Description: "Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life chronicles how local police and criminal justice systems intruded on gay individuals, criminalizing, profiling, surveilling, and prosecuting them from the 1930's through the 1960's. Anna Lvovsky details the progression of enforcement strategies through the targeting of gay-friendly bars by liquor boards, enticement of sexual overtures by plainclothes police decoys, and surveilling of public bathrooms via peepholes and two-way mirrors to catch someone "in the act." Lvovsky shows how the use of tactics indistinguishable from entrapment to criminalize homosexual men in public and private spaces produced charges brought forward and disputed by attorneys and evidence that had to stand before judges, who at times intervened against punitive policies. In Vice Patrol the author demonstrates how developments in the psychological, medical, and sociological handling of homosexuality filtered into police stations, courthouses, and the wider culture"--
Brief description: Anna Lvovsky is a professor of law and an affiliate professor of history at Harvard University. Her website is https: //www.annalvovsky.com/.
Review Quotes: "Lvovsky has done incredible detective work to take us deep inside the machinery of antigay policing during its peak years. Focusing on three distinct sites--the regulation of gay bars by state liquor agencies, the work of plainclothes decoys, and the policing of public restrooms through 'peepholes'--Lvovsky shows that a legal system we assumed to be monolithically repressive was in fact internally divided about these practices. This subtle and smart book not only illuminates the boundaries around sexual difference but criminal justice as well. Revelatory in every sense of the word."--Margot Canaday, Princeton University