Cruising in Plain View: Clandestine Surveillance and the Unique Insights of Antihomosexual Policing

Abstract

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a boom in policing against homosexual cruising, the practitioners of which relied on a set of robust defense tactics to avoid detection by strangers. Frustrated by the difficulties of catching suspected cruisers, police departments developed a variety of surreptitious, deeply intrusive surveillance tactics for monitoring public bathrooms. Yet while necessitated by the insularity of modern cruising culture, these surveillance tactics were legitimized in court partly through judges’ very skepticism of that culture. Weighing the utility of clandestine surveillance against its intrusion on innocent citizens, judges frequently justified surveillance by characterizing cruisers as sexual predators eager to expose themselves to innocent victims. From inception to conviction, the utility of clandestine surveillance thus depended partly on an epistemic lag between the arms of the criminal justice system: a disconnect between the police’s sensitivity to contemporary homosexual practices and judges’ continuing insistence on an older paradigm of perverse predation.

Sexual orientation as a contextual frame for attractiveness judgments.

“…Namely, LGB people risk harassment and violence due to their sexual orientation (Huebner et al, 2004;Meyer et al, 2021) and can thus be endangered by mistaken passes at potential partners that prove to be straight. Sequestering their attraction to straight individuals while focusing their interest on queer targets thus helps them to guard their physical (and emotional) safety and relates to LGB individuals' (a) historic use of symbols (e.g., clothing) to unobtrusively signal their identity to each other (Chauncey, 1994;Lvovsky, 2020) and (b) greater contemporary use of online dating apps that allow unambiguous filtering of prospective partners, circumventing the risks associated with finding partners in other settings (Lever et al, 2008;Sumter & Vandenbosch, 2019).…”

The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview

“…As the robust literature on race and punishment in the Jim Crow South shows (Blackmon 2008, Curtin 2000, Haley 2016, LeFlouria 2015, Lichtenstein 1996, Oshinsky 1997, the convict-lease and sharecropping systems did not fundamentally disrupt the racial hierarchies that had existed under slavery. In fact, as the titles of two of the most seminal books on the subject suggest, for black Americans during this period, the New South's punitive regime was Worse than Slavery (Oshinsky 1997) or Slavery by Another Name (Blackmon 2008).…”

Policing and the LGBTIQ2S+ community in Canada

“…Canadian police have since moved away from overt actions against LGBT-IQ2S+ individuals. While efforts to engage the LGBTIQ2S+ community are now the explicit priority of many police services, critics argue that police work continues to disproportionately affect LGBTIQ2S+ individuals-especially those who experience multiple forms of marginalization-but is now cloaked in arguments that justify enforcement under the guise of public safety and morality (Lvovsky, 2020). This makes the regulation of LGBT-IQ2S+ identities more insidious and difficult to identify, particularly by the general public and those within the community who are outwardly accepted by police and influenced by the adoption of LGBT IQ2S+ image work within policing (McCaskell, 2016).…”