From Policing Queerness to a Diverse Force

Nathan Connolly: Before it was even conceivable that LGBTQ people would openly run for office, serve in the military, or legally get married, just living life as a gay person was a threatened precarious experience. Historian Timothy Stewart-Winter tells us about a time when gay and black communities came together to fight the state violence they both faced. In the 1950s and 60s, police raids on gay and lesbian bars and clubs were a constant threat.

Timothy S. W.: One of the techniques that police would use was sending undercover officers in to kind of witness illegal behavior which could include even serving a drink to a homosexual. In many states it was against state liquor regulations for gay people, just to be in an establishment serving liquor. You know, they might just intimidate folks or they might round everybody up and cart them off to jail, typically charging them with something like disorderly conduct or other kind of catch all charges. At the same time there’s also individual level policing. So cops are picking up gay men who are cruising on the street. They are also arresting lesbians just for wearing men’s blue jeans if you can believe it.

Nathan Connolly: Now, were there any instanced or how might you describe the interaction between racist policing and anti-gay policing. Specifically, how did gay or working class African Americans were the brunt of police brutality during this period?

Timothy S. W.: For African Americans the risk of harassment from policy officers or brutality at the hands of police officers were present whether you were gay or straight. At the same time the sort of growing carceral state of the post World War II decades took some of its harshest actions against queer people of color. So for instance there’s a guy I’ve written about in Chicago named Ron Vernon who was a gay activist in the early ’70s who described growing up on the south side of Chicago, going to an all black high school and being sort of, essentially sent before a judge in youth court as a result of his flamboyance, his visible gayness, queerness. And in a hearing his father was asked by the judge, “Are you aware that your son is a homosexual?” And Mister Vernon said, “Yes.” And the judge sort of said, “Well, then we’re gonna send him to Galesburg mental institution to correct that.” And Vernon went on to spend much of his teen years kind of in and out of the ambit of youth justice system, I guess you would say.

Nathan Connolly: And I as I understand, some of your work has actually revealed that you have gay activist and black nationalist join in coalitions in American cities.

Timothy S. W.: Yeah, it’s a different type of policing that’s affecting white gay folks, you know, cruising or going to gay bars. And yeah, this are both forms of state violence, they’re both forms of state control and partly because they’re both so aggressive. In Chicago there is a coalition that develops to respond to both, to fight both.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m curious about how you understand that cooperation, how deep it went and how we can understand, it’s history, that link between gay politics and black nationalist politics.

Timothy S. W.: The link really has to do with a shared enemy in the form of the police. In December of 1969 Illinois Black Panther Party leaders were killed while sleeping in their bed. There’s a backlash and a kind of widespread sense on the political left that the police were totally out of control. And at the local level this led to a kind of umbrella civil libertarian group called the Alliance to End Repression which oversaw a bunch of different kinds of efforts to reign in the police over the course of the ’70s and into the ’80s, which included both trying to end police raids on gay bars as well as secured concent decrees kind of reigning in the police red squad.

Nathan Connolly: Give me some sense of the strategies that gay activists used to confront these kinds of excesses of state power.

Timothy S. W.: So beginning in the early 1970s there’s kind of an effort to monitor the monitors, or police the police. They actually send undercover people into busy gay bars so that they could serve as witnesses later if the police did conduct a raid. They also began to publicize to try to tell to the press, “This is what’s happening to the gay community.” You know, before the late ’60s there are very few gay people who are willing to come forward publicly and have their name associated with the cause. You know, there were no gay celebrities, there were very few people lining up behind this cause and that stumbling block is the reason that coming out of the closet, which was really invented after Stonewall at the turn of the 1970s kind changed the game a little bit in that people were willing to come forward publicly to accuse individual cops or fight charges rather than just accept be bargained for a lower charge.

Timothy S. W.: Even at the most local level you don’t have any openly gay elected officials in the US until the 1970s. You know, gay people were the opposite of law abiding citizens, they frequented illegal places, they were engaged in illegal acts in most states, they couldn’t hold jobs as teachers or government officials pretty much anywhere, and being outed would mean that you would lose any public sector job.

Nathan Connolly: The 1980s are obviously a huge watershed for a number of reason in the history of gay politics and gay activism. And not the least of which being that you have the election of a mayor in Chicago that you know well, Harold Washington, and Washington was very explicit in trying to continue to bridge this relationship between gay politics and African American politics, again understood as different communities that have overlapping interests.

Timothy S. W.: I think this is a great example of what we miss when we only look at the federal level of politics. You know the story of the 1980s at the federal level is about Ronald Reagan. But in Chicago and in many other big cities you have African American led liberal political coalitions that win power and that are trying to defend the gains that were won by the civil rights movement. And also were kind of trying to defend public spending at a time when it’s being slashed.

Nathan Connolly: How might we understand the 80s and 90s as a time when you have gay activists, we’re thinking about employment and really mainstream their issues, and African Americans who because of their concerns about HIV/AIDS are still sometimes not responding as forth fully to gay issues that are certainly part of the political calculus there.

Timothy S. W.: In the 1970s the routine police harassment of predominantly white establishments, gay establishments pretty much drops off by the early 80s. This is no longer routine in most cities. The gay movement starts to take up a different issue which is protection from job discrimination which they are usually seeking from city councils, and so this is more of a kind of insider kind of politics, brand of politics. You have AIDS which comes along and really radicalized the gay movement, but not specially around policing, but instead around health care.

Timothy S. W.: And so the gay movement is shifting away from a focus on the carceral state at the same time that the carceral state is expanding. And so the kind of tension between those two dynamics over the course of the ’70s and ’80s I think has been overlooked as a key aspect of what was going on in the United Stated in that period and the AIDS crisis adds another layer in that there’s this awful respectability politics. You have one really vivid anecdote, a young man who tells his mother, African American that, “The bad news is I have AIDS, the good news is that I’m a drug addict.”

Nathan Connolly: And why is that good news?

Timothy S. W.: The idea being that he is not gay, that he didn’t become HIV positive as a result of having sex with a man. And so the AIDS crisis along with the crack epidemic and the raise of homelessness and poverty in the ;80s, you have multiple extremely stigmatized communities that are kind of wanting to distance themselves from each other in a sense of gay men and injecting drug users and that makes forming political coalitions more complicated. You know, it also exposes the vast gulf in resources in a segregated city like Chicago between white run gay institutions and organizations which are located in increasingly white parts of the city and meanwhile the south and west sides of Chicago don’t have the same kind of access to resources to respond to AIDS with, and that creates a lot of tensions among activists among the course of the ’80s.

Nathan Connolly: When last decade or so we’ve seen a number of movements even coming from queer activists about the carceral state and trying to deal with the problem of mass incarceration. Where do some of these coalitions hold up under that issue?

Timothy S. W.: I think we’ve seen certainly the gay movement moving towards a more critical stands towards policing and certainly towards the prison system. We’ve had the high the profile case of Chelsea Manning drew attention to some of the very serious health problems facing incarcerated LGBTQ folks. And at the same time we have had Black Lives Matter which is a genuinely intersectional movement with a lot of visible queer leadership articulating the ways in which these systems of oppression interlock and in which state power operates through classifying people by gender and sexuality. I think the sort of gay movement has been a little bit resistant in some ways and we’ve seen in the last couple years controversies over whether out gay police officer groups can march in pride parades which have really led to some serious controversies in a number of cities and I think next year during the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion I think that that’s very likely to be even more controversial. I think we’re gonna see more conflict whether law enforcement should be kind of visible in queer spaces and what that should look like.

Nathan Connolly: Timothy Stewart-Winter is Associate Professor of US history at Rutgers Newark and the author of the book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics.

Nathan Connolly: As you’ve just hear relations between the police force and the gay community have often been strained. During his service as a police officer, Stefan Thorne saw the issue from the inside as a ground breaker. As one of the first out lesbian officers and then as the first officer to transition while serving in the San Francisco police department. Here’s how he responded when I asked him what it was like coming out as a lesbian teenager in Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1970s.

Stefan Thorne: You mean, what was it like being a criminal? Yeah, it was challenging, that would be the word that I would use. It was against the law to be a homosexual at the time. We were outlaws. I didn’t really know anyone else that I knew was a lesbian or a gay man that was in my own social circle and my sister, my older sister, she’s about six years older than I am, she happened to know a gay man, he was very flamboyant, he was a hairdresser and I really needed to find someone that I could confide in. So I don’t remember exactly how I asked or got a hold of his number from my sister and I asked him to meet me and I was able to tell him that I was like him. And I recall the feeling just almost a physical sensation of a weight being lifted from my shoulders, it was amazing.

Nathan Connolly: When did you first apply to work in law enforcement?

Stefan Thorne: Actually I applied to the Omaha Police Department. They have a physical agility test and a written test and I did all of that and I was their highest scoring female candidate, but they had a polygraph exam. And during that polygraph exam they asked about my sexuality, which I tried to hide. So he kept, you know, I was in there for over three hours in the polygraph exam, hooked up to machines. And you know, finally the [inaudible 01:03:40] yes, so I told the truth and I was not hired, I didn’t get a job.

Nathan Connolly: Tell me about what it was like moving to San Francisco in the late 1970s and how different your experience was there applying for Bay Area Police Forces.

Stefan Thorne: A world away. When I came to San Francisco it was just spectacular and I though, “This is it, I’m gonna move.” You know, the first thing that I did was to pick up one of the gay rags, there were at least two that were free weekly newspapers, and when I opened one of those papers, or both of those weekly papers, lo and behold there was a nice big ad from the SFPD reaching out, and it was recruitment ad for out lesbians and gay men.

Nathan Connolly: Talk about a contrast from Omaha.

Stefan Thorne: Talking about a contrast from Omaha. And that was it. It was like, “Oh my god. I can do this here.” So that’s what I did and I applied. And the other thing that has occurred, the previous November a couple of months before that was the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco so it was certainly a very charged time. I wanted to be here very, very much. Even with everything, maybe specially with everything that was going on. The movement being so strong here, I was certainly aware of Harvey being the first openly gay person elected to public office and that he’d been murdered. So I knew work needed to be done.

Nathan Connolly: Right. And now, you have the experience of coming out not onc but twice, and coming out as a trans officer in San Francisco. How was that experience comparatively and just on its own?

Stefan Thorne: Well it was different. It was froth with fear for me as an adult transitioning from female to male. A couple of the fears I had of loss was that either I could be fired from my job potentially. I didn’t think there were any kinds of protections over gender identity at the time, or if they didn’t outright fire me or didn’t feel that they could do that, that they’d try to make my life so miserable at work that I would want to quit. And the final or most severe fear that I felt was what if officers fail to back me up in the field. And I’m so happy to day that I really grossly underestimated not only the professionalism but the compassion of the people that I worked with because none of my fears were realized. Was it easy? No. Were there people who made it very apparent to me that they disliked me and disliked that I was a member of the department? Yes. But there were many more, many more officers who were respectful and compassionate and kind and tolerant.

Nathan Connolly: And once you’re on the police force you’re actively developing training programs that are meant to make the police force even more responsive and responsible to members of the LGBT community.

Stefan Thorne: Well I was, yes. Jamison Green and I who was a very well known trans activist and educator, I had met him in the FTM support group that he was involved with in San Francisco at the time and he and I wrote curriculum for law enforcement training, and we began teaching it together in June of 1995 to San Francisco police academy recruits. And I continued to do that until I retired and now even in my retirement I actually train law enforcement personnel still, anti bias and gender awareness education and training.

Nathan Connolly: From your advantage point as a retired officer now, what advice would you give a young LGBT person who’s potentially interested in a career in law enforcement, how would you explain why you continue to do this training and remain committed to these issue, and what is it you think that could be improved overall about policing given your experience?

Stefan Thorne: Well, to other LGBT people and any other marginalized group in our society, I can do nothing but encourage you to go into law enforcement. The most powerful change that has occurred in law enforcement has been integration. Having racial minorities and women, and lesbians and gay people and now transgender people included in that, has really changed the culture, certainly from when I joined law enforcement back in the late 70s. It’s very different now, it is not a completed process however as people are, well certainly racial minorities are well aware that just because there are laws on the book that protect you doesn’t mean that discrimination vanishes. So there’s a lot more work that needs to be done, but doing it from the inside is just as important and just and significant and moves us further than only being able to do it from the outside. So anybody who’s considering a career in law enforcement, please go for it, participate and do it well, and so I with consciousness.

Nathan Connolly: Lieutenant Stefan Thorne served for over 30 years In the San Francisco Police Department.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, Joanne, I wanna know whether there were any gay founders.

Joanne Freeman: So here’s a thing about that question, Brian, and that is it’s hard to draw lines and impose labels. People wonder and there’s talk of was Alexander Hamilton gay or not? Did he have a relationship with his close friend John Laurens or not? And I think it’s hard to say either way, you certainly can’t say no, but it’s unclear what that relationship was. It might have been a romantic friendship, it might have been more than that. I think there are whole categories of same sex relationship in this time period that precisely because they weren’t labeled we’re in the realm of possibility.

Joanne Freeman: A lot of the dividing lines and labels that we take for granted now didn’t really exist in early America. So although there were all kinds of same sex relationships, although there were even same sex relationships that were treated like a marriage, people at the time wouldn’t have identified themselves necessarily as gay, although they might have understood that something about their identity shouldn’t be made public. It’s a very fuzzy way of saying that I think in early America there was a continuum of ways in which people understood their sexuality and I think that over time we’ve imposed worders and definitions and dividing lines that didn’t exist in that early period.

Brian Balogh: Well, in early America were there any terms used at all? I understand your point and it’s a good one about a continuum, but were the ends of that continuum labeled?

Joanne Freeman: Certainly in the early 19th century sometimes they use phrases like female husbands or wedded bachelors. They were using a lot of kind of like language to not define things but certainly to indicate that there was an understanding of what kind of a relationship there was.

Brian Balogh: So Nathan, what does it mean that we managed to found and run a country for a century or so without having terms that are just so familiar to us today?

Nathan Connolly: Right. It’s relatively recent in American history where we get so caught up in these questions, actually as recent as the 20th century. By the time you get to the late 30’s the policing of gay people in American cities increases as the cities themselves begin to grow. And it really isn’t until the 1940s and 50s that you begin to see what we would now call the closet, which is the space where gay men and women have to basically begin to conceal their identities for reasons of employment or having other kinds of opportunities.

Nathan Connolly: I wanna say one other thing though about that which is that there are other kinds of categories, like for instance transgender, that people are experiencing as identities in this period, the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s that only has political meaning by the time you get to the late 20th century. My favorite example of this is Pauli Murray, a really critical legal mind on civil rights, an African American woman for most of her life. She is a student at Howard who helped to frame what becomes the fight against Jim Crow through the courts.

Nathan Connolly: Well she actually lives most of her life believing herself to be a man, or feeling as if she’s a man in a woman’s body, but there is no gender corrective surgery that she can draw from, there’s no debate about that it means to be a transgendered man. And so there becomes a point where her own alienation and disconnect from the broader body politic drives her politics on civil rights, drives her mission to basically correct and try to make American society more equitable and more open. And so it provides a really singular example of people who would totally see themselves in one side of a political debate in the late 20th century if they had that ability to belong to that community 50 years, 60 years earlier.

Brian Balogh: So Joanne, I want you to train you skilled cultural social political historian’s eye on this raft of categorization or lack of categorization in the case of transgender and tell us what this means. I mean, what does this look like from the perspective of early America? What’s going on?

Joanne Freeman: Well, here’s what I find interesting in the realm of categories and borders and boundaries and labels. I talked a little bit about how in early America I think there was more of a continuum. So I think that the borders or differences were much more fluid and there weren’t labels being stamped on people in the way that they are now. But what’s interesting, and I would like actually to hear what you two guys think abut this, feels to me like right now we’re at a moment where there is more fluidity being introduced and where some of those labels are being cast off or new ideas are being introduced. So are we in a different kind of a period when it comes to gay identity?

Brian Balogh: You read my mind because I had in mind this Washington Post article that says a third of millennials now say that they’re, “Less than 100 percent straight.” Which first sounded like the way I park my car, but when I started thinking about it I realized you know, this is the kind of fluidity that I associated and now you’ve confirmed with early America, where there aren’t this stark boundaries. But we all know that at least in the second half of the 20th century, one of the reasons that language changed and homosexuality and then transgender, bisexuality, queer became more acceptable is that the very people who lived these lives advocated for this, they came out. So I’m curious to know know any changes were made in the 19th century when people didn’t even have a language for identifying who they were.

Joanne Freeman: Well I mean, I think there is a reason why, there are many reasons why but there’s certainly one main reason why, as we’ve been talking about on the show today, their political activism is a mid and late 20th century phenomenon because I think you need a sense of groupness, right? You have to have a sense of yourself as part of a group.

Brian Balogh: And ironically Joanne, part of that sense of groupness comes from being discriminated against, from being labeled in a pejorative way.

Joanne Freeman: Right.

Nathan Connolly: So I think it’s not all about identity but it’s about a meeting place of identity and opportunity, and I think this is really important because you have your examples. Even going back to the colonial period where so-called cross dressing or women who are mascaraing as men or vice versa. But there are ways in which people are looking for openings of one kind or another. This is true of so many different passing accounts, whether it’s black to white or what have you. And so I think it’s really important to look at what the society of a given moment offers. And so I think it’s really critical when you look at the ability of the government or of private sector business to still allow people to be whole people, while adopting their gender identity that tends to determine who and how people identify openly when it comes to these questions of sexuality and identity.

Joanne Freeman: So I want to add a third word then, you talked about identity and opportunity so I want to throw a third word in that goes right along with what you’re saying Nathan, and that is possibility, which is a slightly different thing and in a way is the hardest to define and maybe in some senses the most important, that you can understand the possibilities for becoming who you are, who you think you are, who you want to be. That’s something that’s hard to define but that’s something that obviously is immensely important.

Nathan Connolly: That’s gonna do it for us today, do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 12: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is the Professor of History and American studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities