Top Quotes: “Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States”
Introduction
“More than 60% of prisoners, and 2/3 of the people serving life sentences, are people of color. Women are now being incarcerated at almost twice the rate of men; Black and Latina women are approximately 3x more likely to be incarcerated than white women. Native women also experience disproportionate rates of incarceration: for example, in Montana in 2008, Native women made up slightly more than 27% of women incarcerated in state prison, but only 7% of the population.
Although there’s no data on incarcerated LGBT people, what info is available suggests that trans and gender nonconforming people are disproportionately ensnared in the justice system. A 1997 SF Dept of Public Health study found that 67% of trans women and 30% of trans men had a history of incarceration.”
“By 1994, with support from both Republicans and Democrats, all 50 states and the federal government had adopted at least one mandatory minimum sentencing provision, fueling the growth of the prison population.”
“Criminal” Native Americans
“As Salish sociologist Luana Ross argues, the construction of crime was also a tool of colonization and control of Native Americans. For example, a mid-19th century CA law provided that any Indian who loitered or ‘strolled about’ could be arrested on the complaint of any white citizen. Within 24 hours the court was required to hire out those arrested to the highest bidder for a period of up to 4 months, providing free labor to private interests. In 1883, an extensive listing of offenses by the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs criminalized the practices of traditional medicine people and Native dances that might stir ‘the warlike passions of the young members of the tribes.’”
“From the first point of contact with European colonizers — long before modern LGBTQ identities were formed and vilified — Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, were systematically policed and punished based on actual or projected ‘deviant’ sexualities and gender expressions, as an integral part of colonization, genocide, and enslavement.”
“Religious authorities — essential partners in the colonization of the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous peoples — promoted the ‘queering’ of Native Americans throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Some 16th-century Christian historians went so far as to depict mythologies of peoples indigenous to the area now known as Peru and Ecuador — in which the race of giants that preceded them and, among other things, engaged in sexual relations among males, died off — as reminiscent of the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Several centuries later a historian described the destruction of the peoples’ mythical ancestors ‘as at Sodom and other places.’ This ‘queering’ of Native peoples wasn’t limited to the allegorical; deviant sexualities were projected wholesale onto Indigenous peoples.”
“The gendered and sexualized policing and punishment of Native peoples by European colonizers served as a foundation for laws, cultural norms, and practices that’ve criminalized people of color deemed sexually and gender deviant for the next 3 centuries in the US.”
“The ‘jezebel’ archetype frames African-descended women as sexually aggressive, insatiable, and even predatory toward white men, who were characterized as powerless to resist their advances. This controlling image of Black women was developed to cover the disfavored practice of miscegenation by slavers who sought to increase their wealth by forcing enslaved African women to reproduce through systematic rape.”
Queering Immigrants
“The notion of homosexuality as a foreign threat justifying both exclusion and repression has a long history, dating from the time of the Crusades, ‘Moorish’ invasions, and the Ottoman Empire. It’s been reflected throughout US history in immigration laws that, until 1990, excluded ‘homosexuals,’ and, until 2009, HIV+ positive, and in aggressive policing of immigrant sexualities.
Asian men who came to the US in the 19th century were particularly framed as ‘importers of ‘unnatural’ sexual practices and pernicious morality’ as justification for both their surveillance within the US and their exclusion from it.”
“Katz describes an early sort of ‘homosexual panic’ in NYC in the 19th century during which newspapers promoting ‘sporting culture’ — another form of ‘deviant’ sexuality involving heterosexual promiscuity and patronizing houses of prostitution — described ‘sodomites’ as foreign threats. One such publication claimed that among sodomites ‘we find no Americans, as yet — they’re all Englishmen or French,’ and maintained that homosexuality was neither nor natural to America, emphatically stating, ‘These horrible offenses [are] foreign to our shores — to our nature they certainly are — yet they are growing a pace in NY.’”
Origins of Anti-Queer Laws
“Sodomy laws didn’t spring from whole cloth on American shores. Homosexual and nonprocreative sexual acts have been punishable by death since at least the time of the early Israelites, in 400 BCE — although who suffered this fate was largely determined by economic, gendered, racial, and political factors. Jewish law, recorded in the Hebrew Bible, famously states in Leviticus, ‘If a man also lie with man, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’ According to Plato, thought by many to have had sexual relations with men himself, ‘The crime of male with male, or female with female, is an outrage on nature and a capital surrender to lust of pleasure.’ In ancient Rome, a married woman who engaged in any sexual activity with another woman, even mutual caressing, could be tried for adultery, and if found guilty, executed by her husband. 6th-century Roman law, which forms the basis of Catholic and Protestant law and civil law, provided that adulterers or those guilty of ‘giving themselves up to ‘works of lewdness with their own sex’’ were to be sentenced to death. 7th-century Visigoth law imposed a sentence of castration on men who ‘kept’ male concubines and Charlemagne warned that he would punish all ‘sodomites.’
Mark Jordan credits 11th-century theologian Peter Damian with coining the abstract concept of sodomy. Jordan traces its evolution from the misreading of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, now generally understood to be a cautionary tale on hospitality to strangers, as well as a demonstration of the power of the deity in the Hebrew Bible to wreak destruction as punishment for generalized excesses of the flesh. While Damian’s polemic against the ‘Sodomitic vice’ was largely a call for the removal from office of clergy found to have engaged in it, he asserted that it was a crime deserving of death among common people as well, thereby building a foundation for subsequent cultural and legal constructions of ‘sodomy.’
The century preceding Columbus’ fateful voyage saw reinforcement and consolidation of laws against homosexual acts. A 1348 Spanish law imposed a sentence of castration followed by stoning of individuals found to have voluntarily engaged in sodomy. The Portuguese king issued a 1446 edict that sodomites were to be burned, consistent with the punishment meted out on Sodom and Gomorrah. Such punishments were most often carried out against ‘outsiders’ to Iberian society: ‘Moors,’ Jews, and Catalans. In 1497 the Spanish monarchy reaffirmed the death penalty for sodomy, changing only the method, from stoning to hanging, and eliminating castration as a precursor to death by torture. The first civil English sodomy law was enacted in 1533, prohibiting ‘the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast,’ and imposing punishment by death and forfeiture of all property belonging to the executed person.
Several scholars have dispelled the myth that lesbianism wasn’t punished by law to the same extent as male homosexuality. In Spain and Italy the degree of punishment depended on the ‘severity’ of the crime. Use of a ‘material instrument’ was cause for death; if no instrument was used, a sentence less than death, such as beating or imprisonment, was imposed. Mere overtures led only to public denouncement. According to Faderman, several women — generally of lower classes and gender nonconforming — were prosecuted and punished in Britain for ‘possession or use of such an instrument.’ Lesbian scholar Ruthann Robson describes one instance in France in which ‘a transvestite [was] burned for ‘counterfeiting the office of husband.’’ She also cites research that uncovered 119 cases of women who ‘dressed as men’ in the Netherlands between 1550 and 1839, in which sentences of death, lifetime exile, whipping, and, where sexual relations with a woman were involved, enforced separation was imposed. The increased severity of punishment associated with the assumption of male social and sexual roles is indicative of the role policing of homosexuality played in upholding patriarchal gender relations. As Bernadette Brooten concludes, ‘Gender role transgression emerges as the single most central reason’ for the regulation of relationships among women. These laws and practices were brought by the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonial governments to the Americas, forming the basis of US sodomy laws.”
Colonial Times
“Colonial sodomy laws typically didn’t specifically address sexual activity involving 2 women, with 1 exception: the 1656 New Haven sodomy law prohibited female sex that ‘is against nature,’ citing Romans 1:26 as its basis. Each of the colonies had its own criminal legal code, but sodomy and buggery were capital crimes in all of them, on par with murder, treason, and adultery.
However, it can’t be presumed that a monolithic population of ‘gay’ people in the colonial era shared an equal risk of being accused of sodomy, convicted, and executed. Historians generally agree that the policing and enforcement of buggery and sodomy laws were sporadic and highly selective. There were fewer than 10 documented executions for buggery/sodomy — including beastiality — in the 17th century, still fewer in the hundred years that followed. While many more people were known to have relationships or sexual encounters with people of the same sex and to transgress gender norms, not all were punished equally.”
“The best candidates for trial and execution were men charged with beastiality, along with the animals with which they were alleged to have sex. Sodomy prosecutions beyond those involving alleged beastiality don’t appear to have involved consensual sexual relationships or encounters. Writing of 18th century MA, Thomas Foster concludes that there were no criminal prosecutions of consensual sexual encounters or relationships between men, only of incidents of forced sodomy. Where forcible sodomy was alleged, those targeted for prosecution appear to have engaged in behavior that upset ‘orderly hierarchies of race, age, and status among men.’ While both Black and white men accused of sodomy faced possible execution, swift imposition of a death sentence appears to have been more likely for Black men.”
“White men who were influential enjoyed a more protected status, even when they were widely perceived to engaged in coercive sexual practices with unwilling subordinates such as indentured servants and younger men of lesser social and economic standing. In one case a prominent 17th century gentleman, Nicholas Sension of CT, was accorded a 2nd and even 3rd chance to reform his behavior before facing formal charges in court after town elders first addressed his sodomitical behavior. In the late 1640s Sension, a wealthy married member of his community, was first investigated by town elders who’d received complaints about his aggressive and coercive sexual approaches to a number of young men. Sension received an informal reprimand.”
“Poor white women, free women of color, and immigrant women of low status and few financial means who transgressed sexual and gender norms were usually swept into the multipurpose, criminal legal archipelagos of fornication, prostitution, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and ‘lewd, lascivious, and unseemly’ behavior. Penalties would involve public shaming, combined with corporal punishments common to the day, such as whipping and branding, as well as fines.
While well-to-do white women might be charged with fornication or adultery, few actually appeared in court. It is likely that their sexual policing and punishment was more often privatized, that they were dealt with by their own religious communities or bundled off for indeterminate periods of forced confinement in homes or other places that were situated safely away from public view.”
The Gay Killer
“[Some have fed] the perception that there is such a thing as ‘homosexual murder’ committed by depraved gay men who can only truly feel sexually alive through senseless killing. It’s hardly surprising that, whenever possible, prosecutors continue to deploy such powerful images in order to increase the possibility of winning capital convictions.
Over time others have entered the pantheon of the gleeful gay killer. They include John Wayne Gacy, white and gay, who raped and murdered 33+ boys and young men before being caught, convicted, and executed and Jeffrey Dahmer, white and gay, who murdered, dismembered, and purportedly cannibalized 17 young men, primarily of Asian and African descent. Another is Andrew Cunanan, the biracial (white and Asian) gay man, falsely characterized by some as HIV+, who killed 5+ men, including gay fashion designer Gianni Versace.”
“Prosecutors and the media seldom hesitate to interpret cases in which individual queers have killed into larger-than-life archetypal representations of the purported murderous nature of queer people as a whole.”
Sex Crimes
“In 1997, Anita Bryant, titular head of the ‘Save Our Children’ campaign that successfully fought to repeal Dade Co, FL’s inclusion of sexual orientation in its nondiscrimination ordinance, proclaimed, ‘Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.’”
“While its present-day use against schoolteachers, Boy Scout leaders, and gay parents is de rigeur, an earlier construction and deployment of this archetype unfolded in the agricultural valleys of C. CA in the early 20th century. A stream of seasonal workers, many migrants, arrived seeking employment. Patterns of migration and mobility like this provided new opportunities for interracial, cross-class sexual encounters among men of different ages. Law enforcement authorities in CA during this period routinely characterized S. Asian and Chinese men as importers of perverse, dangerous, and ‘unnatural’ sexual practices — phrases such as ‘Hindu sodomites’ and ‘disgusting Oriental depravity’ were common. Nayan Shah reports that police turned an especially harsh gaze on consensual sexual encounters between older foreign migrant men and younger white men, seeking to prevent and punish them through sweeps for vagrancy as well as for prostitution, public disturbance, ‘lewdness,’ and property offenses.
In 1926, police officers found S. Asian migrant Rola Singh sleeping in a parked car not far from a residential areas. One of the officers later said that Singh ‘looked like a Mexican.’ Regardless of his actual ethnicity, Singh was a dark-skinned person who was considered unlikely to own a car, be a US citizen, or belong in this area even though it was a public space. Opening the car door, police discovered a young, white man, partially undressed and unconscious, with his head allegedly in Singh’s lap. Harvey Carstenbrook said that he picked Singh up to give him a ride, parked the car because both men were drunk, and they passed out. Despite his age, Carstenbrook was continually referred to in court as a boy, and the judge decided that he was entitled to the protection of a minor because he was unconscious when police found him with Singh.”
“The reputation of an older man, primarily determined by race, was the basis on which turned the ‘difference between ‘natural’ intergenerational male friendship and ‘unnatural’ sexual predation.’ That is why in 1913 a CA court considered an appeal of the conviction of Samuel Robbins, a middle-aged, white bookkeeper charged with trying to anally penetrate a 16-year-old white youth while keeping him locked in the bathroom. Their overarching concern was the defendant’s reputation, and they chose to dismiss the testimony of the youth and a servant woman in Robbins’ house in favor of interpreting his actions as wholesome, friendly, and civic minded, part of an effort by middle-class white men in this era to ‘impart moral development’ to younger lads in need of mentoring by reputable elders.”
“A lesser known, but equally important ‘sex crime scandal’ erupted in Iowa when, in Sioux City, a boy and a girl were sexually assaulted and brutally murdered in 2 separate incidents. A frenzy of outrage and panic ensued, fueled by sensational media coverage. Under intense political pressure to solve the murders, police arrested the most readily available ‘sexual deviates’ in the area, 22 white men — including a dance teacher, 3 men who operated hair salons, 2 cosmetology students, and a department store window dresser — identified primarily through police sting operations in which the men were coerced into ‘naming names’ of other homosexuals. Neil Miller, whose account of these events lays bare the antigay hysteria mobilized around accusations of child molestation and murder, emphasizes, ‘These men had nothing to do with those crimes; the authorities never claimed they did.’
Threatened with felony sodomy charges that could send them to prison for years, the men pled guilty to lesser charges of conspiracy to commit sodomy or, in one case, ‘lewd and lascivious’ acts with a minor (who may or may not have existed). But rather than sending them to prison, prosecutors asked the courts to utilize a state law to declare them all to be criminal psychopaths. Sexual deviancy (homosexuality): these diagnostic words were sufficient to sentence 20 of the men to indefinite confinement in a locked ward in a mental hospital. They remained there for some months until, one by one, with lives shattered, they were quietly released.
This conflation of homosexuality and child predation remains strikingly evident in the response of the Catholic Church to the still-evolving story of the sexual abuse of minors by both straight and gay priests. Between 1950 and 2006, almost 14,000 sexual abuse claims were filed against Catholic clergy and deacons. But rather than viewing this as abuse of power by men in a rigidly hierarchical institution, when the scandal broke publicly in 2002, Church authorities, already steeped in homophobia, scapegoated gay men in the priesthood and seminary. In 2005, the Vatican instituted a search for ‘evidence of homosexuality’ in 200+ seminaries and theological schools, declaring that ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies,’ as well as homosexual acts, could constitute ‘disturbances of a sexual nature, which are incompatible with the priesthood.’ In 2009, researchers reported to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops their preliminary finding in a study on the ‘causes and context’ of the sexual abuse crisis that there was no evidence to support the premise that gay priests were more likely than straight clergy to sexually abuse minors.”
Queer Immigrants
“The US-Mexico border has increasingly served as a locus of anti-immigrant anxieties in recent decades. In 1960, as ethnic studies scholar Eithne Luibheid explains, it marked a point of no entry for Sara Quiroz, a mom and domestic worker. Having years earlier acquired permanent US residency, Quiroz attempted to return from Juarez to El Paso. She was stopped for questioning by a US immigration officer with a reputation for detecting so-called sexual deviates and ensuring that they were denied entry into, or expelled from, the US. According to her attorney, Quiroz was stopped because, based on her appearance, the immigration inspector perceived her to be a lesbian.”
“At the border, Quiroz represented every quality the US sought to exclude in order to stabilize and protect its white, straight identity from those who would subvert it. Ultimately, Quiroz was repatriated, though she’d caused no harm to anyone. Despite some ‘liberalizing’ changes in laws, border crossers and immigrants of color who are suspected of being queer or gender nonconforming in any regard continue to be targeted for exclusion, abusive policing, and detention by way of demeaning strip searches, hostile interrogation, and physical and sexual violence.”
Queer & Black Inequality
“The increasing gentrification of NY’s West Village is backdrop to a story that unfolded in 2006. A group of 7 Black lesbian friends from NJ were walking down a street when a Black man sexually propositioned one of them. When told she wasn’t interested, he followed the women down the street, shouting, ‘I’ll fuck you straight, sweetheart!’ He then proceeded to spit in another woman’s face and throw his lit cigarette at her. This, and subsequent events, were caught on tape by a camera in a nearby store. He became increasingly physically abusive, pulling one woman’s hair and choking another. The women attempted to defend themselves, and at some point 2 men, unknown to the women, ran over to help and began to hit the attacker, who was eventually stabbed. The women were walking away from the situation when they were stopped by police, while the 2 unknown men who fought with the attacker had left the scene.
The women were subsequently arrested and charged by police officers who immediately framed the Black, working-class, gender-nonconforming women as perpetrators rather than targets of violence, characterizing the incident as one of ‘gang violence’ by a group of Black lesbians.”
“The investigation was stacked against the women. Police refused to credit their statements or those of other witnesses, and ultimately the attacker himself, that the 2 unknown men were, in fact, responsible for stabbing him. The tape was never used to try to find the men, and no forensic tests were conducted on the knife claimed to be the assault weapon. The prosecutions unfolded within a media circus, in which the press framed the women as ‘killer lesbians,’ ‘a seething Sapphic septet,’ and a ‘lesbian wolf pack.’ 3 of the women plea-bargained, receiving sentences of probation and a criminal record that will follow them for the rest of their lives. 4 of the 7 women, known as the NJ4, went to trial, were found guilty, and received sentences ranging from 3.5–11 years in prison.”
“In March 2003, the Power Plant, a club in Detroit frequented primarily by Black gay men, lesbians, and trans women was filled to capacity. Around 3am, 50–100 officers dressed in black clothing, with guns drawn and laser lights on, suddenly cut the lights and stormed the premises, shouting orders to everyone to ‘hit the floor.’ 350+ people in the club at that time were handcuffed, fored to lie face down on the floor, and detained for up to 12 hours, left to ‘sit in their own and others’ urine and waste.’ Some were kicked in the head and back, slammed into walls, and verbally abused. Officers on the scene were heard saying things like ‘it’s a bunch of fags’ and ‘those fags in here make me sick.’ As at Stonewall, the officers claimed to be enforcing building and liquor codes. The sheriff’s department said they were responding to complaints from neighbors and concerns for public safety. They’d obtained a warrant to search the premises, but rather than execute it during the daytime against only the establishment’s owner, they chose to wait until the club was full, and then unjustifiably arrested 300+ people, citing them for ‘loitering inside a building,’ an offense carrying a max fine of $500. Vehicles parked within a 3-block radius of the club were also ticketed and towed, despite the fact that some of the car owners had never even entered the club that night.”
“A mid-80s report found that 23% of gay men and 13% of lesbians reported having been harassed, threatened with violence, or physically attacked by police because of their sexual orientations. It remains a daily occurrence for large numbers of LGBT people. According to 2008 reports, law enforcement officers were the 3rd-largest category of perps of anti-LGBT violence. Incidences of reported police violence against LGBT people increased by 150% between 2007 and 2008, and the number of officers reported to have engaged in abusive treatment of LGBT people increased by 11%. In 2000, the NCAVP stated that 50% of bias-related violence reported by trans women in SF was committed by police and private security officers.”
“A gay Latino man stopped for a traffic offense in Oakland in 2001 was arrested and placed in a patrol car — but not until an officer who noticed his pink socks called them ‘faggot socks’ and slammed his ankle in the car door so hard the man required medical treatment. Freddie Mason, a 31-year-old Black gay nurse’s assistant with no prior record, was arrested following a verbal altercation with his landlord and anally raped by a billy club covered in cleaning liquid by a Chicago officer who called him a ‘n****er fag’ and told him, ‘I’m tired of you faggot…you sick mother fucker.’ 2 lesbians of color arrested outside a club hosting a women’s night in Brooklyn in 2009 were beaten by officers who called one a ‘bitch ass dyke.’ In each of these cases, under the guise of responding to alleged minor, nonviolent offenses, officers used brute force to maintain raced, gendered, and heterosexual ‘order.’”
Sexualizing Queers
“The existence, or perceived existence, of so-called deviant sexualities in public spaces is aggressively policed and punished, while the normative sexuality that permeates almost every aspect of society goes virtually unnoticed.
Gay men and trans women are among the most visible targets of sex policing. Gender nonconformity in conduct or appearance among men, or trans women perceived to be ‘men in drag,’ appears to be highly sexualized by officers, creating presumptions that gender-nonconforming individuals are engaged, or about to engage, in sexual activity. This in turn justifies preemptive arrest before any sexual act can occur. Such presumptions derive from the reduction of queers to wholly sexual beings, as well as conflation of gender nonconformity with sexual deviance.”
Raids
“Despite widespread resistance, the raids continued through the late 60s and 70s. In 1979, a dozen SF riot police raided a gay bar, shouting ‘Bonzai’ and indiscriminately swinging riot sticks at patrons hiding under tables while yelling, ‘Motherfucking faggots, sick cocksuckers!’ On Sept. 29, 1982, 20+ uniformed NYPD officers raided Blue’s, a Black lesbian and gay working-class bar in NYC. Activists reported that ‘this raid wasn’t for the purpose of arrest or mere harassment, but this was a violently racist, homophobic attack on Blue’s and the people there. The bar was wrecked: bottles smashed, sound equipment destroyed. The Black gay men and lesbians at the bar were savagely beaten: blood splattered the walls and dried in pools on the floor…At one point a cop threw a handful of bullets saying, ‘These are fag suppositories. Next time I’ll put them up your ass the right way.’”
“Far from being a relic of the days before police sensitivity training and enlightenment, raids continue to play a central role in the policing of LGBT communities. 40 years to the day after Stonewall, Ft. Worth police accompanied by alcoholic beverage commission agents, raided a gay bar, injuring several patrons and hospitalizing one gay man alleged to have groped an officer. The police chief justified the violence by claiming that men in the bar made sexual advances toward police.”
“While targeting of ‘mainstream’ gay and lesbian establishments have diminished somewhat in recent decades, predominantly black and Latinx LGBT clubs continue to suffer constant vice surveillance, building and liquor code enforcement, and aggressive enforcement of driving while intoxicated, jaywalking, and noise codes.”
Lewd Conduct
“As a general rule, lewd conduct clauses allow individual officers and agencies to set the standard for decency, and then decide who violates it.
The results are predictable. For instance, the CA Supreme Court concluded when ruling that the town of Mountain View engaged in discriminatory enforcement of lewd conduct statutes against gay men: ‘The officers’ method of operation was designed to ferret out homosexuals…without any relation to the alleged problems at that location for which the citizen complaint had initially been lodged.’ An LA Sheriffs’ Department LGBT liaison admitted to Amnesty, ‘When officers are working in areas where people have sex in their cars, if it’s a man and a woman, or even 2 women, the officers usually check to make sure there's not a serious crime occurring [such as rape] and then send them on their way..They are told to take it to a hotel or take it home. However, if there are 2 men consensually involved in the car, officers arrest them more often than not. This is discriminatory enforcement.’ A San Antonio park ranger who arrested 500+ gay men for lewd conduct acknowledged in court that his motivation was to ‘rid the park of gays.’”
“In some cases the mere threat of disclosure of sexual orientation by law enforcement leads to deadly consequences. In 1997, Marcus Wayman, a high school senior, and a 17-year-old companion were sitting in a parked car in Minersville, PA, when they were approached by 2 officers who interrogated them without any evidence that they were engaged in unlawful activity. The officers proceeded to search the car on the pretext that the young men were in possession of marijuana, demanding that the boys empty their pockets. When the officers discovered that the boys were carrying condoms, they concluded the two were going to have sex. Both were arrested for underage drinking and brought to the station for further questioning, where one of the officers lectured them on his interpretation of the Bible’s views on homosexuality, called them ‘queers’ and threatened to tell Wayman’s grandmother that he was gay. Upon hearing this, Wayman told his companion that he would kill himself, and proceeded to do just that after he was released.”
“In LA, between 1999 and 2001, 54% of lewd conduct arrests were of Black and Latino men. Police targeting of locations where South Asian, Black, Latino, and immigrant gay men are known to congregate is commonplace across the country. Latino gay men in LA point out that regardless of where policing of public sex takes place, it has a particular impact on low-income and young gay men who cannot afford to go to clubs and bathhouses — and often cannot afford the costs of mounting a defense to charges that are in many cases baseless. Disproportionate numbers of arrests of men of color are no doubt at least in part a product of saturation of communities of color with police officers in the context of war on drugs and quality of life policies. Additionally, archetypes framing men of color and gay men as highly sexualized and predatory meld to inform heightened policing of gay men of color’s sexualities in public spaces.”
Sex Work
“Trans women, particularly trans women of color, are so frequently perceived to be sex workers by police that the terms walking while trans, derivative of the more commonly known driving while Black, was coined to reflect the reality that trans women often cannot walk down the street without being stopped, harassed, verbally, sexually and physically abused, and arrested, regardless of what they’re doing at the time. Gender nonconformity is perceived to be enough to signal ‘intent to prostitute,’ regardless of whether any evidence exists to support such an inference. When combined with hailing a cab or carrying more than 1 condom, it’s an open and shut case.
While the gay sexuality of men involved in the sex trades is (at times incorrectly) presumed, the involvement of lesbians and bi women in the sex industries is virtually erased. As a 1982 conference speaker explained, ‘Many prostitute women are Lesbians — yet we have a fight to be visible in the women’s and gay movements. This is partly due to our illegality but also because being out about our profession, we face attitudes that suggest we’re either a ‘traitor to the women’s cause’ or not ‘a real Lesbian.’’”
“A 2002 Chicago-based study of women in the sex trades found that 30% of erotic dancers and 24% of street-based sex workers who’d been raped identified a police officer as the rapist. Approximately 20% of other acts of sexual violence reported by study participants were committed by police.”
The Courtroom
“The archetypal narrative that casts queers as inherently deceptive undermines LGBT defendants’ ability to challenge sex-related charges based on arrests by undercover officers. In such cases, the word of a queer defendant — already marked as dishonest or perverted — is pitted against the word of law enforcement officers, whose testimony is generally afforded more credibility than that of civilians.
In light of these circumstances, queer defendants often accept less than equitable guilty pleas to escape the humiliation of defending against such charges and the harsher punishment they risk if convicted after a trial. The acceptance of such deals is also driven by shame, fear of family or community members’ discovery of sexual orientation or gender identity, or simply a desire to put the entire incident behind them. According to a San Antonio defense attorney, ‘The biggest problem we’re having from the standpoint of wrongfully charged defendants is that 95% of them are so embarrassed by the [sex-related] charge…they’re afraid to fight.’”
“These dynamics illustrate why a Black person is 4x more likely to receive the death penalty for killing a white person than if they kill a person of the same race, or than a white person who kills a person of any race.
Queer people, both of color and white, are also tried before juries composing primarily of straight, gender-conforming people, whose members often have beliefs that LGBT people are deviant or immoral. One study found that jurors in death penalty cases — who must be ‘death qualified,’ or express a willingness to hand down a death sentence — are more likely to possess racist, sexist, and homophobic views, and are therefore presumably more likely to be easily swayed by raced and queer criminalizing narratives.”
Prison
“Prisoners and detainees who are, or perceived to be gay, trans, or gender nonconforming are more likely to be sexually assaulted, coerced, and harassed than their straight and gender-conforming counterparts. One study of 6 male prisons in CA in 2007 found that 67% of the respondents who identified as LGBT reported having been sexually assaulted by another inmate during their imprisonment, a rate that was 15x higher than the rest of the prison population.”
Hate Crime Laws
“Because they fail to address larger social forces influencing individual acts of violence, and instead focus on harsher punishment of individuals rather than prevention, there’s no proactive ‘protection’ to hate crime laws, despite the claims of supporters. While the presumed deterrent value of enhanced penalties is advanced as a central argument for the laws, the hate crime statutes currently in place in 30 states and DC don’t appear to deter much, if any, harassment and violence. More than 2 decades after the first LGBT embrace of hate crime laws, as NCAVP figures illustrate, violence against queers remains a serious problem.”
“MN researchers found that ‘there continues to be a significant percentage of incidents where officers refuse to file a report indicating that a crime has occurred. Over the course of the 9 years, on average, officers refused in 31% of the cases to file a general incident report. More recent NCAVP figures indicate a 27% rate of refusal to classify violence against LGBT people as motivated by sexual orientation or gender identity.
The MN study also found that, despite deliberate efforts on the part of local LGBT antiviolence activists to build strong relationships with local police departments through education, outreach, sharing info about specific incidents, and advocating on behalf of victims of crime, negative interactions with police continued. More than half of the incidences of violence reported by LGBT people over this period were met with ‘negative’ responses by law enforcement, compared with 20% positive responses. Although negative responses decreased by 50% over a 9-year period, they still made up the bulk of police-related incidents reported. The authors concluded, ‘While MN has a reputation as one of the best states in the nation that offers protection against bias-motivated violence and intimidation, we still found low levels of reporting, refusal by police to indicate bias when requested by the victim, and police misconduct against those in the GLBT community.’”
Domestic Violence
“By 2008, 37 states provided for civil orders of protection against an intimate partner of the same sex under varying circumstances, although the availability of this remedy in reality varies from judge to judge and jurisdiction to jurisdiction.”
“A significant proportion of homophobic and transphobic violence takes place within or near our homes, and often represents some of the most brutal violence experienced by LGBT people. The widely used term same sex domestic violence, which appears to reflect an effort to shoehorn queer lives into mainstream domestic violence discourse, similarly excludes these experiences of violence, as well as those of trans people involved in heterosexual partnerships. Recognizing that LGBT people, and particularly queer youth and elders, are vulnerable to violence in a multitude of intimate contexts beyond monogamous relationships that mirror straight marriage, many LGBT antiviolence activists use the broader term LGBT domestic violence to reflect this reality and distinguish these experiences from violence experienced at the hands of strangers or public authorities.”
“Verbal abuse, use of slurs, and physical abuse, was reported in 6% of cases. Arrest of survivors in addition to or instead of abusers took place in an additional 6%. And, overall reports of police misconduct in DV cases increased by 93% in 2008. In LA, which reports the largest number of LGBT DV cases per year, a misarrest was reported in 97% of cases in 2007: ‘Frequently both parties are arrested or law enforcement officers threaten to arrest both.’ Indeed, since 2002 the LA AVP’s STOP DV program has reported that, notwithstanding ongoing advocacy and law enforcement training, many of their clients continue to be erroneously arrested by the criminal legal system as abusers and mandated to attend batterers’ intervention programs. In fact, this trend is so pronounced that the program consistently runs court-mandated ‘batterers’ groups uniquely for people who are actually survivors of domestic violence, for whom being forced to participate in a group intended for abusers is profoundly retraumatizing.”
“Sentencing enhancements won’t get police to investigate crimes they don’t take seriously to begin with. They won’t stop police from harassing trans women on the street because they assume all trans women are sex workers. They won’t have any effect against police officers who believe they won’t be held accountable. They won’t sway the minds of jurors who think ‘I killed her because she was trans’ is an adequate excuse. Sentencing enhancements will allow them to dole out harsher punishments against the people they think are more deserving. And we already know that the legal system sees POC, women, sex workers, immigrants, and the homeless as more deserving of punishment.
The TN Trans Political Coalition began to explore broader, structural changes, calling on ‘business people who refuse to hire trans people to open their doors immediately to trans workers so that there are alternatives to working on the streets; shelters that routinely turn away trans people who are seeking help to open their doors so that trans people don’t have to live on the streets; religious leaders who preach intolerance…to cease immediately and begin preaching messages of love and acceptance.’”
Grassroots Organizing
“Under the slogan ‘The Rebellion Is Not Over!’ in 2000, FIERCE began organizing a sustained response to increased policing and mass arrests of youth of color on NYC’s Christopher St pier as the area underwent redevelopment. Over a 10-year period, FIERCE members surveyed hundreds of queer youth who frequented the Pier about police harassment and abuse, produced a film about the impacts of gentrification in the West Village, and engaged in youth-led organizing and direct action around the impacts of quality of life policing on queer youth of color. The org has mounted a highly successful campaign to build an LGBT youth center in the West Village, secured a spot on the local planning commission, and issued a white paper on maintaining safe spaces for LGBTQ youth. FIERCE conducts ‘know your rights’ trainings for queer youth of color, co-organizes a ‘copwatch’ with ALP during Pride, and advocates, along with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and other local groups, for changes to the NYPD Patrol Guide to address police misconduct against trans people. FIERCE has also played a central role in the national Right to the City Alliance, which works to develop a united response to gentrification and urban displacement.
In rare instances, LGBT activists have taken responsibility for challenging the intensified and often abusive policing that accompanies gentrification — by both queers and straight people — of urban neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by low-income people and POC. For instance, Queer to the Left (Q2L), a multiracial, grassroots group of LGBT folks, joined neighborhood groups in campaigning against the increasing police misconduct accompanying the gentrification of the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago and advocated for building low-income housing in the area. Q2L activists played a key role in highlighting and countering the systemic changes in zoning laws, lending patterns, and housing markets that facilitate gentrification to the detriment of existing residents, and in challenging calls for intensified policing of youth of color in the area by incoming residents, both queer and straight.”
“ALP’s SOS Collective has developed a Safe Neighborhood campaign, empowering community members to take proactive measures to prevent violence, intervene when violent situations arise, and build stronger relationships between LGBT people of color and their communities. SOS members have recruited and trained restaurants, schools, churches, community orgs, and businesses to become ‘Safe Spaces’ for LGBT POC. Safe Spaces agreed to visibly identified as places that provide an affirming environment for queer community members, and to prevent and intervene in racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic violence. Some Safe Spaces also agree to be Safe Havens, providing sanctuary to LGBT people experiencing violence. SOS also organizes ‘Safe Parties,’ community forums, and an annual Safe Neighborhood Summit at which community members share visions and skills for reducing homophobic and transphobic violence by both police and community members.”
“In WI, ACT UP chapters conducted an air-drop of condoms on the Waupun Correctional Institution to protest the institution’s refusal to distribute condoms. Additionally, the ACLU, NCLR, and Lambda Legal have litigated on behalf of LGBT people behind bars, including challenging the denial of access to hormone therapies.”
