Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

[논둑길맨발로]

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Queer Action/Queer Ideas Book)

by Joey L. Mogul

GBS_setLanguage('en'); GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780807051160'); GBS_setViewerOptions({'showLinkChrome': false});

Comment on this title and you could win free books! Synopses & Reviews Read an Excerpt Table of Contents Comment on this title and you could win free books! ISBN13: 9780807051160 ISBN10: 0807051160 All Product Details

var switchTo5x=true; stLight.options({publisher: "c40e6082-e624-4c62-87bd-6b08041c8e2c", tracking: 'google'});

 0 0 0 0 New

 

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system

In March 2003—three decades after Stonewall—police stormed the Power Plant, a private Detroit club frequented by African American LGBT people. Over 350 people were handcuffed and subjected to homophobic slurs. Some were hit on the head and back; others were slammed into walls. Their supposed crime was later chalked up to a bizarre infraction: “loitering inside a building.” Three years earlier, Freddie Mason, a thirty-one-year-old Black gay man was arrested after a verbal altercation with his landlord, and then anally raped with a billy club covered in cleaning liquid by a Chicago police officer. Bernina Mata, a Latina, was sentenced to death on the theory that being a “hardcore lesbian” caused her to kill. A Tennessee police officer’s brutal beating of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman, was even caught on camera. Within a year, she was dead—the third African American transgender woman in Memphis in three years whose murder remains unresolved. Events such as these illuminate a long shadow of criminalization of LGBT people in America.

Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences—as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—like “gleeful gay killers,” “lethal lesbians,” “disease spreaders,” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression‎, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

Book News Annotation:

Written by activists and legal advocates Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock, this work examines the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people within the contemporary US criminal legal system, particularly focusing on how other class, race, occupational, gender, immigrant, and other status marginalities interact with LGBT as a category in US crime and punishment. They argue that the way that the criminal legal system polices notions of sexual and gender "deviance" serves both as a tool of race-based law enforcement and as an independent basis for punishment within an institutionalized setting of systemic violence and injustice. Chapters address historical precedents, queer criminal archetypes, policing gender and sex after Stonewall, treatment of queers in criminal courts, queer experiences in prison, criminal legal responses to violence against LGBT people, and responses to the problem of criminal injustice towards LGBT people. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Synopsis:

A groundbreaking work that turns a “queer eye” on the criminal legal system, and winner of the 2011 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency

Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences--as "suspects," defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression‎, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished. 

back to top

About the Author

Joey L. Mogul is a partner at the People’s Law Office in Chicago and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University’s College of Law. Andrea J. Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney and organizer in New York City. Kay Whitlock is a Montana-based organizer and writer whose work focuses on dismantling structural injustice in law enforcement and other public institutions.

back to top

Table of Contents

A Note from the Series Editor (Michael Bronski)

Introduction

1 Setting the Historical Stage: Colonial Legacies

2 Gleeful Gay Killers, Lethal Lesbians, and Deceptive Gender Benders: Queer Criminal Archetypes

3 The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Gender, Policing Sex

4 Objection! Treatment of Queers in Criminal Courts

5 Caging Deviance: Prisons as Queer Spaces

6 False Promises: Criminal Legal Responses to Violence against LGBT People

7 Over the Rainbow: Where Do We Go from Here?

Acknowledgments

For Further Reading

Notes

Index

back to top

What Our Readers Are Saying

Be the first to add a comment for a chance to win!

back to top

Related Subjects

Gay and Lesbian » Fiction and Poetry » General
History and Social Science » Politics » United States » Politics
Languages » Foreign Languages » Spanish » Gay and Lesbian » Fiction and Poetry » General
Languages » Foreign Languages » Spanish » History and Social Science » Politics » United States » Politics

Excerpt

From Chapter 3

The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Gender, Policing Sex

On a hot August night in 1966, “drag queens” and gay “hustlers” at the Compton Cafeteria in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco rose up and fought back when police tried to arrest them for doing nothing more than being out. The late 1960s saw frequent police raids, often accompanied by brutality, on gay establishments across the country, which were meeting with increasing resistance. The previous five years had also seen uprisings in Watts, Detroit, Chicago, and Newark and dozens of other cities, in many cases sparked by incidents of widespread racial profiling and abuse of people of color by police.

It was against this backdrop that, in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Claiming to be enforcing liquor laws, they began arresting employees and patrons of the private lesbian and gay establishment. Police action, which included striking patrons with billy clubs while spewing homophobic abuse, sparked outrage among those present. Led by people described by many as drag queens and butch lesbians, bar patrons, joined by street people, began yelling “Gay Power!” and throwing shoes, coins, and bricks at the officers. Over the next several nights, police and queers clashed repeatedly in the streets of the West Village. One report described the impacts of the police response to the uprising as follows:

At one point, Seventh Avenue . . . looked like a battlefield in Vietnam. Young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes. Others were nursing bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs, and necks.

The Stonewall Uprising, as the rebellion against the raids came to be known, has been mythically cast as the “birthplace” of the modern LGBT rights movement in the United States, although in reality it was but one of its primary catalysts. In the weeks that followed, the Gay Liberation Front, inspired by contemporaneous movements such as the women’s liberation movement, the Black Panthers, and the Young Lords, was formed. Spontaneous resistance to police raids on gay bars and bathhouses blossomed in the ensuing decade. The 1970 protest march commemorating the one-year anniversary of the raid on the Stonewall Inn grew into an annual worldwide celebration of gay pride.

Fast forward three decades to March 2003, when the Power Plant, a private club in the Highland Park area of Detroit, frequented primarily by African American gay men, lesbians, and transgender women, was filled to capacity. Around 3:00 a.m., between 50 and 100 officers from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department dressed in black clothing, with guns drawn and laser sights on, suddenly cut the lights and stormed the premises, shouting orders for everyone to “hit the floor.” Over 350 people in the club at that time were handcuffed, forced to lie face down on the floor, and detained for up to twelve 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 had obtained a warrant to search the premises, but rather than execute it during the daytime against only the owner of the establishment, they chose to wait until the club was full, and then unjustifiably arrested over 300 people, citing them for “loitering inside a building,” an offense carrying a maximum fine of $500. Vehicles within a three-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.

The policing of queer sexualities has been arguably the most visible and recognized point of contact between LGBT people and the criminal legal system. From the images that form the opening sequence of Milk—the 2008 biopic about gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk—of groups of white gay men hiding from cameras as they are rounded up by police in the 1950s, to the historic clashes with police of the late 1960s and early 1970s, police repression and resistance to it are central themes of gay life in the United States. Groundbreaking gay rights organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis have expressed strong concern about bar raids and police harassment. A study conducted by the National Gay Task Force (now the NGLTF) in the mid-eighties found that 23 percent of gay men and 13 percent of lesbians reported having been harassed, threatened with violence, or physically attacked by police because of their sexual orientation. It remains a daily occurrence for large numbers of LGBT people. According to reports made to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) in 2008, law enforcement officers were the third-largest category of perpetrators of anti-LGBT violence. Incidences of reported police violence against LGBT people increased by 150 percent between 2007 and 2008, and the number of law enforcement officers reported to have engaged in abusive treatment of LGBT people increased by 11 percent. In 2000, the NCAVP stated that 50 percent of bias-related violence reported by transgender women in San Francisco was committed by police and private security officers.

As demonstrated by the Power Plant incident, in many ways, policing of queers has not changed significantly since the days when it sparked outrage and resistance from LGBT communities, although its focus has narrowed to some degree. According to the New York City Anti-Violence Project, “Young queer people of color, transgender youth, homeless and street involved youth are more vulnerable to police violence . . . AVP’s data analysis also reveals that transgender individuals are at a greater risk of experiencing police violence Far from fading into the annals of LGBT history, police violence against queers is alive and well.

Yet with the exception of sodomy law enforcement, since the mid- 1970s resistance to abusive policing of LGBT people has largely been absent from the agendas of national mainstream LGBT organizations, particularly as police have increasingly narrowed their focus to segments of LGBT communities with little power or voice inside and outside such groups. Similarly, while mainstream police accountability and civil rights organizations have called for accountability in a limited number of cases involving LGBT individuals, policing of gender and queer sexualities has not been central to their analysis of the issue. It is essential to bring the persistent police violence experienced by LGBT people to the fore of these movements to ensure the ghosts of Stonewall do not continue to haunt for years to come.

Policing Social Order

In order to better understand the roots and forms of policing of LGBT communities, it is important to consider the power police possess and the role they play in society. Police and other law enforcement agents do not merely objectively enforce the letter of the law. Practically speaking, they also function as lawmakers in their own right. They are given considerable latitude in deciding which laws to enforce, how to enforce them, and which people to target for enforcement. And they often consciously and unconsciously exercise that broad discretion in ways that are anything but neutral. Far from being passive players just doing a job, law enforcement agents play a crucial role in manufacturing, acting on, and enforcing criminalizing archetypes.

The advent of “quality of life” policing in the 1990s further facilitated this process. This now predominant law enforcement paradigm is premised on maintaining social order through aggressive enforcement of quality of life regulations, rooted in age-old vagrancy laws, which prohibit an expanding spectrum of activities in public spaces, including standing (loitering), sitting, sleeping, eating, drinking, urinating, making noise, and approaching strangers. It is based on the theory that minor indications of “disorder”—a broken window, youth hanging out on the corner, public drinking—ultimately lead to more serious criminal activity. While such regulations may appear innocent at first blush, in reality, by criminalizing ordinary and otherwise lawful activities, this new paradigm has given police additional tools to stop, ticket, and arrest increasing numbers of people, most notably youth and homeless people. In 2006 alone, the NYPD stopped, questioned and/or frisked over half a million people, a 500 percent increase over the previous year. Over 80 percent were Black or Latina/o, even though these groups make up only 53.6 percent of the NYC population, while only approximately 10 percent were white, compared to 44 percent of the population. Quality of life stops also create additional opportunities for police officers to use force. While “quality of life” offenses are often low-level misdemeanors or violations (the equivalent of a speeding ticket), an accumulation of tickets or failure to appear in court often leads to more serious consequences.

Given their extensive reach and the common occurrence of the types of conduct they prohibit, it is virtually impossible to enforce all quality of life regulations against all people at all times and in all places. As Yale law professor Charles Reich notes, “Laws that are widely violated . . . especially lend themselves to selective and arbitrary enforcement.” Additionally, the language of quality of life regulations, such as those prohibiting “disorderly” or lewd conduct or loitering, is often vague and subject to multiple interpretations when determining what kinds of conduct to punish, and by whom. Ultimately, “zero tolerance” for quality of life violations means zero tolerance for undesirables, and quality of life can mean quality of life for property and business owners at the expense of quality of life for countless others.

Social constructions of deviance and criminality pervade the myriad routine practices and procedures through which law enforcement agents decide whom to stop on the streets or highways, whom to question, search, and arrest, and whom to subject to brutal force. The statistics reflecting persistent and pervasive racial profiling are as familiar as they are dizzying. Behind the numbers are the stories of daily harassment and arbitrary police action premised on presumptions of criminality that attach to some, but not others.

A Black gay man peacefully walking in a park in New York City was confronted by an officer pointing a gun at him, saying, “If you an arcade with friends in a gay neighborhood in Chicago when an officer passing by in a police car yelled at the young people to “move their ass.” The officer then pulled over to stop and search them, calling the young man a “nigger faggot” while telling him his “ass is not big enough to fuck.” The young man was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The charges were later dismissed. Driving such seemingly routine incidents are undercurrents of archetypal narratives framing Black men as inherently up to no good, and gay men as individuals whose sexuality must be informally controlled, even where they have broken no law.

In addition to possessing the power to stop and arrest, police also have the ability to utilize force as a tool of order maintenance. Criminalizing archetypes framing particular individuals and groups as inherently dangerous, violent, mentally unstable, or disposable fuel and justify physical abuse by police. Statistics pointing to the disproportionate use of force against people of color—including LGBT people of color—abound, and there is no shortage of illustrations bringing the numbers to life.

A gay Latino man stopped for a traffic offense in Oakland, California, 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 thirty-one-year-old Black gay nurse’s assistant with no prior criminal record, was arrested following a verbal altercation with his landlord and anally raped with a billy club covered in cleaning liquid by a Chicago police officer who called him a “nigger fag” and told him “I’m tired of you faggot . . . you sick mother fucker.” Two lesbians of color arrested outside a club hosting a women’s night in Brooklyn, New York, 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.”

http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=HARDCOVER:NEW:9780807051160:27.95&page=excerpt#page

Queer Liberation Means Prison Abolition

Victoria Law

   more on History, Race, US Politics/Economy, Women's Studies/Feminism

5

Victoria Law is a writer, photographer, and mother. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2012) and co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities (PM Press, 2012).

Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 240 pages, $27.95, hardcover.

In 1513, en route to Panama, Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa ordered forty Quaraca men to be ripped apart by his hunting dogs. Their offense? Being “dressed as women” and having sexual relations with each other. The homophobia and transphobia behind Balboa’s actions are far from arcane relics of the past, and violence against LGBTQ people continues to this day, both legally sanctioned and in the streets.

In 2008, Duanna Johnson, a black transgender woman, was arrested for a prostitution-related offense in Memphis. At the jail, she was brutally beaten by a police officer. Her beating was caught on videotape, leading to the firing of two officers. Johnson filed a civil suit against the police department but, less than six months later, was found shot in the head a few blocks from her house. This was the third killing of a black transgender woman in Memphis in 2008 alone, and her murder remains unsolved.

Queer (In)Justice examines the violence that LGBTQ people face regularly, from attacks on the street to institutionalized violence from police and prisons. The three authors are long-time advocates and attorneys who work directly with people impacted by incarceration. Joey L. Mogul, a partner at Chicago’s People’s Law Office and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University, has advocated for LGBTQ people ensnared in the criminal legal system. Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney, organizer, and coordinator of Streetwise and Safe, a New York City organization focused on gender, race, sexuality, and poverty-based policing and criminalization of LGBTQ youth of color. Kay Whitlock has worked for almost forty years to build bridges between LGBTQ struggles and movements fighting for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice. Together, they center race, class, and gender/gender nonconformity in analyzing the myriad ways in which LGBTQ people have been policed, prosecuted, and punished from colonial times to the present day.

Criminalizing archetypes of LGBTQ people routinely inform policing, judgment, punishment, responses to violence against queers, and perceptions of queer people in general. These archetypes include: the perception of queers as mentally unstable, the assertion that LGBTQ are constantly trying to “lure” heterosexuals into gender transgression, and the misleading notion that violence is an inherent part of queers’ personality. According to these archetypes, serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Aileen Wuornos killed because they were gay. “Of course,” the authors say, “no such equivalence is suggested in the case of white heterosexual men who kill.” Thus, heterosexual murderers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway are not seen as being driven by an innate, heterosexual murderous nature.

Race, class, and/or gender non-conformity are used by these archetypes to heighten fears, as demonstrated by the media frenzy against the New Jersey Four in 2006. Seven young black lesbians were accosted by Dwayne Buckle; when they refused his advances, he threatened to “fuck them straight,” choked them, ripped hair from their scalps, and spat on them. The women defended themselves and were assisted by two male onlookers. During the struggle, Buckle was stabbed. The women were arrested and charged with attempted murder by the police. That they were black, working class, and gender nonconforming made the women ideal targets for both the media and the prosecution who framed them as a “lesbian wolf pack.” Police refused to credit their statements, those of other witnesses, and ultimately the testimony of Buckle himself (who said that the two unknown men were the ones responsible for stabbing him). Three of the seven accepted plea bargains; the remaining four women received sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to eleven years in prison.

The policing and prison systems are, of course, not the only source of anti-gay violence. The authors note, “While the use of these archetypal narratives by the machinery of the state is often grotesque, their chronic, low-grade presence in daily conversation about crime, safety and justice for queer people is no less deadly.” For the New Jersey Four, what should have been a fun night out in the West Village became fraught with violence from both an individual stranger on the street as well as the police and prison system.

Queer (In)Justice acknowledges that deep-seated prejudices and fears of queer people cannot be dismantled via hate crime legislation. The authors say that “many of the individuals who engage in such violence are encouraged to do so by mainstream society through promotion of laws, practices, generally accepted prejudices, and religious views,” and they note that homophobic and transphobic violence generally increases during highly visible, right-wing political attacks. For example, in 2007, as the state’s attorney general was concluding a three-year campaign against domestic partnership, Michigan saw the largest increase (207%) in anti-LGBTQ violence reported to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (a national network of organizations that provide services to and advocate on behalf of queer people). Even hate-crime legislation, while allowing for enhanced criminal penalties, does nothing to dismantle the anti-gay politicking and preaching that encourages violence.

But even if queer people and communities recognize the policing and prison systems as perpetrators of violence, how can they keep safe? Noting that “there are no easy, one-size-fits-all answers to the question of how best to move forward—and no single vision of what change could ultimately look like,” the book offers examples of community organizing against homophobic- and transphobic-rooted violence that do not rely on further policing or punishment-based legislation.

In San Francisco, Community United Against Violence and the Bay Area Police Watch Project partnered to form TransAction. This group not only organizes against police abuse of trans people, but also builds an analysis of the policing of gender and sexual nonconformity among anti-police brutality activists who do not normally work around queer issues. They have also allied with communities of color struggling against race-based policing.

In Chicago’s Uptown, Queer to the Left (Q2L)—a multiracial, grassroots group of LGBTQ people—joined neighborhood groups campaigning against increasing police misconduct that accompanied the gentrification of the neighborhood. Highlighting and countering the systemic changes in zoning laws, lending patterns, and housing markets that force existing residents out, they advocate for building low-income housing in the area. They also challenge calls for intensified policing of youth of color in the area by the more affluent incoming residents, both queer and straight.

Queer (In)Justice is an important book both for LGBTQ people and their allies, as well as activists organizing against policing and prisons. It fills the gap in existing literature about how and why the police and prison systems repress LGBTQ people, particularly those further marginalized by race, class, and/or gender nonconformity. By tracing the history of how LGBTQ people have been criminalized and punished up to current-day policing and imprisonment policies, it also adds queer voices and experiences to the discussions and existing literature about policing and prisons. (Two more-recent books have further developed this: Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison-Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith; and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, by Dean Spade, founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project).

Recognizing the intersection between these two issues is crucial to moving both struggles forward. Queer (In)Justice is not only an educational text, but a call to arms. As the authors state in the introduction: “Ultimately, regardless of our intentions, all of us are accountable for the roles we play in reinforcing or dismantling the violence endemic to policing and punishment systems. This book is an invitation—not only to LGBT people but to all people concerned about social and economic justice—to accept that responsibility.”

http://monthlyreview.org/2012/11/01/queer-liberation-means-prison-abolition