LGBTQ+ folks have a long & troubling history with police. Is mending fences ever possible?

As with most traditionally marginalized communities, LGBTQ+ communities have suffered from a tortured and traumatic relationship with law enforcement agencies, even before these communities had come into official existence. As we commemorate LGBTQ+ History Month, I offer a brief survey of this relationship.

On the cusp of 2019’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the historic Stonewall Inn riots of 1969, which many historians cite as sparking the modern movement for LGBTQ+ equality, New York police commissioner James P. O’Neill offered a long overdue apology on behalf of the force.

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“I think it would be irresponsible to go through World Pride month and not to speak of the events at the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969,” O’Neill said. “I do know what happened should not have happened. The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong, plain and simple. The actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive, and for that, I apologize.

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He continued by asserting, “I vow to the LGBTQ community that this would never happen in the NYPD in 2019. We have, and we do, embrace all New Yorkers.”

While these statements serve as an appropriate first step, they certainly do not go nearly far enough.

Still, “in 2019,” arrests by New York police led to the incarceration of trans women in men’s jails and prisons, aided by Trump administration policies striking down an Obama-era guideline that recommended “housing by gender identity when appropriate.”

The National Center for Transgender Equality found that 16% of transgender adults (including 21% of transwomen) have been incarcerated in prison or jail at some point in their lives. Nearly half (47%) of Black transgender people have been incarcerated.

These high rates are associated with disproportionate poverty, homelessness, societal and workplace discrimination, involvement in street economies, and sometimes, bias by law enforcement. Trans people are also at higher risk for harassment, abuse, and violence in juvenile detention facilities, jails, and prisons.

“Corrections” officials routinely deny transgender people transition-related medical care, and trans inmates often suffer prolonged sentences of isolation. Where are the police department’s apologies and their reform measures for humane treatment?

Law enforcement agencies and departments of “correction” have justified their harsh treatment and overreaction against members of LGBTQ+ communities through de jure statutes and de facto policies, biased press coverage, and negative public sentiments for literally centuries.

The earliest raids

In England from approximately 1700 through the 1830s, in one of the first subcultures of homosexual men, a network of so-called “Molly Houses” (the term was used to signify a place where men gathered to socialize and to have sex with one another) formed in pubs or in houses.

Same-sex sexuality between men had been criminalized in England under the reign of Henry VII in the Buggery Act of 1533, which declared that the “detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast” be punishable by death.

Sometimes police raided the Molly Houses, and the men were tried. Some were executed.

The first victims of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the United States

Richard Cornish, captain of the merchant ship Ambrose, was accused in 1624 of raping a male indentured servant, Richard Couse. Cornish was the first man executed (by hanging) for the offense of sodomy in an American Colony.

In 1649, Sarah White Norman and Mary Vincent Hammon of Plymouth, Massachusetts were the first women in an American colony prosecuted for “lewd behavior with each other upon a bed.” Mary received only a reprimand since she was younger than 16 years of age. Sarah was ordered to publicly confess her “unchaste behavior” with Mary, and she was warned against future offenses. 

In the United States, people suspected of same-sex activity were often punished, since all states passed anti-sodomy laws. Most states prescribed imprisonment. For example, Pennsylvania: 5-10 years; New York: 10 years; Massachusetts: 20 years.

“Liberal” reformer Thomas Jefferson suggested eliminating the death penalty for same-sex sexuality. In 1779, he proposed: “Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman (or beast) shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one-half inch diameter at the least.”

One of the first New York City anti-gay police raids occurred on February 21, 1903, at the Ariston Bathhouse, which was frequented by homosexual and bisexual men. Police detained 60 men and arrested 14. Where is the department’s apology?

The U.S. Congress also passed the Comstock Laws in 1873. They criminalized usage of the U.S. Postal Service to send any materials it considered “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” (which included most material with homosexual or gender non-traditional themes), as well as all contraceptives and birth control information, sex education, “abortifacients” (drugs used to abort a pregnancy), sex toys, anatomy books, personal letters with sexual content or information, and any letters with information from the other categories.

The laws were named to “honor” Anthony Comstock, former U.S. Postal Inspector, member of the National Purity Party (a Eugenics organization), and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

The New York police department enforced these draconian laws. Where is the department’s apology?

Anti-Cross Dressing (Gender Policing) Laws

From the mid-19th century, several states passed laws prohibiting wearing, as stated in the 1845 New York law, “the dress of the opposite sex.” Collectively referred to as “masquerade laws,” they were used to control any form of gender variance. Anyone perceived as male could be arrested as late as 2011 in New York for “impersonating a female.”

The 1845 New York law defined an unlawful vagrant as a “person who, having his face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a manner calculated to prevent his being identified, appears in a road or public highway.”

An 1848 law in Columbus, Ohio forbade a person from appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” This law was not overturned until 1974.

A 19^th-century Chicago city law (Section 192-8) was worded: “Any person who shall appear in a public place in a dress not belonging to his or her sex, with intent to conceal his or her sex, shall be fined not less than twenty dollars nor more than five hundred dollars for each offense.”

Police arrested a man in New York City as late as 1968 in a subway station where he was traveling home after attending a masquerade party.

As a side note, this was also the time period of the so-called “ugly laws” whereby municipalities outlawed people appearing in public who might offend other people’s sensibilities. Chicago’s City Code of 1881 made it a crime to be seen outdoors if a person was “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.”

On April 13, 1888, the headline in the Washington Post newspaper blared, “Negro Dive Raided. Thirteen Black Men Dressed as Women Surprised at Supper and Arrested.”

Another account of the raid in The Evening Star reported that more than a dozen men escaped through the windows when police officers stormed the residence as one of the partygoers, the leader named William Dorsey Swann (a formerly enslaved African American), attempted to obstruct them from entering.

Swann forcefully told police Lieutenant Amiss, who led the raid, “You is no gentleman,” as he engaged in a physical clash that resulted in his dress being ripped to shreds.

One year prior, in January 1887, DC police raided another drag ball in which the partygoers included both Black and white invitees. Several of the same people were arrested in the 1888 raid, including Swann.

The raid and confrontation in 1888 signaled one of the earliest reported cases in which someone, in this case William Dorsey Swann, stood up in defense of a queer community, which is truly admirable given the place and time of severe social rules and laws about race, sexuality, and gender expression.

On January 1, 1896, the courts handed down a ten-month sentence to Swann following a conviction on the false charge of “keeping a disorderly house,” which was coded language for running a house of prostitution.

Though he had no documented evidence that anyone in the house engaged in sex work, the prosecutor admitted that the charge was imposed as punishment for Swann’s supposed sexual relationships with other men and for his “evil example in the community.” Here the intersection of sexuality, race, and low socio-economic status of the accused merged.

These and the other gender policing laws were applied selectively and inconsistently. But the arrests of Swann and his friends by local authorities attracted particular attention in the press because most of the participants were Black.

Drag balls were a mainstay in many cities and smaller towns throughout the socially conservative 1930s. The New York City police department conducted frequent raids on these balls and arrested many of the participants, like the reported arrest at a “masque ball” in NYC in 1939.

Many of the earlier gender policing laws were not only intended to harass people assigned male at birth, but they were also a reaction by the government to inhibit and harass members of the burgeoning women’s movement fighting for greater opportunities outside the home.

Feminist scholars have discovered the “association between dressing as men and the demands of young women for greater personal freedom.” Also, cross-dressing women during the early 1900s were regarded in some areas of psychology as associated with insanity or homosexuality.

Homosexuality as “disorder”

The New York State Liquor Authority issued a policy in 1930 banning the serving of liquor to homosexuals in any licensed bar in New York State. Penalties included revocation of the bar’s operating license. The courts confirmed the policy in the 1940s. The mere presence of homosexuals in a bar constituted “disorder.”

The New York police department enforced this policy. Where is the department’s apology?

Police departments throughout the country were also granted permission to intimidate, harass, arrest, and incarcerate what would become known as members of LGBTQ+ communities by top officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

F.B.I. Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who was emotionally and likely to have been sexually involved with his “assistant,” Clyde Tolson, wrote in 1936, “The present apathy toward perverts [homosexuals] generally regarded as ‘harmless,’ should be changed to suspicious scrutiny. The harmless pervert of today can be and often is the loathsome mutilator and murderer of tomorrow… The ordinary offender [turned] into a dangerous, predatory animal, preying on society because he has been taught he can get away with it.”

More bars, more raids

In the 1940s, as the U.S. mobilized for war, many LGBTQ+ people left their small towns and rural communities and moved to major cities. There they met others like themselves. These cities saw a rapid growth of bars, which were often Mafia-owned and operated, to serve this increasing clientele.

Police often raided these spaces, sometimes arresting clientele. Arrest blotters were printed in local newspapers, and arrestees often were fired from their jobs once they had been exposed.

Patrons tell stories of gruesome conditions inside these often crowded and musty spaces. In some of the women’s bars, they had to line up to enter the bathrooms. Once in line, they were handed a limit of three squares of toilet paper and no more to use. Some cities mandated wearing at least three pieces of clothing “appropriate” to one’s birth sex under penalty of arrest.

The Lavender Scare

Post-World War II America signaled the beginning of the “Cold War” and a swing further toward political and social conservatism. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, the brash Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin sternly warned that Communists corrupt the minds and homosexuals corrupt the bodies of good upstanding Americans, and he proceeded to have them all officially banned from government service in what came to be known as the “Red Scare” and the “Lavender Scare.”

During this era, police continued to raid homosexual and trans bars, which were still Mafia-owned. The U.S. Postal Service raided homosexual and trans organizations and published the names on their mailing lists in local newspapers. People continued losing their jobs.

Homosexual and trans people were often committed to mental institutions against their will. Some were forced to undergo painful and damaging electro-shock therapy, and some underwent frontal lobotomies.

Within this era of Cold War politics, in 1955 a supposed “ring” of homosexuals in Boise, Idaho was allegedly “perverting youth.” The scandal stemmed from conspiracy fabrications by the press, police department officials, and local politicians.

Police arrested three men in October 1955, and the investigation expanded to include allegations of more than 100 young men and teenage boys who supposedly engaged in sexual acts within an adult “homosexual underground.”

Toward the end of the investigation in January 1957, approximately 1,500 people had been interrogated. 16 men were eventually charged, and 15 received prison terms. Some of those sentenced were found guilty of having sex with other consenting adults.

So-called “sodomy laws” (which included people engaging in consensual adult sex with members of their own sex) were finally declared unconstitutional in the Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision of 2003.

The resistance begins

There are moments in history when conditions come together to create the impetus for great social change. Though organizing around “homophile” equality began during the 1950s and throughout the 1960s in select cities in the United States, many historians and activists place the beginning of the modern movement for LGBTQ+ equality at the Stonewall Inn, a small bar frequented by trans people, lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, students, and others of all races located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

At approximately one-twenty on the morning on June 28, 1969, New York City Police officers conducted a routine raid on the bar on the charge that the owners had been selling alcohol without a license. Feeling they had been harassed far too long, people challenged police officers on this morning. The resistance lasted with varying intensity over the next five nights. Folks were flinging bottles, rocks, and bricks and using trash cans and parking meters as battering rams.

But a lesser-known action preceded Stonewall by nearly three years, and it should more likely be considered the founding event for the modern LGBTQ+ movement.

In August 1966, at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in what is known as the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, trans people and sex workers joined in fighting police harassment and oppression. Conducting one of their numerous raids, police entered Compton’s and began physically harassing the clientele.

This time, however, people fought back by hurling coffee at the officers and heaving cups, dishes, and trays around the cafeteria. Police retreated outside as customers smashed windows. Over the course of the next night, people gathered to picket the cafeteria, which refused to allow trans people back inside.

Out of the ashes of Compton’s Cafeteria and the Stonewall Inn, people, primarily young, formed several militant groups. One of the first was the Gay Liberation Front. GLF was not a formalized organization per se, but rather a series of small groups across the U.S. and other countries. Members insisted on the freedom to explore new ways of living as part of a radical project of social transformation.

People from this newly emerging LGBTQ+ liberation movement organized the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March in June 1970 down New York City streets and ending in Central Park. Today, in large cities and small towns across the globe, annual Pride marches and parades commemorate the joy and the continuing struggle for our rights.

I remember my first Pride March at the 2nd Annual Christopher Street Liberation March in New York City in 1971.

But even though more people were fighting back, New York City police raids on LGBTQ+ spaces did not end at the doors of the Stonewall Inn.

Just a few blocks from Stonewall, police raided the Snake Pit bar on March 8, 1970 on charges that the bar was selling alcohol without a license. All the patrons were taken to the police station.

One of the patrons, Alfred Diego Vinales, a 23-year-old Argentinian national with an expired U.S. visa was so terrified that he threw himself from a window to escape police custody. He impaled himself in five places on his body on a spiked fence.

Police had to call welders to release him from the spikes. Alfred was then rushed to the hospital where he survived his serious injuries. The community organized a protest march condemning police harassment.

Racial profiling

Amnesty International states, “Racial profiling occurs when race is used by law enforcement or private security officials, to any degree, as a basis for criminal suspicion in non-suspect specific investigations. Racial profiling constitutes a form of discrimination, based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and other identities, which Amnesty International declares ‘undermines the basic human rights and freedoms to which every person is entitled.’”

Throughout the U.S., police departments have been shown to racially profile individuals and have been convicted on such charges. The New York City policy of “stop-question-and-frisk” or “stop-and-frisk” certainly falls under this definition since it has been inordinately used on primarily people of color.

Where is the department’s apology?

Can we forgive?

Gay African American novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist,James Baldwin was asked by a white reporter, “What do Negroes want?”

He responded by stating, “You ask the wrong question. It is not what we want from white people, but rather, can we forgive you?” Baldwin was asking whether African Americans can ever forgive all the blatant and subtle forms of racism by whites and by the system of white supremacy throughout the history of the United States.

Apologies are nice to begin relaxing the rift between LGBTQ+ people and their local police departments and the larger society, but it takes more than apologies.

Can (or should) we ever truly forgive?