual hierarchies among
Black people.
31
reproductive dispossession. David Harvey notes that facing bankruptcy, the city of New York
chose to protect corporate profits and discipline the surplus population, substituting corporate
welfare for social welfare
.42
Beale's specific focus on the gender, race, and class dimensions of
state-sanctioned discipline of surplus populations in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico is one
example of how black and women of color feminism models a comparative critique of capitalism
that is grounded in an engagement with race, gender, and sexuality, not as stable categories but
as sites of contestation across different geographic locations. Black and women of color
feminism is an indispensable political and intellectual formation for this project because, as
Grace Hong argues, it functions as a register at which we can trace post WWII ruptures in capital
along the axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
43
This project engages Black and women of
color feminism and intersectionality as frameworks that index political-intellectual projects that
both respond to the several iterations of racial capitalism and centers the lives and knowledge
production of people of color, queer and LGBT people, and poor people in its imaginings of a
more livable future.
I add to this work by giving an account of LGBT political formations that were
developing in the same time period and sometimes in proximity to black, women of color, and
queer of color political formations and examining how such organizations struggled over the and
speculated the relationship between sexuality, race, gender, and class, producing multiple and
contradictory discourses of sexual difference. When possible, I try to recover the participation of
leftists, lesbians, people of color, and trans and gender non-conforming in political struggles
around policing, while also showing how discourses and analyses of race, class, gender, even
42 Harvey, David. A brief history of neoliberalism. (Oxford University Press, 2005), 47.
43 Hong, Grace Kyungwon. The ruptures of American capital: Women of color feminism and the culture of
immigrant labor. U of Minnesota Press, 2006.
32
when seemingly materially absent in terms of archival remains and political representation, are
preserved in the spatial politics of policing gender and sexual deviance in an earlier period, the
spatial politics of LGBT anti-police and police reform efforts, the social relations these efforts
attempted to displace, and the relations these efforts helped to cohere.
I take up George's Jackson incitement for perfect disorder by using history as a method to
disorganize the abstracting pressure racism, which Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues is a practice of
abstraction, has exerted on the translation of queer criminality into a politics of identity.
44
Perfect
disorder, as an alternative way of being and knowing to law and order, asks us to think about the
spatial arrangements and social relationships that support the life cycle of carceral apparatuses,
like law enforcement agencies. I take up policing as a mode of spatial management that creates
an uneven topography of surveillance and violence, and criminality as an enduring social relation
that facilitates the development of policing as a constitutive feature of twentieth century
American life.
Perfect disorder draws our attention to the fungibility of criminality as a social relation
and the fragmentary pressure criminalization imposes on the articulation of identity and
selfhood. The advancement of rights and use of the law as a mode of redress has allowed various
and particular discourses of race, gender, and sexuality to become legally enshrined, while
simultaneously enabling the capacity for law enforcement to multiply at every spatial scale. This
contradiction has been termed by Jodi Melamed: represent-and-destroy, or the incorporation of
managing difference into the aegis of the post-Civil Rights U.S state, alongside the creative
destruction of racial capitalism evinced in the buildup of the prison industrial complex at state,
44 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "Fatal couplings of power and difference: Notes on racism and geography." The
Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15-24, 16.
33
federal and global scales beginning in the late sixties.
45
Similarly, Chandan Reddy terms this
contradiction: freedom-with-violence, to underscore the productive tension between the
expansion of sexual citizenship alongside the expansion of racialized carcercal violence.
46
Lisa
Marie Cacho names the gap between the socio-spatial multiplicity that criminality indexes, and
the particular embodiments that become reified through the production of identity-based political
subjects, unprotectability. Cacho argues that when one is rendered unprotectable, not only does
the interpretive violence of the law attempt to make one politically, economically, and socially
illegible, but also these modes of representation and subjectification: the law, law enforcement
and political representation work and are reconstituted precisely through the very endurance of
unprotectability as a mode of existence, the disciplinary double to political subjecthood. These
scholars illustrate in different ways, how the fungibility of criminality marks both the potential
and limits of identity based political formations.
Study Site and Methods
The Stonewall Uprising of 1969 is remembered as the ushering in the multiplication of
LGBT political formations and discourses of sexuality and sexual difference. In Los Angeles,
Stonewall energized and ignited an already growing gay and lesbian movement against policing
that had been smoldering throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Before Stonewall in 1969, Los
Angeles had several similar uprisings, few of which are remembered as seminal moments in the
production of LGBT politics. The first in 1959 was at Cooper's Doughnuts, near the intersection
5
th
and Main streets downtown. Cooper's Doughnuts was a preferred late night hangout for
45 Melamed, Jodi. Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. U of Minnesota
Press, 2011.
46 Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with violence: Race, sexuality, and the US state. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011.
34
patrons of nearby gay establishments including the Waldorf and the Belmont and was frequently
patrolled by LAPD officers. According to John Rechy, on that night, LAPD officers at Cooper's
were in the process of arresting patrons, when, as one of the arrestees attempted to flea custody,
patrons began to pelt LAPD officers with doughnuts, coffee, and debris forcing officers to call
for backup. A standoff ensued, with the LAPD eventually having to retreat, without the person
they had planned to arrest.
47
The second incident was on New Years night of 1967, at the Black
Cat in Silverlake. A more noted incident, a standoff with the LAPD ensued after plainclothes
officers infiltrated the bar and attempted to arrest patrons for kissing, two of whom were later
convicted of lewd conduct and forced to register as sex offenders. Several days after the incident,
over 200 people gathered to protest the raid and arrests. The raid also inspired the formation of
the group PRIDE (Personal Rights and Defense and Education), who began to publish The
Advocate, one of the longest running LGBT periodicals in the United States. The third incident
was at the Patch, a gay bar in Wilmington, quite a distance from Downtown and Silver Lake, but
still within the frenetic city boundaries and therefore under LAPD jurisdiction. In August of
1968, LAPD Vice officers raided the Patch, demanding to see identification and arresting
patrons. Bar owner Lee Glaze took to the stage and encouraged patrons to resist the LAPD's
tactics, saying “Its not a crime to be in a gay bar.”
48
A rally ensued, with patrons chanting, “We're
Americans, too!”
49
Patrons then proceeded to march to the Harbor Division police station after
obtaining flowers from local florist, also a patron of the Patch, demanding the release of all those
arrested. After the raid on the Patch, several patrons, frustrated with the lack of momentum and
47 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 1.
48 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 157.
49 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 158.
35
political action around police entrapment, formed Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, a legal
service and political advocacy organization that among other things, provided a AAA-style bail
service for people (mostly men) arrested for sex crimes.
By the time the Stonewall Inn uprising took place, bar and bathhouse raids, entrapment in
public restrooms, lewd conduct arrests for touching and kissing, raids of private parties, arrests
for cross-dressing, and police beatings, had become so routine in Los Angeles that gay liberation
was just one of many emergent political formations in Los Angeles directing its attention towards
policing. When Gay Liberation arrived on the scene, gay and lesbian Angelenos had already
began organizing themselves into a political bloc aimed at pushing for gay civil rights with
issues like police harassment, housing, political representation, and social services for gays and
lesbians as central issues. Organized LGBT struggles against the Los Angeles Police Department
predate watershed moments in LGBT political formation, like Stonewall, and addressing
policing remained a centerpiece in the work of mainstream Los Angeles LGBT organizations
into the 1990s. As early as 1953, homophile organizers in Los Angeles were attempting to build a
political response to policing and used policing as a unifying trope in their articulations of sexual
self-hood, sexual identity, and homophile unity.
Policing also informed the spatial clustering of some LGBT people and institutions into
neighborhoods like Hollywood and West Hollywood. The frenetic boundaries of Los Angeles,
which left places like West Hollywood outside of the jurisdiction of the LAPD encouraged some
LGBT Angelenos to settle in West Hollywood throughout the postwar period and into the 1970s
and 80s. Furthermore, the perceived attack on Hollywood area bars, theaters, cruising spots, and
other establishments deemed lewd, incited gay and lesbian Angelenos to claim such spaces as
36
their own, at the expense of places existing outside such zones of political recognition.
Several studies in LGBT history suggest that law enforcement containment of gender and
sexual deviance, especially in gay and lesbian bars, incited LGBT political formations in US
cities beginning the late 1950s through the 1960s.
50
However, few of these studies have focused
on the relationship between LGBT political formations and law enforcement in Los Angeles. The
fact that Los Angeles has been understudied as a site of LGBT police reform is striking,
especially since California became the first state to legalize gay bars in 1951, after the California
Supreme court ruled, in Stoumen v. Reilly, that a bar could not loose its liquor license strictly for
catering to gay clientele. Also, accounts of of LGBT history in Los Angeles suggest policing
played a role in the establishment of nascent political institutions and programs created by and
targeted towards gays and lesbians in Los Angeles including: Mattachine Society, PRIDE
(Personal Rights in Defense and Education) and The Advocate (started after the Black Cat raid),
the Metropolitan Community Church (formed after the raids on the Black Cat and the Patch), and
Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (formed after a raid on the Patch), to name a few.
Los Angeles as a city and county is notorious for its investment in carceral infrastructure.
Los Angeles County has the second largest law enforcement force in the country and its policing
strategies and tactics have been exported throughout the country and across the globe. Los
Angeles County also runs the world's largest jail system and 34% of California state prisoners
come from Los Angeles county.
51
Los Angeles is a critical node in the United States' imaginary
50 See: Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-open town: A history of queer San Francisco to 1965. Univ of California Press,
2003, 17. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold 20th
Anniversary Edition: The History of a Lesbian Community. (Routledge, 2014), 127. Hanhardt, Christina B. Safe
space: gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence. (Duke University Press, 2013), 35 and 81. Stein,
Marc. City of sisterly and brotherly loves: Lesbian and gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. (Temple University Press,
2004), 178.
51 Prison PolicyInstitute. “Diluting Democracy: Census Quirk Fuels Prison Expansion,” Northampton, MA: Prison
Policy Institute, 2004.
37
of policing, where we can witness the use of policing, imprisonment, and surveillance as tactics
to manage members of the surplus population in moments of economic instability. This work
contributes to existing research on policing, imprisonment, and surveillance in Los Angeles by
detailing how policing and criminality change over time, and by accounting for how queer and
LGBT Angelenos have both challenged and consolidated carceral institutions, logics and
practices.
The postwar period is of particular interest to me because it is a time during which we
can witness the contradictions between the advancement of de jure legal protections for people
of color, and scalar transformations such as such as White flight, the disciplining of organized
labor, tax revolts, suburbanization, de-industrialization and the demise of the Keynesian state, all
of which deepened pre-existing patterns of poverty and spatial segregation and circumscribed the
scope and reach of desegregation policies, particularly for Black and Brown people. Scott
Kurashige argues that the re-organization of racial hierarchies during the postwar period
constrained the development of radical left, anti-racist, and multiracial social movements in Los
Angeles, resulting in a divergence of approaches and strategies employed by differently
racialized people struggling to make their lives livable. This study traces those political
divergences among mainstream and left-leaning LGBT organizations. Race and class as well as
anti-racist and anti-classist social movements were sources of inspiration for Los Angeles gay
and lesbian organizers. The legacy of anti-communism and repression of organized labor in Los
Angeles impacted the development of LGBT and queer political activism and organizing in Los
Angeles by weakening strains of radical organizing whose politics revolved around anti-racism,
sexual and gender self-determination, as well as a critique of capitalism.
38
Studies on LGBT culture and politics in Los Angeles have often cited a lack of, or loss of
archival evidence on LGBT life in neighborhoods composed primarily of people of color, like
South Central.
52
Studies on LGBT culture and politics that do deal with race, class, and gender
tend to narrate the relationship between mainstream LGBT institutions and people of color
primarily as one of exclusion.
53
For example, Moira Kenney narrates the history of LGBT people
of color in relation to the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center (formerly the Gay Community
Services Center) as a history of exclusion, noting how since its founding, LGBT people of color
and lesbians have been systematically kept out of upper management positions at the center.
54

Kenney also details the struggle to of lesbians and feminists create women-centered spaces in
Los Angeles, including the downtown Women's Building in 1971 and Connexxus, a women's
center in West Hollywood established in 1985. In both cases, the inability of leadership at the
Gay Community Services Center and within the gay liberation movement to adequately address
the concerns of women and lesbians encourages lesbians and feminists to create and claim their
own spaces. I question how the narrative of exclusion can abstract the productive tension
between race, class, and gender that constitutes sexuality and sexual identity. For example, Jane
Ward offers a nuanced reading of contemporary LGBT institutions in Los Angeles, detailing how
both mainstream LGBT institutions and grassroots people of color-led LGBT institutions get
positioned to commodify racial, class, and gender differences in order to survive in the neoliberal
non-profit market. At the same time, Ward argues, the categories and populations of risk that Los
Angeles LGBT organizations and institutions attempt to manage in order to receive funding,
52 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 4.
53 Ward, Elizabeth Jane. Respectably queer: Diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations. (Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2008).
54 Kenney, Moira. Mapping gay LA: The intersection of place and politics. (Temple University Press, 2001), 134.
39
exert internal pressures on organizations that create ruptures around race, class, and gender. For
example, Ward traces the transition of Bienestar, an LGBT services organizations started in 1989
as a project of Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos, one of the first people of color led LGBT
organizations established in Los Angeles. Early in the organization's history, Bienestar took an
intersectional approach to HIV / AIDS prevention that focused on community empowerment and
culturally relevant interventions. As such, organizers justified using HIV / AIDS funding money
to fund programs for lesbians, who were thought of as occupying one of the lowest risk
categories for HIV / AIDS. Over time, as Bienestar became more focused on HIV and AIDS
prevention services, lesbians' lack of risk is mobilized as a reason to cut programs for women
and lesbians.
55
Ward's work asks us to think about how inclusion and exclusion often operate
simultaneously and informs this project's focus on how the processes of criminalization,
politicization, and institutionalization disavow, manage, and valorize risk and risky people.
In order to complete this project, I conducted archival research at several local archives.
First I looked through files related to the Los Angeles Police Department at the City Archives
and Records Center for data on sex crimes and prostitution arrests, LAPD budgets, and to get a
sense of how the LAPD described and presented itself throughout the 1940s and 1950s. I spent
significant time at the City Archives and Records Center reviewing the meeting minutes of the
Los Angeles Police Commission, to understand how gender deviance was regulated through the
granting of police permits and Commission's control over a variety of business permits. Through
reviewing these records, I was able learn more about the Commissions' attempt to contain gender
impersonation. I reviewed local newspapers to get a sense of how sexual and gender deviance
55 Ward, Elizabeth Jane. Respectably queer: Diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations. (Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 118.
40
was discussed locally as a policing concern. Subject files at the ONE Archive on the Los Angeles
Police Department, Police Entrapment, and Bar Raids, also provided information about the
criminalization gay and lesbian establishments and social gatherings.
In order to tell the history of homophile and LGBT responses to policing, I searched
organizational files of Los Angeles based LGBT groups starting in the 1950s at the ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archive, the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society in San Francisco, and
the Southern California Library for Social Research, identifying groups that organized or
campaigned around policing. The majority of organizational files I reviewed are housed at the
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive, while the rest are housed at the Southern California
Library for Social Research. I reviewed several Los Angeles LGBT periodicals including The
Advocate, BLK, and Lesbian Tide, at the ONE Archive to identify some of the major policing
concerns of gays and lesbians, as well as to flesh out the activities of particular organizations,
groups, or individuals that I give an account of.
Project Outline
The first chapter, “Carceral Boosterism, Constructing Queer Criminality, and Early
Homophile Responses to Policing,” examines the local production of gender and sexual deviance
and early homophile responses to policing. I show how sexual and gender non-conformity were
both generative for the development of the Los Angeles Police Department during the postwar
period. The penal codes used to criminalize non-conforming, consenting adult practices, such as
sodomy and fellatio, were passed at the turn of the century, but law enforcement of these codes
ramped up significantly during late 1930s and again during the postwar period. The Los Angeles
41
Police Department takes a growing interest in Sex Crimes in the late 1930s, as vice, gender and
sexual deviance, and corruption come into focus as crystallizations of public anxieties over the
impact of urbanization. These concerns are leveraged as a part of a power struggle between the
longtime cabals of power in Los Angeles: the Mayor's office, organized commercial vice,
industrial capitalists, and a political bloc of middle class reformers and organized labor.
Criminalizing gender and sexual non-conformity during the postwar period helped the LAPD
transition from a War on Labor, to a War on Crime. This transition boosted the LAPD's
institutional legitimacy and autonomy from City Hall and industrial capitalists. I also examine
early homophile responses to policing and law enforcement and argue that race and class both
consolidated and challenged early homophile efforts against policing. This queer relationship to
race and class, I argue, continues to haunt gay and lesbian responses to policing in Los Angeles
that proceed throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s.
The second chapter, “Gay Liberal Police Reform Activism and Making Gay LA,”
examines the development of gay liberal police reform activism during the 1970s. Gay liberal
police reform activism is one register through which we can trace the production of LGBT space
in Los Angeles. I profile several organizations that organized against policing and criminalization
of gay and lesbian social spaces including United States Mission, HELP, Gay Community
Alliance, and the Lesbian and Gay Police Advisory Task Force, a project of the Gay Community
Services Center (Now the Los Angeles LGBT Center). Gay liberal organizations reformed the
police not only by organizing against police practices and penal codes, but by articulating gays
and lesbians as subjects, as a legitimate minority group, which was accomplished through the
production of space. I outline the strategies and tactics employed by these organizations in efforts
42
to decriminalize gay and lesbian identity and argue that gay liberal institutions strategically
disavow race and class difference rhetorically but rely on risk and risk management (already
always racialized and classed) as a source of value. This dynamic accrues over time as a social
relation that I term, serviceable-but-unprotectable, that can always see risky people as sites of
value but not as political activists.
The final chapter, “Bridge Work: Building an Anti-Racist Gay and Lesbian Left in Los
Angeles,” examines responses to policing through the development of lesbian and gay Leftist
organizations in Los Angeles. I consider the development of lesbian and gay leftism as a form of
bridge work, which I define as political or cultural production that articulates new scales of
struggle and / or relationality. Bridge work attends to the ruptures and evacuations that occur
whenever the phenomenological gets translated into a politics of identity. First I give an account
of Gay Liberation Front. I show how Gay Liberation Front's potential, which was their ability to
appeal to a wide variety of people, was forestalled by their lack of structure and inability to
provide a method of mediating individual and identity-based experiences into collective action.
As a result the group, which did have an a diverse membership including working class people,
trans people, lesbians, radicals, and conservatives, became a bridge space in which White gay
men with resources aligned themselves, took the better ideas generated in the space, and
operationalized them in Gay Community Alliance and through the development of the Gay
Community Services Center. Next I examine the work of Lavender and Red Union, a gay and
lesbian Marxist-Leninist group that attempted to both intervene on what they saw as a
homophobic left in Los Angeles, as well as a liberal reformist mainstream gay and lesbian
political culture. Lavender and Red Union, while only in existence for a few years, orients us
43
towards a national network of gay and lesbian leftists who were engaging policing to build a gay
and lesbian left premised on anti-racism, anti-sexism and homophobia. I argue that while gay and
lesbian leftist formations did attempt to advance a more relational notion of sexuality, the arcs of
anti-Communism and racist police violence in Los Angeles stymied attempts to build
relationships between LGBT leftists and Third World Left community groups and organizations
in Los Angeles.
44
CHAPTER ONE
CARCERAL BOOSTERISM, CONSTRUCTING QUEER
CRIMINALITY, AND EARLY HOMOPHILE ERA RESPONSES
TO POLICING
In January of 1950, LAPD officer R.E. Brown spotted three young Black women exiting
the restroom of a theater in the Wilshire district. One of the arresting officers, R.E. Brown said
that he was looking for female purse-snatchers and that these three women caught the officer's
eye. After they explained to officers that they were employed as domestic workers in a home
nearby, the officers proceeded to arrest the three for no apparent cause. Once they were being
searched at the Wilshire police station, the arresting officers discovered that Tisha, Mary, and
Rita, the names the young people gave to the police, were not exactly who the officers expected
them to be. The Los Angeles Herald Express article that covered the arrest reads: “Togged out in
fancy feminine attire, including dainty underclothes, falsies, high heels, lipstick, and powder,
three young housekeepers were unmasked as males today following an examination at Wilshire
Police station.”
56
The press interviewed the employers of the three young people, who also
expressed shock upon learning the news. It is not known what the fate of these three were, but
before and throughout the postwar period, news stories about gender and sexual deviance like
these formed one mode of encounter between the general public and ideas and embodiments of
gender and sexual non-normativity. This kind of reporting also had a punitive function, as being
publicly outed as homosexual, or as a gender or sexual deviant could cost you your job, social
reputation, and in some cases your life. The first striking thing about this incident is that the
headline reads “Nabbed in Maid Masquerade,” implying that the offense the three were arrested
56 “Nabbed in 'maid' masquerade.” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (Los Angeles, CA), January 27, 1950.
45
for was masquerading, or dressing as a member of the opposite gender, which was illegal in Los
Angeles at the time. However, news coverage emphasizes the shock of the officers during
booking at the station, implying that they were convinced that the three young people were
cisgender women when they made the arrest. So what were these three people arrested for?
The arresting officer reported being on the lookout for purse-snatchers, although accounts
of the incident make no mention of officers finding any stolen items on the three. The prevailing
code of racial segregation in Los Angeles likely made these three young Black people stand out
to police officers in the multi-racial Wilshire district, that became increasingly policed by the
LAPD throughout the 1950s. In this case, criminality affixed to racial difference and the
protection of private property facilitated the “discovery” and criminalization of gender non-
conformity. This story asks us to consider how both race and class drive the entanglement of
sexual and gender deviance and criminality.
Scholarship on the criminalization of gender and sexual deviance and Los Angeles
already accounts for how policing facilitated the entry of homosexuality into the realm of city
politics as a dangerous and criminal identity.
57
Police raids of private parties and bathhouses,
arrests of men engaging in public sex, and intervention into drag balls and cross-dressing
occurred in Los Angeles since the early 1900s, before homosexuality or gay identity was
articulated as a coherent social identity or political category. The “discovery,” of non-normative
sexual practices and gender expression by law enforcement in Los Angeles increased throughout
the 1930s and intensified again during the 1950s. By the 1950s, however, Angelenos had begun
to articulate some non-normative sexual practices, gender expressions, and the subcultures that
57 Hurewitz, Daniel. Bohemian Los Angeles: And the making of modern politics. (Univ of California Press, 2007),
117, and Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and
lipstick lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 76.
46
grew around them as constituting an identity category. In Los Angeles, as in other US cities, the
shared experience of policing was one phenomenon that helped people generate the language and
politics of sexual self-hood that constituted the homophile movement. While I do not mean to
suggest that policing forms the entire context for the articulation of lesbian and gay identity, I am
interested in how the creation and politicization of homosexual identity gets organized around a
collection of policed practices, which in turn shape the demands activists made of the LAPD. As
this story illustrates, categories of difference, like race, inform both the capacity of law
enforcement to “discover” and articulate queer criminality. In this chapter I explore this idea
further, as well as the political formations LGBT Angelenos develop to respond to the
criminalization of gender and sexual deviance. I consider how the criminalization of gender and
sexual deviance fits into the growth of the LAPD and the development of Los Angeles during the
interwar and post-WWII periods. The criminalization of sexual deviance developed as a part of
the transition from a War on Labor, that was vital to the growth and development the city's
infrastructure, to a War on Crime, which linked urbanization to a sharp decline in social values.
Containing sexual and gender deviance was taken up by the Los Angeles Police Department as
one avenue of boosting organizational capacity and autonomy during a drastic period of
economic and political change in Los Angeles' history.
First, I explain how the LAPD grew as a military force in a War on Labor, that
disciplined Los Angeles' racially and ethnically diversifying workforce in order to develop key
pieces of city infrastructure like railroads and ports. Next, I give an account of how queer
criminality develops in Los Angeles beginning in the 1930s. Many of the legal codes that were
used to criminalize gender and sexual deviance were passed at the turn of the century or in the
47
early 1900s, but the enforcement of these laws becomes acute in Los Angeles in the 1930s, and
intensifies after World War II. Containing gender and sexual deviance is operationalized as one
solution for dealing with the impact of urbanization on traditional moral values. In the 1930s,
controlling sexual and gender deviance was folded into a political struggle between progressive
reformers, city politicians, and power elites over controlling corruption in city politics that led to
the first recall of a mayor in a large US city in the 20
th
century. Vice had long been a source of
LAPD power and profit from the founding of the force, and containing “sex perverts' emerged as
a strategy on the part of the LAPD to appease an increasingly concerned and organized public,
while they continued to let particular organized crime establishments flourish. By the 1950s,
containing sexual and gender deviance had become of a cornerstone of LAPD vice. The drive to
contain homosexuality was bolstered locally by a national panic around homosexuality that was
cap-stoned by Executive Order 10450 in 1953, which functioned as a federal employment ban on
homosexuals.
Next, I examine arrest data on sex crimes and prostitution to capture the demographic
breadth of the containment of gender and sexual deviance from the 1930s to the 1950s. The
spatial pattern of arrests for sex crimes and prostitution highlights how vice policing worked to
reinforce spatial segregation and influenced the materialization of Hollywood and West
Hollywood as gay enclaves. While gay and lesbian politics increasingly claims and struggles
over Hollywood and West Hollywood throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the data on sex
crimes and prostitution arrests shows that containing queer criminality was as much about
managing a crisis in White masculinity as it was about policing zones of inter-racial contact like
the downtown Newton and Central districts. A queer nightlife flourished in the Central district
48
that included downtown bathhouses, regular drag performances in the famed Central Avenue
corridor, tea rooms, bars, clubs, and the like.
Finally I look at two examples of homophile era responses to policing in Los Angeles,
before the multiplication of gay and lesbian political formations evinced by the 1969 Stonewall
Uprising. Because there were several Stonewall-type standoffs with police in Los Angeles before
1969, Angelenos were already developing political organizations and engaging in advocacy to
curtail the impact of policing. While subcultures of gender and sexual non-normativity developed
along class and race lines in Los Angeles (secret private parties, versus bathhouses, bars, and
drag shows), the attempt to contain sexual and gender deviance cut across class and racial lines.
As such, a variety of responses developed in the mid 1950s to the late 1960s to address the
articulation and containment of queer criminality in Los Angeles. I give an account of the
development of the Mattachine Society's Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Police Repression in
1953, and the struggle of Sir Lady Java, a nationally famous Black drag performer, to overturn
the LAPD's ban on public cross-dressing in 1967. Both of these examples demonstrate how race
and class difference both challenge and constitute the formation of LGBT politics.
The Beginnings of the LAPD: A Military Force in the War on Labor
Since the beginning of the mission system in 1771, the development of Southern
California has depended on successive waves of racialized labor, beginning with the forced labor
of indigenous peoples in the mission system until 1830, when the system was secularized and
gave way to the rancho system, which was built on the labor of least 5,000 indigenous people by
1848. During missionization, indigenous people developed over one million acres of land in
49
Southern California, which was valued at $78 million in 1834.
58
Brutal working conditions and a
racialized caste system that justified indigenous expropriation and extermination lead to the
death of a large portion of the indigenous population. Spanish colonization was substituted for
American imperialism in 1850, when California was annexed as a state following the
capitulation of the Californios with the Treaty of Cahuenga in 1847. During the first two decades
of American imperialism, over 15,000 indigenous people died as a result of forced labor and
extermination. After California was annexed as a state in 1850, over 100,000 whites migrated to
California during the Gold Rush, re-ordering the racial and ethnic hierarchy that existed between
between indigenous people, Spanish gente de razon, Mexicans, and the few Black people that
lived in the region during the Mission and rancho eras.
Ernesto Escobar (1994) describes the period of Americanization of Los Angeles as being
characterized by inter-racial violence during which White political manifest destiny was defined
against the racial inferiority of the non-white Californios, indigenous people and Mexicans.
59

Beginning in the 1850s, Chinese people began to migrate to Los Angeles from San Francisco in
limited numbers and developed fishing, celery, and citrus in the region. Post civil war economic
depression coupled with anxieties about labor competition crystallized into an anti-Chinese
sentiment in Los angeles that took a violent turn in October of 1871 when a group 500 people,
assaulted Chinese residents in Chinatown, robbing and vandalizing businesses and murdering 18
people.
60

58 McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An island on the land. (Gibbs Smith, 1946), 29.
59 See Escobar, Edward J. Race, police, and the making of a political identity: Mexican Americans and the Los
Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945. (V ol. 7. Univ of California Press, 1999), who argues that the early
development of Los Angeles was marked by whites killing Mexican Americans with impunity (20). McWilliams
(1946), also writes about the lynching of Mexicans in Southern California in the 1850s as an example of how
notions of racial inferiority were underscored by violence (60).
60 For a more detailed account of this incident see: Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and
the Massacre of 1871. Oxford University Press, 2012.
50
Law and order in Los Angeles up until this point had been in the form of small militia-
type groups and vigilante patrols. The Los Angeles City Council established the first paid police
force in 1869 and the Board of Police Commissioners in 1870 to intervene on the reputation the
city had at the time as a hotbed of lawlessness. The Los Angeles Police Department fumbled into
existence during the latter decades of the 1800s due to lack of funds to pay officers and
constantly changing leadership: between 1869 and 1889 there were 15 different chiefs of police
before John M. Glass took charge of the LAPD in 1889. Scholars describe the LAPD at this time
as a demoralized and underpaid force.
61
During this time, officers were paid through on-the-job
assessed fees, fines, and taxes. This commission-style payment structure supported the
corruption that the LAPD became infamous for.
During the early years of Los Angeles expansion at the turn of the 20
th
century, law
enforcement developed as a tool of the White business elite of Los Angeles. White elites rose to
power by dispossessing Spanish and Californio elites of land and political power through inter-
marriage, violence, the rule of law, and the creation of a new racial hierarchy in which whiteness
was defined against racialized and classed others who were employed as workers in the
burgeoning industries of railroad construction, oil, shipping, and agriculture. The Merchants and
Manufacturers Association (M&M), founded in 1893, was an employers organization that sought
to keep Los Angeles and other U.S. cities open shop in order for Los Angeles to effectively
compete with San Francisco, which had more developed industrial infrastructure, but generally
higher wages and strong networks of organized labor. For General Harrison Grey Otis, who
guided the M&M after he joined in 1896, profitable growth in Los Angeles was synonymous
61 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
34.
51
with suppressing organized labor.
62
Under the guidance General Harrison Gray Otis, the M&M
routinely employed the LAPD and private investigators to aggressively stamp out organized
labor. Not only did organized labor threaten the vision for rapid economic development shared
by Otis and other corporate and industrial elites, but it belied the myths about Los Angeles that
boosters like Charles Lummis and Harry Chandler were promoting in order to stimulate
population growth.
Labor scholar John Laslett, argues that labor struggles throughout the early 1900s put
pressure on the myths boosters sold about Los Angeles being a white middle-class paradise,
characterized by high rates of home ownership, a small non-white population, and contented
workers.
63
By 1910, most of these myths were not true: 79.2 percent of Los Angeles residents
were wage earners, there were 557 immigrants and 3000 non-white residents of Los Angeles out
of a total population of 319,000.
64
By 1920, the dream of homeownership was also becoming
ever more elusive, decreasing from 40% in 1890 to 34.7% in 1920.
65
Poor people who were
coming to Los Angeles in search of work and could not afford the train fare were greeted by
LAPD officers and taken directly to work camps. In and around what is currently downtown,
was an industrial district bounded to the north by Sunset / Cesar Chavez, to the South by Vernon,
to the east by Indiana, and to west by Figueroa, that by 1910, contained 36%t of the city's
population. Despite the ideal of racial homogeneity pushed by boosters like Charles Lummis,
62 Escobar (1999) notes that Otis kicked off the charge against organized labor in Los Angeles by convincing local
newspaper owners to lower wages by 20 percent (20). This struggle eventually lead to the Los Angeles Times
building being blown up in 1911.
63 Laslett, John HM. Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010. (Univ of California Press,
2012), 17.
64 Laslett, John HM. Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010. (Univ of California Press,
2012), 17.
65 Laslett, John HM. Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010. (Univ of California Press,
2012), 17.
52
people of modest or no means who came to Los Angeles looking for employment at the turn of
the century lived in multi-ethnic and multi-racial enclaves the like Flats, the area between present
day Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo, where Russian Molokans, Mexicans, Japanese, Polish,
Jewish, Armenian, and Italians live alongside one another.
Despite the idea of Los Angeles that boosters pushed on the east coast and in the
midwest, the rapid growth the city attained in a relatively short period of time compared to other
U.S. cities required a vast reserve army of (increasingly non-white) labor. The industrial and
political elite knew this and even when faced with a national recession in 1913-1914, that left
between 20,000-30,000 Los Angeles workers unemployed, boosters continued to advertise job
opportunities on the east coast to control wages, attracting an additional 30,000 to 40,000 people
to Los Angeles during the recession, much to the chagrin of local law enforcement, who
complained about increased crime rates due to unemployment.
66
During this time law
enforcement ramped up patrols in the industrial corridor and railroad yards, arresting homeless
and unemployed people for vagrancy.
67
The practice of using the LAPD as a strike breaking force began in 1903 when Henry
Huntington called in the LAPD to break up a strike initiated by Mexican tracklayers. The
tracklayers, represented by Unión Federal Mexicanos, were laying track for the Pacific Electric
Railway (red car system) along Main Street in downtown.
68
The strike started after the union's
demand for wage increases for tracklayers was rejected. After the strikers held solid for 3 days,
despite Huntington bringing in strikebreakers, the LAPD was called in to dismantle the strike.
66 Perry, Louis B., and Richard S. Perry. A history of the Los Angeles labor movement, 1911-1941. (Univ of
California Press, 1963), 10, and Laslett (2012), 61.
67 Laslett, John HM. Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010. (Univ of California Press,
2012), 48.
68 Laslett, John HM. Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010. (Univ of California Press,
2012), 33.
53
Huntington's tactic catches on and in 1906, the M&M gets the Los Angeles Police Commission
to provide special police to protect strikebreakers brought in to dismantle at least 83 strikes
against employers that occurred that year.
69
The October 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles
Times printing plant in downtown, brought tensions between workers and the M&M to a head.
The M&M hired an investigator who was able to tie the bombing to members of the Iron
Workers Union. The bombing was taken by industrialists as an affront to their open shop visions
and cemented the role of LAPD as a military force in the War on Labor, until the late 1930s.
After the Times bombing, the size of the LAPD doubled to 500 sworn officers by 1911. The
M&M also used to bombing to push for a city ordinance against picketing that was also used by
the LAPD target labor organizing.
70
The treatment of workers throughout this period of economic
and population growth demonstrates how the labor needs of capitalists clashed with the image of
Los Angeles these same capitalists depended on to attract both workers and middle-class settlers.
Boosters depended on a vast reserve army of workers to lay railroad tracks, build buildings,
produce lumber, iron, and steel, work in the fields, and work in the growing shipping industry.
However, the very presence of these people, who after 1910 were increasingly Mexican,
Chinese, Japanese, and Black, posed a problem to Los Angeles, as the proclaimed, “white spot of
the world.” At the same time, as law enforcement was used to by capitalists to curtail organized
labor, White Middle-Class Protestants, who began to move to Los Angeles in larger numbers,
also began to assert their political power by allying with conservatives to stamp out organized
labor and pushing for curbing vice. Regulating leisure time practices quickly became a site of
struggle between the needs and desires of an ever expanding population of laborers and the
69 Laslett, John HM. Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010. (Univ of California Press,
2012), 45.
70 Donner, Frank J. Protectors of privilege: Red squads and police repression in urban America. (Univ of
California Press, 1990), 35.
54
moralizing force of politicized White middle-class migrants from the Midwest and East coast.
For example, in 1908 the Los Angeles city council started limiting the licensing of public dance
halls and saloons. The opposition by local unions reflects laborers discontent with moral
prohibitions targeted at working class culture.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 ignited a wave of radical organizing, anti-communism
and assault against organized labor that continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s. First, on the
eve of the Revolution, in 1916, the LAPD established its infamous Red Squad, which began to
surveil and infiltrate labor unions, community organizations, and other establishments deemed
threatening at the behest of the M&M until it was dismantled in 1938. The curtailment of
organized labor was continued with the passage of the 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Act, a state
law that criminalized union organizing and affiliation. The Criminal Syndicalism Act was
challenged and upheld in 1927 and was eventually over-tuned in 1969
71
The right of workers to
organize was upheld at the federal level in 1935 with the passage of the Wagner Act, also known
as the National Labor Relations Act. The assault on organized labor did not stop Angelenos from
fighting for better working conditions and wages. At the Port of Los Angeles, which was earning
a growing share in the national shipping volume, the International Workers of the World (IWW)
was making headway in the 1920s organizing longshoremen at the ports. Armed with the
Criminal Syndicalism Act, law enforcement was routinely called on to arrest striking workers at
the ports. For example, an April 1923 strike of 3000 members of the Marine Transport Workers
Industrial Union, that tied up at least 90 ships for several weeks, threatening to shut down the
port in San Pedro, was dismantled by 140 LAPD officers and 20 detectives. Capitalists didn't
71 Similar acts were passed in other states with Idaho (1917) and Minnesota (1918) being among the first. See
Whitten, Woodrow C. "Criminal syndicalism and the law in California: 1919-1927." Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society (1969): 3-73, and Dowell, Eldridge Foster. A History of Criminal Syndicalism
Legislation in the United States. V ol. 57. Johns Hopkins Press, 1939.
55
just settle on the LAPD as a strikebreaking force. They also employed private investigators, like
William “Red” Hynes, who was hired in 1923 to infiltrate the IWW and the Communist Party in
Los Angeles.
72
Credited with singlehandedly destroying the IWW, Hynes was then hired by the
LAPD in 1927 and put in charge of the LAPD's Intelligence Bureau / Red Squad.
While the M&M was most interested in maintaining open shop, the middle-class White
Protestant settlers that boosters attracted from the Midwest, 600,000 of whom migrated to Los
Angles during the 1920s, began to assert their moral will and political power on the what they
perceived as the city's lawlessness. Controlling vice and ending corruption in City Hall became a
point of unity between middle-class new-comers and posed a problem to organized crime
leaders, capitalists, and the LAPD, for whom selectively regulating vice had become profitable.
73
Capitalist elites attempted to attach lawlessness and degraded masculinity to Communism, to
align public concern over vice with the maintenance of open shop. For example, a news report
on an address made by Maj. Walter K. Tully at the annual banquet of the Merchants and
Manufacturers Association reads:
Those concerned for the safety of the home and the suppression of the thug and the
bandit must get into the fight with bare fists...Applauding or hooting from the sidelines
leaves no mark on the organized minority that is pushing our crime record to a perilously
high percentage. Unless that percentage is materially decreased in the next twelve months
we shall approach that confession of masculine impotence reached in the first stages of
the Russian revolution. Our women will be compelled to band themselves together in a
Battalion of Death. For, when the bounds of lawlessness are unleashed, the sex that
rightfully looks to man for protection is always the worst sufferer.
74
Tully's address, which cited high rates of burglary and violent crime in Los Angeles
72 Donner, Frank J. Protectors of privilege: Red squads and police repression in urban America. (Univ of
California Press, 1990), 59.
73 Domanick (1994) notes that throughout the 1920s, selectively controlling vice was profitable both for LAPD
officers and purveyors of vice, like Albert Marco, who banked $500,000 between 1922 and 1924 running
prostitution in Los Angeles. Prohibition era liquor smuggler, Tony Cornero noted paying the LAPD at least
$100,000 in protection money to facilitate the operation of his business (47).
74 “The Fight with Crime.” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Jan 31, 1924.
56
compared to Canada and England, fuses the threat of crime and violence with the threat of
communist revolution. In his remarks we can also see the beginnings of the attachment of gender
and sexual deviance to communism in city politics, as he attaches gender role inversion and
“masculine impotence,” to the spread of Communism. The fusing of communism to gender
inversion would come to play a greater role later, in the struggle to unseat mayor Frank Shaw in
1937, and would bring gender and sexual deviance under increased public scrutiny and LAPD
regulation.
It is important to remember that the War on Labor was itself a scale-making project.
The War on Labor not only allowed capitalists to enact a vision of creating a large open-shop
city, but also helped to upend the image of Los Angeles as the “White spot,” of the nation.
Policing was one force that supported an organization of space that clustered waves of racialized
labor into downtown so that tourists and Middle-class migrants from the Midwest could imagine
how Los Angeles could succeed as a White anti-city, city, that relied on racialized labor. The War
on Labor helped to organize and cajole human activity and the re-organization of the
environment into use and exchange values.
From Boosting Growth to Carceral Boosterism: The LAPD and the War on Crime
The 1920s marked the transition from a War on Labor to a War on Crime. It wasn't
that the LAPD discontinued its surveillance and infiltration of organized labor and leftist
organizations, it thrived during this time period. However, as Tully's remarks above suggest, the
issue of crime and discourse of criminality: gambling, alcohol, prostitution, and theft became the
grounds through which organized groups of middle-class, Protestant reformers began to assert
57
their political power. Joe Domanick outlines in detail how during the 1920s, the LAPD's
capacity was driven by a group of elites including business owners, bankers, attorneys, the
M&M, the Breakfast Club, and wealthy residents of Hancock Park, Pasadena, and San Marino,
and organized crime bosses, like Kent Kane Parrot who was tied to then Mayor, George Cryer.
75

A War on Crime crystallized as a precipitate of increasing public concerns over political
corruption. The discourse of the War on Crime appeased reformers while maintaining the
interests of the vice bosses with ties to City Hall who wanted to keep vice profitable, wealthy
business owners who wanted to keep Los Angeles open shop. Containing gender and sexual
deviance emerged during this period as one strategy to manage and appease these conflicting
interest groups. In practice, containing gender and sexual deviance relied on and reinforced a
racist socio-spatial imaginary predicated on the social and political unprotectability of poor
people, people of color, and working class and racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods.
The LAPD at this time remained a powerful tool in the hands of wealthy elites. The
new city charter of 1925, gave the Los Angeles Police Commission the responsibility of
appointing the police chief, which was supposed to limit influence from City Hall. This failed in
practice, because the Police Commission members were appointed by the mayor. However, it is
important to note that most of the men, in whose hands fell the task of running the LAPD and
appeasing the political interests that supported policing, did not share the upper class and
wealthy backgrounds of the power brokers they were beholden to. The first several decades of
Los Angeles' development taught these men how to participate in a political machine and they
began using that expertise to forge LAPD autonomy from city council and elite power brokers.
75 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
51.
58
William Parker, who would become one of the LAPD's most remembered chiefs, served as
James Davis' assistant when we was Chief, witnessed the various interests that Davis had to
navigate as chief and used his tenure to solidify the LAPD's organizational autonomy. The
political context that made this possible was a recall of Mayor Frank Shaw in 1938, which
shifted the power hold on City Hall. New Deal policies, including the Wagner Act, which gave
workers the right to organize, stimulated a resurgence of radical organizing in Los Angeles,
bolstering the political coalition to unseat Shaw, who came to represent corruption in City Hall.
In this context, professionalizing and reforming the police, which also worked to grow the
capacity of the LAPD in numbers and dollars, became a common sense public safety solution for
a police force that was understood as being rife with corruption. Throughout the 1920s and
1930s, the discourse of professionalization, augmented the LAPD's ability to act as a military
force and facilitated the development of the tactics and resources that would be used to contain a
new constellation of criminality: the sexual criminal, a construction I will return to in the next
section.
In wake of departmental scandal in the early 1920s, Mayor Cryer appointed respected
criminologist and Berkeley police chief, August V ollmer as Chief from 1923 to 1924 to give the
temporary appearance of reform. V ollmer, an advocate of professionalized policing significantly
increased the infrastructure of the LAPD during his one year tenure. V ollmer increased the force
by 800 officers, established a 90-day training program for police officers, commissioned 5 new
police stations, and successfully petitioned City Council for 63 new patrol cars, 60 motorcycles,
and 70 police sirens. V ollmer also increased the number of fingerprint experts from 2 to 19, and
started a statistical bureau that published daily crime reports. Joe Domanick argues that V ollmer
59
pushed the LAPD towards professionalization earlier than other large city police forces, and that
after V ollmer, professionalism remained a cornerstone of LAPD growth, co-existing neatly with
corruption.
76
While V ollmer brought professionalism to the LAPD, James Davis, who was LAPD
chief from 1926 to 1929, then again from 1933 to 1938, further molded the LAPD into a more
lethal force. Davis shaped V ollmer's 90-day training program into the Police Academy, built by
Central City Jail inmate labor, where he emphasized the use of fire power and refinement in
marksmanship. Davis was the first police chief in the U.S. to employ the dragnet, a precursor to
the broken windows style of policing that would characterize the Parker administration. The
dragnet was composed of a team 100 officers who would scan 10-12 major intersections in teams
of 8, with 2 officers on each corner. Officers would stop each passing car and search for legal
infractions and “suspicious characters.”
77
Davis deployed the newly professionalized LAPD
primarily towards the suppression of radicalism and organized labor as well as containing
vagrancy. Under Davis' leadership, and with the fiscal support of the M&M and the Better
America Federation, William Hynes expanded the surveillance and cajoling work of the Red
Squads. In 1936, Davis, fed up with the influx of so-called Oakies to Los Angeles, expanded the
jurisdiction of the LAPD by patrolling the California state borders to prevent poor people from
entering Los Angeles. By 1932, economic depression and the drought had left 2 million people in
the United States homeless and jobless. In California, over 100,000 unemployed people migrated
to the state by 1931, 70,000 of that number, to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times stirred up
anxiety over so-called vagrants by reporting that they were entering the state at a rate of 2,000
76 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
48.
77 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
54.
60
people per week and draining state and local welfare systems. Davis responded, dispatching
LAPD officers to the major points of entry into California along the borders of Oregon, Arizona,
and Nevada, as well fortifying the borders of Los Angeles County, stationing officers in the
northern border counties of Siskiyou, Modic, and Del Norte, and the southern border counties of
San Bernadino, Riverside, and Imperial.
78
Davis assured elites that the blockade would save Los
Angeles $1.5 million in property damages and $3 million in welfare payments. The blockades
were ruled unconstitutional and ceased by court order after two months. However, Davis
continued these tactics within the city limits for several years. The dragnet and aggressive
policing tactics that Davis developed to contain radicalism, organized labor, and poverty would
later be turned on a new security threat: the sexual criminal. Davis' tenure as chief came to an
end in 1938, when a recall election that united progressive reformers, embodied by the coalition
CIVIC (Citizens' Independent Vice Investigating Committee, and organized labor against vice,
unseated Mayor Frank Shaw. Davis, a crony of Mayor Shaw's, was fired by newly elected Mayor
Fletcher Bowron, a staunch advocate of police reform. While Davis was able to grow the muscle
of the LAPD, the force still remained largely in the control of City Hall, organized vice and
wealthy elites. It was this moment of liberal reform that facilitated the establishment of LAPD
autonomy from City Hall, elites, and organized groups of Angelenos, like CIVIC.
CIVIC's push to curtail city corruption came to a head in 1938 when CIVIC
investigator Harry Raymond was almost killed in a car bombing orchestrated by LAPD officer
Earl Kynette. The investigation and trial of Kynette focused public attention on the LAPD,
bolstered support of CIVIC's recall movement, and for Fletcher Bowron's mayoral run. Once
78 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
61.
61
elected, Bowron began a cleanup of city politics and the LAPD. Davis, facing investigation for
his role in the bombing, resigned along with 23 other high-ranking officers. Bowron used his
mayoral capacity to constitute the Police Commission and to reform the LAPD; between 1938
and 1940, the Commission retired over 150 officers deemed corrupt or incompetent.
79
Bowron
also abolished the Red Squads and reassigned Hynes to the Westside. Under Bowron's tenure as
mayor, the LAPD began to enjoy more day-to-day autonomy, as then LAPD chief Horrall
cooperated with Bowron's agenda to eliminate corrupt officers from the force.
Another issue that hampered LAPD autonomy were the personnel procedures
outlined in city charter. The current structure tied job security to politics: while the Police
Commission was in charge of personnel, City Hall was in charge of the Police Commission. For
example, during the tenure of Mayor George Cryer in the 1920s, Cryer obtained letters of
resignation from members of the Police Commission upon appointment, to ensure their
cooperation with his organized vice influenced agenda.
80
Within the LAPD, an up and coming
Lieutenant, William Parker, who chose to stay on with the LAPD despite being admitted to the
California bar in 1930, worked with other members of the Fire and Police Protective League, the
LAPD and LAFD equivalent of a union in the 1930s, to amend city charter to protect the LAPD
from outside interference. In 1937, William Parker and Earl Cooke rewrote Section 202 of the
city charter, which outlined the personnel procedures for police officers. The new legislature
protected officers by making it such that only a group a police officers had the power to fire
another officer. The group would be selected by making a random drawing of six officers from a
list of ranking officers, then allowing the accused officer to pick three of the six to act as a
79 Escobar, Edward J. Race, police, and the making of a political identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles
Police Department, 1900-1945. (V ol. 7. Univ of California Press, 1999), 156.
80 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
52.
62
disciplinary board, who would make a finding of facts and issue a decision. Furthermore, the
new version of Section 202 extended these same rights to the police chief. The job of LAPD
chief was enshrined in the amended Section 202 as a “substantial property right,” that could only
be dispossessed by a guilty verdict following a full, fair and impartial hearing of the Civil
Service Commission. This language made it possible for the chief to cross-examine any witness
against him, including other politicians. It also made it possible for a fired chief to challenge the
decision in state and federal courts, as well as receive damages in the case of a favorable ruling.
Essentially, this new ruling insulated the LAPD from the fluctuations of the city political
machine. The fact that progressive reformers and the mayor were having a power struggle during
this very time, with corruption and the uncontrolled spread of vice and communism at the center
of the public debate, facilitated the passage of the amendment to city charter in 1937 by a narrow
vote of 79,336 to 69,380. The slim passage of the amendment perhaps registers the dissent of
radical labor and community organizations to the violent and racist tactics of the LAPD.
While the Red Squad was dismantled in 1938, the memory of their violent, limb-
breaking and skull-busting assault on the 5,000 workers participating in the West Coast Maritime
Strikes of 1934 and 1935 was still in recent memory in 1937. LAPD officers opened fire into
crowds of strikers, beat strikers, made mass arrests, and assaulted strikers in prison. In 1936
alone, over 10,000 workers in various industries in Los Angeles went on strike 50 times. The
growth of radicalism in Los Angeles in the 1930s also created spaces for multi-racial engagement
and created opportunities for people to develop and innovate anti-racist praxis around the issue
of policing. For example, in 1938, El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Espanol, or the Congress
of Spanish-Speaking people was formed by a group of labor activists and Magonistas, both
63
groups who had experienced the violent tactics of the LAPD's Red Squad.
81
El Congreso, took on
police issues early in their work, organizing for example, around the LAPD murder of Florentino
Sanchez in 1939, bringing out over 2000 people to an anti-LAPD demonstration. El Congreso
attempted to advocate for Sanchez and others killed by the LAPD, especially when the coroner's
inquest ruled the deaths justifiable, as it often did. Perhaps these were some of the concerns
registered by those 69,380 no votes. Then again, the passage of the bill also reflects the culture of
reform that took root, even in communities of color. In 1932, for example, the Mexican Chamber
of Commerce made an unsuccessful lobby for the LAPD to hire Mexican cops to patrol East Los
Angeles.
Through the denouement of 1930s, while a coalition of progressives and labor altered
the landscape of city politics, an up and coming lawyer-turned-cop was able to legislatively
wrench the LAPD from the grip of wealthy elites and politicians, thereby leveraging reform for
institutional growth and capacity building. How fitting that William Parker, who would later
assume the role of chief was the architect of this legislation that would in a little over a decade,
enable him to grow the LAPD into its own political machine. In a way it was a White working
class revanchist victory. The working class men, who had for several decades served at the
behest of rich capitalists and corrupt politicians, could now turn the tactics and resources these
peoples' money and influence had developed around on them. During his tenure as LAPD chief,
Parker, for example, gathered intelligence on city and state politicians and was known for
refusing to except bribes from crime bosses. The revision of Section 202 sets the stage for the
final phase in the transition from a War on Labor to a War on Crime: carceral boosterism, the use
81 Escobar, Edward J. Race, police, and the making of a political identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles
Police Department, 1900-1945. (V ol. 7. Univ of California Press, 1999), 152.
64
of booster-style tactics like advertising and data manipulation to render the growth of carceral
infrastructure, like the LAPD, as a common-sense outcome to population increase and / or
demographic diversification.
In 1950, 12 years after the recall election that shook up city politics and changed the
relationship of the LAPD to politicians and elites, William Parker began his tenure as LAPD
Chief. In the time between, Fletcher Bowron's administration had significantly removed corrupt
officers from the force. Going into the job, Parker had diverse experiences as former chief James
Davis' administrative assistant, as a trained attorney (Parker passed the California bar n 1930), as
the creator of the department's internal discipline system, and as the first head of the LAPD's
Internal Affairs division. Parker gained an understanding of the terrain of city politics and used it
boost the idea of the LAPD as a public good. In a public comment made at the time of his
appointment as LAPD chief, Parker swore he would, “with all the fiber of [his being to] see to it
that crooked rats who would change the City of Angels to the city of diablos, will not do so.”
82

The thinly veiled reference to Mexican-Americans as a threat to the purity of the city would be
re-iterated throughout Parker's career. Various sources note that during his first year as LAPD
Chief, Parker gave hundreds to thousands of speeches and addresses. Parker routinely linked the
city's demographic diversification, which only increased throughout the 1950s and 60s to urban
disorder and posited the LAPD as the common-sense solution to the problem of urban disorder.
Parker's primary strategy of carceral boosterism was data collection and intelligence
gathering. In 1950, Parker instituted the Research and Planning Division, an entity dedicated not
just to studying crime, but studying the LAPD. In addition to collecting and analyzing crime
82 Domanick, Joe. To protect and to serve: the LAPD's century of war in the city of dreams. (Pocket Books, 1994),
103.
65
patterns, tracking stolen vehicles, and studying traffic patterns and accidents, the Research and
Planning Division also charted officer absences over time to identify patterns of misconduct and
standardized booking procedures and department training manuals. This dual function reflected
Parker's understanding of his role as chief as an administrative and political one. Standardization
allowed Parker to exert control over the flow of information both inside and outside of the
LAPD, without having to micro-manage. Parker's re-structuring of the officer recruitment
process was designed to assure the public that the LAPD would be characterized by rigorous
standards of professionalism. The 1950 Annual Report emphasized this, noting that of the
applications for the most recent round of new officers, only 3.8 percent were selected. Parker re-
organized the chain-of-command within the department, placing Planning and Research, Public
Information, Internal Affairs, Intelligence, and Administrative Vice under the control of the
Business Office, in order to free up his time to act as a “coordinator,” and a politician. This was
important in 1955 after the Cahan decision, which made evidence obtained through illegal search
and seizure inadmissible in court. While Parker worked to assure the public that the LAPD was
finally corruption free. Parker's aversion to Constitutional rights and penchant for spying put him
at odds with the Cahan decision, and the district attorney. By 1955, members of the Democratic
National Committee in Los Angeles were calling for Parker's resignation.
Parker understood data gathering as an act of power and as such used the
dissemination and withholding of data as a tactic to support institutional growth. In 1950, for
example, Parker supplanted the LAPD Annual Report of yesteryear, a staid 70-page affair filled
with endless data tables, with a shorter, glossier publication that included photos and info-
graphics. In the past, each year of the LAPD Annual Report was prefaced by a letter from the
66
police chief to City Council, outlining the major trends in the report and making brief
recommendations to improve policing or reduce crime. After 1950, the LAPD Annual Report
guided the reader through selected statistical information using info-graphics, black and white
photos and text narration. Data and tables were used sparingly, to make an argument about crime
instead of leaving it up to the reader's interpretation of the statistics. Instead of creating an
appendix to accompany the new Annual Report, Parker chose not to release complete arrest data
to the public in the year 1950. In 1951, Parker created a second publication, called the Statistical
Digest, that housed the endless data tables of previous years but only after a public demand for
more detailed reporting beyond the glossy editorial that the Annual Report had become.
Parker also re-arranged the flow of the report, which generally began with internal
statistics on the budget, expenditures, and numbers of sworn versus civilian personnel, and
placed expenditures on the last page of the report, next to the names of officers killed in the line
of duty each year. Expenditures were re-titled as “Costs,” and deaths in the line of duty, a new
addition altogether, titled “Cost in Lives,” emphasizing the human cost of policing alongside the
cost in dollars. The 1950 LAPD Annual Report was also the debut of a new statistic called Police
Per Square Mile, that attempted to discursively link Los Angeles sprawl to the necessity of
LAPD growth, independent of crime rates. Police Per Square Mile, was simply a measure
derived by dividing the number of sworn officers over the expanding square mileage of the city.
Because of Los Angeles' sprawling boundaries, the Police Per Square Mile (PPSM) statistic
estimated that Los Angeles was severely behind major cities like New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia, and Detroit, which had PPSMs of 51, 34, 32, and 30 compared to Los Angeles'
woeful 9 police officers per square mile. The 1950 Annual Report also attributed Los Angeles'
67
crime problem to the unique characteristics of the city: rapid sprawl, rapid population and
industrial growth, frequent tourism, and a “heterogeneous,” ie multi-racial, population. The
report names the Newton and Central Districts as the highest crime areas in the city, both
neighborhoods where most of Los Angeles non-White population was concentrated before the
abolition of racially restrictive covenants. On one hand, the 1950 Annual Report suggests that
policing activities could significantly curtail the crime rate by focusing on these two districts.
However, the association of the racialized Central district with rampant criminality, was used to
justify the idea that the number police should be in proportion to the square mileage of the city.
The report also emphasizes the attenuating effect increased numbers of sworn personnel had on
the rate of major crimes (murder, rape, assault and robbery) between 1940 and 1950:
Figure 1: “Personnel”
The solid line, shows the major crimes rate, and the dotted line the “Personnel Rate,” which is
undefined, but perhaps reflects how quickly the number of new personnel increases per year.
The graph depicts a near overlap between the bottoming out of the personnel rate and the zenith
of the major crimes rate, implying that increasing the ranks of sworn personnel has a natural
attenuating effect on crime rates, although elsewhere the report notes that certain crimes,
68
particularly violent crimes against the person, were: “unresponsive to police activity. Crimes of
passion involve people under emotional stress, often in the privacy of their homes.”
83
The report
also attributes the rise in such crimes to “marginal workers,” and “unemployables,” who “formed
a new, and for time, unassimilated element in the community.”
84

Parker had already wrested the LAPD from the control of the mayor's office, but also
learned from the past that keeping a tight reign on vice was a way to appease the middle-class
conservatives, who always pointed to uncontrolled vice as evidence of LAPD mismanagement.
Parker played on anxieties about demographic diversification and the decline of the nuclear
family and began enforcing Sex Crime legislation more stringently during his tenure. During the
first year of his tenure as chief, arrests for Sex Crimes increased by 84.9%, while arrests for
prostitution and commercialized vice declined by 17 %. Arrests for gambling and bookkeeping
also declined by 32.6 % and 3.9% respectively in 1950. Containing gender and sexual deviance
aided Parker's campaign of carceral boosterism because homosexuality was a newly
materializing category of criminality whose very containment would serve as evidence that the
LAPD was committed to controlling vice. In the section to follow, I will give a brief account of
the laws that were used to criminalize sexual and gender deviance, and how they reflect the
coming into being of the homosexual as a category of criminality.
Carceral boosterism and the War on Crime were scale-making projects that attempted
to make the growth of LAPD concomitant with city growth. The creation of statistics like Police
Per Square Mile, cathected racialized anxieties into the putatively race-neutral language of
regulating crime. The War on Labor, that characterized the early growth of the LAPD could no
83 Annual Report of the Police Department: 1950, Los Angeles Police Department, C257, City Archives and
Records Center, Los Angeles, CA, 24.
84 Annual Report of the Police Department: 1950, Los Angeles Police Department, C257, City Archives and
Records Center, Los Angeles, CA, 24.
69
longer function in this shifting political context, in which organized labor and Middle class
reformers were demanding more of a stake in city politics. The War on Crime, resolved a
political crisis over who should be in control of LAPD. However, the contradiction of reform
was that the LAPD was able to forge its organizational autonomy through the re-organization of
City Hall, instead of civilians or City Hall gaining more control over the LAPD.
Constructing Queer Criminality: Legal and Social Constructions of Sexual and Gender
Deviance
In Los Angeles, organized responses to the criminalization and harassment of
homosexuality did not develop until the 1950s. This is because even though the legal
infrastructure that was used to criminalize homosexuality was being built throughout the mid to
late 1800s, homosexuality did not exist as a coherent identity. Historian Margot Canaday
describes the relationship between the State and homosexuality as developing through a dialectic
of creation and discovery. Law makers, police officers, journalists, sexologists, and the like,
created a legal framework to discipline non-normative behavior as they encountered the
multiplying discourses and expressions of sexuality and gender that flourished as cities rose to
prominence as sites of social life and value extraction.
The legal infrastructure that provided the basis for law enforcement to arrest, harass, and
jail LGBT Angelenos is bound up in successive waves of moral panic around protecting women,
youth and the nuclear family in the context of scalar transformations that threatened to
destabilize such categories. Such scalar transformations included: mass internal migration and
immigration to U.S. urban areas, the rise of consumer culture, the de-centering of the home as
the primary site of social life and reproduction, and changing social attitudes and practices of
70
gender and sexuality. I will give a brief account of the laws and developments in the first fifty
years or so of Los Angeles' development that undergird the tactics and strategies used to
criminalize LGBT and queer people in Los Angeles. I will also analyze arrest data from the
interwar and postwar years to get a sense of which people and places were impacted by the
containment of queer criminality.
In 1850 the state of California made sodomy illegal, punishable by a jail sentence of five
years to life and in 1855, “assault with intent to commit sodomy” was criminalized through a
state law that punished this offense with a term of incarceration between one and fourteen years.
In 1897, the sodomy law was clarified to only include anal penetration and not oral sex. These
laws reflected a growing national concern over youth, and were most often used to prosecute
sexual acts between adult and male adolescents and/or children, rather than consensual sex
between adults.
85
State laws passed during this period regarding the age of consent (for women it
was increased to sixteen in 1897) also reflected growing concerns about adolescence as a crucial
and vulnerable stage of human development that needed to be managed. Shah argues that the law
became a medium through which adolescence was defined and regulated as the collapse of the
traditional family structure was increasingly linked to young peoples' exposure to sexual and
moral depravity in U.S. cities.
86

One of the statutes that would come to be used to criminalize homosexuality in Los
Angeles was the lewd vagrancy category. Lewd vagrancy (later termed lewd conduct) was
invented in 1872 and was expanded in 1903 to criminalized idleness, lewdness, prostitution, and
85 Scholars concur that these 19
th
century laws were most often used to punish sexual relations with minors. See:
Eskridge, William N., and William N. Eskridge. Gaylaw: Challenging the apartheid of the closet. (Harvard
University Press, 2009), page 19, and Shah, Nayan. Stranger intimacy: Contesting race, sexuality and the law in
the North American west. (V ol. 31. Univ of California Press, 2011), 131.
86 Shah, Nayan. Stranger intimacy: Contesting race, sexuality and the law in the North American west. (Univ of
California Press, 2011), 136.
71
association with known thieves or “dissolute persons.” This law, along with a 1903 state statute
that made “outrages to public decency” a crime, became useful tools to harass and arrest any
people engaging in sexual activity deemed socially unacceptable. The ambiguity of these laws
from the outset made them flexible to shifting social attitudes around sexual and gender non-
conformity. This ambiguous legal infrastructure was activated on the ground through dominant
ideas about human difference and how industrialization and urbanization was impacting white
life. At the turn of the century, the degeneracy thesis, popularized at the latter half of the 19
th

century by scientists like Benedict Morel and Cesare Lombroso, organized a variety of physical
attributes, habits and customs along the axes of normal and abnormal. Degeneracy was premised
on the idea that abnormal habits or dispositions, which scientists believed could be measured
anatomically, could be passed on to future generations. The work of sexologists like Richard V on
Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud created models of sexual degeneracy, in which
habits like comportment and affect became measurable symptoms of a psycho-social disease.
These ideas shaped the crafting of state and local solutions to the problems of sexual and gender
deviance before homosexual, gay or lesbian became coherent categories of identification or
regulation. Anne Fausto-Sterling and Siobhan Sommerville remind us that notions of degeneracy
in their earliest articulations also linked prevailing ideas of non-white racial inferiority that were
also supported in degeneracy research, to sexual and gender abnormality.
87
In this way, ideas
about sexual and gender deviance are inextricable from the project of racial difference. The
ability of LGBT and queer Angelenos and LGBT and queer organizations to recognize and
engage racial difference and sexual and gender normativity as inter-locking discourses conditions
87 See Somerville, Siobhan B.Queering the color line: Race and the invention of homosexuality in American
culture. (Duke University Press, 2000) and Sterling, Anne Fausto. "Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative
Anatomy of Hottentot Women in Europe I: 1815-1817." in Terry and Urla eds, Deviant Bodies (1995): 19-48.
72
the advocacy and reform efforts that attempted to dismantle the legal, ideological and material
infrastructure of queer criminality in the years following the end of Word War II.
Oral sex was added to the roster of outlawed acts in the state of California with the
passage of AB 219 in 1915. The passage of AB 219 was precipitated by a public scandal
involving the arrest of at least thirty men in Long Beach caught having an oral sex gathering in
November of 1914.
88
The incident, heavily reported in both the Los Angeles Times and the rival
Los Angeles Tribune, reveals how wartime anxieties and notions of degeneracy provided the
ideological scaffolding for the criminalization of gender and sexual deviance. Ullman (1995) and
Scott (2010) both give detailed accounts of this incident and note several things that help us to
understand how the state comes to know sexuality through the law and law enforcement. First,
although the sodomy and “crimes against nature” charges had already been legislated, the
arrested men were brought up on social vagrancy charges instead because the existing statutes
only specified anal penetration as a criminal activity. Vagrancy charges were already being used
to discipline and regulate Mexican, Chinese, Black, and poor white workers in Los Angeles and
the use of vagrancy in this instance highlights the social ambiguity at the time about
homosexuality as a coherent social or political category. Sexuality and legal scholar William
Eskridge, concurs, noting that The Long Beach incident provided a window of visibility in Los
Angeles gay White male culture at the time. Eugene Fisher, hired by the Sacramento Bee to
investigate the incident, interviewed a source who described a gay male Los Angeles subculture
consisting of 2000-5000 gay men who gathered and threw “drags” in secret clubs and private
residences.
89
The Los Angeles Times headline story the incident reads: “Long Beach Uncovers
88 There are some sources that list the number of arrested at 500, however, published accounts in papers at the time
put the number at 30 or 31.
89 Ullman, Sharon R. "The Twentieth Century Way": Female Impersonation and Sexual Practice in Turn-of-the-
Century America." Journal of the History of Sexuality (1995): 573-600.
73
‘Social Vagrant’ Clan: Thirty Men Heavily Fined or Given County-Jail Sentences—Church and
Business Men Included in List of Guilty Ones who, Police Say They Have Evidence to Show,
were Organized for Immoral Purposes.”
90
The participation of respectable middle-class white
men in the incident, one of whom committed suicide with poison after his name was published in
the newspaper, stirred anxieties over white masculinity and the deterioration of the nuclear
family. Concerns over normative masculinity were driven further by the fact that some
participants were discovered wearing feminine clothing. Throughout the 1920s, this legal
infrastructure at the state level (sodomy, oral sex, and lewd vagrancy laws) combined with local
municipal codes on cross-dressing and proper gender comportment, gave LAPD officers the
statutory grounds upon which to contain queer criminality.
One of the first concerted waves of LAPD activity against gender and sexual deviance
occurred as the result of a progressive reform effort to change city politics. In 1938, a
progressive coalition called CIVIC (Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee), formed
by Clifford Clifton, allied with organized labor to unseat then mayor Frank Shaw. Gender and
sexual deviance emerged as a site of struggle between the progressive-labor coalition and the
Shaw camp. On the one hand, selective enforcement of vice satisfied the needs of the mayor,
who had ties to organized vice. This fact was well known and publicized by the CIVIC-led
coalition, who used the unchecked spread of vice as a rallying cry against City Hall and LAPD
corruption. In response, the Shaw-controlled LAPD began to turn its attention increasingly
towards Black women sex workers, gender impersonators, and so-called “pansy clubs,” as social
ills that required containment.
91
This was in many ways a performative gesture on the part of
90 “Long Beach Uncovers ‘Social Vagrant’ Clan: Thirty Men Heavily Fined or Given County-Jail Sentences—
Church and Business Men Included in List of Guilty Ones who, Police Say They Have Evidence to Show, were
Organized for Immoral Purposes,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), November 14, 1914.
91 Hurewitz, Daniel. Bohemian Los Angeles: And the making of modern politics. (Univ of California Press, 2007)
74
Shaw to push back against his flailing public image, while allowing certain commercialized vice
operations to continue unchecked.
As Black people began to migrate to Los Angeles, despite racially restrictive covenants,
Black neighborhoods fragmented across class lines. By 1934, the Central, and Newton, and 77
th

districts, comprising the areas of downtown, the Central Avenue corridor, and Watts, quickly
became concentrated by working class Black people, while more “economically stable” Black
people were concentrated on the Westside.
92
In his 1936 study of Black families in Los Angeles,
J. Max Bond categorizes the family structure of different Black communities in Los Angeles,
remarking that the Central District community was characterized by “extreme disorganization of
the family and community resulting in a lack of control. Some families however, represent well
organized units.”
93
The Central District was also home to an infamous red light district, frequently
a target of critique by anti-vice reformers like CIVIC. Kimberly Boyd explains that the
criminalization of Black women for prostitution in Los Angeles during this time operationalized
prevailing notions of racialized and class pathology in the Central district, and took advantage of
the political unprotectability of Black people, and other marginalized communities in general.
Black women sex workers often worked outside the racialized networks of organized vice. As
such, they, and other women of color sex workers, were more precarious as workers relative to
white women due to their lack of extralegal and / or political ties.
94
While it was common for
independent sex workers to purchase protection from the police, the viciousness of the police
and Boyd, Kaitlin Therese. “The Criminalization of Black Angeleno Women: Institutionalized Racism and
Sexism in Los Angeles. Ph.d Dissertation. (University of California Los Angeles, 2012).
92 Robinson, Paul. "Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles." Black Los Angeles: American Dreams
and Racial Realities (2010): 21-59, 39.
93 Robinson, Paul. "Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles." Black Los Angeles: American Dreams
and Racial Realities (2010): 21-59., 39.
94 Boyd, Kaitlin Therese. “The Criminalization of Black Angeleno Women: Institutionalized Racism and Sexism
in Los Angeles. Ph.d Dissertation. (University of California Los Angeles, 2012), 32
75
against workers and people of color during this time, likely prevented many Black sex workers
from attempting to avail such options.
95
LAPD officers, like many other urban police forces,
would target more vulnerable people and operations for vice policing to appease calls for reform,
while letting better-connected operations continue without disturbance.
96
Escobar documents this
same kind of treatment of Mexican and Mexican-American women by the LAPD in the late
1930s; EL Congreso, a leftist organization that organized around civil rights for Los Angeles'
Spanish-Speaking community, began community patrols in 1939 to intervene on LAPD
harassment of sex workers in East Los Angeles.
97

The containment of gender impersonation tapped into a periodic social concern around
gender inversion, that gradually became solidified into a homosexual panic during and after
World War II. Gender impersonation was once considered family entertainment in Los Angeles.
The waxing and waning popularity and social acceptance of gender impersonation tracks the
tides of social ambivalence about non-normative gender practices before they are attached to a
criminalized social identity. In 1898, the city passed Ordinance 5022, a municipal code
outlawing cross-dressing. The impetus to ban cross-dressing was All Fool's Night, a yearly frolic
that embraced camp, debauchery, and gender play. All Fool's Night was invented by the Los
Angeles Merchant's Association in 1894 in order to drum up tourism during a period of
economic depression. The party was a success and the next year, drew a crowd of 100,000. The
event was criticized by conservative Protestants, who were beginning to build more presence in
Los Angeles. Conservatives were particularly offended by the cross-dressing aspect of All Fool's
95 Boyd, Kaitlin Therese. “The Criminalization of Black Angeleno Women: Institutionalized Racism and Sexism
in Los Angeles. Ph.d Dissertation. (University of California Los Angeles, 2012), 53
96 See Wolcott, Victoria. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 111 for examples of this in Detroit.
97 Escobar, Edward J. Race, police, and the making of a political identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles
Police Department, 1900-1945. (V ol. 7. Univ of California Press, 1999), 160.
76
Night and described it as, “Hell turned loose on Los Angeles.”
98
By 1898, these forces won out
and City Council voted to ban All Fool's Night and tasked the city attorney with drafting an
ordinance banning cross-dressing, resulting in the passage of Ordinance 5022.
Local law enforcement and politicians justified the criminalization of gender and sexual
deviance by placing non-normative sex acts on a continuum with sexual violence. In 1938,
amidst the crackdown on prostitution and gender impersonation, the LADP established a Sex
Offenses Bureau. The Los Angeles Times report on the establishment of the Bureau reads: “On
the theory that each minor sex offender is a potential major sex criminal, Chief [James] Davis
yesterday established a bureau of sex offenses for the classification and control of this type of
crime.”
99
Davis then goes on to outline how the responsibilities of the Bureau would be to
maintain a database of sex offenders with fingerprints and photos and facilitate the psychiatric
examination of all sex offenders in order to determine, “the proper correctional as well as the
punitive procedure for their rehabilitation.”
100
Davis also notes that the Bureau would be
responsible for creating a classification system that would help law enforcement create profiling
systems to identify future sex deviants.
That same year, the LAPD also hired famed criminal profiler and author of The Sexual
Criminal, John Paul de River to run the Sex Crimes Bureau. De River worked as a consultant for
the LAPD, helping to solve several high profile murder cases including the Black Dahlia case.
De River also trained LAPD officers in criminal profiling and educated a curious public about
98 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 16.
99 “Sex Crimes Clinic Opens: Chief David Starts Classification and Control Bureau.” Los Angeles Times (Los
Angeles, CA). Jul 30, 1938.
100 “Sex Crimes Clinic Opens: Chief David Starts Classification and Control Bureau.” Los Angeles Times (Los
Angeles, CA). Jul 30, 1938.
77
sexual criminality.
101
De River believed that homosexuals could be cured with treatment and
advocated the establishment of a state hospital for the treatment of so-called sex perverts.
However, his tenure with the LAPD demonstrates how reform of the criminal system can co-
exist alongside and develop through the practice of criminalization
The study of sexuality during this time period was bound in a public debate over what to
do with sexual deviants and to what extent deviant practices were indicative of mental pathology.
People like J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, advocated for criminalizing all non-
normative sexual practices, including consensual adult ones. Hoover made his view known in a
series of editorial style articles published in the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets in the
late 1930s. In a 1937 essay titled, “War on the Sex Criminal,” published on September 26,
Hoover writes: “The harmless 'pervert' of today can be and often is the loathsome mutilator and
murderer of tomorrow.” Articulating misdemeanor sex offenses like lewd vagrancy as gateway
offenses to more violent acts, typifies the “broken windows” approach to policing that became
more pronounced under the administrations of William Parker and Darryl Gates. We can
understand state and local responses to the moral panic over sexual deviance from the 1940s into
the 1960s as splitting the difference between the treatment model advocated by de River and
other more moderate voices and the criminalization and containment model advocated by the
likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Governor Warren.
For example, in 1949, Governor Warren made a plea in the Los Angeles Times for better
enforcement of sex crime laws, including the recently passed sex offender registry law (1947)
that required anyone convicted of a sex crime to register as a sex offender, the first of its kind in
the United States. Warren was anti-treatment and also advocated for enforcement of a law
101 “Officers to Discuss Criminal Psychiatry.” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA). Jun 4, 1949.
78
requiring convicted sex criminals who use an insanity plea to serve their jail sentences before
being transferred to a mental hospital. In a 1948 interview, Pasadena Judge Frank C. Collier
advocated the use of castration for people convicted of felony sex crimes, like oral sex and
sodomy. Collier offered to give people convicted of felonious sex crimes probation if they agreed
to voluntary castration. Collier states that during his 23 years on the bench, of the 100 “proven or
admitted sex degenerates,” he has encountered, all but three opted for prison instead of
castration.
102

While the Warrens, Hoovers, and Davises advocated equally criminalizing all forms
sexual deviance, the vast and sometimes conflicting body knowledge produced about sexuality
during the first half of the 20
th
century had an impact on attitudes about sexual non-normativity.
For example, in a 1947 interview with the Globe and Mail, veteran probation officer Rick
Thomas says: “We must differentiate between the homosexual offender, the indecent exposure
case, the alcoholic degenerate, the rapist and the monster who ships dismembered women in
trunks. Society should be thankful they are not all the same.”
103
In 1950, the California
legislature passed the Sexual Deviation Research Act, designed to address the problem of sex
crimes through a statewide research campaign. Reporting on the Act criticized the overuse and
ineffectiveness of legal prohibitions and cites ongoing studies at UCLA and Norwalk State
Hospital that promise to shed valuable insight into the psychology of homosexuals. Moderate
approaches to containing homosexuality like this were constrained by aggressive criminal laws
that were passed alongside more moderate and reformatory measures. In 1952, a year after the
Sexual Deviation Research Act was implemented, the state of California increased the maximum
102 Herbert, Raymond. “Collier's Choice: Judge Perfects Cure for Sex Offenders – Proud of Record.” South China
Morning Post and the Hongkong Telegraph. Feb 2, 1948
103 McAree, J.V . “Scientific Treatment for Sex Perverts.” The Globe and Mail. Feb 21, 1947.
79
jail sentence for certain sex crimes from 44 months to life imprisonment.
104
The drive to study
and understand gender and sexual deviance in the 1950s was already bound in an effort to
contain queer criminality at the state and local level that had been in the making since the early
20
th
century. However, two years later, treatment advocates did see their aims met when Los
Angeles County constructed Atascadero State Hospital, which by 1956, housed between 600 and
700 people who were held as sexual psychopaths.
105
To be clear though, treatment was not a life-
affirming options for many people. People housed in Atascadero for sex offenses were subjected
to cruel forms of “therapy,” like electrocution. It is notable that Gay Liberation Front, took on the
discourse and practice of treatment for homosexuals as a form of policing in the early 1970s.
Gay Liberation Front Los Angeles' challenge of psychiatry and psychology as forms of policing
draws our attention to the role of knowledge production and data gathering, regardless of the
political aims of the researcher, in constituting carceral geographies. Absent the political power
to put knowledge to work towards building non-punitive infrastructure, the collection of data on
sexuality in postwar California circulated in a political context in which the most enduring forms
of spatial fixity that data collection evinces became punitive in nature. I will address this more in
next section and show how the demographic and spatial patterns of LAPD efforts to contain
gender and sexual deviance, from 1933 to 1969, formed a gendered matrix of discipline that
differentially targeted White men, gender non-conforming people, and Black and Brown people
for arrest. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how the advance of gay liberal politics
redoubles the precariousness of particular clusters of difference, namely women of color, trans
and gender non-conforming people.
104 “Sexual Offenders and Public Safety.” Los Angeles Times. Aug 14, 1952.
105 “Judge Praises New Policy on Sex Deviates.” Los Angeles Times Sep 20, 1956.
80
A Closer Look at Queer Criminality: Sex Crimes and Prostitution Arrests, 1933-1969
LAPD arrest data was obtained from the City Archives and Records Center and the Los
Angeles Public Library. Data irregularities required two different methods of visualization. For
the years 1933 to 1949, data on Sex Crimes and Prostitution was disaggregated by type: Lewd
Vagrancy, Sex Perversion (oral sex), Sodomy, and Dissolute Vagrancy and by race: White, Black
and Red (Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican-American), and Brown (Southeast Asian) and
Yellow (Japanese and / or Chinese). After 1945, the racial categories changed to: White, Black,
Red (indigenous), Mexican (Spanish-Speaking), Yellow, and Brown. For these years I visualize
the data using a stacked bar graph for each of the most arrestable categories of sex crimes, which
were Lewd Vagrancy and Sex Perversion, and for the sum of prostitution related offenses, which
included soliciting (attempting to pay for sex), offering (offering sex for money), and owning
and / or operation a prostitution business. After 1950, Sex Crimes arrest data was no longer
aggregated by type of offense (Lewd Vagrancy vs. Sodomy) but instead collapsed into one
category called, “Sex Crimes.” Furthermore, data is missing for the years 1939 and 1951.
After 1965, the LAPD discontinues publishing any arrest data aggregated by race. The
second set of data shows arrests for Sex Crimes and Prostitution by reporting district. Because
the racial data during this period was incomplete, and because after 1950, the LAPD began to
publish arrest data by police division, I chose tabulate the data from 1950 to 1969 by reporting
district. The LAPD also published a map of the policing districts in each edition of the Annual
Report. I used these maps to draw the policing boundaries for the 1950s and 1960s in ArcMap so
that I could visualize the tabulated arrest data spatially and overlay it with racial demographic
data from the US Census. I paired 1960 census data with the 1950s arrest data, since the 1960
81
census is a snapshot of the decade of the 1950s and similarly paired the 1970s census data with
the 1960s arrest data. The US census data was created by a research team headed by Dr. Phil
Ethington through a research grant from the Haynes Foundation.
106
Data on arrests in Los Angeles from this time period reveals two key insights: 1)
containing queer criminality placed Sex Crimes, which later become the penal codes around
which gay liberal police reform is directed, as one element in a gendered matrix of discipline that
targeted White men along with Black and Brown people and 2) that policing both Sex Crimes
and Prostitution targeted what scholar Kevin Mumford terms, interzones. Interzones are places
where the prevailing logics of racial, gender and class segregation were routinely troubled
through the intersecting developments of the consumerization of leisure and the and
demographic diversification of US cities.
107
Focusing on Chicago and New York, Mumford
shows how red light districts, much like the Los Angeles' Central district, were places where the
proliferation of deviant subcultures was characterized by interracial sociality. The bulk of
policing for Sex Crimes and Prostitution focused on interzones and tracked to a certain extent,
the movement of people of color out of the city center.
106 Philip J. Ethington, Anne Marie Kooistra, and Edward DeYoung, Los Angeles County Union Census Tract Data
Series, 1940-1990. Version 1.01. Created with the support of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes
Foundation. (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 2000).
107 Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/white sex districts in Chicago and New York in the early twentieth century.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 20.
82
Figure 2: “Lewd Vagrancy Arrests 1933 – 1949”
83
Figure 3: “Sex Perversion Arrests 1933 – 1949”
84
Figure 4: “Prostitution Arrests 1933 – 1949”
As the data shows, the lewd vagrancy charge and the sex perversion charge played a
much larger role in the mass regulation of sexual deviance than the sodomy or “crime against
nature” statutes. In this time period sodomy charges did not exceed 90 and “crimes against
nature,” charges did not exceed 5 in any given year. This is in contrast to cities like New York,
where sodomy arrests broke the hundreds as early as 1915.
108

108 Eskridge Jr, William N. "Law and the Construction of the Closet: American Regulation of Same-Sex Intimacy,
1880-1946." Iowa L. Rev. 82 (1996): 1007, 1111.
85
The data confirms how homosexuality comes into being as a crystallization of anxieties
about white masculinity, in the sense that white males make up the largest number of arrests for
lewd vagrancy, sex perversion, and sodomy. However, that did not limit the enforcement of these
laws on men of color; over time, Black and Mexican men make up an increasing proportion of
arrests for all sex crimes in general and for lewd vagrancy, while White men continue to
constitute a majority of the arrests for sex perversion. A look at the rate of arrests by ethnic and
racial group highlights the overall racist tenor of policing. In 1940, there were about 2.6 million
white people, 63,744 Black people, and 61,248 Latinos
109
in Los Angeles County. Arrest data for
1940 show of 78,493 total arrests: 57,656 White people were arrested (2% of the White
population), 7549 Black people were arrested (11.8% of the Black population) and 11812
Mexicans were arrested (approximately 19.3% of the Mexican-American population).
Analyzing the presentation of arrest data by the LAPD is also revelatory in the sense that
during the 1930s, data tabulation was extremely detailed and thorough. LAPD arrest data was
disaggregated by age, race, citizenship status, and until the mid 1930s, by occupation (with
categories like “Public Servant,” “Clerk,” “Labor,” “Servant,” and “Trader”). For the three years
that occupation data is available on people arrested for sex crimes, laborers and servants make up
the majority of lewd vagrancy and sex perversion charges. The ever-changing format of the
statistical reports, not only reflect the leadership turnovers in the LAPD during this period, but
also the increasing concern with homosexuality as threat to the public good. Before 1945, lewd
vagrancy, sex perversion and the crimes against nature were categorized along with prostitution,
and offenses against children as Sex Crimes. In 1945, prostitution is given its own category and
109 Figures on racial and ethnic population counts in 1940 come from Ethington, Philip J., William H. Frey, and
Dowell Myers. "The Racial Resegregation of Los Angeles County, 1940–2000." Race Contours (2000): 2001-5.
86
statutes addressing sexual activity with minors were folded into a “Crimes Against the Children
and Family” section. While the public discourse of the LAPD and of law enforcement at the time
sought to fold consensual but non-normative sexuality activity between adults into public
concern over sexual psychopathy, the tabulation of data suggests some conscious differentiation
between sexual deviance and sexual psychopathy.
These statistics confirmed for the general public that police were arrested who they were
supposed to be arresting: a flexible and shifting pool of undesirables that has always included
poor people, particularly poor non-whites, and during the 1930s and 1940s increasingly included
gay men, lesbians, and gender non-conforming people. The Long Beach sex scandal that was the
impetus for California's oral sex ban emphasizes the role of gender deviancy played in public
encounters with non-normative sexuality. The scene of arrest, featuring attendees dressed in silk
kimonos, evinces how gender experimentation has been a key component in the development
and expression of homosexual subcultures. Effeminate or non-masculine affect and dress
functioned as clear visible markers of sexual inversion and sexual deviance long before
homosexuality became a legible category.
110
What this data is incapable of representing is the
degree to which gender non-conformity played in the surveillance and containment of sexual
deviance. Although Los Angeles passed anti-cross-dressing ordinances as early as 1898, police
data provides few clues into how observable gender non-conformity shaped interactions with law
enforcement and the criminal justice system.
The next set of data maps Sex Crimes and Prostitution arrests from 1950 to 1969. The
maps can be viewed in Appendix B. I chose to display the relative intensity of policing by
110 Bérubé, Allan. Coming out under fire: The history of gay men and women in World War II. (Univ of North
Carolina Press, 2010), 19.
87
representing arrests by police district with a chloropleth map, using the Jenks natural breaks
method to distinguish classes of values for arrests. Jenks natural breaks is a method of clustering
quantitative values by reducing the deviation of each individual value within a class of values
from the class mean, and maximizing the deviation between the mean values of each class of
values. For each map, I created one version with just the arrest data and one overlaid with the
census data as a dot density mapping. For the 1950s, I map White and Non-White demographics,
and for the 1960s, I map White, Black, Hispanic and Non-White /Non-Hispanic demographics.
These maps help situate the containment of queer criminality in relation to the racialization of
space. First, the maps highlight how much vice policing was focused on the Central district in the
decades following World War II. For both Sex Crimes and Prostitution, arrests were numerically
concentrated in the Central district for the whole of the 1950s and 1960s, even as gay and lesbian
political formations began to claim areas like West Hollywood, Hollywood, Silverlake, Echo
Park, and at times, Rampart in their efforts against policing. The continued policing of the
Central district not only sought to contain queer criminality, which always indexed interracial
contact, but also was a part of an urban renewal effort to rid areas like Pershing Square of
undesirables including vagrants and people engaging in a range of non-normative sexual and
gender practices including public sex, sex work, drag performances and public gender non-
conformity.
111
As the removal of racially restrictive covenants facilitated the spread of non-white
people from downtown, throughout the 1950s and 60s, areas west and south of the Central
district show increased arrests. It is in this context that West Hollywood and Hollywood
materializes as “Gay Los Angeles,” despite the fact that the map suggests that subcultures of
111 “Pershing Square,” ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los
Angeles, California, logs the cleanup of Pershing Square, beginning in 1964 as a part of an effort to redevelop
downtown. Articles in this subject file reference the desire to rid Pershing Square of undesirables.
88
sexual and gender non-conformity were just as sprawled as the city itself. West Hollywood was
outside the city boundaries and became an attractive place to live for LGBT people in the 1960s
and 70s. The added issue of a relatively higher vacancy rate in Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s
likely attracted LGBT Angelenos and organizations. The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center,
upon its founding, was located just east of downtown, before relocating to Hollywood in 1975.
The organizations I will profile in the next chapter also chose to site themselves and the majority
of their work in Hollywood.
The dot density overlay allows us to track how policing maintained the boundaries
between racially and ethnically segregated neighborhoods, demonstrating how interzones
continue to be sites of containment into the 1970s. For example, looking at Sex Crimes policing
in the Wilshire and University Districts, we can see that during the 1950s there are similar levels
of arrest. Both areas are significantly populated by people of color. However, during the 1960s,
policing in Wilshire increases, while policing for Sex Crimes in University decreases. However,
looking at the dot density overlay map we can see that in this same time period, Wilshire
becomes more of an interzone than University. Also we can see the policing districts change to
contain the movement of people of color west of downtown. For example, while Central is still
heavily policed during the 1960s, it is also smaller and less densely populated. The Rampart
division is created to contain the movement of Brown people, a limited number of Black people,
and other non-Whites west of downtown. Similarly the Valley district becomes differentiated into
five different districts, with the more interracial Van Guys and North Hollywood districts
experiencing higher levels of arrest than the mostly white Devonshire district. Not every racially
diverse neighborhood always experienced increased levels of policing for Sex Crimes. For
89
example, the Highland Park, Foothills, and West Valley, had relatively low numbers of arrests for
Sex Crimes, despite being racially diverse. This could be attributed to the relative number of
bars, cruising spots, theaters, and other policed social spaces in these neighborhoods, or due to
other factors. Future directions for this project include mapping bars, bathhouses, tea rooms, and
other establishments to get a clearer picture of the spatial development of sexual and gender non-
conforming subcultures in Los Angeles.
However, the maps underscore how the racialization of space drove the containment of
queer criminality. The political context however was one in which homosexual and gender non-
conformity was materializing as a criminal social identity, through an association with
Communism. The discursive construction and criminalization of sexual and gender deviance also
commenced in Los Angeles at a time when both radicalism and reform were creating the context
for the development of interracial political coalitions, like CIVIC, El Congreso, and later the
Civil Rights Congress. Containing queer criminality was leveraged by reformers and politicians
like Frank Shaw in a struggle over corruption. At the same time, radicals were being met with the
violent force of the LAPD Red Squads. These concurrent developments matter, because as
LGBT political formations develop over time in Los Angeles, Communism in particular, and
radicalism in general become consistent sites of rupture for LGBT political formations,
beginning with the Mattachine Society. As I will discuss further, Mattachine attempted to bring a
leftist organizing model and an analysis of race into their efforts to fight LAPD entrapment.
However Communism became an issue that splintered the group and left the attempt to bridge
anti-racist police activism with homophile activism an unfinished task that continues to be a
challenge for LGBT activists and organizations. Analyzing the policing of queer criminality
90
helps us understand how policing shaped the development of such ruptures in place. Examining
arrests in a spatial context shows how the racialization of space drove the containment of queer
criminality. The categorization of queer criminality: Sex Crimes versus Prostitution, and the
different demographics of people these different categories of crime targeted, condition the
translation of queer criminality into a politics of identity. White men, the group with the most
number of arrests for Sex Crimes, and later to a degree, men of color tend to dominate the
leadership and management of community organizations and institutions that address policing as
a homophobic issue. Such efforts generally did not take up prostitution and masquerading arrests
as sites of reform.
Next, I will examine how early homophile responses made sense of the ideas of race and
class that were reified by the containment of queer criminality and radicalism that characterized
interwar and postwar vice policing. The Mattachine Society, through the Citizens' Committee to
Outlaw Entrapment attempted to translate the experience of policing into a politics of identity,
that recognized policing as a common experience shared by all oppressed minorities. However,
the splintering of the group around the issue of radicalism stymied the development of its anti-
racist praxis. Sir Lady Java translated the ban on cross-dressing in clubs and bars as a labor issue,
however, the particularity of the ban positioned Java outside of the realm of legal redress,
reminding us how the particularized modes of policing queer criminality also created gendered
ruptures than also continue haunt LGBT political formations in Los Angeles.
91
Homophile Era Responses to Policing: Ruptures Around Race and Class
The Citizens' Committee to End Police Entrapment
The LAPD's ramp up of Sex Crime arrests beginning in 1950 was reified by the
prevailing logic of homophobia as a security threat at the federal level. In 1950, Senator Joseph
McCarthy and Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy began a very public effort to remove
homosexuals from the State Department. The association of homophobia with Communism as a
threat to traditional American values eventually lead to the issuance of Executive Order 10450 in
1953, which defined sex perversion as a security risk that could make one ineligible for federal
employment. A year earlier, in November, Harry Hay, Rudi Gernreich, Bob Hull, Dale Jennings,
and Chuck Rowland held the first meeting to discuss the formation of the Mattachine Society.
Hay, a long-time leftist activist and teacher, was a key visionary for the group. Hay was inspired
by the organizational structures of the Communist Party, freemasonry, and Alcoholics
Anonymous, and devised an a cell structure for the group that included the use of pseudonyms to
ensure anonymity. The first meetings for Mattachine were held in Hay's home in Silver Lake. In
the spring of 1952, after Dale Jennings arrested for lewd vagrancy in McArthur Park, Mattachine
members created the Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapment (CCOE) as the public face of
the campaign to raise awareness and funds for Jennings' legal defense. The archive of CCOE's
activities is scant, but the flyers and promotional materials members produced give us insight
into how radicalism both challenged and constituted homophile political formations.
A few months before Jennings' arrest, on January 27
th
, LAPD officers arrested five
Mexican-American teenagers after one of the group, Horace Martinez, had a run in with an
undercover vice cop in the restroom. Martinez noticed the officer watching him and after they
92
exchanged words, the undercover officer slapped Martinez in the face. Martinez ran out of the
restroom, shouting, “Help! Help! A Queer!” alerting his friends to the situation. The undercover
officer Ted Porter, proceeded to chase and subdue Martinez and shoot and wound another
member of the group, William Rubio, before another officer arrived. All five teenagers were
arrested, including Rubio, who was transferred to jail after recovering from his gunshot
wound.
112
Mattachine members were aware of the Echo Park case and referenced it throughout the
flyers and promotional materials of the Citizens' Commission to Outlaw Entrapment (CCOE). A
flyer titled, “NOW is the time to fight,” reads:
Now while the Grand Jury investigation of police corruption is on...now while there is
before the courts the case of the Mexican-American youths who defended their right to
heterosexuality while a vice squad plainclothesman sought to charge them with lewd and
indecent acts...now while the public demands an end to police subversion of
Constitutional rights. Citizens of Los Angeles have a real opportunity for action now in
support of a test case which will come before the courts soon.
113
What is striking here is that despite the fact that Martinez' reaction could have been castigated as
homophobic, CCOE instead asserted the right of of the teenagers to their “heterosexuality,”
which can be read as a right to bodily autonomy against the charges of lewd vagrancy that were
leveled at the teens to justify their assault. CCOE and member Dale Jennings, who refused to
plea guilty to his charges, planned to use his trial as a test case against lewd vagrancy. Rather
than emphasizing Jennings' general innocence as a law-abiding citizen, CCOE cited the Echo
Park case to connect police entrapment of homosexuals to the policing of all minorities and used
112 Hobson, Emily. “Policing Gay LA: Mapping Racial Divides in the Homophile Era, 1950 – 1967.” The Rising
Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, andRadical Movements Across the Pacific. University of Washington Press,
(2014): 188 – 212, 119.
113 “Now is the time to fight,” 1952 Press Release, Citizen's Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment, Box 1: 14,
Mattachine Society Project Collection, Coll2008-016, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles,
California.
93
racist policing as a frame of reference to articulate homosexuals as a new oppressed minority
group. For example, an undated press release announcing the formation of the Committee reads:
For many years there has existed here in our midst a variation of “Police Brutality”
known as intimidation and shake-down. It has been allowed to flourish unheeded and
unchecked because the source-victims for this administrative corruption are
Homosexuals...Only in recent years, through the dissemination of scientific research and
statistics by such eminent authorities as...Dr. Alfred Kinsey have Homosexuals begun to
be aware of themselves as a social minority with the group-culture characteristics
(patterns, problems, and oppressions), that are common to all Minorities similarly
persecuted by baseless myths and vulgar prejudices.
114
CCOE argued that the experience of policing and visceral extension of “baseless myths and
vulgar prejudices,” was what made homosexuals a minority a group. The press release continues
to explain that that the purpose of the Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapment (CCOE) was to
“expose to all eyes an injudicial and unconstitutional police conspiracy which, under the cloak of
protecting public morals, threatens not only all Minorities but civil rights and privileges
generally.”
115
CCOE articulated the policing of homosexuality as a part of a larger scheme of
racialized, gendered and classed discipline that constituted vice policing. CCOE described the
pattern of vice policing in Los Angeles as “simple and deadly.” Simple in the sense that the lack
of political power of “Minorities,” in general facilitates their vulnerability to policing as an
unchecked and routine product of the normative exercise of hegemony. CCOE criticized the
practice of LAPD officers black-mailing gay people arrested for Sex Crimes to release them
from custody in in exchange for payment to illustrates how policing queer criminality remained a
site of LAPD corruption despite sweeping departmental reforms in the late 1930s, which
themselves supported increased policing of Black sex workers and gender non-conformity.
114 Undated Press Release, Citizen's Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment, Box 1: 14, Mattachine Society
Project Collection, Coll2008-016, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
115 Undated Press Release, Citizen's Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment, Box 1: 14, Mattachine Society
Project Collection, Coll2008-016, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
94
In another communique, CCOE described themselves as, “an anonymous body of angry
voters in full sympathy with the spirit of rebellion in our community concerning police brutality
against Minorities in general.”
116
The implication being that there was, or should be, a group of
homophiles who understood their experience of policing as inter-connected to the policing of
working class people and people of color.
Dale Jennings' case commenced in June of 1952. Jennings refused to accept a plea and
admitted to being a homosexual but refused to admit that he had committed a crime. After the
jury remained deadlocked for 10 days, the judge dismissed the charges. This was an
unprecedented victory, especially in the anti-homophobic climate of the 1950s. Mattachine
published news of the legal victory emphasizing that victory was not just for homosexuals but
for, “all citizens interested in equal justice under the law.”
117
As news of the legal victory grew,
Mattachine ranks quickly swelled and set the stage for the displacement of the five original
founders from the organization, and thereby the development of anti-racist praxis in Mattachine.
By 1953, Mattachine chapters had formed in San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and
Chicago.
118
However, rumors that the five founders had Communist ties and complaints of the
secrecy of the organizational structure forced the founders and member John Gruber out of the
organization.
119
With the excision of these members, ended the tentative relationship with the
Civil Rights Congress that CCOE was building. Mattachine's rupture around Communism comes
116 “An Anonymous Call to Arms,” 1952 Flyer, Citizen's Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment, Box 1: 14,
Mattachine Society Project Collection, Coll2008-016, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles,
California.
117 “An Open Letter to Friends of the Citizens' Committees to Outlaw Entrapment,” 1952 Press Release, Citizen's
Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment, Box 1: 14, Mattachine Society Project Collection, Coll2008-016,
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
118 White, C. Todd. Pre-Gay LA: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights. (University of Illinois
Press, 2009), 27.
119 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 113-114.
95
to function as rupture around race that mainstream LGBT organizations and institutions in Los
Angeles have yet to reckon with: the inability of homophile and later LGBT political formations
to recognize and politicize the various embodiments of difference caught up in the dragnet of
queer criminality. CCOE's attempt to organize homosexuals around policing encouraged more
local individual legal challenges to repression of homosexuality, such as ONE Inc's legal
challenge to the postmaster's refusal to send their publication through mail on the grounds that
the content was indecent. However, these individual legal challenges but did little to encourage a
nuanced understanding of homophobic policing that acknowledged the full breadth of queer
criminality. The fragmentation of Mattachine around Communism stymied the development of
an organized gay and lesbian left until the mid 1970s and forestalled the development of an
organized mass gay and lesbian response to policing until the late 1960s.
In a latter dated August 26, 1954, Frank Parkhurst, who was serving as Mattachine
Oakland's Legal Director, wrote to the Board in Los Angeles to officially resign from his
position. In his letter he writes that he is was to engage in new project, “on behalf of the variant
minority [gender non-conforming people], which I trust, will eventually gain your whole-hearted
support and approval.” While, Mattachine and CCOE attempted early on to bring an analysis of
race into the production of homosexual identity, they weren't perfect. They participated in a
tradition of excluding gender non-conforming and trans people from political organizing spaces
that continued throughout the 1960s and 70 in gay liberationist and gay liberal organizations and
institutions. In the next section I jump ahead in time to 1967, when Sir Lady Java, a nationally
known drag performer, challenges the Los Angeles Police Commissions' ban on employing
cross-dressing performers in bars in cafes. Java's struggle calls our attention to how the different
96
modes of containing queer criminality condition the articulation of identity.
Sir Lady Java and Rule Number Nine
Figure 5: “Sir Lady Java Protesting Rule No. 9 at the Redd Foxx”
Recent studies in queer history have emphasized how gender non-conformity functioned
as a primary index of sexual non-normativity before the homosexual materializes as a coherent
social category.
120
In Los Angeles, public gender non-conformity and cross-dressing were
criminalized by municipal ordinance 5022, which was passed in 1898 and amended in 1922 to
include the penalty of a $500 fine and 6 months in the city jail. In 1940, after the crackdown on
120 See Alan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, in which Berube argues that effeminacy and gender deviance among
US soldiers formed the early characterization of homosexuality and containing effeminacy and gender deviance
amongst male soldiers formed one of the primary directives of WWII homosexual screening programs in the
Armed Services. See Clair Sears, Arresting Dress on how the containment of cross-dressing formed turn of the
century attempts to contain sexual deviance. Also Hurewitz, in Bohemian Los Angeles, marked the 1930s
crackdown on gender impersonation and “pansy bars,” as one of the earliest waves of concerted policing of
gender and sexual deviance in Los Angeles.
97
gender impersonation, the Los Angeles Police Commission developed another mechanism to
repress impersonation, which was a rule requiring bar owners to obtain written permission from
the commission to perform dressed as a member of the opposite sex. The rule, which came to be
known as Rule No. 9 by 1967, required performers to be wearing at least three pieces of properly
gendered attire. By 1967, the California Supreme Court, had ruled Ordinance 5022
unconstitutional, so the Police Commission’s Rule No. 9 was the only legal foothold the LAPD
had to support criminalizing gender deviance.
121
The LAPD never published data on
masquerading arrests, making it difficult to ascertain how the enforcement these laws took shape
between 1940 and 1967 or where these prohibitions were most heavily enforced. The business of
granting or denying permits was taken up at Police Commission meetings, whose minutes are
archived in the Los Angeles City Archives and Records Center. These minutes are unindexed but
remain perhaps one of the few archives of the containment of gender deviance through the
regulation of business.
Sir Lady Java, like many other Black Angelenos, moved to Los Angeles from New
Orleans with her mother and five siblings in the 1940s. Java worked as a female impersonator
and a go-go dancer, but also lived her everyday life as a woman. Java became famous for her
impersonation of Lena Horne and was nationally recognized by 1967, having appeared in
periodicals like Jet. Her feminine appearance or high degree of “passing,” as a cisgender woman
earned her the performance tagline: “the prettiest man on earth.” The popularity of and
fascination with gender impersonation persisted nationally despite prohibitions in several cities,
making impersonation a living wage profession for popular performers like Java.
122
Java, for
121 “MTF Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966 – 1975.” GLQ 4, no. 2 (1998): 349-372, 365.
122 Sears, Clare. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.
Duke University Press, 2014.
98
example, was able to purchase a home for herself and her family with the money she made as a
performer. Unfortunately not much has been written about Java's life before this time period, but
between 1965 and 1967, Java returned to Los Angeles to perform a series of sold shows across
the city that were received rave reviews in the Los Angeles Times, by Gertrude Gibson in her
“Candid Comments” column. A May 11, 1967 article announcing Java's farewell performance at
the Red Carpet, article noted that Java was planning to launch her first east coast tour later that
year, beginning in Milwaukee. However, Java was still performing in Los Angeles towards the
end of 1967. In September of 1967, Java was scheduled to perform at the Redd Foxx on 339 N.
La Cienega, a bar owned by Redd Foxx, of Sanford and Sons fame. The Redd Foxx bar catered
to middle-class Black and Black elites on the Westside, and hosted the likes of Richard Pryor as
well as a benefit for the Watts Writers Workshop in the years following the Watts Uprising. On
September 14
th
, LAPD officers approached Redd Foxx management after seeing an
advertisement for Java's performance in a Valley newspaper notifying them that they were in
violation of Rule No 9 by employing Java.
123
The investigator's report on the matter says that
Redd Foxx management assured investigators that the show, scheduled for September 26
th
,
would be cancelled. On scheduled night of the performance, management ignored police
investigators and allowed the show to go on as planned. Commission investigators returned to
the Redd Foxx and observed Java performing in violation of the act. After her performance,
investigators attempted to interview Java in order to verify her biological sex. Java refused to
meet with investigators, who threatened to pull Foxx's liquor license if he did not comply with
Rule No. 9. This was not the first time the LAPD tried to interfere with Java's ability to earn a
123 Los Angeles Police Commission Investigative Report: Redd Foxx Enterprises, October 3, 1967, Meeting
Minutes of the Los Angeles Police Commission, Los Angeles City Archives, Erwin C. Piper Technical Center,
Los Angeles, CA, 1.
99
living. The investigator’s report to the Police Commission also notes that, “on two separate
occasions in December of 1966, permittees were warned regarding the employment of this
entertainer without the special permit.”
124
Redd Foxx hired attorney Burton Marks to negotiate with the Police Commission. Marks
addressed the Police Commission in a letter, dated October 7, 1967, requesting a special permit
for the Redd Foxx to employ Java and questioning the constitutionality of Rule No. 9. Needless
to say, the Commission denied the request. Sir Lady Java responded, organizing a protest outside
of the Redd Foxx on October 25, 1967. Java framed her struggle as a labor issue, telling the
press,“the law is depriving me of my livelihood.”
125
The Advocate covered the story but clearly
delineated Java's struggle, and Java as, outside the scope of homophile politics, writing:
“Although the question of homosexuality is in no way involved in the dispute, many gay
entertainers around town have been bugged by Rule 9 for a long time.”
126

Java turned to the American Civil Liberties Union who worked with her to file a civil suit
against the Police Commission. However, Rule No. 9 made bar and cafe owners the subject of
the law, rather than impersonators, even though the rule was squarely targeted at impersonators.
The leverage the Police Commission had to enforce Rule No. 9, was their power to grant, deny,
or suspend business licenses. As such, the court ruled that Java had no legal grounds on which to
challenge the Commission's decision without a bar owner who was willing to be named as a
complainant. Java and the ACLU could not find a bar owner willing to take on the case and thus
the suit was dropped. A year later, the owner of a heterosexual topless bar took on Rule No. 9
124 Los Angeles Police Commission Investigative Report: Redd Foxx Enterprises, October 3, 1967, Meeting
Minutes of the Los Angeles Police Commission, Los Angeles City Archives, Erwin C. Piper Technical Center,
Los Angeles, CA, 1.
125 “Sir Lady Java Fights Fuzz-Y Rule Nine” The Advocate, (Los Angeles, CA), November 1967 V . 1, No. 3, 2.
126 “Sir Lady Java Fights Fuzz-Y Rule Nine” The Advocate, (Los Angeles, CA), November 1967 V . 1, No. 3, 2.
100
and it the California Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
I had the opportunity to meet Sir Lady Java at the January 2013, Martin Luther King
Kingdom Day Parade, a yearly parade down Crenshaw Blvd in the neighborhoods of Jefferson
Park / Leimert Park. In her early seventies at the time, Java still remembered the ferocity with
which the LAPD attempted to shut her down. At her May 1967 show at the Red Carpet, Java
recalled coming on stage and seeing uniformed officers in the audience, batons drawn, waiting to
arrest her for violating Rule No. 9. Java thumbed her nose at the rule by wearing three pieces of
men's clothing along with the sequined bikinis she became notorious for performing in: men's
ankle socks, a wristwatch, and a sequined mens' bow tie. The fact that Rule No. 9 subjected
gender non-conforming performers to LAPD intervention, but made bar owners the subjects of
the law exemplifies how the different avenues of control that took shape as queer criminality
shaped the articulation of politics. The circuity of enforcement against gender impersonation, and
the lack of available data on masquerading and impersonation arrests, worked to abstract the
ways that gender non-conformity functioned as a discursive anchor for and marker of sexual
deviance.
101
CHAPTER TWO
GAY LIBERAL POLICE REFORM ACTIVISM AND MAKING
GAY L.A.
“Oh God, I can't go to jail,” may have been some of the last words that LaVerne Turner
said before being shot by LAPD Sergeant John Breslin, while LAPD officers Carlton Olson and
Robert Torson attempted to physically restrain Turner during a vice sting. After Turner
reportedly “fell to the pavement,”
127
officers proceeded to handcuff Turner, who suffered a
gunshot wound to the chest, while they waited for an ambulance to arrive. LaVerne Turner was
pronounced dead at Central Receiving Hospital in the wee hours of the morning on March 8,
1970.
LaVerne Turner was a twenty year old Black person who graduated from Compton High
School in 1967. Turner, who is refereed to in press articles as a homosexual, a female
impersonator, and a transvestite, like many other people in Los Angeles, found employment in
the aerospace industry. A Mrs. A. Haynes, reported to Los Angeles Sentinel reporter Charles
Baireuther, that she worked with Turner for over a year at an aerospace firm in Culver City.
Haynes refers to Turner in her interview using male pronouns, suggesting that she read or
understood Turner as masculine in their mediated space of encounter, the workplace. However,
officer Carlton Olson, who initially pursued Turner while working an undercover vice shift in
South Central, claimed that he approached Turner, assuming Turner was a female sex worker.
Olson claims he spotted Turner while driving down Broadway Avenue near 53
rd
Street.
According to his official statement, Olson slowed his car at 53
rd
Street, at which point Turner
127 Baireuther, Charles. “Parents, Friends Do Not Accept Full Police Report.” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 19,
1970, 20.
102
approached and entered his vehicle, offering to give Olson a blow job for $15.
128
Having
entrapped Turner, Olson drove himself and Turner to 56
th
and Broadway, where they were met by
backup officers Robert Torson and Sergeant John Breslin. After instructing Turner to exit the car
and assume a position of arrest, officers report that Turner reached for small handgun hidden on
their person and proceeded to fire at officers.
Hours after Turner was pronounced dead at Central Receiving, unaware of Turner's
murder, 200 to 250 protestors, lead by several gay and lesbian organizations including Gay
Liberation Front, US Missions, and Metropolitan Community Church, marched from Civic
Center Plaza to downtown LAPD headquarters, demanding government intervention into vice
policing. The mobilization was planned to commemorate the death of Howard Efland, a Jewish
gay man who was beaten to death exactly one year earlier, on March 8, 1969, by LAPD vice
officers while seeking a sexual encounter at the downtown Dover Hotel, some fifty blocks north
of where Turner was murdered. In the case of Efland's death, a coroner's jury ruled his beating in
the course of arrest an “excusable homicide,” which outraged local gay activists, who believed
Efland to be the latest victim LAPD Chief Edward Davis' moral crusade against gays and
lesbians. In Turner's case, family and community organizers struggled to get even get a coroner's
inquest, a process through which a jury uses information provided by a Coroner to make a ruling
on the manner of death (Homicide, Suicide, Natural Causes) and, in the case of a police shooting,
whether or not a homicide was justifiable. Reverend Robert Humphries of United States Mission,
a politicized gay religious and service organization founded in 1962, reached out to Turner's
family and held a special memorial service for Turner, as he did for Efland, which Turner's
128 Baireuther, Charles. “Parents, Friends Do Not Accept Full Police Report.” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 19,
1970, 20.
103
family attended.
Robert Humphries, claimed Turner as a homosexual “brother,” in printed materials like
flyers and press releases. In their coverage of the incident, the Los Angeles Free Press, a gay-
friendly publication, affirmed Turner's gender non-conformity but challenged the claim that
officers mistook Turner for a female sex worker by questioning Turner's comportment during the
time of arrest. The Free Press article covering the March 8
th
rally asserts that that Turner died
wearing bell bottoms and a see-through t-shirt.
129
The Free Press sutured Turners death to the
anti-vice agenda of emerging gay liberationist and gay liberal organizations by casting Turner's
murder as an act of retaliation for the rally and march planned to commemorate Efland's 1969
murder.
130
Claiming Turner as a gay brother and a transvestite emblematizes the terms of political
order during this time period: visibility becomes an instrument of political and social
productivity for gay, lesbian, and queer organizations in Los Angeles and beyond. Acts of
publicly naming and claiming, which were made socially more possible by legal protections
gained through earlier rounds of homophile organizing, were used to craft a notion of sexual
difference that was essential to gay liberal politics. Policing was generative for this emerging
politics of sexual difference because it provided a material and discursive basis for the
uniqueness of sexuality as a category of social difference. For example, in both public statements
and press releases from United States Mission, the critique of criminalization focuses on the
uniqueness of sexual difference and the narrative of victimless crimes. “His only crime was
love,” was repeatedly invoked by Reverend Bob Humphries in public speeches and press
129 Los Angeles Free Press, March 20, 1970, “Larry LaVerne Turner” ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001,
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
130 Los Angeles Free Press, March 20, 1970, “Larry LaVerne Turner” ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001,
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
104
statements made about both Turner and Efland.
131

While the gay and lesbian left claimed Turner as one of their own, Turner's family
emphasized that Turner was a non violent person. When asked about Turner's sexuality, his
mother, Alice Lewis, responded, “the only thing I would like to say on the matter is I don't
believe my son had a gun. He never was a violent person.” Turner's Aunt also questioned the
alleged facts of the case, saying, “He never carried a gun or knife. He had been in the Navy and
received a medical discharge, but during the time he was in basic training he was unable to fire a
gun...He had some sort of psychological thing about guns.”
132
Charles Baireuther, the reporter for
the Sentinel who followed the story, writing two in-depth articles about Turner's murder, wrote in
his report that the Sentinel office received, “numerous phone calls...which described the victim,
Larry LaVerne Turner, 20...as a person who abhorred violence.”
133
This move on the part of
Turner's family and the Black press reflects how violence and risk became overrepresented as
defining characteristics of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles and in urban areas across the
United States.
George Lipsitz proposes that race and racism inform the production and management of
space through two dialectical processes: the racialization of space, and the spatialization of
race.
134
Real estate practices like racially restrictive covenants, red-lining and discriminatory
lending practices, tax distribution policies, and many others racialize space. These kinds of
practices affix racial difference to particular embodiments of human variation, but also to
131 US Mission Press Releases, 1970, “Dover Hotel” ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE National
Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
132 Baireuther, Charles. “Parents, Friends Do Not Accept Full Police Report.” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 19,
1970, 20.
133 Baireuther, Charles. “Parents, Friends Do Not Accept Full Police Report.” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 19,
1970, 20.
134 Lipsitz, George. "The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race Theorizing the Hidden Architecture
of Landscape." Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10-23.
105
particular places. The racialization of space, facilitates the spatialization of race (and vice-
versa), a process through which race and racism form a socio-spatial imaginary that makes racial
difference an unnamed driving force of uneven spatial development. In the case of Los Angeles,
housing segregation and employment discrimination throughout the postwar period facilitated
what Phil Ethington terms, segregated diversity, characterized by an increased demographic
diversity with sustained spatial clustering around race and ethnicity.
135
The ability of different
ethnic and racial groups to increasingly live outside of the city center represented an opening up
of the real estate market and increased economic opportunities for working class White people,
Chinese-American, Japanese-American, and some Mexican-American people as well as a limited
number of Black people. However, postwar social mobility was experienced unevenly; by 1970,
South Los Angeles, where LaVerne Turner was murdered, held a higher concentration of
unemployed Black people who had only attained limited representation in the industrial job
sector compared to other working class, people of color neighborhoods like East Los Angeles.
136

The response to the Watts Uprising exemplifies how the racialization of space can
facilitate the spatialization of race. Take for example, the 1965 McCone Commission report. The
McCone Commission was convened by the Governor to investigate the causes of and to propose
a social response to the 1965 Watts Uprising. The McCone Commission, postulated that the
urban uprisings of the 1960s would only intensify over time without necessary intervention. The
Commission casted violence as a psycho-social illness that is passed on hereditarily under
environmental conditions that breed failure. The report reads: “In examining the sickness in the
center of our city, what has depressed and stunned us most is the dull, devastating spiral of
135 Ethington, Philip J. "Segregated Diversity: Race-Ethnicity, Space, and Political Fragmentation in Los Angeles
County, 1940-1994." Report submitted to The John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation (2000).
136 Pulido, Laura. Black, brown, yellow, and left: Radical activism in Los Angeles. (Berkeley: Univ of California
Press, 2006), 40.
106
failure that awaits the average disadvantaged child in the urban core.”
137
The report further
asserted that unemployment was the biggest problem facing Black people in South Los Angeles.
The Commission proposed that unemployment breeds an anti-social attitude that parents in
“disadvantaged areas” pass on to their children. An iteration of the subculture of poverty thesis
that promulgated throughout the 1960s and into the present, the McCone Commission rendered
risk as a race-neutral category by using the discourse of cultural difference to explain why
poverty persists in so-called disadvantaged areas. Police violence, a central point of contention
between Watts residents and the city of Los Angeles, was abstracted as the imminent risk of
violence of the so-called underclass. The violence of the LAPD was imagined as a measured
response to a culture of violence that evolved in the minds of South Los Angeles residents. South
Los Angeles in the decades to follow became both a material site of struggle and policy
experimentation but also a social imaginary. After the Watts Uprising, South Los Angeles
became a synedoche for Black violence, and poverty; the bearer of both an inveterate and place-
specific social illness. Race becomes spatialized as a model of urban reform that makes poverty
the problem of non-white, particularly Black and Brown people and neighborhoods, instead of a
product of white supremacy and racial capitalism. Solving poverty in this context, comes to be a
putatively color-blind project of risk-management, one that characterizes urban reform and anti-
poverty strategies in a post-Civil Rights context. The spatialization of race matters for gay
organizing and organizations because the notions of racial inferiority and the underclass are
preserved in the federal and local mappings of risk and disadvantage, a model of urban
management that gay liberal organizations have to make their efforts legible to in order to
137 McCone, John A. "Violence in the city: An end or a beginning." Governor's Comm. on the Los Angeles
Riots (1965).
107
receive funding.
Few gay liberal mobilizations against policing during the 1970s and 80s, including those
carried out in Turner's name, connected vice policing to other racist and classist tactics of spatial
development and management like prostitution stings, quality of life policing, and racial
profiling. While more concerted efforts to bridge organizing between gay and lesbian
organizations and people of color did happen in the 1990s, especially after 1992, I am focusing
the on formative years of gay liberal police reform activism, precisely to understand why such
work became so critically necessary, when racial difference, racist violence, and racial and ethnic
identity based social movements served as a frame of reference for the homophile movement and
the gay liberation movements. For example, the coroner's inquest, a source of outrage in the
Efland case, had long been a site of struggle for Black and Brown people in Los Angeles.
138
In
1966, four years before Turner's murder, LAPD officers killed 25 year-old Leonard Deadwyler
near 60
th
and Avalon, almost around the corner from where Turner was killed, at 56
th
and
Broadway. Occurring just months after of the Watts Uprising, the coroner's inquest into Leonard
Deadwyler's murder took place over eight days and was the most covered local story of that
year.
139
The jury's decision to rule Deadwyler's death an accidental homicide illustrates not only
the supremacy of police power that was built deliberately during the Parker administration, but
also the iterative production of ineligibility for legal redress for particularized embodiments of
race, class, and gender.
In this context, the decision of LaVerne Turner's family to insist on Turner's non-violence
points us towards a contradiction that characterizes gay liberal organizing in this time period: the
138 In L.A City Limits, for example, Josh Sides talks about the 1948 murder of Herman Burns. Burns was beaten to
death by LAPD officers in 1948 during the course of a bar fight at the La Veda Ballroom in Los Angeles.
139 “Deadwyler Story Tops Local News Los Angeles Sentinel” Los Angeles Sentinel, Dec 22, 1966, A1.
108
simultaneous incorporation and disavowal of racial and class difference into the rhetoric of
sexual selfhood and the project of gay liberal institution building. That is to say, Turner's life or
more aptly, Turner's afterlife as an object of gay liberal concern can do the work of summoning a
shared sense of vulnerability that consolidates gay subjectivity. This work can happen without
any guarantee that gay liberal institution-building will destabilize the logics of criminality that
made Turner vulnerable to begin with. While Efland's murder was ruled excusable, the inherent
excusability of police violence in working class neighborhoods of color, like South Los Angeles,
made both murders possible. The Dover Hotel, where Efland was murdered, was in the heart of
historically working class and multi-racial Central district. During the 1960s, the Central district
was subject to quality of life policing in places like Pershing Square, in order to make way for
revitalization efforts and remained a hotspot for sex crimes arrests into the 1970s. While the
LAPD does begin to hone in on Hollywood throughout the postwar period and into the 1970s
and 80s, scenes of obliteration that mark this period are restricted to non-white neighborhoods.
For example, a few months after Turner's death, Miss Dakota, a popular local Black drag
performer, whose image appears in some of the advertisements in early editions of The
Advocate, was murdered during the course of a home invasion in South Los Angeles. Vice
policing in the Newton policing division, where both Turner and Miss Dakota were both
murdered, proceeded throughout the postwar period and continues into the present. What
LaVerne Turner and Miss Dakota's murders ask us to think about is how unprotectability
becomes a lived condition for particular embodiments of race, class, gender, and sexuality during
a time period characterized by the multiplication of political discourses of race, gender, and
sexuality.
109
While vice policing was criticized by gay liberal organizations, vice policing, and
particularly, curbing prostitution in South Central, which put Turner in LAPD crosshairs and
didn't save Miss Dakota's life, was something that some Black people in South Los Angeles
asked and organized for. For example, a March 1970 Los Angeles Times article reports a group of
70 South Los Angeles residents delivering a petition to City Council member John Gibson to
deal with the problem of prostitution and hustling.
140
A review of Los Angeles Police
Commission Records throughout the postwar period shows similar instances, where Black
residents petition the Police Commission for LAPD intervention into prostitution in South
Central and West Adams. Black residents appealed repeatedly to Tom Bradley, after he was
elected to city council in 1963, for LAPD presence in West Adams and South Central to curb
burglaries, prostitution, and other proclaimed nuisances.
141
Alice Lewis' insistence that her child
was “non-violent,” her refusal to comment on Turner's sexuality or gender, and her difficultly to
speak publicly about her child without allowing Turner's life to subsumed in any totalizing
narrative of gay brotherhood, Black violence, or sexual deviance makes sense begs the question:
is there a place for LaVerne Turner just be? Is there a kind of place where Turner's existence does
not need to be rhetorically or politically justified, claimed, categorized, tracked, or triaged
towards the end of social welfare or social justice?
Laverne Turner poses a disorderly presence in and on this chapter. Turner's entry into the
discourse of gay and lesbian politics indexes the social relationality of what Lisa Marie Cacho
refers to as unprotectability, the historically accrued status of permanent criminalization and
containment, a social positioning that is the disciplinary double to the rights-bearing citizen-self
140 “70 South Central Residents Complain About Prostitution,” Los Angeles Times, March, 12, 1970.
141 “Western-Adams Residents Seek Public Vice Action,” Los Angeles Times, Jan 30, 1961 and “Problem of
Prostitution Never-End for Police,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1965.
110
under neoliberal multiculturalism.
142
For Cacho, unprotectability isn't just about a present or
historical lack of political representation, although that is a contributing factor. Unprotectability
means that certain apparatuses of subjectivity, like the law for example, have historically
developed to consistently fail to protect certain groups of people from harm and / or premature
death in certain places, at certain times. One group's displacement from the shadows of
unprotectability doesn't displace unprotectability as mode and realm of existence.
Unprotectability asks us to think about the limit of identity politics in place, if as Norman Klein
suggests, every socio-spatial articulation requires an excess, evacuation, or removal of some
kind.
In the pages to come, I give an account of gay liberal organizations and their responses
to policing. In doing so, I grapple why such politics have been so unproductive at protecting
some of the very people in whose names they have proceeded. Historicizing the criminalization
of of sexuality and gender difference with an attention to race, as I have done in the previous
chapter, shows us how the levers of racial segregation did not have a totalizing effect in terms of
curbing inter-racial contact. The fact that Turner and Efland were both killed in heavily policed,
working-class multiracial neighborhoods, reinforces the idea that postwar cultures of sexual and
gender non-normativity developed in and alongside working class neighborhoods of color.
In the last chapter, I discussed how the criminalization of sexual and gender non-
conformity fit into the organizational growth of the LAPD. I also emphasized how queer
criminality always exceeds the political discourse and organizing that arises around queer
identity. This is because in Los Angeles, the criminalization of gender and sexual deviance and
142 Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social death: Racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected. (New
York: NYU Press, 2012), 5.
111
its categorization helps to consolidate the demographic groupings of people who would
eventually develop gay liberal organizations. In Los Angeles, postwar arrests for “Sex Crimes”
targeted white men primarily, but was driven by the racializaiton of space. While white men
made up greatest number of arrests for sex crimes from 1950 to 1970, the density of policing is
concentrated in working class neighborhoods of color and multi-racial contact zones. The
criminalization of gender and sexual deviance targeted Black, Latina, and White women for
Prostitution related offenses, White men for Sex Crimes, and increasingly, Brown and Black men
for Sex Crimes in smaller numbers, but in a higher relative proportion. The politicization of
queer criminality in Los Angeles in the 1970s, however, was dominated by gay liberal
institutions. During this period, Sex Crimes, became over-represented as the primary
constellation of penal codes that upheld queer criminality when in fact, they were not. This is
precisely why I chose to consider the range of primarily gay white male centric organizations and
efforts that comprise gay liberal police reform activism. These organizations attempted to
incorporate gays and lesbians across class lines into the project of sexual difference, often times,
celebrating or stylizing working class and youth embodiment in fundraising and advertising
efforts meant to consolidate the private capital of middle class and elite gays.
143
In doing so, they
focused on particular penal codes and categories of policing that valorized particular
embodiments of sexual and gender non-conformity differently. It is not just that gay liberal
organizations rhetorically and politically over-valued white masculinity, but that in producing
gay space, some of these organizations also valorized racial and class difference as a method of
building organizational stability. A political culture of reform liberalism and the onset of
143 For example, US Mission's began conducting an annual “Greasy Guy” contest in the mid-1970s, a costume
contest celebrated 1950s greaser culture. The money raised from this event helped the organization to retain the
Hudson House in 1978, one of US Missions' emergency shelter homes.
112
neoliberalism as a mode of governance form the context in which gay liberal organizations could
act as they did. I will continue by explaining why liberalism matters as the context for gay and
lesbian police reform in Los Angeles during the 1970s and 80s.
Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Gay Activism During the Bradley Years
What differentiates gay and lesbian organizing efforts against policing in the 1970s and
80s from those of the homophile era are the spatial claims these efforts made, and the proximity
of policing reform activism to the growth of gay institutions. While GLQ police protests in other
locations (like New York), are better remembered and documented, the first gay mass
mobilizations against the police happened in Los Angeles.
144
The Black Cat bar raid in 1967 led
to the formation of PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education), who began publishing
The Advocate, which became and remains a widely circulated gay periodical. The Advocate
brought together some of the people, ideas and resources that went into the establishment of the
Gay Community Services Center. The mobilizations that happened after the Black Cat raid also
resulted in the establishment of Troy Perry's Metropolitan Community Church, which becomes
an institutional container for the Gay Community Alliance.
145

Policing was generative of gay identity and gay organizations because addressing police
harassment of gays was a unifying spoke in the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights in Los
Angeles. LAPD chief Ed Davis emerged as a target because of his blatant public homophobia.
Davis routinely refused to sit down and meet with gay or lesbian organizations or individuals
because, in his view, the police chief didn't meet with criminals. Davis' refusal to acknowledge
144 Self, Robert O. "Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79." Gender &
History 20, no. 2 (2008): 288-311.
145 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006).
113
gays and lesbians as a minority group narrowed the criminalization gender and sexual deviance,
which took on various forms, into the rhetoric and politics of gay and lesbian identity. Gay
liberal organizations focused on describing themselves as law-abiding, tax paying citizens,
missing a critical alliance on the use of vagrancy codes, including lewd vagrancy to contain poor
people, immigrants, and other groups deemed undesirable.
In August of 1970, Davis blocked the parade permit for the first ever Christopher Street
West Parade, planned to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York. The action
was being sponsored by Gay Liberation Front, Troy Perry's Metropolitan Community Church,
and the Gay Community Services Center, among other gay organizations. During the Police
Commission hearing, Davis made comment and likened granting a permit to gays as tantamount
to legitimizing a band of burglars and robbers. He bookended his public comments with an
increased police presence at gay political and social events and sustained crackdowns on gay
bars, nude theaters, and all things considered obscene during his tenure.
146
While the ACLU was
able to assist organizers in eventually getting a permit, Davis' comments, and later his declaration
of gays as vice priority number one, cemented, for the time being, the antagonistic relationship
between the LAPD and gay and lesbian organizations. Davis further alienated gay and lesbian
activists after he refused to meet with gay organizations in October of 1971 and he was quoted in
the Herald-Examiner saying, “We are going to treat the gay liberation groups the same as female
prostitutes.”
147
Davis' adamant homophobia would eventually become productive for gay liberal
146 See Strub, Whitney. "The clearly obscene and the queerly obscene: Heteronormativity and obscenity in cold war
Los Angeles." American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 373-398 and Self, Robert O. "Sex in the City: The Politics
of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79." Gender & History 20, no. 2 (2008): 288-311.
147 Mention of Davis' remarks in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner article from Dec 17, 1971, an an undated
document titled “Homosexual Crackdown By Police” can be accessed in the Homophile Effort for Legal
Protection Subject Files: Box 4, Folder 10, Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated (HELP, INC.)
Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
114
organizing, as City Council shifted its attitude towards the LAPD, and funding for vice policing.
Davis' homophobia would eventually be used to argue that Davis was essentially wasting
taxpayer dollars to pursue an outmoded personal vendetta. Davis' explicit comparison between
gay liberationists and women sex workers, outlined the un-recognized boundaries of queer
criminality: the connection between criminalizing prostitution and criminalizing what becomes
gay identity. In equating gay liberationists and female sex workers, Davis is arguing that the
legality of criminalizing homosexuality is precisely hinged on the legality of criminalizing
prostitution. However, very scant organizational attention throughout the 1970s and 80s is given
to the criminalization of prostitution, not even for male sex workers, let alone women, trans,
and/or gender non-conforming sex workers. Gay liberal organizations decriminalize gay identity
precisely through the exclusion of prostitution as a site of legislative reform.
The ability of gay liberal organizations to convince everyday people to identity with and
participate in a public culture of protest and advocacy was conditioned by multi-scalar liberal
transformations. First, sexual liberalism flourished throughout the late 1950s and 60s. Legal
victories at the close of the 1950s around homosexual free speech in ONE Inc. vs. Oleson, 1958
and around what counts as obscene (Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 1957)
supported the multiplication of sexual subcultures by removing content restrictions on
publications that were circulated via mail. In Los Angeles however, sexual liberalism that was
enforced federally by the Supreme Court was met locally with a police crackdown on obscenity,
public nudity, and lewd behavior.
Locally, the mayoral administration of Tom Bradley, from 1973 to 1993, facilitated a shift
in city politics that over time, embraced gay liberal institutions into the milieu of urban
115
management. The political bloc that re-elected Bradley to five terms was assembled strategically
through alliance building with downtown finance capitalists, organized labor, and a multi-racial
coalition of Black, White liberal, and Jewish liberal voters.
148
Bradley's election in 1973 marked
the beginning of a period of reform liberalism in city politics. Bradley's tenuous political bloc
however, tempered his ability to adequately redistribute wealth and resources by shifting city
budget priorities. Instead, Bradley's strategy was to leverage outside funding to fund social
services and re-invest in South Central, and then foster longer term economic growth and jobs
through redeveloping downtown and creating pathways for foreign investment by assembling a
pro-business City Hall.
149
Within the first month of Bradley's election, Bradley successfully
lobbied for a leftover half-million dollars in U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare
funds and used it as seed money for the development of the City V olunteer Corps through a grant
from federal ACTION funds and for local job training programs through a grant from the U.S.
Department of Labor. By fiscal year 1978, grants to the city totaled $412.7 million, up from
$99.1 million in fiscal year 1972, the year before Bradley's election. Federal grants became the
means to deliver on campaign promises made to poor people, particularly poor Black and Brown
people, without upsetting the business alliance through increased taxation. The LAPD budget
peaked during the Yorty mayoral administration at 22% of the total budget in 1972. Bradley was
able to reign in the LAPD budget to 17%, but primarily by capping police pensions and limiting
148 On downtown finance capitalists and the Bradley administration see Davis, Mike. "Chinatown, revisited? the"
internationalization" of downtown Los Angeles." Sex, Death and God in LA (Random House, Inc., New York
1992), and Soja, Edward W., Michael Peter Smith, and Joe R. Feagin. Economic restructuring and the
internationalization of the Los Angeles region. (Blackwell, 1987). On organized labor see: Regalado, James A.
"Organized Labor and Los Angeles City Politics An Assessment in the Bradley Years, 1973-1989." Urban
Affairs Review 27, no. 1 (1991): 87-108. For Bi-racial coalitions and the Bradley administration see Sonenshein,
Raphael. Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. (Princeton University Press, 1993).
149 Sonenshein, Raphael. Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. (Princeton University Press,
1993).
116
equipment purchases, not by significantly decreasing the number of sworn officers.
150
At the federal level, the Bradley administration's ability to fund social services through
contingent and external funding sources was enhanced by the General Revenue Sharing program.
General Revenue Sharing was a funding scheme developed by U.S. Keynesian economist Walter
Heller, and was signed into law by President Nixon in October of 1972. Through the General
Revenue Sharing program, federal tax dollars were distributed to state and local governments to
fund programs or cover budget deficits. The General Revenue Sharing (GRS) program lasted
until 1986 and during that time, $85 billion in federal revenues were distributed to states and
municipalities. It is in this context that gay liberal institutions used service provision as a tactic to
incorporate themselves into the political milieu of city and county politics. The GRS program
and Bradley's enthusiasm for a “self-help” approach to funding social services created an
opportunity for community organizations to boost their organizational capacity with federal
funding. The trade-off was that funding guidelines required community organizations to adopt a
professional structure. For example, to be eligible for GRS funds through Los Angeles County,
organizations had to provide a mission statement, organizational by-laws, a description of the
organization's structure, an organizational history, and an itemized budget describing how funds
would be spent. Organizations also had to explain how their work addressed federally defined
high-need or high-risk service areas and / or populations. Another consequence of the increasing
incorporation of community based organizations into the project of state-funded social services
was the re-spatializaiton of social services provision. Throughout the 1970s, as War on Poverty
programs and infrastructure were dismantled, job training, basic needs, emergency housing, and
150 Sonenshein, Raphael. Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. (Princeton University Press,
1993), 158.
117
other social services were increasingly being provided by community based organizations, non-
profits, and other voluntary sector agencies.
151
The siting of services became less intentional and
more sporadic as community groups and non-profits entered into market relationships with the
local and federal governments and private foundations and charities. While the federal
government did mandate service areas and populations, Los Angeles city council was able to
successfully funnel federal grants into every council district in spite of federal regulations and
mandated service areas.
152
Additionally, community organizations that may have been providing
key services in areas of need may not receive funding if they don't have the know-how to apply
or meet the eligibility requirements. In that regard, the siting of social services themselves
became more of a reflection of organizational capacity for self-help and self-advocacy rather
than of actual need.
The era of reform liberalism in Los Angeles city politics becomes an important context
for gay and lesbian police reform efforts because gays and lesbians in Los Angeles were
articulating gay and lesbian as a mode of selfhood, a market, and a political bloc at the same time
as they were organizing to de-escalate homophobic policing. These efforts were happening
during a transition period in city politics during which perceived old guard conservative cabals
were being displaced by a seemingly more progressive, more multi-racial, city government.
Liberalism both created the conditions of possibility for gay and lesbian groups and
organizations to gain legitimacy in city politics and also limited the ability of these organizations
and groups to adequately address the full breadth of the criminalization of gender and sexual
deviance. In other words, reform liberalism constrained the development of different kinds of
151 Wolch, Jennifer R. The shadow state: Government and voluntary sector in transition. Foundation Center, 1990.
152 Sonenshein, Raphael. Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. (Princeton University Press,
1993), 164-169.
118
political approaches to organizing around sexuality by encouraging activists to adopt a more
professionalized, service-based model of political reform, one that they had just witnessed
successfully change the landscape of city politics.
These multi-scalar transformations in liberalism can be understood as episodic scalar re-
configurations in the longer arc of the transition to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism as a mode of
political-economy couples austerity with opportunity. The intentional uneven distribution of
austerity and opportunity across space as well as their simultaneous and overlapping operation
provides the motive power for producing and capturing value under neoliberalism. David
McNally argues this, noting how neoliberalism transformed the world economy through creative
destruction. Parting from economists that associate long-term capitalist prosperity with value
recouped during the postwar, golden era of capitalism, McNally argues that the “boom period”
ended with a global recession in 1980-1982, preceded by a slump in the mid 1970s.
153
In order to
create new sources of profitability and accumulation, neoliberal capitalists created new
opportunities for capital (via financialization and the spatial re-organization of labor-intensive
production to places with large surplus labor populations and low wages) and extracted value via
austerity, disciplining working class living standards, depressing real wages, while increasing
worker productivity and thereby rates of exploitation, and further enclosing and appropriating the
commons across the globe. McNally argues that neoliberalism's creative destruction is inherently
unstable because it tends towards the fall of profitability and the over-accumulation of capital.
This is because, if we follow Marx's assertion, that human labor is the only true source of surplus
value under capitalism. By polarizing wealth, depressing real wages, and expanding productive
153 See McNally, David. Global slump: The economics and politics of crisis and resistance. (PM Press, 2011) and
McNally, David. "From financial crisis to world-slump: accumulation, financialisation, and the global
slowdown." Historical Materialism 17, no. 2 (2009): 35-83.
119
technology, neoliberal economic strategies facilitate a steady human recession: unemployment,
debt, and poverty. Under neoliberalism, economic growth always reaches a periodic limit,
becoming stagnant because the rate of realizing capital into more capital slows down, decelerated
by a consistent human recession.
The neoliberal state emerged as the state's capacity to govern was re-tooled through the
contraction of social services at different scales (municipalities, state governments, the federal
government). The state, despite being a constellation of contradictory relations, tended towards
privatization of public goods and siding with capital against labor in decisive struggles, such as
the Air Traffic Controllers strike of 1980. Deregulation created risky opportunities for capitalists
to attempt to boost working class consumption globally in the context of declining real wages,
such as the expansion of consumer credit and subprime lending. We can think of the neoliberal
state's expansion of the voluntary sector as a part of these kinds of attempts as well. In this
context we can better understand how the invitation become ensconced in the milieu of
governance through social service provision appeared as an opportunity to community groups
and political organizations in the United States. Understanding how these multi-scalar
transformation in liberalism play out in the context of social movements helps us understand how
neoliberalism as a mode of spatial organization and governance, as a scale-making project,
intersects the articulation and practice of the radical demand for self-determination and the
attendant subjectivities that emerged from post WWII era oppositional political formations like
Black Power, Third World Liberation, and Gay Liberation.
Liberal scalar transformations like the expansion individual rights, and the expansion of
the voluntary sector, that formed the context of possibility for the emergence for gay liberal
120
police reform activism in Los Angeles, refracted the oppositional impulse of identity politics and
political activism through the double prism of opportunity and austerity. While the growth of the
voluntary sector of governance and the expansion of individual rights created opportunities for
activists and saved peoples' lives, both opportunities exerted a normalizing force on the
oppositional aspirations of political activists and political organizations. Both opportunities ask
groups of people to demonstrate proof of injury and demonstrate their singularity and uniqueness
as a group in order to be legible through the terms and modes of political representation. As we
will see, this pressure tended towards reifying existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies.
The protests around Turner's and Efland's murders direct us towards an emergent
constellation of gay liberal organizations and efforts aimed at police reform. During the rally on
March 8, 1970 to protest Efland's murder, organizers delivered a letter addressed to LAPD chief
Edward Davis, demanding that the officers involved in Efland's beating be charged with murder
and that the vice squad be abolished. The signatories included Robert Humphries, of United
States Mission, Jim Kepner, who had been an active member of several homophile organizations
in the 1950s and 60s, Morris Kight, then Secretary of Gay Liberation Front, Cliff Letttieri,
President of Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (H.E.L.P), Helen Niehaus, President of
Society of Anubis, Troy Perry, Pastor of Metropolitan Community Church, and Don Slater, editor
of Tangents magazine. I will not have time to address the work of all these organizations in this
chapter, but this letter gives us key insight into the beginnings of mainstream gay and lesbian
institution building as it was happening.
Police-reform activism in Los Angeles drew together a range of organizations across the
political spectrum, from the more conservative Society of Anubis, to the left-leaning Gay
121
Liberation Front (an organization I will discuss more in the next chapter). Most of these
organizations did not question the logic of policing itself, but instead, advanced the notion that
the crime of being gay or lesbian was a victimless one and that law enforcement capacity would
be better spent dealing with “real” crime. These organizations and others that grew out of the
resources and social networks of the organizations named above, made remarkable progress dis-
affiliating gay and lesbian subjectivity from the tropes of criminality, dysfunction, and pathology
that underwrote the criminalization of sexual and gender deviance throughout the postwar
period. In this chapter I will focus on United States Mission, Homophile Effort for Legal
Protection (H.E.L.P.), Gay Community Alliance (GCA), and the Los Angeles Gay Community
Services Center's (GCSC) Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (GLPATF).
These groups cover an arc of police reform activism beginning 1970 and ending roughly around
the late 1980s. These organizations were able to convince everyday people, other organizations,
and city officials that gays and lesbians formed a unique cluster of risk and reward that should be
included in the political and economic milieu of community and non-profit governance. As a
result, some of these organizations, like United States Mission and the GCSC, now the Los
Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, were able to build themselves into large, long-standing
institutions. Other organizations, like HELP and GCA, rose and fell as internal organizational
goals became less clear. The demands, framing, and internal struggles of these organizations
illustrate how policing forced people to posit the connection between race, gender, and sexuality
and struggle over the meaning and function of gay and lesbian identity and politics.
None of the these organizations alone can claim responsibility for a decisive victory
against the LAPD. Instead these organizations de-criminalized gay and lesbian identity by
122
claiming and producing space. The result was a shift in political orientation towards gays and
lesbians by local politicians that gradually fomented a shift in LAPD attitudes and practices
towards gays, lesbians, and gay and lesbian establishments. When I say these groups produced
space, I mean it in terms of Lefebvre's formulation of space as being constituted through social
relations: practices, representation and knowledge production, and signs, symbols and accruals of
affect.
154
Gay liberal organizations claimed spaces of practice like bars, clubs, and cruising spots
as their own in the face of law enforcement crackdowns on lewdness and obscenity. They
claimed representational space, articulating and imagining sexuality and gay identity as a site of
political and economic power. For example, after the Black Cat raids in 1967, gay activists
organized a campaign to defeat city councilman Paul Lamport in 1971, who they believed was to
blame for the raids of gay bars in the Silverlake area. Lamport himself acknowledged the “gay
vote,” when he lost saying, “I’m inclined to think that the final vote was the vote of about 3,000
homosexuals who’re probably pretty pleased today that they were able to defeat me.”
155
Gay
liberal power brokers like Morris Kight, who was trained in public policy administration,
imagined how this new sexual minority, gays and lesbians (and at times transvestites and
transsexuals), could fit into the milieu of city development and social services provision. Gays
and lesbians also created spaces of representation, they crafted new ways of pleasure, desire,
kinship and belonging; a new way of feeling and being oneself. Gay liberal organizations
leveraged these accumulations of signs, symbols and affect to encourage and incite other people
to participate in political activism.
154 Lefebvre, Henri. The production of space. V ol. 142. Blackwell: Oxford, 1991.
155 Self, Robert O. "Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79." Gender &
History 20, no. 2 (2008): 288-311.
123
Gay Liberal Police Reform Activism, 1970 – 1989
United States Mission
United States Mission (US Mission) was the oldest organization in the constellation of
gay liberal organizations organizing around the queer criminalization. US Mission described
itself as, “a group of militant queens,”
156
and functioned primarily as a religious service
organization. US Missions created a gay accepting and gay-centric social space for low-income,
poor, and homeless people in Los Angeles to receive food, clothing, job training, and emergency
shelter. Being one of the oldest gay organizations in Los Angeles, US Missions was poised to
serve as one institutional hub for organizing around the Efland, Turner, and Hartley murders. US
Mission was founded in 1962 by Reverend Robert Humphries and other gay members of a gay
religious coterie called, Order of the Androgyne, headed primarily by white gay men including
Humphries, Pat Lenhoff, Morris Kight, and Pat Rocco. Kight's and Rocco's involvement is
notable because Kight was a coordinating member of Gay Liberation Front Los Angeles and both
Kight and Rocco were a part of the formation of the Gay Community Services Center. By 1970,
US Mission was expanding their aid program into San Francisco, where they organized the first
Gay Pride parade. Over time, US Mission would grow into a national religious service
organization and their anti-capitalist politics would shift as the leadership changed.
Although they were a gay political organization headed primarily by white gay men, US
Missions saw poor Angelenos, regardless of sexual orientation and race, as their target audience.
Several undated flyers from the 1970s, for example, make such appeals: “Our place is clean and
warm and our people are friendly. If you want something much better than the streets – we're
156 Program from Efland Memorial in 1971 held by US Missions from the “Dover Hotel” Subject File at ONE:
“Dover Hotel,” ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los
Angeles, California.
124
here. Black – White – Straight – Gay – All are welcome!”
157
US Mission provided food and
clothes to poor people, emergency housing for homeless gays and lesbians, and employment
leads and job training. US Mission also worked to transform everyday homophobia by writing
and publishing gay religious tracts for public dissemination.
US Mission contributed to police-reform efforts by raising public awareness around the
murders of Efland, Turner, and Frank Hartley. US Mission issued press releases for both
murders, narrativizing the events surrounding both deaths. This was an important thing to do
because in the case of Efland's murder, the Rabbi officiating over his funeral services told
attendees that Efland died of a heart attack.
158
Furthermore, mainstream media refused to cover
the story of Efland's murder, save for the radical Los Angeles Free Press.
159
Outrage over the
coroner's inquest that ruled Efland's murder justifiable was exacerbated in February of 1972,
when Deputy Medical Examiner Donald Stuart was arrested for felony perjury. Stuart, who was
the coroner that ruled Efland's death a justifiable homicide, had lied about his educational
background and perjured himself in a 1969 hearing that lead to the dismissal of the Chief
Medical Examiner at time, Thomas Noguchi. Gay activists believed that if Noguchi hadn't been
dismissed, that Efland's murder would not have been ruled justifiable.
160
Some Angelenos
suspected that Noguchi was fired because he was disliked by the medical elite, a consequence of
his unwavering professionalism.
161
Following his dismissal in 1969, Noguchi led a coalition of
157 Undated Brochure, United States Mission Collection, Coll2012.125, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives,
Los Angeles, California.
158 Undated Press Release on Howard Efland's murder, United States Mission Collection, Coll2012.125, ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
159 The role of independent media in the crafting of gay politics cannot be over-stated. The Advocate, which was
born out of the The Black Cat Raids, became a which lead to the establishment of The Advocate, The use of
print culture here underscores why the One Inc. v. Oleson and Roth v. United States cases were so important to
the proliferation of sexual subcultures.
160 “Protest Meeting” Berkeley Barb (Berkeley, CA), February, 11, 1972.
161 “A Nasty Thought.” Hollywood Citizen-News (Los Angeles, CA), August 5, 1969, “Dover Hotel,” ONE Subject
File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
125
local politicians, members of the LAPD and Sheriff's Department, as well as local attorneys in a
Blue Ribbon Panel that studied the racial inequalities inherent in the coroner's inquest procedures
and proposed recommendations to curb corruption.
162
The panel specifically highlighted the way
the coroner's inquest over-represented the views of law enforcement in ways that systematically
devalued the lives of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles.
163
Once Stuart's falsification was
discovered, Noguchi was reinstated by the Civil Service Commission in 1972.
Stuart's arrest renewed gay outrage over Efland's murder; this time organizers sought to
“scale-up” their actions by mobilizing in San Francisco. US Mission worked with Gay Liberation
Front who had been staging “Gay-Ins” across Los Angeles to plan another demonstration on
March 8, 1972 in San Francisco to call attention to the killing of gay people by police on the
West Coast.
164
This time in protestors marched from Civic Center Plaza downtown to front of the
Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue, to appeal to the federal government to intervene on
LAPD vice policing. The ability to organize in San Francisco was aided by the fact that US
Mission had recently incorporated a San Francisco chapter. The 1972 mobilization, themed “Gay
Genocide in America,” brought together a more liberal-leaning and progressive grouping of
organizations including the newly minted Gay Community Services Center and the Society for
Individual Rights, compared to the March 8, 1970 mobilization.
US Missions couched its critique of vice policing in the rhetoric of self-expression and
162 Williford, Stanley. “Coroner's Inquest Procedures Studied by Blue Ribbon Panel.” Los Angeles Times August,
14, 1969.
163 Williford, Stanley. “Coroner's Inquest Procedures Studied by Blue Ribbon Panel.” Los Angeles Times August,
14, 1969. This article also reports on a forum held by the Blue Ribbon Panel on the issue in August of 1969.
Panel Member Johnny Cochran said about the coroner's inquest procedure: “the system largely brings out only
the view of the police and police witnesses and many questions as left unanswered.” Frank Munoz, another
Panel member said, “...in the Mexican-American community it is a foregone conclusion that a police killing will
be ruled justifiable homicide.”
164 “Protest Meeting” Berkeley Barb (Berkeley, CA), February, 11, 1972.
126
individual rights. For US Mission, vice policing worked to socially stigmatize gays and lesbians
and alienate out gays and lesbians from civil society. Alienation from civil society, in Humphries'
view increased vulnerability to poverty and anti-social behavior. For US Mission, ending vice
policing was the first step in creating an environment where all people had the freedom of self-
expression and could therefore pursue self-actualization without social ostracism. It it unclear
from archival records the breadth of US Missions participation in police-reform activism
throughout the 1970s, but they did provide a vital organizational hub in the beginnings of gay
organizing around vice policing in Los Angeles at a time when other gay liberal organizations,
like the Gay Community Services Center, were still in their formative stages. After the 1972
mobilizations, US Mission recedes as a visible presence in the struggle to reform vice policing.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s US Mission expanded themselves as a service provider, acquiring
new property for their emergency housing program and expanding their fundraising power by
opening a thrift store.
Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (HELP)
While US Mission worked with other Los Angeles organizations to scale-up gay
organizing around in policing in 1972, Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (HELP) another
participant in the 1970 Efland mobilizations, was in the midst of building a membership driven
organization of gays, lesbians, and gay bar owners to address the problem of police raids,
entrapment, and harassment at gay bars. HELP was formed in 1968 after a raid at the Patch, a
working class bar in Wilmington. While the PRIDE and The Advocate were formed as an attempt
to address policing after the Black Cat raids, many organizations, especially HELP, felt that the
127
managers of the Advocate weren't doing anything on the ground.
165
HELP was incorporated as a
non-profit in 1970 and developed a AAA-type service that included a 24-hour call line, bail
service, and legal referrals. The annual rate for individual HELP membership in 1971 was $15.
The benefits of membership included 24-hour free legal advice on any subject, and immediate
bail for any misdemeanor charges and / or the felony charges of oral copulation or sodomy. Bail
was required to be repaid by the individual to HELP at a rate of 10% per week, interest free. If an
individual member was arrested in a member establishment, then bail was provided for free.
Later on, HELP members amended membership rules and created two forms of individual
membership: general membership ($10 annual fee) and voting membership ($60 annual fee).
Meeting minutes from March 28, 1973 indicate that HELP membership reached an all time high
that year, with 750 paid members.
166

Although HELP did negotiate with the LAPD at times, especially on the issue of Own
Recognizance release for misdemeanor sex crime bookings, organizers put a majority of their
capacity into building a base of gay capital that could be leveraged to meet the needs of
individuals and businesses in need on a case-by-case basis. HELP operated primarily on
volunteer labor; the organization was ran by a board and leadership was composed mostly of
white men and sometimes white women. The leadership diversified throughout the 1970s and
HELP was slightly more multiracial by the late 1970s, near its official end in 1980.
167
HELP
funded its work primarily by charging a membership fee for individuals and bar owners seeking
165 HELP Inc Newsletter 2:1, January 15, 1971, Box 4: 3, Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated
(HELP, Inc.), Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
166 Meeting Minutes, March 28, 1973, Box 4: 1, Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated (HELP, Inc.),
Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
167 Letter to State of California officially disbanding HELP, 1980, Box 1: 1 Homophile Effort for Legal Protection,
Incorporated (HELP, Inc.), Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles,
California.
128
legal help or protection.
Towards, the end of 1972, with almost 800 paid members and at least 50 member
establishments, HELP decided to expand by opening up a center in September in West
Hollywood at 7221 Santa Monica Boulevard. HELP envisioned the center as a place where
people in the West Hollywood, Hollywood, and San Fernando Valley could get legal counseling
and employment help, a place where gay organizations, like the Gay Community Alliance, could
hold meetings and have office space. Their organizational documents provide little insight into
why HELP thought they needed to create a center, given that the Gay Community Services
Center had recently opened. However, by 1976, HELP had completely dropped the center idea
and focused on rebuilding membership, which was starting to decline.
HELP also organized the Tavern and Guild Association; bars and taverns could pay a
membership fee of $60 that included free legal assistance for issues like licensing and permits
and legal assistance for any bar patron arrested in the establishment, even if the individual was
not a HELP member. The bar membership also designated the owner or manager as an individual
member and covered up to 4 on-duty employees. For a fee of $100, bars and taverns could enjoy
all of the above benefits plus coverage for up to 9 on-duty employees.
168
When HELP first began
offering these services, they had six member establishments: the Black Pipe near Mid-City,
Hounds Tooth in Garden Grove, Joani Presents in North Hollywood, Ruby Rue in Inglewood,
Sewers of Paris in Hollywood, and The Wellington Club, a Wilmington based bath house.
169
By
beginning of the next year, bar and tavern membership had grown to include fifty different
establishments, as well as several organizational affiliates, like the Society of Anubis. HELP's
168 HELP Inc Newsletter 1:1 September, 1970, Box 4: 2, Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated
(HELP, Inc.), Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
169 HELP Inc Newsletter 1:1 September, 1970, Box 4:2, Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated
(HELP, Inc.), Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
129
protection strategy paid off. For example in August of 1972, when the Black Pipe, a newer
leather bar, was raided by the police, HELP mobilized its attorneys and bondsmen and had all 21
arrestees bailed out immediately and eventually, twenty of the twenty-one arrestees exonerated
of all charges.
170
HELP subsequently filed a $100,000 lawsuit against the LAPD for damages,
arguing the arrests jeopardized the “reputation and standing of the conservative legal aid
organization, resulting from the false arrests of many persons.”
171

HELP also organized gay and / or gay-friendly attorneys to offer discounted legal
services for people arrest for sex crimes. For example, in their September newsletter, HELP
quotes the market rate for a Lewd Conduct defense at $800 to $1200. With a HELP membership,
however, the price is reduced to $150 to $300. What HELP sought to do was consolidate gay
capital and leverage it to train the legal system to decriminalize gays by making sure that gays
arrested for particular gay offenses: PC 286 – Sodomy, PC 288(a) – Oral Copulation, PC 314 –
Lewd or Obscene Conduct, PC 647(a) – Solicitation of Lewd Conduct, didn't spend significant
time in jail, or go bankrupt defending themselves. Although membership did entitle one to bail
assistance for any misdemeanor, HELP's focus on “Sex Crimes,” automatically streamlined their
audience to focus on white gay men. Lesbians, and women in general, were more often arrested
for prostitution related codes than the collection of penal codes described as Sex Crimes, which
HELP organizing left untouched. Incomplete records make it difficult to estimate how many
bails and legal references HELP arranged during the peak of their years of activity, 1970 – 1974,
but scattered records from a few months in 1971 show at least 60 individual cases from the
months of October, December, April and May combined.
170 Freeman, Ima, “Help Line,”, Box 4:6 Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated (HELP, Inc.),
Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
171 Drummer V olume 2:3, November 15, 1972, Box 4:5 Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, Incorporated
(HELP, Inc.), Records, Coll2008-052, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
130
By the late 1970s, HELP was facing waning membership, financial issues, and a lack of
organizational clarity. They quickly lost the HELP center, after moving locations and having to
pay double rent. Also by the late 1970s, membership began to wane, which made the bail
program unsustainable. HELP began to circulate “No Bail” lists for volunteers, to avoid bailing
out members who had not yet already paid back their bail amounts. By 1980, the HELP
Executive Board filed papers with the state of California to officially disband the organization.
Gay Community Alliance (GCA)
Gay Community Alliance (GCA) was founded in 1971 under the leadership of Craig
Hanson, Frank Zerilli, and David Glascock. Upset by the consistent failure of AB 473, the
Brown Bill, which would have legalized all consenting adult sexual behavior, the founders of
GCA sought to create a group focused solely on building gay political power. GCA founders felt
like the issue of police harassment required a concerted effort undistracted by the work of service
provision.
172
Inspired by the Gay Activists Alliance in New York and Chicago, and frustrated
with rifts between radicals and moderates in Gay Liberation Front, members pursued an
aggressive agenda of gay civil rights, that focused on organizing gays and lesbians as a voting
block and ramping up non-violent, non-sectarian protests against LAPD vice policing. While
they had a short organizational lifespan, GCA formed an ardent force of non-violent direct action
against the LAPD that often worked in conjunction with organizations like HELP and the Gay
Community Service Center, who focused more on building membership and service provision in
the early 1970s. Incomplete records make it difficult to know how many members GCA had at its
172 ”An Invitation to Participate in Activities of the Gay Community Alliance,” May 10, 1971, Gay Community
Alliance Collection, Coll2011-045, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
131
height, although undated membership rosters list 40 different names and addresses.
Members recognized early on that neoliberal multiculturalism sutured political
representation to legible categories of social identity and attempted to organize gays as an
identity category around a political platform, that included building a “gay vote,” and courting
political candidates in local politics as a method of pushing for reform of police practices. They
defined the scope of their work early on, saying that they were “Activist, Political, Male-
Oriented, Educational, Local, and Fraternal.”
173
In their call to action members write, “GCA is
Male-Oriented. Focusing on the pressing legal and political needs of male homosexuals and
seeking a social atmosphere liberating to males, but GCA is sympathetic to the separate problems
of Gay Women and Transsexuals.”
174

GCA eschewed certain acts of institutionalization that other gay liberal organizations
followed like getting office space, or having paid staff and instead relied on active voting
members and a member elected Executive Board to drive the decision-making, goals, and daily
work of the organization. Although GCA listed a mailing addressing of 525 N. Laurel Ave,
90048, they operated publicly from the Metropolitan Community Church, hosting all of their
public events, meetings, and forums there. By 1972, GCA boasted “having involved over 4000
gay people in the Los Angeles area in politics,”
175
in a letter campaign aimed at building
relationships with local and national politicians including Sam Yorty, Shirley Chisholm, George
McGovern, and Assemblyman Willie Brown Jr. (sponsor of the Brown Bill, AB 437). In the
173 “An Invitation to Participate,” May 10, 1971, Gay Community Alliance Collection, Coll2011-045, ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
174 “Statement of Purpose and Call to Action,” March, 2, 1971, Gay Community Alliance Collection, Coll2011-045,
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
175 Letter to Senator George McGovern, dated January 7, 1972, inviting him to come to address GCA members in
Los Angeles. In the letter, President David Glascock promises McGovern an audience of at least 800 people.
Gay Community Alliance Collection, Coll2011-045, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles,
California.
132
letter, GCA distanced themselves from the more confrontational gay liberationist crowd writing,
“Though we oppose anti-homosexual policies by every appropriate means, we are not inflexibly
anti-police or anti-establishment.”
176
Beginning in 1971, GCA began to hold monthly Political
Forums that featured local politicians and attorneys speaking on gay civil rights issues. GCA
used the political forums to build a gay voting bloc and build relationships with members of city
council such as Joel Wachs, Arthur K. Snyder, Robert Stevenson, and Ed Edelman.
GCA used direct protest to challenge the LAPD more than any other gay liberal
organization. They claimed the space of Hollywood, frequently using Hollywood High as a
rallying point for marches and rallies against LAPD Vice. When GCA was first founded they
worked with HELP to compile information on police harassment of gay people and
establishments. GCA sought to increase police accountability to the gay community by regularly
attending LAPD Police Commission meetings and filing grievances at those meetings based on
the information they collected. They demanded the resignation of Ed Davis, and end to Davis'
public inflammatory remarks about gay people, a police liaison for the gay community, a review
of policing practices around enforcing solicitation laws in gay establishments, and the right of
gays to make complaints of police conduct without fear of reprisal.
177
In October of 1973, GCA's
persistence paid off, when the Los Angeles Police Commission ruled that they would now
schedule special meetings, open to the public, where a group spokesperson could file grievances
on behalf of individual members of that group. The ruling, supported by Mayor Bradley, was
described by David Glascock, former GCA president as, “a victory for all minorities with gay
liberation in the vanguard.”
178
By this point, Glascock, a founding member, had resigned due to
176 Letter to senator George McGovern, January 7, 1972, Gay Community Alliance Collection, Coll2011-045, ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
177 “LA Gays Gain Police Board Ear.” The Advocate, October 24, 1973, 1.
178 “LA Gays Gain Police Board Ear.” The Advocate, October 24, 1973, 1.
133
in-fighting and pressure from his employer to contain his public activism with GCA. Glascock
continued his police reform work through the auspices of the Gay Community Action Council,
and participated in the 1973 hearings of the Police Commission, filing several grievances on
behalf of gay men arrested by LAPD vice officers.
Gay Community Alliance devoted a significant amount of time to building gay political
power. They started a political forum in 1971, inviting city and state politicians and lawyers to
dialogue with the gay public about gay civil rights and educating members about their rights and
what to do in case of arrest. Because they eschewed non-profit status, GCA was able to lobby for
political candidates. For the 1973 city elections, GCA endorsed Tom Bradley for mayor, Steve
Pines for City attorney, and Robert Stevenson for city council in District 13. GCA also endorsed
a slate of candidates for the Board of Education and Board of Trustees in City Council District 3.
GCA's political ticket of Bradley and Pines, in particular, puts pressure on the notion that the
liberal transformation of Los Angeles city politics was accomplished primarily through a
powerful bi-racial coalition.
179
Both HELP and GCA supported Pines for City Attorney and
vetted him through the GCA political forum. Pines was an attractive candidate to gay liberal
organizations because he promised to minimize prosecution of non-violent gay sex crimes arrests
if elected. Once elected, Pines did in fact go on record and say that he planned to shift the
priorities of the City Attorney's office in relation to gay-related arrests.
180
GCA quickly faced capacity issues early on in their organizing work. They recognized
quickly that keeping people engaged in long political battles was difficult without creating
consistent places for social engagement like the bars nights, themed parties, and performances
179 Sonenshein, Raphael. Politics in black and white: Race and power in Los Angeles. Princeton University Press,
1993.
180 “Pines to Minimize Prosecutions for Activity in Gay Bars.” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1974.
134
other gay liberal organizations hosted regularly to raise money and bring people together. While
GCA avoided service provision as a tactic to devote more time to direct action, by not offering
services or spaces of sociality, GCA organizers found it difficult to increase their membership.
Members began a short-lived publication called Lewd Conduct, to help bring more people into
the organization, but capacity to produce Lewd Conduct waned by April of 1974, and organizers
agreed to suspend publication. Finances were also an issue from the beginning; after four months
of organizing GCA was already in debt and their debt continued to increase. By 1972, meeting
minutes, reveal that GCA was almost $700 dollars in debt.
An internal split over who to support in the 1973 election for district attorney, Marge
Buckley, a lesser known peoples' candidate, versus Ray Bugliosi, further divided the group. For
example, in a 1973 communique member Reverend Mikhail Itkin, of the Peoples' Church,
announced his resignation from the group. In the letter, Itkin voices his hesitancy around GCA's
single issue approach. Itkin criticizes GCA for putting organizational energy into supporting the
Brown Bill, which he believes will be ineffective if passed. It is notable that Itkin still wished to
remain a member in name because of his belief that “GCA and the other militant Gay Civil
Rights groups is useful in helping develop a Gay identity.”
181
Archival documents make the exact
reasons that GCA fell apart difficult to ascertain. By 1974, however, GCA's work has dissipated.
In January of 1975, former GCA President David Glascock was hired by District 3
County Supervisor, Ed Edelman, to work at Edelmen's new West Hollywood branch office
specifically on issues impacting gays and lesbians. Estimating that between 60,000 and 100,000
gays and lesbians lived in District 3, Supervisor Edelman saw himself as ahead of the curve on
181 Letter from Rev. Michael Francis Itkin of the Quest Institute resigning from GCA as an active member,
February, 1972, Gay Community Alliance Collection, Coll2011-045, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives,
Los Angeles, California.
135
gay and lesbian issues remarking, “Other than City Atty. Burt Pines, I'm one of the first public
officials to seek representation in the gay community. This large segment has unique problems
which have been neglected.”
182
So, while GCA did not have long organizational staying power,
their combination of persistent but non-violent protest and building political power locally
inserted gay activists into the city's political infrastructure and was successful in terms of
orienting local politicians towards gays and lesbians as a legitimate minority group.
Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force
In 1978, leaders of the Gay Community Services Center began to talk about putting
together a coalition of gay organizations that would address the continued issue of police
harassment and entrapment. The Gay Community Service Center had long since been a supporter
and sponsor of demonstrations, actions, and campaigns aimed at police reform, but focused
instead on building its capacity as a service provider throughout the 1970s. In 1978, GCSC
organizational files show that the Board began circulating a memo to try and bring together a
coalition of organizations to address policing. By this time, Davis had retired and was replaced
by Daryl Gates, who quickly came under fire for his aggressive policing tactics, particularly
against Black and Brown people. The passage of AB489, the Consenting Adult Sex bill in 1975,
a version of the Brown Bill introduced 1970, repealed the ban against sodomy. Gay liberal
organizations had effectively dented City Council's support for Davis and for vice policing, and
had helped elect gay-friendly City Attorney Steve Pines. Gay liberal organizations had also made
political inroads with Governor Dymally towards overturning PC 647, the code against Lewd
Conduct, the operational formulation of lewd vagrancy at the time. However, police harassment
182 Zeman, Ray. “Edelman Hires Assistant to Work in gay community.” Los Angeles Times, Jan 10, 1975, 29.
136
and entrapment of gays continued. Although the Civil Service Commission removed the ban on
homosexuality in the requirements to be a police officer, there had still been no movement to hire
gay and lesbian police officers. The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Police Task Advisory Force
(Task Force) took this issue up as a central concern in their organizing, along with education and
training of LAPD officers on gay and lesbian issues.
The task force formally began in August of 1981, after several members gave testimony
in front of the Police Commission, reiterating the long-time demands of gay liberal police reform
activists: the designation of a police liaison for the gay and lesbian community, reform of police
practices, and hiring of gay police officers. Darryl Gates, at this point at the beginning of his
infamous tenure as LAPD Chief, acquiesced, and appointed officer Ken Hickman as liaison. The
original member organizations of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force
were: The Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, formerly the Gay Community Services
Center, ONE Inc., Stonewall Democratic Club, the Metropolitan Community Church, Black and
White Men Together, Eastside Association, American Civil Liberties Union – Gay Rights
Chapter, Asian / Pacific Lesbians and Gays, Gay Teachers of Los Angeles, Southern California
Council of Motorcycle Clubs, Parents and Friends of Gays, and Whitman Brooks. The Task
Force would soon add Dignity LA, the Latin Church of Christian Fellowship, Los Angeles
Tavern Guild, and the Southern California Harvey Milk Democratic Club to their ranks.
The Task Force was member driven but lead by co-chairs, Jim La Maida, and lesbian
activist Ivy Bottini. The group had monthly general meetings and working committees that met
as needed. Membership on the Task Force required a representative from the organization to
attend all meetings and required each organization to pay annual dues of $25.00. Membership
137
was capped at 18, with 4 alternate organizations who could ascend to the status of regular
membership (have voting rights) if a regular member or member organization was absent or left
the Task Force. The Task Force operated as a political bargaining unit for the gay and lesbian
community. Their primary goal was to get official recognition from the LAPD as the political
voices of the gay and lesbian community, and then use that status to implement departmental
reforms. The Task Force was officially recognized by the LAPD on April 14, 1982. Task Force
members used the LAPD liaison, Ken Hickman, as a conduit to channel complaints about police
harassment of gays and lesbians directly to LAPD administration. They collected complaints
from gay and lesbian individuals and businesses, held public forums, and in turn addressed
complaints received by the LAPD that might heighten policing of the gay and lesbian night life
crowd. For example, in 1983, Task Force members began an alley patrol with the purpose of
reducing complaints to the LAPD from property owners and residents near West Hollywood area
bars. In June of 1983 they began to pass out leaflets that read: “We all know that gay sex is
wonderful. It just should not be happening in the backyards of residential neighborhoods. We
would appreciate your cooperation in making social contact in a safe and suitable place.”
183

The Task Force's work was focused around reforming the hiring practices of the LAPD.
They pushed for recruitment and advertising of law enforcement positions in gay and lesbian
periodicals, recruitment at gay and lesbian events, gay and lesbian liaisons at each of the 18
police divisions, and for participation from Task Force members in LAPD officer training. Gates
agreed to the inclusion of Task Force members in sensitivity training right away. Members began
to develop their own training program, called “Gay and Lesbian Cultural Awareness Training for
183 “Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force Media Watch,” July 27, 1983, Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory
Task Force (Los Angeles) Collection, Coll2011-049, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles,
California.
138
Law Enforcement.” While I haven't yet been able to locate a copy of the curriculum, records
show that the training program consisted of 1.5 hour and 3.5 hour training modules, with student
and instructor assessments, questionnaires, and extensive bibliography and resource lists.
Undated request forms show that once developed, the Task Force sold the training program for
$20, and received orders from individuals and groups in San Diego, Chicago, and Tempe,
Arizona. In 1984, the group eventually reached an agreement with the Police Commission for the
LAPD to recruit in gay periodicals and at gay social events.
Documents show that race and gender representation remained a contentious issue for the
Task Force throughout its existence. In a draft document announcing the formation of the task
force, members make an expressed commitment to working with groups already addressing
policing focused on racial identity: “Representatives of 12 Gay & Lesbian community
organizations met on Thursday, August 6, [1981] to establish the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian
Police Task Force...The Task Force also hopes to work with the already-established Black and
Hispanic task forces on issues of mutual concern.”
184
Some members, like Charles Stewart a
Black activist working with Black and White Men Together, pushed for the recruitment of
women and people of color organizations onto the Task Force. Minutes from a meeting on
September 10, 1981 show that Stewart supported a motion to bring Lucia Chappelle, a Black
lesbian clergywoman and KPFK radio producer, Southern California Women for Understanding,
Lesbians of Color, Lawyers for Human Rights, and Temple Beth Chayim Chaddashim onto the
Task Force. The group instead chose to strike Lesbians of Color and Southern California Women
for Understanding from the list and instead add Gay Latinos Unidos and the Log Cabin
184 “G/L Police Task Formed” Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (Los Angeles) Collection, Coll2011-
049, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California
139
Republican Club. A handwritten note from Charles Stewart, to Task Force chair Ivy Bottini,
taken on the meeting minutes handout, suggests that the choice was a contentious one: “Ivy, As
Lucia, The Lawyer, and Temple survived the 'purge' of this meeting and were approved at the
PTF meeting. I suggest you get in touch w/ them so they won't miss any more meetings...Also,
can we meet somewhere other than GLCSC?”
185
Minutes also suggest that struggles around race in the group reflected the vexed
relationships between sexuality-based and race based political formations in Los Angeles. For
example, at a November 1981 meeting, the group discussed building relationships with Black
and Brown groups organizing around policing. One member relayed that LAPD liaison Ken
Hickman suggested that the Task Force avoid these groups because they “have pursued different
directions,” from the Task Force. This turned into a contentious discussion with several members
including Lucia Chappelle, encouraging the group not to trust the LAPD: “PTF [the Task Force]
may need to know directions they've gone in to benefit from their experience. Also G/L [the gay
and lesbian] community does include Blacks and Hispanics.”
186
Another member fired back that
they and another member attended a meeting of the Third World Film Association to build
bridges between people of color groups and the Task Force and felt that, “these minorities may
not be interested in G/L [gay and lesbian] issues.”
187
Tony Sullivan retorted that “G/L [gay and
lesbian] movements means reaching out to other minorities, whether receptive or not.”
188
Another
member, felt that there was no urgency to connect with race-based groups and that it seemed
185 Meeting Minutes, September 10, 1981, Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (Los Angeles) Collection,
Coll2011-049, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California
186 Meeting Minutes, November, 19, 1981, Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (Los Angeles) Collection,
Coll2011-049, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
187 Meeting Minutes, November, 19, 1981, Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (Los Angeles) Collection,
Coll2011-049, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
188 Meeting Minutes, November, 19, 1981, Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (Los Angeles) Collection,
Coll2011-049, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
140
clear that the LAPD liaison was implying that the good faith that had characterized their
meetings with the LAPD and Police Commission thus far, were predicated on not building an
alliance with the “other” task forces, which by 1981 was a union of leftist, grassroots, and
progressive organizations that were coming together around the demand for civilian oversight of
the LAPD. In the end, the motion to contact Black and Brown groups organizing around policing
lost out. The discussion shows how gay police activism archives a struggle over both the
relationship between race, gender, and sexuality, and the meaning and function of gay and
lesbian politics. Organizing around policing forced gay and lesbian activists to think about, posit,
and struggle over the relationship between race and sexuality, between sexuality and gender.
External pressure from the LAPD to distance themselves from race-based groups marks
the limit of identity politics in the context of neoliberal governance. Gates' play to court the gay
and lesbian community at a time when he was receiving harsh criticism from anti-racist and
progressive groups over the death of Eulia Love and LAPD choke holds typifies how inclusion is
leveraged to channel dissent into manageable forms. Perhaps the biggest threat to Gates was
organized gays and lesbians building an alliance with organized anti-racists, leftists, and
progressives. Gates' response also exemplifies how community policing developed in the 1970s
and 80s in the LAPD as a neoliberal mode of policing. While Parker preferred, a top-down style
of policing, his successors, like Thomas Reddin, and Ed Davis, while iron-fisted with the gay
and lesbian community, evolved the velvet glove approach of the LAPD. Reddin expanded the
community relations department from a staff of 4, to over 100 after the Watts Uprising. By 1971,
LAPD had over 71 community relations programs including youth programs, storefront
substations, citizens' watch groups, and programs for formerly incarcerated people. During Ed
141
Davis' tenure as chief, he expanded community policing through the Basic Car Plan, which
subdivided the city in 95 sub-districts and assigned a permanent police car and officer to each
sub-district. Davis' tenure also saw the development of a team-policing experiment in the Black
and Brown Oakwood community in Venice.
189

By 1989, the group was still campaigning over the hiring of gay and lesbian cops when
Ivy Bottini announced that she was stepping down as chair and hoped that a women of color
would assume her position.
190
Bottini's vacancy fomented a power struggle between Marshall
Phillips, who represented the Stonewall Democratic Club, and Roger Coggan of Lawyers for
Human and Rights and Gabriel Bustamante, a gay aide in Mayor Bradley's office, both of whom
were charged with recruiting potential new co-chairs. A power grab ensued, with both sides
stacking meetings to attempt to gain control of the Task Force through voting. The in-fighting
eventually ended in all the people of color organizations being expelled from the task force at an
April 1989 meeting, in front of LAPD representatives. The fall out was covered in BLK
magazine by Lloyd Jordan who wrote:
Every so often an incident occurs which dramatizes the fact that what Anglo and minority
lesbians and gays have in common is shared oppression, not shared values; a common
enemy, not a common community...Because lesbians and gays of color are inhibited in
living healthy gay lives by racism as much as by homophobia, it is difficult to respond to
the two “isms” as though they are unconnected. It feels diminishing to accept as
legitimate the Anglo need for minorities to subordinate the battle against racism to the
battle against homophobia when interacting with them.
191
Jordan's critique of the Phillips, the Task Force, and what he terms as “the Anglo need,” is
189 Tony Platt, J. Frappier, Gerda, Ray, Richard Schauffler, Larry Trujillo, Lynn Cooper, Elliot Currie, and Sidney
Harring. The iron fist and the velvet glove: An analysis of the US police. (San Francisco: Crime and Social
Justice Associates, 1982), 64-65.
190 “Bottini Exists Task Force.” BLK: National Black Lesbian & Gay Newsmagazine. Issue 11 (October, 1989):,
p22-22.
191 Jordan, Lloyd. “Policing the Task Force." BLK: National Black Lesbian & Gay Newsmagazine. Issue 6, (May,
1989): p8-12, 10.
142
striking. It is not just a critique of the lack of representation of people of color in mainstream gay
and lesbian organizing spaces, but a critique of the ways that gay liberal organizing reconstructs
the color line in its articulation of sexual difference. Jordan's critique of the Task Force cautions
us from reading the relationship between gay liberal police reform activism and racial difference
solely as an exclusionary one. A deeper look into the context leading up to the formation of the
Task Forces shows that while people of color and people of color organizations were disavowed
by the Task Force, they were already being incorporated into the institutional vision of the
GCSC, the organizational container for the Task Force.
While the Task Force was struggling over incorporating people of color and anti-racist
praxis into its work, the Gay Community Services Center (GCSC), had already been building
relationships with race-centered organizations and incorporating the very people who were
disavowed in gay liberal political spaces: people of color, poor people, formerly incarcerated
people, drug users, homeless people, transsexuals, transvestites, into its institutional milieu via
service provision. As I mentioned earlier, the General Revenue Sharing (GRS) Program, which
began in 1972, gave community organizations the opportunity to lobby for federal funds at the
state and municipal level. Mayor Bradley, who was leveraging GRS funds to deliver on
campaign promises, had planned to primarily re-distribute the money among city and county
governmental agencies. GCSC director Donald Kilhefner found this out and helped to organize
the Community Coalition for Equitable Revenue Sharing, a coalition of 300 Los Angeles area
community organizations, who successfully lobbied the Bradley administration to distribute GRS
funds to community organizations as well as governmental agencies.
Reviewing some of these early grants the Center applied for reveals an astute
143
understanding of the spatial, racialized, and gendered politics of precarity on the part of GCSC.
For example, in 1975, the GCSC applied to the Echo Park / Silverlake Regional Drug Coalition
for a grant to start a detoxification and residential treatment center. Their proposal, which
requested $189,410 to fund a live-in facility, food, program staff, and 11,140 hours of
professional counseling services, justified the need for the grant based on the precarity of people
residing within the catchment area.
192
The proposal lists high rates of substance abuse, some of
the highest suicide rates in Los Angeles county, low median family income levels compared to
the whole county, a high concentration of people with mental illnesses, and a high infant
mortality rate as characterizing features of population living in the catchment area. While gays
and lesbians were fighting to make sexual difference a legible category in city politics, it was the
racialized, gendered, and classes categories of precarity that activists used to script themselves
into the non-profit service provision.
Similarly, in a grant proposal to wealthy trans activist Reed Erickson to fund transgender
health services, GCSC emphasized that it had provided 19,650 units of services to at least 745
transsexuals and transvestites during the first year of the Center's operation. By 1973, after two
years of existence, the GCSC had at least 13 on-going daily social service programs including:
emergency and temporary housing, and venereal disease clinic, a women's health clinic, couples
and individual counseling, drug and alcohol counseling, employment and job training programs
for women and trans people, a “Systems Assistance Project,” or re-entry program for formerly
incarcerated people that included job training, welfare counseling, and program for gay and
lesbian runaways who found themselves stranded in Hollywood. Looking through the window of
192 Echo Park / Silverlake Region Drug Coalition. Detoxification and Residential Treatment Project Funding
Proposal, 1974, Box 6:1, L. A. Gay & Lesbian Center records, Coll2007-010, ONE National Gay and Lesbian
Archives, Los Angeles, California, 6.
144
service provision, it is clear that GCSC leadership did not just expel difference but also (and
sometimes simultaneously) sought to valorize it, to literally recoup value from their proximity to
racialized, gendered, and classed precarity. GCSC leadership could build ties with people of
color, but under the right circumstances.
193
GCSC leadership could recognize race, class, and
gender as as categories that circumscribed risk, and sought to incorporate risky people into the
purview of their work through service provision. One the one hand, while the GCSC and GCSC-
supported political projects, like the Task Force, and gay liberal activism has been criticized for
excluding women, people of color, and trans people from positions of power, this narrative while
absolutely true, misses the whole story. This example asks us to consider the ways gay liberal
organizing and gay liberal organizations both disavowed and incorporated race, class, and
gender in constructing the boundaries of gay identity and the boundaries of Gay Los Angeles.
Gay Liberal Police Reform Activism and the Production of Space
As I have tried to show, gay liberal police reform activism was bound up in the
production of space. In their efforts to reform the LAPD, gay and lesbian activists intervened in
the 1973 election that re-organized the city's political landscape. GCA and HELP organized
middle and working class gays and lesbians into a political bloc that helped to elect liberal
candidates in city government like Steve Pines (District Attorney), Robert Stevenson (City
Council), and Tom Bradley. HELP politicized consumption by leveraging it to create a war chest
for gay civil rights. The Lesbian and Gay Police Advisory Task Force was able to get the LAPD
to negotiate with them (no small feat) and left a lasting imprint on the development of the
193 “Gays, minorities organize fight for federal funds.” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), April 24, 1974. This
article details how the Gay Community Services Center worked with groups and organizations organized around
racial identity to lobby the city and county governments for General Revenue Sharing funds.
145
LAPD's sensitivity training for officers. The places and people that gay liberal police reform
activism claimed as a sites of struggle: bars, intersections, neighborhoods, people, like Howard
Efland and LaVerne Turner, necessarily put pressure on Hollywood and West Hollywood as the
over-representation of gay Los Angeles. Instead, the development of liberal police activism begs
a consideration of the long forgotten places and people whose, lives, deaths, and afterlives
constitute the more enduring and memorable forms of spatial fixity that gay and lesbian political
formations have taken on, such as Los Angeles LGBT Center or West Hollywood.
Gay liberal police reform activism entwined sexuality as an identity category into liberal
praxis through the production of space. The leveraging of political power through service
provision, exemplified by US Mission, HELP, and GCSC, helped the public, city officials, and
other gays and lesbians understand gays and lesbians as constituting a minority group. For
example, a favorable Times article on the issue of de-criminalizing consensual adult sexual
behavior, reads: “Aside from an occasional clash with Chief Davis --- to which the Gay Libbers
apply the maximum dramatic flair – the Gay community also is involved in a number social
programs as staid and respectable as the Salvation army.”
194
Similarly, US Mission's service
programs were lauded by the likes of Tom Bradley, Dianne Feinstein, Pete Wilson, and Governor
Deukmejan.
195

Despite the fact the most of GCSC's early programs were modeled from Gay Liberation
Front's (Gay Libbers) early Survival Programs, Gay Liberation and GLF were excoriated in the
local press, while organizations like Gay Community Alliance were able to court city politicians,
like City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, by maintaining a consistent, but narrow set of demands
194 Smith, Dave. “Homosexual Groups Push Fight for Liberalized Morals Laws.” Los Angeles Times, January, 24,
1971, A1.
195 “Gay? Homeless?” (United States Mission Promotional Brochure), United States Mission Collection,
Coll2012.125, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
146
for police reform and practicing non-confrontational, non-violent protest. GCA's concerted effort
to build relationships with local politicians resulted in Ed Edelman, being one of the first City
Councilman to create a gay-community liaison. However, the narrow set of demands also left
certain embodiments of gender and sexual non-normativity outside the purview of gay and
lesbian political subjecthood. In general, gay liberal efforts at police reform failed to address the
racist tenor of policing, formulate an anti-racist agenda within gay and lesbian police reform
efforts, or adequately acknowledge the full breadth of queer criminality in their formulation of
demands. Instead gay liberal police reform efforts relied on a victimless crime narrative, in
which violent “real criminal” others, were the unnamed foils to the victimless crime of gay sex.
At the same time, these efforts proceeded at times in the names of people, like LaVerne Turner,
who at the end of the 1970s would be way more likely to be offered services than be welcomed
into a gay or lesbian political space in Los Angeles. The fact that gay liberal organizations
understood poor people, homeless people, people with mental illnesses, and people of color as
serviceable risk populations but routinely disavowed them and others from political spaces is
important. This dynamic coheres as a pernicious socio-spatial relation: serviceable-but-
unprotectable. Over time, the serviceability of risk becomes a source of political legitimacy and
economic value for institutions, like the Los Angeles LGBT Center, while the political disavowal
of so-called risky people attempts to ensure serviceability and unprotectability are permanent
modes of existence for certain people. Unprotectability becomes the driver of a market
relationship between non-profits, state, local, and federal governments, and private foundations
and charities, that turns serviceable populations into sources of surplus value for service
providers.
196

196 See Wolch, Jennifer R. The shadow state: Government and voluntary sector in transition. (Foundation Center,
147
This dynamic does not go un-noticed by gay and lesbian Angelenos. In the next chapter I
will examine police activism during this same time period from the perspective of gay and
lesbian liberationists and leftists, who posited a slightly different relationship between race, class,
gender, and sexuality and attempted to bridge anti-racism into gay and lesbian political
formations in Los Angeles.
1990).
148
CHAPTER THREE
BRIDGE WORK: BUILDING AN ANTI-RACIST LESBIAN AND
GAY LEFT IN LOS ANGELES
I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody
Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me Right?
I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the Ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends' parents...
Then
I've got the explain myself
To everybody
I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.
Forget it
I'm sick of it
I'm sick of filling in your gaps...
- except from “Bridge Poem,” by Donna Kate Rushin, 1981
Gay liberal organizations helped to change the orientation of policing towards gays and
lesbians during the 1970s by advancing a narrow but clear set of demands aimed at curbing vice
policing and changing police employment requirements so that gays and lesbians could become
police officers. While these organizations rallied against LAPD Chief Davis, because of his
blatant homophobia, they did not necessarily rally around policing itself as a violent technique of
managing and producing space. In fact, gay liberal police reform activism relied on an unnamed
violent figure as a necessary foil to the “victimless crime,” of gay and lesbian identity. As
discussed in the last chapter, one consequence of gay liberal activism was that particular kinds of
people, namely trans people, sex workers, and women (especially women of color) fell outside
149
the purview of what materialized as gay and lesbian police reform.
While gay liberal institutions were bargaining with the LAPD over hiring gay officers
and reform of vice practices in the late 1970s, liberal, progressive, and leftist organizations in
Los Angeles were building an alliance for civilian oversight of the LAPD, premised around the
notion of police lawlessness. In 1979, the Citizen's Commission on Police Repression, a coalition
of Los Angeles institutions and community organizations was formed to address LAPD
lawlessness. The work of the Commission was spearheaded by the Coalition Against Police
Abuse (CAPA), a community organization formed in 1976 to address the racist tenor of policing,
particularly in South Central. CAPA aligned radical, leftist, grassroots organizing efforts that
arose around particular LAPD murders of Black and Brown Angelenos. The Citizen's
Commission on Police Repression created a plural ideological terrain that linked grassroots and
neighborhood organizing with longer-standing reform and advocacy institutions, like the ACLU
and the National Lawyers Guild, around the demand for community control of the police. The
1979 LAPD killing of Eulia Love, a 39 year-old Black woman in South Central, an incident that
was initiated over $22.09 unpaid gas bill, further invigorated public fury over police shootings of
unarmed civilians. Love was using a boning knife to prune a rubber tree in her front yard, when
LAPD officers approached her. She was shot eight times by LAPD officers two minutes and
twenty seconds later, after refusing to comply with officer instructions to drop the knife. Concern
over the use of deadly force including shootings of unarmed civilians and choke hold deaths as
well as LAPD surveillance and infiltration of community organizations, pushed local organizers
to demand for community control of the police rather than single-issue reform of specific police
practices. What is notable is that all of the institutions covered in the last chapter that were still in
150
operation by 1980, when the Commission was founded, did not participate in this city wide
coalition. The Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force, for example, chose specifically not
to align themselves with struggles around policing that centered race and class early on in their
work. Some gay and lesbian organizations, like the Lesbian and Gay Rights Chapter of the
ACLU, did work in coalition with the Citizen's Commission to bridge local anti-racist and anti-
homophobic political efforts around policing.
In the pages to follow I will give an account of bridge work, or gay, lesbian, and trans
organizing efforts that tried to bridge the gap between what was becoming mainstream gay and
lesbian politics, and the gendered, racialized, and classed vulnerabilities to policing that fell
through the cracks of gay liberal police reform activism. Gay Liberation Front (GLF), founded in
1969, eschewed the 'polite,' approach to direct action that the Gay Community Alliance and
HELP employed and engaged in a raucous campaign against police entrapment in the early
1970s that included street theater, “Gay-Ins,” takeovers of public space and confrontations of
homophobic establishments. Lavender and Red Union (later Lavender Left), attempted to bring
an analysis of race, class, and capitalism to mainstream gay and lesbian politics. Lavender Left
politicized police violence against gays and lesbians by doing the intellectual labor of
articulating sexuality difference as an element of class composition, and attempting to organize a
multi-racial gay and lesbian radical alliance. These efforts also had their limitations, but are
worthy of attention because of how they attempted to bridge gay and lesbian politics with New
Left and progressive political formations. Before discussing how these organizations attempted
to mobilize across the ruptures of mainstream gay and lesbian institutions and politics, I will
offer a theorization of bridge work as well as a brief local genealogy.
151
Theorizing Bridge Work
My understanding of bridge work in grounded in women of color feminist scholarship
and activism. Throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, articulations of Black, Chicana, and
Third World feminism attempted to bridge the gap between anti-racist and feminist praxis and
women of color's lived experiences of oppression. Women of color founded organizations like
the National Welfare Rights Organization (1966), Third World Women's Alliance (1970), and the
National Black Feminist Organization (1973). These organizations addressed the way the co-
optation of the radical demand for self-determination into self-help and voluntary governance
fractured politicized categories of social identity like Black, Feminist, Revolutionary into even
more differentiated status groups. For example, in 1979, following the murders of 12 black
women in Boston, members of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black and
Black lesbian feminists, called into question both the police and media's dismissal of the
murders, that hinged on accusations of prostitution against the women to excuse their murders.
The Collective also critiqued Black masculinist framings of the murders, which posited the
murders exclusively as racialized violence and implored women to stay at home for their own
safety. The Collective published and circulated over 26,000 copies of a pamphlet called: “6, 7, 8,
9, 10, 11, 12 Black Women...Why Did They Die,” held self defense classes, and organized
community meetings. They framed the murders as an example of heterosexist and racist class
oppression. Members understood the ways that racialized non-conforming gender and sexuality
are produced as the surplus of the legitimate subject citizens who are protectable by the law and
by mainstream social movements. The Collective used the pamphlet to problematize the
152
ideological and material erasures of the 12 women in the context of transformations in capital
accumulation that hit cities like Boston hard throughout the 1970s and 80s. The Combahee River
Collective was itself an an offshoot of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO),
formed in 1973 to address the ways that the feminist and anti-racist movements did not
adequately address the particular experiences of Black women. The Combahee River Collective
broke off from the NBFO to work with deeper focus around the issues of working class Black
women and Black lesbians.
Black and women of color feminism emerged alongside the political economic shift from
military Keynesian to post-Keynesian militarism.
197
As a political praxis, women of color
feminism responded to the ways both the U.S. carceral state, social service institutions, and
social movements reproduced themselves at the expense of poor people, women of color, and
gender and sexual non-conforming people of color. Women of color feminism is a bridge
formation because it conjured new scales of relationality and politics by advancing the idea that
race, gender, sexuality and class are co-constituted. Post-1970s formulations of Black and
women of color feminism were not the first political intellectual formations, or the last, to
advance or organize around such an idea.
198
Members of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union,
for example, engaged in bridge work throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, innovating worker
as a category that could hold multiple identities and embodiments to advance a variety of
political goals, including fighting for the working rights of Black women.
The term bridge work encompasses the range of activities that attend to the normalizing
197 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "Globalization and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian
militarism." Race and Class 40. no 2/3 (1999): 171-187.
198 See Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the crossroads: African American women activists in the Cold War. (New
York: NYU Press, 2011) and McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism,
and the Making of Black Left Feminism. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) on articulations of
intersectionality in Black women's political pre-1970.
153
tendencies of political representation. Bridge work can be carried out as an intentional
organizational strategy or tactic and / or as, the unexpected, but overdetermined, by-product of
socio-spatial interactions.
199
As Donna Kay Rushin reminds us in “Bridge Poem,” the work of
bridging or being a bridge, can be painful, unrecognized, and unheralded; not all bridges lead us
to places we want to go. While women of color scholars have used the metaphor of the bridge to
bring attention to the often unwaged and unremembered political and intellectual labor of women
of color, I am interested in bridge work as the iterative work of mobilizing across political and
ideological ruptures. The need for bridge work tracks the re-marshaling of gendered, classed, and
racial meanings. For example, in the first chapter, I discuss how early homophile organizing
against policing used anti-Brown police violence as a frame of reference to define and articulate
the changing boundaries of race and masculinity that the criminalization of homosexuality
reflected. Harry Hay and Mattachine's short lived effort to link anti-gay police entrapment and
police racism against Mexican-Americans was an attempt to bridge the newly materializing
homophile into an anti-racist class consciousness. It depended on the political praxis of anti-
racist organizations, like the Civil Rights Congress, who did the intellectual and on-the-ground
work to get people to recognize and identify policing as a racist practice of spatial
management.
200
Mattachine provided the language to frame gays and lesbians as a minority
group but because this work splintered over the issue of Communism, Mattachine failed to
produce the working relationships between homophile organizers and organizations and anti-
racist and leftist organizations in Los Angeles that may have been meaningful for the
199 Sanchez, George J. "" What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews": Creating Multiculturalism on the
Eastside during the 1950s." American Quarterly56, no. 3 (2004): 633-661 and Alvarez, Luis, and Daniel
Widener. "A History of Black and Brown: Chicana/o-African American Cultural and Political
Relations." Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33, no. 1 (2008): 143-154.
200 Patterson, William L. "We charge genocide: The historic petition to the United Nations for relief from a crime of
the United States government against the Negro people." New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951.
154
development of the gay and lesbian Left during the 1970s.
201

The disavowal of gays and lesbians by leftist organizations coupled with local
criminalization of homosexuality vis a vis an association with Communism, also splintered early
manifestations of gay and lesbian left politics in postwar Los Angeles. In regards to the issue of
policing, the dissipation of gay and lesbian radicalism limited the development of an analysis of
how racism and classism constituted homophobia in practice. One reason for this is that leftist
political formations in general, and the Communist Party in particular, have served as critical
bridge spaces in Los Angeles for building multi-racial relationality and anti-racist politics.
Throughout the 1930s, a multi-racial left culture flourished in Los Angeles, anchored by the
International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, Hollywood trade unions and a
network of multi-racial workers that included Black workers, middle and working class alike,
Japanese workers, and a smaller number of Mexican workers.
202
Prior to the postwar onslaught of
McCarthyism, and despite LAPD cajoling of labor since 1906, Los Angeles had some of the
highest rates of Communist Party membership in United States.
203
Black people who moved to
Los Angeles throughout the postwar period sympathized with the Party because the Party
organized against racist policing, exemplified in their work around the case of the Scottsboro
Boys in Alabama. These sympathies were bolstered locally by organizations like Civil Rights
Congress (CRC), who operated as “the civil rights wing of the Communist Party,”
204
embarking
201 Hobson, Emily. “Policing Gay LA: Mapping Racial Divides in the Homophile Era, 1950 – 1967.” The Rising
Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, andRadical Movements Across the Pacific. University of Washington Press,
(2014): 188 – 212, 118-119.
202 Pulido, Laura. Black, brown, yellow, and left: Radical activism in Los Angeles. (Univ of California Press, 2006),
40 and Horne, Gerald. Fire this time: The Watts uprising and the 1960s. (Virginia: University of Virginia Press,
1995), 5
203 Horne, Gerald. Fire this time: The Watts uprising and the 1960s. (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1995),
6
204 Sides, Josh. "You Understand My Condition": The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American
Community, 1946-1952." The Pacific Historical Review (1998): 233-257. 233
155
on a vigorous campaign for civil rights in Los Angeles' Black community from 1946 to 1956,
including organizing against racist police violence.
205
In 1951, the CRC lobbied the United
Nations, in accordance with the UN's 1948 General Assembly Resolution 206, for international
intervention into racism in the United States. CRC argued that policing, unemployment, and lack
of political representation constituted an act of genocide against Black people in the United
States.
206
CRC took on these issues locally, organizing around cases of LAPD violence against
Black and Brown people. Locally, the Communist Party was also able to recruit Japanese
immigrants and limited number of Mexican-Americans, however, the Party's changing stance on
anti-racism throughout the 1950s caused people of color to exit the organization in large numbers
in Los Angeles and nationally.
207
The dissolution of the Sharecroppers Union in 1959, and the
expulsion of Harry Haywood, who was a key organizer of both the Sharecroppers Union and the
Scottsboro defense, signaled the wane of the Party's commitment to anti-racism. While leftist
organizations and culture had been an important bridge space for anti-racist politics during from
the 1930s to the 1950s in Los Angeles, the suppression of radicalism and internal fissures had
consequences for Angelenos attempting to build a gay and lesbian Left during the 1970s.
Laura Pulido notes that throughout the 1960s and 70s, the white New Left in Los Angeles
struggled to re-negotiate their relationship to the Old Left but Third World and people of color
Leftists did not: “...members of the Third World Left had relatively few leftist traditions and
resources to draw upon. In Southern California, only a handful of non-white members of the Old
Left work with youth of color...Thus for the most part, activist of color created leftist
205 Sides, Josh. "You Understand My Condition": The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American
Community, 1946-1952." The Pacific Historical Review (1998): 233-257.
206 See Patterson, William L. "We charge genocide: The historic petition to the United Nations for relief from a
crime of the United States government against the Negro people." New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951.
207 Pulido, Laura. Black, brown, yellow, and left: Radical activism in Los Angeles. (Univ of California Press, 2006),
63.
156
organizations outside of the shadow of the Old Left”
208
Like the Third World Left, the gay and
lesbian left in Los Angeles had few leftist traditions and resources to draw upon. The
renunciation of gays by the Communist Party, had driven gay and lesbians out of the Party
throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The inability of organizers like Hay to sustain gay and lesbian
left organizations or organizing efforts by the mid-1950s meant that there would be little in terms
of traditions, relationships, and resources for the gay and lesbian left of the late 1960s and early
1970s. This is the context in which organizations like Gay Liberation Front and Lavender and
Red Union developed.
Bridge work underscores how hegemony always attempts to manage dissent; the fact that
bridge work needs to be done says something about how the process of constructing a
subjectivity: every act of social imagination always produces an evacuation of some sort. The
need for bridge work reminds us that spatial differentiation is not just about maintaining and
organizing the physical environment, but also about managing and organizing social relations
and subjectivities. Imagining gay and lesbian identity through liberalism helped gay and lesbian
institutions to acquire and manage spatially fixed and more mobile forms of capital like real
estate, money and labor, but it was also productive of gay and lesbian subjects: subjects of city
politics, of the market, and of the carceral state.
In the context of policing, bridge work attempted to address the issues that slipped
through the cracks of gay liberal police reform, specifically the ways that racial difference and
racism shaped the experience and practice of policing. In the last chapter, I argued that gay
liberal activism advanced not only by politically disavowing racial, class, and gender difference,
208 Pulido, Laura. Black, brown, yellow, and left: Radical activism in Los Angeles. (Univ of California Press, 2006),
64.
157
but also through the incorporation of racialized, classed, and gendered risk populations into
organizational infrastructure through service provision. Organizations and coalitions like, the
Gay Community Alliance and the Lesbian and Gay Police Advisory Task Force, that did not
attempt to do service work, still made explicit choices to disavow transsexuals, transvestites,
drag queens, hustlers, women of color, lesbians, and poor people in their organizational structure
and organizing efforts. The result of this was that by the 1980s, a working class and gender non-
conforming person of color, could increasingly receive specialized social services from
mainstream gay institutions in lieu of disappearing forms of direct cash payments. However, the
social relations and forces that constitute the very serviceability of so-called risky populations
often fell outside the purview of most organizing efforts and institutions framed around
sexuality.
George Jackson's incitement for a politics of perfect disorder asks us to consider how this
social relation: unprotectable-but-serviceable, supports the life cycle of policing and
criminalization. Such a relation has to be understood as constituting the post-1970s carceral state
alongside the expansion of prisons and jails because it was the other “spatial fix” that helped the
state reproduce its capacity by externalizing the work of service provision. In California, the re-
territorialization of social services continued at the state level throughout the 1970s. During his
term as Governor from 1975 to 1983, Jerry Brown re-territorialized social service provision
further in California, by transferring responsibilities for management of caseload social services
from the state to local municipalities, just as the federal government attempted to transfer such
responsibilities to state and local governments, and the voluntary sector. This relation attempts to
manage surplus population in some stage of proximity to the criminal justice system (at risk, re-
158
entry, parolee) and positions precarity as a source of surplus value for service providers. It
upholds a contingent workforce: volunteers, social workers, counselors, tutors, clinicians, staff
organizers, grant writers and the like, whose job security is tied to short term funding packages
and asks these workers to willingly increase their rate of exploitation based on affective and
identity-based incitements to fix a social problem whose very un-fixability is a source of
organizational value.
209
This socio-spatial circuitry supports the life cycle of policing by further
sedimenting criminality as a permanent social category that is productive not only for the state
but one that can be generative for identity based political institutions and organizations as well.
In the context of gay and lesbian activism in Los Angeles, this other spatial fix, the
respatialization of social services, supported the growth of the carceral state by channeling the
demand for self-determination, which took on a myriad of forms throughout the 1960s and 70s,
into voluntary sector and non-profit governance, which took on a more finite set of forms
including: social service provision (US Missions, HELP, Gay Community Services Center), voter
engagement and electoral alliance building (Gay Community Alliance and HELP), and
community stakeholder politics, or community policing (Lesbian and Gay Police Advisory Task
Force). In doing so, the relation of unprotectable-but-serviceable attempts to fix and immobilize
dissent by channeling dissent into a format that is manageable and one that produces surplus
capacity for local and federal governments.
The consequences of the convergence of self-determination, liberalism, and voluntary
sector governance underscores the relevance of bridge work. If the advance of gay liberal police
reform activism was also bound up in the production of the US carceral state, precisely because
of its simultaneous disavowal and incorporation of racial, class and gender difference, then
209 Laing, Mary, Katy Pilcher, and Nicola Smith, eds. Queer Sex Work. (Routledge, 2015), 25.
159
bridge work constitutes a genealogy of the places between subjection and legible subjectivity. It
provides the field notes for enacting a politics of perfect disorder by accounting for how people
and organizations attempted to re-articulate sexuality as well as gay and lesbian identity in
relation to race, class, and gender in practice. In this chapter I will give an account of attempts to
organize a gay and lesbian left during the 1970s. Covering the formation and dissolution of Gay
Liberation Front Los Angeles, and Lavender and Red Union, I will detail both how these
organizations participated in anti-policing and police reform efforts as well as explain how these
organizations used policing as one register through which to address the fissures of what was
becoming “mainstream” gay and lesbian politics, around race, class, and gender. Again, not
every bridge leads us to a place we want to go, and in that way, I am not attempting to place a
value judgement on bridge work but instead, to use it a framework to understand how LGBT
Angelenos dealt with the contradictions that arose from the entwining of of gay and lesbian
identity and liberalism via gay liberal police reform activism.
Building a Lesbian and Gay Left in Los Angeles
Gay Liberation Front
“We affirm that as free, Gay human beings we are a part of greater communities of interest...mankind in general and
the movement toward human freedom in specific. We oppose all forms of oppression whether sexual, racial,
economic, or cultural. We declare our unity with a support for all oppressed minorities who fight for their freedom.”
- “What is Gay Liberation,” Gay Liberation Front Los Angeles
Gay Liberation Front was founded in 1969 by Morris Kight (who you may remember
from US Missions and the Gay Community Services Center), and Donald Kilhefner (also
affiliated with GCSC). Despite the fact that Los Angeles already had at least three Stonewall type
melees with the LAPD before the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, the disciplining of communism
160
and radicalism was such in Los Angeles that local organizing efforts hadn't fomented towards the
articulation of gay liberation in Los Angeles the way it did in other US cities like New York. Gay
liberation was a decisive break from homophile politics because it privileged pride, visibility,
and disruptive presence as political strategies. In Los Angeles, the formation of Gay Liberation
Front (GLF) highlights how political pluralism worked as a strategy in organizing efforts against
policing. GLF was founded around the same time as the Gay Community Services Center, and
developed alongside gay liberal organizations like HELP and GCA. As such, Gay Liberation
Front Los Angeles did not mobilize across the ruptures of gay liberal politics but instead
represents the visioning of gay and lesbian identity as the ultimate bridge subjectivity. Gay
Liberation had so captured the imagination and attention of gays and lesbians in Los Angeles that
people of various ideological beliefs and political orientations were interested in joining GLF; in
1970, GLF members reported having 150 attendees at early meetings. The ideological fissures
that emerged at the outset between GLF members, which included moderate to conservative,
middle-class White men, trans women, lesbians, leftists, and occasional people of color, would
make the organization difficult to hold together. However, these fissures were also productive of
the early programming and focus of gay liberal organizations like Gay Community Alliance and
the Gay Community Services Center, whose early service provision programs were modeled off
of GLF's Survival Programs. Kight advocated a by-any-means necessary approach to gay and
lesbian civil rights and for him and other GLF members, Stonewall signified the birth of the
“New Homosexual,” the vanguard in a transformation of traditional social structures, like the
nuclear family, and in traditional gendered and sexual roles. GLF founders saw Gay Liberation
as a formation that appealed to a defiant consciousness and practice of self invention and self-
161
acceptance that was critical in terms of displacing the pathologizing narratives of gay and lesbian
perversion that flowed from the criminal justice system and the fields of psychiatry and
psychology. As co-founder Kight stated in the first issue of the GLF newsletter Front Lines:
“This is the time for all good gays to come to the aid of themselves.”
210
Gay liberation was a
political formation that GLF founders saw as bridging everyday gays and lesbians into the fight
for gay and lesbian rights.
When gay and lesbian organizing around policing took off in 1970, GLF participated in
the 1970 and 1972 mobilizations around the Efland and Turner murders but paralleled that
participation by launching a series of Touch-Ins, Gay-Ins, and bar liberations from 1970 to 1972.
Each of these actions hinged on disruptive presence rather than peaceful protest. For example,
while HELP sought to work with bar owners in order to consolidate funds for legal defense, GLF
saw some Hollywood area gay bar owners as constituting an unpaid police force. Because bar
owners feared the economic impact of LAPD raids, bar owners often prohibited gay and lesbian
patrons from touching, kissing, or dancing too close in order to avoid problems with the LAPD.
In response to this, GLF members organized a series of bar liberations and touch-ins, led by the
GLF Radical Caucus' Touch Freak Theater troupe, encouraging gays and lesbians to flout the
unfair use of lewd conduct and solicitation laws to criminalize gays and lesbians for touching,
kissing, or dancing too close in bars and to articulate bar owners' adherence to this double
standard as a form of policing. GLF organized groups of people to takeover bars, hang posters in
bars instructing gay and lesbian patrons that it was ok to touch and kiss each other. Bars and
establishments that complied with GLF demands were declared, “Liberated,” and ones that did
210 “Alpine Co. Here we come!” Front Lines 1:1, December 1970, Box 1:3, Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Los
Angeles Records, Coll2012.031, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
162
not give into GLF demands were routinely picketed until they did. One of GLF's most notable
pickets, was at Barney's Beanery cafe in Hollywood, which prominently displayed a “Fags, Stay
Out” sign over the bar and later began to produce and sell t-shirts with the same slogan. GLF
members also raised public consciousness around homophobic policing by placing bright orange
stickers that read: “Police Entrapment Practiced Here,” in bars that were known hotspots for
arrests. Members also printed and distributed cards with instructions on what to do during an
arrest and held Know-Your-Rights workshops throughout the early 1970s.
Gay-Ins re-claimed Griffith Park as a gay and lesbian space by encouraging gays and
lesbians to gather in mass in public places like Griffith Park, an often policed gay cruising spot.
The first Gay-In at Griffith Park was held in May of 1970 and was raided by LAPD officers.
Varying accounts of the incident note that plainclothes officers were deployed to monitor the
event before 30 uniformed officers disbanded the gathering. GLF hosted several more Gay-Ins
between 1970 and 1972, which continued to court the intrusion of the LAPD. After the fourth
Gay-In, GLF members decided to work with the ACLU to file a class action lawsuit against the
LAPD for harassment on behalf of gays and lesbians. For a brief moment, members considered
joining a class-action lawsuit against policing that was being formulated by the ACLU on behalf
of Black and Brown people. In The Advocate, GLF members reported that they chose instead to
pursue their own class action suit because theirs was about a cultural difference and not ethnic or
racial difference and that each side would be best served by pursuing separate legal action.
While gay liberal organizations were beginning to focus their efforts against policing in
Hollywood, after setting up their call line, GLF members began to receive complaints about
homophobic policing in the Rampart division and began to organize there in addition to
163
Hollywood. To commemorate the LAPD murders of Howard Efland, LaVerne Turner, and
Virginia Gallegos, GLF organized a march on March 7, 1971 action, asking participants to bring
a small tin can and pencil to make noise as a part of an exorcism, designed to levitate the
Rampart Division Police Station, “at least several feet in the air.”
211
Marchers walked from
McArthur Park to the Rampart station in a procession, carrying floral wreathes and a pig's head
on a silver platter. GLF members also routinely sent in news articles on policing in the Rampart
division to The Advocate, investigated Rampart complaints on an individual basis.
Gay Liberation Front operated out of an office near Westlake on 577 1/2 N. Vermont
Avenue. GLF had a non-hierarchical organizational structure: there were no rules or
requirements for membership, a member was defined as anyone who attended a meeting, and at
each meeting each member held one vote. Leadership positions were rotating, and chapter work
was driven by caucuses, or working groups that were affinity based. The affinity model was
supposed to deal with the recurring issue of male chauvinism and elitism that plagued GLF and
other gay and lesbian organizations throughout the 1960s into the 1970s. By 1970, GLF's
caucuses included a Survival Committee, that coordinated social service programs, a Radical
Caucus that coordinated GLF's direct actions, a Gay Women's Caucus, a Radical Lesbian
Caucus, an Agit Prop Committee, and a Sports Club. Gay Liberation Front used service
provision selectively as a tactic to develop a politics of gay inter-relationality and gay
nationalism. One of GLF's earliest, most ambitious, and unfinished projects was a planned
peaceful takeover of Alpine County, California to build a gay and lesbian colony. GLF members
held the first public information session for the Alpine project in October of 1970 and at the
211 “Watch LAPD, GLF is going to 'magick' you.” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), March 3, 1971, and GLF gives
LAPD a lift.” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), March 31, 1971.
164
meeting, signed up 480 gays and lesbians who were interested in the project. While the Alpine
project languished and later became a point of internal contention, GLF members began to
implement its survival programs, including an effective draft counseling program, a legal support
hotline, a 24-hour call line for both suicide prevention and collecting data on LAPD harassment,
and later job training programs, and a housing program. The housing program was never
implemented by GLF, but became the basis for the Gay Community Services Center's Liberation
House project. Members also began general counseling services for gays and lesbians as a part of
a program of self-help and self-actualization, designed to encourage gays and lesbians to
embrace their sexuality and demand social acceptance from family, friends, and employers.
In many ways, GLF survival programs responded to the inaccessibility of social services
and affordable housing to gays and lesbians in the 1970s. To gay organizers like John Platania, a
trained urban planner who was the architect of the GCSC Liberation House project, policing was
a part of a cycle of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, drug use and prostitution that many
other working class Angelenos found themselves in throughout the 1970s.
212
HUD policies
centered affordable housing around the nuclear family (relation via blood or marriage), making
affordable housing inaccessible to single people and non-heterosexual couples. Affordable
housing in Los Angeles, a crisis the Bradley administration was never able to adequately address,
also became a key issue of concern for gay, lesbian and queer organizers in the 1970s. Platania,
who was the first co-director of the Gay Community Services Center with Morris Kight,
understood this cycle all too well. A former HUD employee, Platania was fired from his job after
being arrested at a Gay Liberation Front “Gay-In” at Griffith Park in 1970. Platania was able to
212 Baldwin, Ian M. "Rethinking the “Era of Limits”: Equitable Housing, Gay Liberation, and the Opening of the
American Family in Greater Los Angeles during the Long 1970s." California History 91, no. 3 (2014): 42-59.
165
eventually win his court case, having the charges dismissed. However, his pathway to
politicization, as an upwardly mobile cis-gendered White passing person underscores, how the
criminalization of gay and lesbian identity was so structurally entrenched at that point that it
impacted people across race and class lines. The willingness of middle class and working class
White cisgender men to pursue a liberationist strategy tells us that the materialization of
sexuality as an identity category troubled the real and imagined boundaries of relationality that
resulted from the racial, ethnic, and class segregation that characterized Los Angeles'
development.
GLF organizers attempted to expand the purview of gay politics to include lesbians,
transsexuals, transvestites, women, and people of color. GLF Los Angeles particularly focused
on building relationships with Black and Chicano organizations but this work was easier stated
than operationalized. Kight's and Kilhefner's involvement in just about every gay and lesbian
organizing project or organization in Los Angeles at the time created the impression among GLF
members that a double leadership structure persisted in the group: the putative one, with affinity
groups and rotating leadership, and a clandestine one, in which Kight and Kilhefner made
decisions that were imposed on the general membership.
213
Secondly, the gestures GLF members
made towards radical and anti-racist political organization ended up being mostly rhetorical. The
disciplining of the Left and the outmigration of activists of color from the Communist Party
throughout the 1950s, left little in terms of networks of relationality, contacts, or strategies for
GLF members to avail in terms of building anti-racism into the work Gay Liberation. In 1970,
GLF members began to build a relationship with the Peace and Freedom Party. In February GLF
213 Ron Jackson makes a statement about Alpine Project in an internal document titled, “GLF Problems,”Gay
Liberation Front (GLF), Los Angeles Records, Coll2012.031, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los
Angeles, California.
166
members presented a platform on Gay Liberation at the Peace and Freedom Party Convention,
outlining how the Peace and Freedom Party could support the goals and aims of gay liberation.
A review of GLF Los Angeles' organizational files does not have much evidence of
communication between GLF Los Angeles and other GLF chapters, meaning that some chapters
with a more materialized practice of anti-racism were not necessarily sharing practices and
strategies with GLF Los Angeles. A review of Come Out!, the publication of Gay Liberation
Front, New York, shows that GLF LA member Angela Douglas, wrote several articles and sent
updates on GLF activities in Los Angeles to the publication. For example, in 1971, Douglas
notified New York GLF members about the lack of investigation into the LAPD murders of
LaVerne Turner and Virginia Gallegos, suggesting that at least some members may have been
interested in following the work of and building relationships with other GLF chapters. The lack
of organizational structure, however, left such work up to those interested individuals.
While GLF was getting off the ground organizationally in 1969, the LAPD and the FBI,
were waging a war on the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. Between 1968 and 1969, LAPD
officers shot and killed at least 4 Panthers, raided the Black Panther Party office at 41
st
and
Central (blocks away from where LaVerne Turner was murdered by the LAPD) several times,
drew guns on children in the BPP childcare program on the grounds of investigating a landlord
nuisance complaint, and raided the BPP breakfast program in Watts under a directive from the
FBI to destroy BPP survival programs. This war on the Black Panthers culminated in a
December 8, 1969 shootout between BPP members and 400 LAPD officers, including the SWAT
team with tactical air support at 41
st
and Central that lasted for 5 hours. GLF Los Angeles was
notably silent on this, despite modeling their demands and organizational work, such as
167
community survival programs, after the BPP. After Huey Newton made statements in support of
gay liberation in the August 1971 edition of The Black Panther, GLF members responded
penning a letter of support for the Panthers and tried to forge ties with the Panthers and other
radical organizations by sending members to the Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional
Convention in November 1970, a convergence designed to discuss and implement a national
political platform for radical, liberationist, and leftist groups and organizations. There is little
archival evidence that helps discern what materialized from GLF members' attendance of the
Convention. However, GLF's ideological proximity to the Black Panther Party and its material
and practical distance from BPP in Southern California further underscores a spatial disavowal of
South Central, or what is now referred to as South Los Angeles, that characterized a majority of
gay and lesbian political formations in the early 1970s, a pattern that continues today.
214
The fact
that GLF's survival programs, modeled off the Panther's Survival Programs, became enshrined in
the milieu of voluntary sector governance while those of the Panthers were systematically
destroyed, underscores the dynamic of scalar intersectionality. The difference between the two
programs was that one was realized through the apparatuses of voluntary governance, and the
other was launched as a critique of the project of governance in and of itself. Analyses that
would stop at identity, the oppositional Blackness of the BPP versus the more appealing
Whiteness of the GLF and GCMC, misses how neoliberal spatial strategies differentiate also
through eviscerating socio-spatial forms that are incongruent with its aims. The dismantling of
the Black Panther Party was as much as about disciplining Blackness as it was about disciplining
214 Black LGBT organizations and politics did develop in West Adams and Leimert Park neighborhoods throughout
the late 1970s and 1980s. These organizations like Minority Aids Project, Unity Fellowship Church, BLK
Magazine, Jewel's Catch One, and the Village Health Foundation claimed South Los Angeles as home and as a
site of sociality, advocacy, and struggle. The development of these organizations and the people that did the
bridge work between different clusters of people, resources, and ideas are explored in detail in Kai M. Greene's,
Into the Darkness, A Black Quare Remembering of Los Angeles.
168
politics in general by directing it into formats that governments could regulate and control
through funding eligibility requirements.
In July of 1970, GLF organized pickets of both the Park Theater and a Hollywood bar
called Sewers of Paris (1608 Cosmo). GLF received complaints of discrimination against drag
queens, sex workers, and women at Sewers of Paris. After 2am, Sewers of Paris turned into a
private club and GLF members were made aware that Sewers routinely barred women and drag
queens from entry after 2am. Additionally, Sewers refused to help promote the Christopher
Street West parade, which had become another site of struggle between gay and lesbian
organizers and the Chief Davis, who attempted to block the parade permit. When questioned
about discriminatory practices, Sewers management remarked: “We're in a bad area, especially
after 2am,” and that the exclusion of women and drag queens was the result of several recent
attempts of drag queens to sell drugs in the club and that the private club arrangement helped to,
“keep out people in this area who can be very violent, can be mentally ill.”
215
The Park Theater was a part of the Continental theater chain, one of the first to show
adult films that catered to gay audiences. As one of the few theaters in Los Angeles that screened
gay adult films, GLF members felt that the theater's $5 ticket prices, coupled with a $1
membership fee exploited the gay community. Then GLF chairman, Ralph Shafer reported to
The Advocate, that GLF decided to picket the two venues starting July 18, 1970 after
unsatisfactory meetings with both the owner of the Continental theater chain, Shan Sayles and
the management of Sewers of Paris. The Continental theater chain was also engaged in a labor
dispute with the projectionists union, IATSE Local 150 at the time. Continental management had
215 “L.A. Gay Lib pickets theatre, bar, charging community exploited.” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), August
19, 1970.
169
dismissed several members after they requested a meeting to negotiate their contract with
management within the legally required advance notice period. A gay member of IATSE reached
out to GLF and brought about the working arrangement between GLF and IATSE. GLF members
used the working relationship as an opportunity to push IATSE to revise their, “exclusionary
policy against certain minorities such as youths, longhairs, homosexuals, women, chicanos,
blacks, and others,”
216
although it is not clear how this relationship impacted IATSE's future
practices. GLF's willingness to challenge Sewers of Paris (a HELP member bar) is important.
The Sewer's formulation of violent / unwanted others: women, drag queens, drug users and
vendors, and mentally ill people were also the others of gay liberal political organizations. GLF's
willingness to take these issues on shows us the potential gay liberation had to trouble the socio-
spatial boundaries that cohered unprotectability as a classed, racialized and gendered mode
existence characterized by legal and extralegal policing, as well social and political disavowal.
However, the lack of a cohesive group ideology diluted GLF's attempts to bridge anti-racist
politics into gay and lesbian political formations. After ending their picket of Sewers of Paris on
August of 1970, for example, then GLF Chairman Dell Reed remarked that GLF had come to a
place of agreement with Sewers of Paris and that some of the charges of discrimination were
simply exaggerated.
217
During the summer of 1970, GLF members also made overtures of support to the
National Chicano Moratorium Committee, an anti-war and anti-racism organization based in
East Los Angeles. The Chicano Moratorium Committee was rooted in the political work of the
Brown Berets and the Chicano Student Walkouts of 1968 and mobilized around the number of
216 “LA Gay Lib pickets theater, bar charging community exploited.” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), August, 19
1970.
217 “Picketing off at LA bar,” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), September, 15, 1970.
170
Mexican-Americans dying in Vietnam. Organizers were planning a mass mobilization for August
29, 1970 and GLF members reached out Moratorium leaders to inquire about bringing a gay and
lesbian contingent into the march. Organizers told GLF members that they could participate as
individuals but that they couldn't bring signs or carry banners with any GLF messaging. This
angered GLF organizers, who penned an account of the exchange in the Los Angeles Free Press:
When we told the people responsible for the recent Chicano Moratorium that we would
support them and participate in their Moratorium, they told us not to. They were
embarrassed that the news media would see us. They told us that we would get our heads
smashed in by the chicanos if we supported them as homosexuals. We could support them
as individuals (which we did) but not as obvious homosexuals...It is not just the chicano
who feels this way, of course. At a demonstration at LACC, the Gay Liberation Front was
ridiculed by the blacks. Some black men affected ultra-feminine gestures and paraded in
front of us...Unless the Gay Liberation Front can convince liberated heterosexuals that we
are human beings and equal, that we truly suffer from the most insidious and
dehumanizing propaganda that any government and church has perpetuated on any
people...then we will have to fight our struggle by ourselves.
218
This account echoes much of GLF literature that posited the oppression of gays and lesbians as
the most deeply embedded, pernicious form of state sanctioned violence to date.
219
This false
contention was also put forward by many other gay organizations during the 1970s. While
homophobia among some leftist and anti-racist organizations and Los Angeles was a real barrier
to the development of a gay and lesbian left in the early 1970s, GLF's inability to understand
how racism and racial difference, classism and capital impacted the criminalization of sexual and
gender deviance, limited the scope and endurance of their anti-racist work.
While GLF Los Angeles struggled to build relationships with the Third World left in Los
Angeles in 1970, internal rifts splintered the group from the outset, and the advance of gay
liberal politics threatened to alienate GLF from the some of the gay liberal organizations that
218 Gay Liberation Front letter printed in the Los Angeles Free Press, September 25, 1970, Gay Liberation Front
(GLF), Los Angeles Records, Coll2012.031, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
219 Other mentions include a Feb 18, 1972 GLF radio broadcast on KPFK: “Homosexuals are the most oppressed of
all minorities.”
171
they regularly collaborated with.
220
From the beginning, GLF attracted a seemingly unlikely mix
of people across racial and class backgrounds and political affiliations. The clash between
leftists, and more conservatively minded members, between “friendly gays,” and “irregular
members,” is cited repeatedly in organizational documents as a challenge. After the first
meetings in 1969, that were so well attended, many White gay men, like Jim Kepner and Craig
Hanson, left GLF to start Gay Community Alliance, while other members, like Schofer and
Weinstein, would later form Lavender and Red Union. The membership of women and lesbians
decreased in October of 1970 after the Gay Women's Liberation Caucus of GLF broke amicably
with the organization and moved to the new Women's Center downtown. Member Michelle Ross
writes:
Up to this time, when Gay Women's Lib was basically a part of the Gay Liberation Front,
headquarters on Vermont, I really felt no part of it all, except for the encounter group we
had (the women)...I just couldn't seem to fit into their activities. This was true with a lot
of the women also because very few us sat in our participated in their committees. While
all this was spinning in space the issue of a coalition with the Black Panthers arose. The
men invented this idea and were entirely behind it. The women, as can be seen now, were
not. We feel we must find our own identity and our own causes as gay women and put
our efforts against suppression and oppression into the gay community, lending a hand
mainly to them, for they are us and so be it. Finally, it was announced that the Los
Angeles Gay Liberation Front is a coalition with the Black Panthers. Groovy, the men
completed their trip and now are an official militant group.
221
GLF rhetorically aspired to be open to everyone, however, the structurelessness of the group did
little to erase the power differentials and perceptions that existed between members. As Ross
intimates, the alliance with the BPP reflected the way that structurelessness supports
patriarchy,
222
but also the ways that the explosion of identity politics, while creating many
220 “GFL/LA Factions Vie.” The Advocate (Los Angeles, CA), March 17, 1971, “Councilman's cut at GLF strains
LA Gay Unity.” December, 22, 1971.
221 “Gay Women's Lib Center Opens.” Los Angeles Press, October, 23, 1970, Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Los
Angeles Records, Coll2012.031, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
222 Freeman, Jo. "The tyranny of structurelessness." Berkeley Journal of Sociology(1972): 151-164.
172
opportunities to imagine and craft new scales of political struggle, was also constrained by the
lack of a method to mediate individual and idenitarian experiences. Similarly, Angela Douglas,
one of the few, if not only, openly trans members in GLF, also left the organization in 1970 to
form Transgender Action Network (TAO). Douglas was a musician, singer, and actress who lived
in Los Angeles during the late 1960s, joining GLF in 1969. After ideological disagreements with
the direction of GLF, and inspired by the establishment of trans-led organizations like Street
Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Queens Liberation Front, Douglas founded Transgender
Action Organization (TAO) in 1970. TAO used their publication, Moonshadows to build the
capillaries of trans relationality and trans solidarity on an international scale. In 1970, the
publication first started under the name ARC, and shared office space with Gay Liberation Front.
Despite the inability of the group to engage the particular vulnerabilities trans people faced
meaningfully, GLF's caucus driven structure made it possible for Douglas to leverage
organizational resources even if for a limited amount of time, in order to launch TAO. By 1971,
Douglas left Los Angeles, relocating to Berkeley and eventually to Miami, Florida. TAO grew to
be a national, and then international organization with chapters in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Puerto Rico, England, among other locations. More research needs to be conducted on TAO Los
Angeles, to ascertain how and to what extent the chapter took policing in their work.
Because their commitment to anti-racism did not materialize into the group's work or
structure and in fact, the pluralism of the group, which was one of it radical potentials led to in-
fighting, Gay Liberation Front in effect, functioned as a left-leaning staging ground for gay
liberal politics. The ruptures within GLF deepened the racialized, gendered and classed
boundaries of LGBT political representation: liberal and conservative White gay men retreated
173
into the Gay Community Services Center and Gay Community Alliance, leaving LGBT leftists,
lesbians, LGBT people of color, and gender non-conforming people to devise their own political
formations.
Lavender and Red Union
Lavender and Red Union (LRU) was started in 1974 by Gene Schofner and Michael
Weinstein, who is currently the director of the Aids Health Foundation. Lavender and Red Union
sought to organize a gay and lesbian left centered around the critique of capitalism. Lavender and
Red Union started off as a Marxist-Leninist Study group that began to take on issues of classism,
sexism, and racism within the nascent LGBT community. Like GLF, LRU had a short
organizational lifespan and by 1977, internal and external pressures left the group severely
fractured. However, LRU's work and the challenges they faced give us a view into networks of
gay and lesbian left organizing and bridge building that has remained largely unexplored by
scholars. An internal split over LRU's decision to fuse with the Sparticist League, a political
move towards Trostkyism, disagreements over the Stalin question, were among the many things
that caused a self-named Revolutionary Faction within LRU emerge and formally break ties with
the organization in 1977. LRU members like Franz Martin, who donated the LRU materials this
chapter is based on to the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, was a
member of this Revolutionary Faction. Martin's unruly archive of unorganized papers, copies of
gay and lesbian left periodicals from all over the United States, handwritten notes, and cutouts of
news stories all chart a search for a national leftist network that Los Angeles gay and lesbian
leftists could plug into. This search underscores the ways that the disciplining of homosexuality
174
in traditional left spaces, and the disciplining of radicalism in Los Angeles constrained the
development of an LGBT left in Los Angeles. Correspondence suggests that Martin and other
gay and lesbian leftists in Los Angeles had established organizational ties with the Revolutionary
Socialist League in June of 1977, but by the early 1980s, Martin and other Los Angeles gay and
lesbian leftists were organized under the banner of Lavender Left, claiming to be “not just
another bunch of White yuppies.”
223

Lavender Left was a national network of gay and lesbian leftists that grew after the 1979
March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. At the 1979 march, members of Lavender
Left and other gay and lesbian leftists discussed planning a national gathering of GLQ leftist
organizations. Plans materialized in 1980, when Lavender Left hosted the convergence at Appel
Farm in New Jersey. The convergence was attended by gay, lesbian, and queer leftist and radical
organizations like Dykes Against Racism (New York), Lavender Left, the Revolutionary
Socialist League, the Freedom Socialist Party, etc. Timmons and Faderman note that ACT UP
Los Angeles later arises out of Lavender Left in 1987, due to the arrival New Orleans gay activist
Mark Kostopoulos, a member of Lavender Left in New Orleans and Los Angeles, who along
with former Lavender and Red Union members, like Michael Weinstein and Chris Brownlee,
began organizing around local and federal AIDS policies in the late 1980s.
224
Lavender Left, has
been given very scant scholarly attention. Moira Kenney writes that Lavender Left emerged out
of Gay Liberation Front.
225
However, Franz Martin's archive suggests that Lavender Left
materialized out of the ruptures of Lavender and Red Union, who, through the Gay Community
223 Undated Lavender Left Flyer, Gay Left Periodicals Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies
and Research, Los Angeles, CA.
224 Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay LA: A history of sexual outlaws, power politics, and lipstick
lesbians. (Basic Books, 2006), 314.
225 Kenney, Moira. Mapping gay LA: The intersection of place and politics. Temple University Press, 2001.
175
Mobilization Committee, brought together gay and lesbian leftists and progressives and allies
from the Peoples' College of Law to build a queer left direct action caucus. Martin's archive,
treated as a narrative, is a window into a spatially and organizationally fragmented gay and
lesbian left that struggled throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s to consolidate an
organized response to and definition of policing that centered on anti-racism, anti-sexism, and a
critique of liberal reformism. However, ideological struggles and the lack of a strong local leftist
infrastructure also made their interventions episodic rather than sustained or programmatic.
Tracking how these activists responded to and articulated policing, highlights both the challenges
that constrained and fractured the gay and lesbian left, as well as the ways organizing around
police violence was productive of local and national networks of gay and lesbian radicalism that
are deserving of increased scholarly attention.
When Lavender and Red Union began organizing in 1974, they were a Marxist-Leninist
organization that operated under the principle that true gay liberation required a socialist
revolution, and that a socialist revolution would be incomplete or inadequate without gay
liberation, or that US socialism could not proceed effectively by evacuating LGBT people from
the articulation of the working class. LRU deliberately positioned themselves against gay liberal
institutions, like the Gay Community Services Center and the Christopher West Street
Association, who they believed constrained the development of gay liberation due to their
misunderstanding of how capitalist interests constituted the repression and criminalization of gay
and lesbian identity. To LRU members, an understanding of capitalism demanded an alternative
strategy to reform as means of truly producing gay liberation. This distinction needed to be made
in Los Angeles especially, where Gay Liberation (embodied by GLF and the GCSC) was so
176
aligned with, and eventually gave way to gay liberalism. LRU members also addressed what they
saw as a homophobic left. In an undated flyer for an 11-week Introduction to Socialism class
sponsored by the LRU, Schofner and Weinstein write: “the Union [LRU] began because we did
not feel that Gay communist could work effectively either inside the Gay liberation movement
[GLF] or in the revolutionary movement. Directly, many of our experiences at the Gay
Community Services Center and in a variety of left groups had contributed to this decision.”
226

LRU defined their work as multi-pronged: 1) supporting and growing gay liberation struggles, 2)
working to, “reverse many counter-revolutionary trends within our community,”
227
particularly
liberal reformism, and 3) struggling “against the anti-gay positions taken by most socialist
revolutionaries.”
228
In July of 1974, LRU members passed out a leaflet at a meeting of the
Revolutionary Union titled “Is Genocide the Answer to Contradictions Amongst the People,” in
which they refuted claims made by the Revolution Union, who barred gays and lesbians from
membership, that posited stable monogamous relationships as the most revolutionary way to
struggle through the contradictions and division of labor capitalism creates between men and
women. The leaflet accused this logic of being ahistorical, non-dialectical, abstract and sexist:
The logical extension of their [Revolutionary Union's] reasoning would be that in order
for white people to struggle with their racism, a Third World person would have to relate
to them in a sexual context. These incorrect theories lead to reactionary politics. RU's
analysis would lead to a superficial economistic dealing with the specific oppression of
Women and Third World people. And, specifically for Gay people – genocide – the prison
camps in some socialist countries. In short, THE RU'S POSITION ON GAYNESS IS AN
INSULT TO THE WORKING CLASS. WORKERS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE OF
ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!
229
226 Undated letter, Lavender and Red Union Subject File, ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
227 Lavender & Red Union Undated Press Release, November 6 1974 Press Release, Gay Left Periodicals / Franz
Martin Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California.
228 Lavender & Red Union Undated Press Release, November 6 1974 Press Release, Gay Left Periodicals / Franz
Martin Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California.
229 “Is Genocide the Answer to Contradictions Amongst the People?” Lavender & Red Union Handout, July 24,
177
In October of 1974, members attempted to organize a gay contingent in a local march
against U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico planned by the Puerto Rican Solidarity Day Committee.
This request was blocked by Free Los Tres, La Raza Unida Party and the Puerto Rican Socialist
Party, all of whom agreed that homosexuality in Puerto Rico would disappear once Puerto Rico
was liberated from U.S. control. In addition to the Revolutionary Union and the Puerto Rican
Solidarity Day Committee, the LRU also struggled with the Los Angeles Venceremos Brigade,
who organized solidarity trips to Cuba, the October League, the Communist Labor Party, the
Black Workers Congress, and the Socialist Workers Party around the “bourgeois decadence
theory,” of homosexuality throughout the late 1970s.
230
LRU was not alone in its critique of
homophobia on the left; in 1975, the Los Angeles Research Group, a group of mostly White
lesbians, wrote an even lengthier response to the Revolutionary Union's position on
homosexuality, arguing that their position renders gender and sexuality unchanging formulations
that are pre-made before the construction of social classes rather than through them.
231
Archival
evidence makes it difficult to adequately assess the nuances of the objection of these
organizations to working with LRU. For example, did Third World leftist organizers in Los
Angeles see LRU as an another instantiation of the White left, who Laura Pulido reminds us,
Third World leftists in Los Angeles typically eschewed working with? Is the bourgeois
decadence theory not just the product of the underlying hetero-patriarchal assumptions of
Marxism, Marxists and Third World left organizations and organizers, but also in a local context,
1974, Lavender and Red Union Subject File, ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
230 Lavender & Red Union Undated Press Release, November 6 1974 Press Release, Gay Left Periodicals / Franz
Martin Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California.
231 Hobson, Emily K. Imagining alliance: Queer anti-imperialism and race in California, 1966 – 1990. University
of Southern California, 2009, 181.
178
an attempt to preserve a focus on race, class, and empire in Third World leftist organizing? This
subject area requires additional investigation to more accurately assess the impact the struggle
around sexuality had on the left in Los Angeles. Regardless, the intellectual and ideological labor
of articulating how homosexuality fits into social class composition consumed a significant
portion of LRU activity in 1974.
Being rejected by local leftist organizations and feeling frustrated with gay liberal
institutions, LRU attempted to organize those who typically fell outside the purview of both
kinds of organizations. LRU's organizing pamphlets and flyers promoted two points of unity: 1)
full rights for gays and lesbians including equal employment, the abolishing of anti-gay laws, the
end to police and psychological harassment, and sexual freedom and 2) ending racism and
sexism: “an end to discrimination of women, transvestites, transsexuals, Blacks, Chicanos,
Asians and Native Americans. Close gender manipulation programs for children. Stop crimes
against women and the slaughter of Black people by the LAPD.”
232
In order to build a strong left
movement, Weinstein and Schofner promoted intensive study as the best guide to political action.
In addition to the 11-week course on socialism, members also held lectures and discussions,
organized study groups, opened an office at 6844 Sunset Blvd, and opened a bookstore at 6618
Sunset Blvd to support their work financially. Unlike Gay Liberation Front, LRU had a clearer
ideological framework to guide their work: for LRU gay liberation represented the radical
potential of gays and lesbians as a members of the working class. Like GLF, LRU also struggled
to actualized its anti-racist and anti-sexist politics both in terms of reaching out to and recruiting
transgender people, lesbians, women and gays and lesbians of color, and in terms of developing
232 Undated Flyer, Lavender and Red Union Subject File, ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
179
and executing a sustained plan of action to address racism and sexism in the regular work of the
organization.
In 1975, LRU's critique of gay liberal institutions deepened after their participation in the
Greater Los Angeles Coalition to Guarantee Fair Employment Practices. LRU joined the
coalition to push for a bill that would remove bans to city employment based on marital status
and sexual orientation. At this time, LRU was also starting its In Defense of Gay Workers
project, a survey of the wages and working conditions of gay and lesbian workers. However, in
LRU's view, “gay leadership,” who they defined as David Glascock, Morris Kight, Don
Kilhefner, and the Gay Community Services Center, had pushed the coalition to focus more on
pushing the Civil Service Commission to remove the ban on sexual orientation specifically so
that gays and lesbians could become police officers. In LRU's view, Kight, Glascock, and
Kilhefner, were overstating the interest of gays and lesbians in becoming cops: “The net result
[of the actions of gay leadership] has been to shift the entire focus in the sphere of Gay
employment rights away from fair employment and in the struggle against the police, away from
the harassment and terrorization of Gay people.”
233
In February of 1975, LRU wrote an open
letter to the Coalition, accusing GCSC, Kight, Glascock and Kilhefner of manipulating and
misleading the community and suppressing mass mobilization:
The original strategists for this legislation (chiefly Morris Kight and Don Kilhefner) were
going to slip it through the city council in order not to embarrass city council persons
who would most certainly vote against the bill if there was any public disclosure of the
nature of it. It is difficult to say whether this is more of a testament to their stupidity or to
their slavish devotion to these politicians...The police and others are mobilized against us
and yet these so called leaders still oppose mass mobilization and still bow to the wishes
of self-serving politicians. These “leaders” actions are most disgusting in two areas:
233 The Lavender and Red Book: A Gay Liberation / Socialist Anthology, Gay Left Periodicals / Franz Martin
Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California, 24.
180
1) in their undermining of a proposed Gay community meeting which was the only
potential this coalition ever had for real community involvement, and
2) there withholding of vital information from the community and the coalition itself. The
most blatant example is their refusal to release police documents maligning Gay people.
They have been coaxed into keeping them secret by people such as Councilman
Stevenson and Supervisor Edelman.
It is sad that the Gay community has been manipulated by the likes of these politicians
whom we only see at election time or when they appoint of of these “professional Gay
liberationists” as a token to their staff. We are tired of seeing the Gay community used
and manipulated by self seekers who would sell out our interests to the highest bidder.
234

LRU further expounded on this issue in The Lavender and Red Book: a Gay Liberation /
Socialist Anthology, a book LRU published in 1975 outlining their political perspectives on
socialism and gay liberation. In the section titled “Gays vs. the Police,” LRU used the struggle
around the employment rights bill as an opportunity to offer its perspective on policing and
reform, outlining the limits of the victimless crime discourse that permeated gay liberal
responses to policing:
The primary function of the police (and the entire state apparatus) is to guard the property
of the bourgeoisie, directly and through the maintenance of order on their behalf. Their
secondary function is to uphold the ideas and the value systems of society whether or not
there are laws against a particular activity or not. This second function is most often
spoken of these days as victimless crime...For reformists who accept the basic framework
of private ownership of the means of production, the struggle is defined in terms of
limiting the police to protecting private property. The reformist does not understand that
these two functions are inseparably linked...Invariably, in looking for a solution to the
police problem some radicals will talk of community control of the police. This
“ultimate” solution is actually very regressive. The maintenance of capitalism is
dependent on an insufficient understanding by the masses of a system that oppresses
them. Until a consciousness has been created of their real situation they would not
necessary provide greater restraints on the police...The most important viewpoint we
must put forward at this moment is to return the focus of the struggle with the police to
the issue of their terrorization of the Gay community and what the true nature of the
system is.
235
234 Open Letter to the Members of the Greater LA Coalition to Guarantee Fair Employment Practices, Feb 8, 1975,
Lavender and Red Union Subject File, ONE Subject File collection, Coll2012-001, ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
235 The Lavender and Red Book: A Gay Liberation / Socialist Anthology, Gay Left Periodicals / Franz Martin
181
LRU's perspective on policing and community control of the police helps to begin to explain
why LRU did not build a relationship with the Coalition Against Police Abuse, which was started
in 1976, or the Citizens Commission on Police Repression, started in 1979/1980 (although LRU's
internal contradictions had left the group split by 1977). Both coalitions had grassroots and leftist
participation and were both open to having gay and lesbian organizations as members. While
LRU did provide an alternative to the victimless crimes narrative, which depended on an
unnamed violent (racialized) figure as the rightful target of policing, their class-centered analysis
did not adequately account for the role of policing in maintaining class and racial boundaries in
Los Angeles. Furthermore, this class-centered analysis may have been ineffective at recruiting
gays and lesbians of color in Los Angeles, whose lived experiences and analyses of policing
might have conflicted with the LRU's analysis of policing.
236
Despite LRU's incisive critique of
reform politics and their questioning of community control as a radical strategy, their lack of
understanding of how racial difference becomes a lived modality of class difference
237
made an
organized campaign intervening in LAPD practices an issue that was largely unattended to in a
sustained way by the burgeoning gay and lesbian left in Los Angeles. It was in such a context
that gay liberal police reform activism became the predominant kind of sustained campaign
around LAPD harassment and violence toward LGBT people in Los Angeles.
The Revolutionary Faction of LRU, which included Franz Martin, focused on trying to
bridge anti-racist praxis into gay and lesbian politics and social spaces, including the LRU.
Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles, California, 25.
236 Also, during the development of the multi-racial left in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s, leftist community
organizations in Los Angeles, like the Civil Rights Congress had already moved beyond dual function of
policing argument, arguing that policing of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles also functioned as a tool of
White Supremacist genocide.
237 Hall, Stuart. "Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance." Black British cultural studies: A
reader (1996): 16-60.
182
Martin was a student at the newly established Peoples' College of Law, formed in September of
1974. The Peoples' College of Law was established by a several groups including the National
Lawyers Guild, to create an affordable way for working class people and people of color to
qualify for and pass the California bar exam. At the College, Franz Martin met Step May, once a
member of GLF in New York, Ron Grayson, and Julie Gaviria, who were a part of the Gay
Student's Caucus on campus. The coming together of Martin, May, and Grayson gave way to the
formation of the Gay Community Mobilization Committee (GCMC) in 1976. The Gay
Community Mobilization Committee created a container for leftist and progressive gay and
lesbian activists to address what they saw as racism and sexism in the gay and lesbian
community. The GCMC's first action was organizing a boycott of the Studio One, a gay bar that
routinely discriminated against non-White gays and lesbians, requiring people of color and trans
people to show several forms of identification in order to enter the bar. The GCMC took on
Studio One, not because they were unique in this policy, but because organizers regarded Studio
One the largest gay bars in Hollywood, and felt that if they could make an intervention there,
other bars might follow suit. The GCMC also used the boycott to intervene on the ways they saw
gay and lesbian politics as becoming increasingly detached from material contexts of oppression.
For the GCMC, nothing symbolized that more than how the Christopher Street West Parade had
turned into a celebration of gay pride. The GCMC used the Studio One boycott to also organize a
Liberation Contingent for the Christopher Street West parade as an attempt to re-politicize the
event, which only a few years ago had been a site of political contest between gays and lesbians,
and the LAPD. More work is required to truly gauge how Peoples' College of Law impacted the
gay and lesbian left in Los Angeles, but records suggest it had played a significant role. Peoples'
183
College of Law (PCL) students played a significant role on the 1976 Committee to Build
Stonewall, a working group that planned a gay and lesbian left convergences in Los Angeles in
1976 and 1977. Furthermore PCL brought gay and lesbian leftists like Franz Martin in contact
with other working class gays and lesbians of color like Ronald Grayson, who records show
began organizing a legal defense fund in 1976 on behalf of Ernest Marshall, a Black gay janitor
who was fired from his job after being arrested for lewd conduct. LRU covered the Ernest
Marshall case in Come Out Fighting but seemed to leave the on-the-ground support work for
Marshall's legal defense to Grayson. Perhaps it was meeting leftists of color like Grayson, May,
and Gaviria, that convinced members of the Revolutionary Faction in LRU that it was possible to
find other gay and lesbian leftists who were committed to anti-racism. A year later after the 1977
Stonewall Conference, the Revolutionary Faction split from the LRU, joining with the
Revolutionary Socialist League, and the rest of LRU, fusing with the Sparticist League. At this
point LRU was no more, and began operating with the Sparticist League as Red Flag Union.
Additional research needs to be conducted to give an adequate account of the RSL years in Los
Angeles, which are less documented, and to understand the transition from working with the
RSL to Lavender Left. However the few RSL documents in Martin's collection do give evidence
of a network of lesbian and gay leftist in places like Seattle, Detroit, and New Orleans, who did
engage the issue of policing to build a lesbian and gay left focused around anti-racism and
international solidarity. Future directions of this research include more investigation into the
work of the RSL in Detroit and the growth of Lavender Left in New Orleans, which is relevant to
Los Angeles, as Lavender Left – New Orleans member Mark Kostopoulos becomes an
organizing member of ACT UP Los Angeles in 1987.
184
Minding the Gaps
The challenges both Gay Liberation Front and Lavender and Red Union faced in building
relationships with the Third World Left in Los Angeles deserves deeper investigation. These
challenges help us understand how the relation of serviceable-but-unprotectable imposes such a
material force in the present. It wasn't just a result of lesbians, trans people, and people of color
being exiled from gay and lesbian political spaces, because as this chapter shows, lesbians, trans
people and people of color didn't just accept the racial and gendered boundaries gay liberal
activism cohered. People like Angela Douglas, and Ronald Grayson, Franz Martin, and others
tried to operate in the gaps of what was becoming normative gay liberalism in Los Angeles, but
their ability to do so was also constrained by political fragmentation on a larger scale, that made
it difficult for gay leftist gays and lesbians to build bridges with New Left and Third World Left
organizations.
185
CONCLUSION
PERFECT DISORDER AND OTHER WAYS TO BE
Perfect Disorder
I have endeavored to use history as a method to illustrate the productive tension between
spatial differentiation and social differentiation, or the multiplication of identity. Using policing
as a route through the articulation of identity and production of gay space underscores the ways
that sexuality, as a category of identity, always archives an articulation of, or struggle over, the
relationship between race, class and gender. This is because criminality as a status, has
historically been constituted by the racialized, classed, gendered, sexed, and spatial anxieties that
incited the development of criminology. To be folded into the discourse of modern criminality is
always already to be placed in proximity to racialized, classed, gendered, and sexed otherness.
Notions of sexual difference that overrepresent sexuality as a the province of Whiteness,
masculinity, urbanity, and affluence become hegemonic, when the always, already racialized,
classed, gendered, and place valuations that constitute sexual difference are evacuated from the
history, discourse, politics, and praxis of sexuality. The struggle to de-criminalize what becomes
lesbian and gay identity necessarily referenced racial and class difference as a reservoir of
meaning through which activists articulated the particularity of sexuality-based criminalization
and oppression.
The gap between queer criminality and its politicization is the space of perfect disorder. It
is the place where racial, gendered, and classed meanings are replayed and / or revised. This gap
archives both the potential and trap of subjectification. If perfect disorder is concerned with the
life-cycle of law and order, then the arc of homophile and LGBT organizing around policing
186
highlights how the socio-spatial differentiation around race and class that cohered the LAPD's
capacity during the War on Labor and the War on Crime, both enabled and abstracted the
relationship between race, class gender, and sexuality. On the one hand, the violence of policing
induced some people and organizations to understand and articulate the relationality between
race, class, and gender. The demand for self-determination that was pushed by both the Civil
Rights, Black Power, and Third World movements of the 1950s and 1960s proved a salient and
productive one for homophile and LGBT movements. Groups like Mattachine's Citizen's
Committee to Outlaw Entrapment (CCOE) used racist violence as a framing metaphor to
articulate homosexual police oppression as a relational experience that was held in tension with
racist police violence. Gay Liberation Front, for example, used the Black Power and Third World
Left Movement as a model to build their Survival Programs, which became institutionally
enshrined when the White, male, and more affluent members left the organization to put their
capacity in the Gay Community Services Center. While GLF was able to attract people across
racial, gender, class, and political lines, the inability of the group to develop a method to mediate
individual experience into collective action caused GLF to fragment across the same class and
ideological lines that fractured Mattachine. This break facilitated the re-inscription of color and
class lines within political organizing spaces in Los Angeles that were addressing LAPD
harassment. For example, Gay Community Alliance, which was forged by the more politically
moderate and conservative members of Gay Liberation Front, attempted to bar women and drag
queens from participating in their organization, advocating for single-issue approach that would
allow gay men, lesbians, and gender non-conforming people to pursue their own separate
agendas.
187
Sir Lady Java eschewed an identity-based connection to her crusade against LAPD's anti-
cross dressing ordinance and instead chose to frame it as a labor rights issue. However, because
the spatial politics of the LAPD's jurisdiction public cross-dressing, which vested control in the
ability of the Police Commission to suspend the license of the bar or club employing female
impersonators, Java ended up not being seen in the eyes of the law as the legitimate subject of a
regulation that directly targeted her as a gender non-conforming person. The fact that White men,
like Dale Jennings of CCOE, could more often be seen as the subject of the laws designed to
contain their non-normative behavior supported not only the over-representation of White men in
leadership roles in gay liberal organizations that look on police reform, but also a focus on
certain penal codes as over-representing the full breadth of queer criminality. This abstraction
was not just a result of White men's prejudices, but a product of policing, and how the LAPD
categorized and juxtaposed different practices of queer criminality (prostitution vs. sex crimes)
and the legal infrastructure used to justify enforcement (state penal code vs. municipal code vs.
ad hoc police commission rules). The fact that the LAPD chose not to publish statistics or data
on arrests for masquerading, helped to discursively separate such forms of ad hoc and
administrative criminalization that more frequently targeted trans and gender non-conforming
people from the penal codes that most often targeted gay men.
The collection of these abstractions and opportunities, incorporations and disavowals in
time and space, is a map of the perfect disorder of difference, the potential of subjectificiation as
a practice of survival and solidarity, and the limits of identity politics and political subjecthood,
when they activate “fatal couplings of power and difference.”
238
A politics of perfect disorder
238 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "Fatal couplings of power and difference: Notes on racism and geography." The
Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15-24.
188
understands identity as a scalar category, meaning that the project and politics of identity
participate in the creation of different kinds of places, whose development over time can
facilitate, disorganize and/ or confound the very aims and claim of identity. Gay liberal police
reform organizations like HELP, Gay Community Alliance, and the Police Task Force built
political power in an attempt to stem the tide of aggressive law enforcement, but in doing so, also
supported the serviceable-but-unprotectable relation that positions poor people, people of color,
and trans and gender non-conforming people as target service demographics, but not as sites of
political knowledge or agency. Organizers affirmed sexuality as the a new vanguard, the new
horizon of universality by juxtaposing the victimless crime of sexual deviance, to the “real”
threat of violent crime. A similar trope is used currently, to distinguish drug and so-called
“poverty crimes,” from violent crime. Each of these narratives is itself a scripting of the
relationality (or lack thereof) between race, class, gender and sexuality, and other categories of
difference like citizenship and ability. However, as this study shows, the durability of
criminality as a permanent status is sustained over time, partly through the scripting of multiple
and varying discourses and practices of identity into a finite and manageable set of political
forms.
In the 1950s, anti-Communism helped to script Mattachine's cleavage around radicalism,
which foreclosed the organization's rhetorical and practical commitment to anti-racism. The
decision by the majority of the members that Communism constituted a criminal affiliation,
helped to inculcate the idea that sexuality, class, and race were socially related, but politically
separate categories, which is itself a supposition on the relationship between race, class, gender,
and sexuality.
189
In the 1970s, the expansion of federal funding to community-based organizations,
facilitated in part through the General Revenue Sharing Program, was a development that
scripted community-based organizations, like the Gay Community Services Center, into a form
that could be manageable and valuable for the State. However, the State, as a set of contradictory
relationships, was the same State, that, for example, failed to provide competent or adequate
healthcare to gay men with venereal disease, a gap that informed the early work of the GCSC.
Federal and municipal housing assistance programs at the time were centered around developing
and sustaining the nuclear family, which made them unavailable to many poor gays and lesbians
as well as single, and unmarried people. As Jennifer Wolch argues, the expansion of the
voluntary sector in the United States, throughout the 1970s brought community organizations
increasingly into a market relatiosnhip with the state, private charities, and foundations. This
multi-scalar transformation of the welfare state helped to channel the radical demand for self-
determination, that exploded throughout the 1970s as the multiplication of discourses of race,
class, gender, and sexuality, into the politics of self-help and self-management. This effect of
channelling self-determination into a manageable and value-producing political format, meant
that lesbians, people of color, and trans and gender non-conforming Angelenos who were
vulnerable to policing and economic instability were more likely to find services among LGBT
institutions than political representation. This relation, which I name serviceable-but-
unprotectable, asks us to understand the role of the re-territorialization of social services in the
life-cycle of law and order.
If anything, gay liberal police reform activism underscores the strategic importance of
political legitimacy and political representation in decriminalization efforts. Gay Community
190
Alliance and HELP, for example were able to court local politicians like District Attorney Steve
Pines, Councilman Ed Edelman, and Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, who personally lobbied to
Chief Davis on behalf of gays and lesbians, because of the political visibility and legitimacy that
groups like US Mission, and the Gay Community Services Center gained in City Hall by
providing social services. Gay liberal organizations turned Hollywood and West Hollywood, the
so-called gay ghetto, into a space of dependence, in which resources, infrastructure, and political
power gained by one organization, sustained the political and economic capacity and legitimacy
of all organizations. However, gay liberal organizations simultaneously used Los Angeles, and
their proximity to racialized, gendered, and classed precarity, as a space of engagement, a space
in which they could expand their organizational capacity. Spatial differentiation, or the creation
of different kinds of places: the gay ghetto versus the larger context of the neoliberal reform city,
in this case is the lever of abstraction that enables the simultaneous incorporation and disavowal
of difference into the politics of sexual identity. The entrance into the realm of voluntary sector
governance, a space of engagement for community organizations and a space of dependence for
the anti-state state, threatened to unravel the rapidly expanding Gay Community Services Center.
Internal strife over the racial and gender politics of administration and management at the Center,
an internal fallout over how to allocate a large federal grant for drug and alcohol treatment for
Latina women, and an employee strike in the mid-1970s all threatened to shut the Center down
within the first seven years of its existence.
Lavender and Red Union emerged through this period of disorder, questioning the limits
of the politics of liberal reform that they saw as guiding the Center's politics. In practice, this
questioning was also about positing a different relationship between gender, sexuality, race, and
191
class, that centered a socialist revolution, rather than civil rights, as the proper objective of
LGBT identity and politics. However, the longtime fragmentation of the Left in Los Angeles, a
product of long-term scale-making project, the War on Labor, made it difficult for LGBT leftists
to forge working relationships with Third World Left anti-racist organizations. The long arc of
law enforcement effort to stamp out Communism constrained the development of the gay and
lesbian left, although the rising concern over HIV /AIDS re-energizes gay and lesbian leftists in
Los Angeles throughout the late 1980s, into the 1990s.
Other Ways to Be
If a politics of perfect disorder asks us to consider the scope of the life-cycle of
criminality, then how could this study of homophile and LGBT policing activism re-orient the
aims and claims of LGBT politics and LGBT history? First, since queer criminality has always
exceeded the political response to it and its translation into a politics of identity, this should
encourage us to continue to pursue alternate forms of political selfhood, as did some of the
people in this study. Sir Lady Java, for example, attempted to expand the terrain of labor rights to
be able to comprehend and contain her struggle against the ban on cross-dressing. While she did
not craft her politics around her identity, Java affirmed her own personhood by refusing to
submit to an LAPD strip search to affirm her “true” gender, while living openly as a gender non-
conforming person. Activists of color within the Police Advisory Task Force, for example,
pushed fellow organizers on the Task Force to build relationships with racial and ethnic
communities struggling around police violence, despite eventually being pushed out of the
group. Similarly activists in Lavender and Red Union attempted to get gay and lesbian, anti-
192
racist, and leftists groups and organizations to “show up” for each other. This kind of bridge
work, highlights a trajectory of political selfhood that supposes a different relationship between
race, class, gender, and sexuality than has been reified by the arc of gay liberal police reform
activism and the sustenance of the serviceable-but-unprotectable relation.
Secondly, this study underscores how gender non-conformity and trans embodiment has
been a key material and discursive reservoir for constructions of queer criminality. Before the
homosexual was a cogent social identity, gender deviance, and specifically, cross-dressing was a
site of queer criminality in Los Angeles, and other cities in the United States. I have
demonstrated how the different approaches to policing gender deviance versus sex perversion
and lewd vagrancy, also shaped disaggregation of policing gender deviance and trans and gender
non-conforming people from the agenda of homophile and gay and lesbian police activism. Both
Chapters One and Two begin with stories of Black gender non-conforming people, whose gender
non-conformity becomes knowable, is rendered through the act of policing. In both cases,
broken-windows style patrolling for pickpockets, purse thieves, and sex workers forms the scene
of discovery of gender non-conformity. Criminalizing gender non-conformity was inter-woven
into other modes of policing and in may ways, was a category of identity whose scope of
criminalization throughout the postwar period resisted a homogenous or spatially clustered
demographic, unlike Sex Crimes policing, which very clearly targeted White men in the 1940s
and increasingly, men of color in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Despite the formative role
that gender non-conformity has had on the criminalization and articulation of homosexuality, the
homophile and gay movements in Los Angeles and beyond have tended to disavow drag queens,
trans people and gender non-conforming people as political subjects and gender non-conformity
193
as a political concern.
Finally, LGBT politics around policing demonstrate a willingness on the part of
organizers to experiment and hybridize ideological frameworks like liberation and liberalism.
For example, the Los Angeles LGBT Center would not exist in its current format, without Gay
Liberation Front, and the Survival Programs (modeled off the Black Panther Party) that GLF
members innovated. LGBT institutions, which are the most enduring forms of spatial fixity that
LGBT political struggles in Los Angeles have taken on should always be remembered as a
resolution of struggles over the relationship between race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Future Directions for Research
The process of writing this dissertation has illuminated several areas for further research
that will improve this study. First, I will extend the narrative timeline of the study through the
end of the 1990s. Additional archival research and interviews will allow me to unpack how queer
criminality and the serviceable-but-unprotectable relation transform throughout 1990s,
particularly in the context of the HIV / AIDS crisis and HIV / AIDS activism in Los Angeles. I
will also extend the examination of the spatial politics of arrests using mapping into the 1990s.
Post-1970 arrest statistics were unavailable from the City Archives and Records Center at the
time I was conducting research. I have since located 1970s and 1980s arrest statistics and
policing boundaries through the Los Angeles Public library.
A secondary research phase for this project includes conducting oral histories with some
of the activists who worked with the organizations I profile. I have already identified several
people including Sir Lady Java, Donald Kilhefner (GLF), and Julie Gaviria (LRU) who are still
194
alive, two of whom have already agreed to be interviewed. I am currently trying to identify and
locate members from other organizations, particularly late 1970s and 1980s organizations like
The Task Force, Lavender Left, and the ACLU.
Additionally, while I gesture towards the struggle of racial and ethnic groups in Los
Angeles against policing, I will conduct additional research in order to hone that comparative
element throughout the entire arc of the narrative, so we can more clearly understand how the
meaning and function of identity is struggled over at the register of criminality across categories
of difference. In particular, I am interested in detailing the struggle for civilian oversight in Los
Angeles during the early in 1980s to understand how the coalition imagined, defined, and
practiced the relationship between race, class, gender and sexuality, as well as the kinds of
pressures the structures of redress and politicization exerted on the coalition.
Finally, the process of research has revealed several potential digital archiving projects
that would be beneficial for this study and for research on Los Angeles in general. Although
there are many texts about the Los Angeles Police Department, few of them focus on the LAPD
as a constituting force of city development. Accounts of the LAPD tend to focus on
accomplishments and directives of the Police Chief, or focus on police practices, police
professionalization, or particular moments of policing crisis, like the 1965 and 1992 rebellion.
This study suggests that policing is a defining feature of American life in the 20
th
century. A
better understanding policing then, might help us better understand the kind of world we live in.
For example, the un-indexed meeting minutes of the Los Angeles Board of Police
Commissioners, reveal a pattern of economic disenfranchisement based on difference. The Police
Commission routinely denied business permits for a variety of business types to Black people,
195
people deemed morally unfit, female impersonators, and the like. In most cases, permit requests
include the address of the business. I am interested in digitizing this data so that it will be
possible to investigate the spatial patterns of business permitting. This data could provide a
powerful glimpse into how policing has shaped spatial and racialized patterns of business
ownership in the city. Another digitization project that emerges from this study is the creation of
GIS shape-files and datasets from the LAPD Annual Reports and Statistical Digests. I have
already begun this project in order to create the maps that I analyze in the first chapter.
Additional work includes obtaining and transcribing arrest data for Sex Crimes from the 1990s,
and transcribing all the arrest data in the reports, which span from the 1930s to the 1990s.
196
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APPENDIX A
LIST OF ARCHIVES
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive
Los Angeles City Archives and Records Center
Southern California Library for Social Science and Research
Los Angeles Public Library
202
APPENDIX B
MAPS OF SEX CRIMES ARRESTS AND PROSTITUTION
ARRESTS, 1950 – 1969
These maps shows arrests for Sex Crimes and Prostitution disaggregated by reporting
district from 1950 to 1969. After 1950, the LAPD began to publish arrest data disaggregated by
police division, I chose to tabulate the data from 1950 to 1969 by reporting district. The LAPD
also published a map of the policing districts in each edition of the Annual Report. I used these
maps to draw the policing boundaries for the 1950s and 1960s in ArcMap so that I could
visualize the tabulated arrest data spatially and overlay it with racial demographic data by block
from the US Census. I paired the 1960 census data with the 1950s arrest data, since the 1960
census is a snapshot of the decade of the 1950s and similarly paired the 1970s census data with
the 1960s arrest data. The historical census data was created by a research team headed by Dr.
Phil Ethington through a research grant from the Haynes Foundation.
239
In the maps with the census overlay, the abbreviation legend is as follows:
• P60TOTNW – 1960 Total Non-White Population
• P60WHN – 1960 White, Non-Hispanic Population.
• P70WNH – 1970 White, Non-Hispanic Population
• P70BNH – 1970 Black, Non-Hispanic Population
• P70ONH – 1970 Other, Non-White, Non-Hispanic Population
• P70HIS – 1970 Hispanic Population
239 Philip J. Ethington, Anne Marie Kooistra, and Edward DeYoung, Los Angeles County Union Census Tract Data
Series, 1940-1990. Version 1.01. Created with the support of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes
Foundation. (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 2000).
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Creator Ellison, Treva C. (author)

Core Title Towards a politics of perfect disorder: carceral geographies, queer criminality, and other ways to be

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/02/2017

Defense Date 05/21/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag gender,LGBT history,OAI-PMH Harvest,policing,Race,sexuality

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee chair), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Khanna, Neetu (committee member), Pulido, Laura (committee member)

Creator Email tellison@usc.edu,trevaellison@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-623860

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