The Dictionary of Homophobia (115 page)

Police activity of the same nature occurred in London during the same period. Starting in 1699, police made raids on molly houses (taverns or private rooms where homosexuals could congregate). The most famous of these operations took place in 1726, when dozens of people were arrested at Mother Clap’s bawdy house in Holborn. The proprietress and her customers were placed in the stocks, where they were at the mercy of furious crowds; a number of sodomy trials ensued, and three people were condemned to hanging. Besides, the English police, just as the French, had no qualms about setting traps and using abetting agents.

The French Revolution decriminalized homosexuality in 1791; the Napoleonic Empire confirmed this decriminalization in its penal code of 1810. Henceforth, and until 1942, French law did not specifically repress homosexuality. But this did not prevent the French police from continuing to entrap and harass homosexuals, using increasingly inventive methods. Indeed, they were faced with a phenomenon which was no longer
criminal
in the eyes of the law but which was still considered monstrous according to public opinion. This was evident in the discourse of magistrates, which was embellished with such phrases as “shameful passions,” “immoral act,” and “facts that shock nature.” Napoleon, however, thought that sodomy was a concern for police, not the justice system, offering the immense advantage of settling scandalous affairs without publicity. In 1804, during a search, Paris police came across love letters exchanged between two men; the police prefect decided to imprison them for seven weeks and then to separate them (one was sent to Belgium and the other one to Etampes [near Paris]). Further, between 1810 and 1813, a man named Pierre Barbier was kept under lock and key in Dourdan for “pederasty and
debauchery
” without being charged with a crime.

For the most part, police activity was developed and carried out in an extrajudicial manner; only the fight against
pedophilia
relied on substantial legislation, namely the 1832 measures with respect to “indecent assault without violence” on minors eleven years old or younger (the age was increased to thirteen in 1863). It is clear that the arbitrariness of the police was facilitated by public prejudices, the shame of the person being questioned, and the public’s lack of judicial knowledge. It is also evident that many people—perhaps a majority of France’s population—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed in good faith that homosexuality was in fact illegal in their country; in 1975, the French archaeologist and historian Paul Veyne noted the shocked comment of a villager in Vaucluse, after the famous “Les Homosexuels” episode of the program
Dossiers de l’écran
was broadcast: “They said on television that it was allowed. ”The police were as interested in homosexuals as they were in prostitutes (prostitution was not an offense either), essentially in the name of the fight against “indecency” (Paragraph 330 of the penal code), with the wide support of the public (the police assured them that they would “keep the streets clean”). But while police regarded female prostitution as a minor “pain,” they considered homosexuality a monstrous aberration, which explains the vehemence of their handling of pederasts who fell into their hands. As for homosexual prostitutes, the police considered them the dregs of society and the “anteroom to crime,” according to François Carlier, leader of the vice squad between 1860 and 1870, in his
Etudes de pathologie sociale: les deux prostitutions
(Studies of Social Pathology: The Two Prostitutions) in 1887. The police were also interested in homosexuality when a pederast was charged in a criminal case: inquiries into the subject’s morality gave his neighbors and janitors an opportunity to express their prejudices and personal resentment against him in ways that could profoundly influence the handling of the case. These testimonies weighed heavily on the verdicts; whether the verdicts were delivered by a judge or a jury, the homosexuality of the accused was always an aggravating circumstance.

The Second Empire of Napoleon III clearly marked a hardening of police and judicial positions on homosexuality. It was during this era that the “danger of pederasty” became a popular topic, partially under the influence of Ambroise Tardieu (who associated homosexuality with crime and child abuse), and because homosexual activity involved the mixing of social classes in ways that seemed increasingly unhealthy. As a result, the police resumed its tactic of traps and “raids” on cruising areas and, in the 1880s, charges of public indecency were almost exclusively leveled at homosexuals. By the end of the nineteenth century, the vice squad became even more powerful, as well as corrupt. Police raids took place around urinals and other well-known places of soliciting, such as the arches of the Palais Royal, the Jouffroy, Panoramas, and Verdeau passageways), as well as cafés and public dances that were frequented by gays. The urinals in particular, located on Paris sidewalks, used by homosexuals as a discreet place for contact, were subject to police surveillance. Christian Gury offered insight into police efforts on the Champs-Elysées when he described the arrest of the Count de Germiny in 1876: several undercover policemen spent time observing the interactions of the men who gathered there, before jumping on the “delinquent” and proceeding to arrest him. This police harassment was crucial in many respects: it made gay encounters very difficult, further complicating lives that were already difficult; it strengthened the public’s opinion of homosexuality as abominable and degrading; and it facilitated all forms of blackmail. The police also raided theaters, if “good moral standards” were offended; when Colette publicly kissed her partner Missy onstage at the Moulin Rouge in 1907, a riot ensued, resulting in a police raid.

The ability of police to compile records on homosexuals was strengthened by the restructuring in 1894 of the vice squad, which was now charged with the task of compiling “moral standards files” on the personalities of “all Paris.” In particular, the vice squad increased surveillance records of the most notorious homosexuals, as well as public houses and other businesses specializing in this type of clientele, from which the police could draw information and, no doubt, hush money as well. Police reports were not above entertaining rumors or innuendo, either; of the famous feminist Madeleine Pelletier, a police index card read: “She is known to have special customs and is represented in the circles which she patronizes as a tribad [lesbian].” Of course, police files on gays and lesbians went beyond the vice squad and the capital of Paris; its practice would remain in effect until 1981, with dramatic consequences in Alsace and Moselle between 1940 and 1944 in particular: while Pierre Seel (the only French person to testify openly about being deported during World War II due to his homosexuality) was arrested by the Gestapo, it was because the Alsatian police had originally registered him as a pederast in the 1930s.

The last time police interventionism against homosexuality increased significantly in France was during World War II. The 1942 Vichy legislation created the offense of an “unchaste and unnatural act with a minor less than twenty-one years old of the same sex as the subject,” which was upheld by Charles de Gaulle in 1945; it was used to criminalize many sexual relations which had been tolerated in the pre-war years. Further, Gaullist and Christian Democrat familialism provoked a postwar ban on transvestism and on any homosexual contact in public places, once more giving police more reason to intervene. The
Mirguet
amendment of 1960 proclaimed homosexuality a “social scourge,” which resulted in nearly doubling the punitive measures brought against gays found guilty of public indecency. By the beginning of the 1970s, police raids of gay establishments were still frequent, and were harshly denounced in the famous leftist manifesto entitled
Tout!
on April 23, 1971. (It is at this same moment that the first gay activists coined the insult “hetero-cop.”) During the 1970s, the police regularly made the rounds of bars and cinemas considered to be places where public gay sex occurred, and made arrests. A decade later, the
AIDS
epidemic gave them another reason to intervene in the most “hard-core” gay bars, notably when the decision to close backrooms was made in 1984–85.

In other countries, there was even heavier police activity regarding homosexuality, particularly where it was illegal. In
England
, police actions against gays, prevalent as early as the nineteenth century, intensified in the 1930s and 40s, when the most flamboyant homosexuals were tossed out of pubs and arbitrarily accused of soliciting, as described by Quentin Crisp in his diaries. Homosexuality’s criminalization also encouraged informants and blackmail, i.e, a moral corruption very foreign to the fair-play values and transparency generally associated with the British identity. In particular, the police (or “bobbies”) were merciless against those engaged in “cottaging” (sexual touching in public places, so named because the public toilets in parks resembled cottages), resulting in the arrest of thousands of people a year during the 1950s, and using more and more abetting agents. The victims of these interventions were often shocked and ashamed, given that in England, respect was a key social value, and an accusation of buggery or gross indecency could have huge social and human consequences (actor Alec Guinness, arrested in Liverpool in 1946, was only able to save his burgeoning career by giving police a false name). In the 1950s, the obsession of police with this issue was such that the entire country, in spite of its liberal traditions and the guarantees of personal freedom it had advocated for centuries, was within a hairsbreadth of becoming a police state on this question. Between the late 1930s and 1955, the number of men arrested for homosexual offenses increased by a factor of six. There were three people responsible for this trend: Sir Theobald Mathew, a devout Catholic who became the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1944; Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, Home Secretary in the Churchill cabinet from 1951–54; and Sir John Nott-Bower, who became commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police in 1953. Despite the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967, the fight against gay public sex by police continued, with a predictable voracity during the Thatcher era of the 1980s, with some strange consequences: in 1985, gay pop singer Jimmy Somerville was arrested in Hyde Park for gross indecency by a policeman, who allegedly then asked him for an autograph for his daughter.

In Germany, the police showed themselves to be relatively tolerant in the 1920s, particularly in Berlin, where they came to an agreement with prominent gay leader Magnus
Hirschfeld
to allow homosexual establishments to prosper; the advent of the Nazi era in 1933, however, obviously changed this: between 1937 and 1939, raids in bars, parks, and other meeting places resulted in the arrest of 95,000 gays, who were then subject to the whims of the Gestapo. Following World War II, West Germany resumed the harassment of homosexuals (with the blessing of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a devout Catholic) until the abrogation of Paragraph 175 in 1969.

The police were also very active in the United States, even if anti-gay legislation was not the same in every state. It is necessary to state that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) played an increasing role on the subject from 1937 on: J. Edgar
Hoover
, the FBI’s director between 1924 and 1972 (and himself a closeted homosexual), compiled files on those regarded as sex degenerates and sex offenders (the most famous of these were on writers Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote). In 1953, the compilation of these records was strengthened by President Dwight Eisenhower’s Order 10450, which authorized the dismissal of federal civil servants on grounds of sexual
perversion
. The FBI relied on informers’ networks, infiltration agents,
agents provocateurs
, and large-scale phone-tapping and mail diversion tactics (it can be noted in this respect the links between the police and the US Postal Service: postal workers did not hesitate to name homosexual coworkers to their employers). As a result of this activity, Hoover accumulated a vast amount of information on suspected homosexuals, including politicians whom he blackmailed, thereby increasing even further the FBI’s immense power. Added to this practice was the harassment and surveillance of homosexuals in parks and bars and the outlawing of transvestism; many gays and lesbians were arrested, and often these arrests were accompanied by
violence
, sometimes rape. All of this activity exasperated the burgeoning gay community, culminating in 1969 with the
Stonewall
riots in New York. During the 1970s in the aftermath of Stonewall, police violence seemed to recede, but it did not totally disappear: the crucial events of 1978 in San Francisco revealed that police bias remained firmly on the side of homophobia. Dan White, who murdered pro-gay rights mayor George Moscone and openly gay councilor Harvey Milk at San Francisco City Hall, was himself a retired San Francisco police officer. When White was shockingly only convicted of manslaughter, the city’s gay community went on the rampage; in response, the police raided Castro Street in the heart of the gay community, destroying several gay bars and businesses in the process. Even today, particularly outside of the major urban centers, many homosexuals in the US who are victims of assault do not lodge a formal complaint, for fear of how the police will treat them.

Nevertheless, the relationship between homosexuals and the police in the West has generally improved since 1970. In France, as early as the Pompidou-Giscard years, the gay movement’s increased importance ensured that the police could no longer resort to its authoritarian tactics of the past. The FHAR (Front homosexual d’action révolutionnaire; Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front), for instance, was relatively protected by its political connections with the far left, but it was not until the election of François Mitterrand in 1981 that turned back centuries of police suspicion and arbitrary power. The Deferre
circulaire
(notice) of June, 1981 drafted by Maurice Grimaud, Prefect of Paris Police, director of the cabinet of the home secretary, was sent to all police services stipulating that “no
discrimination
, let alone suspicion should weigh upon people based only on their sexual orientation.” In the United States, the 1974 Privacy Act forbade police and other authorities from breaking the First Amendment (in 1998, under the authority of this law, a gay librarian named Daniel C. Tsang won a lawsuit against the CIA, which was ordered to stop spying on him and pay him $46,000 in legal costs). Another positive phenomenon was the coming out of numerous gay and lesbian police officers; on November 22, 1981, Sgt. Charlie Cochrane became the first New York policeman to publicly reveal his homosexuality). However, police continued homophobic actions in states where laws prohibiting sodomy still existed (all of which were struck down by 2003), and sometimes even in so-called “liberal” states (Amnesty International listed several cases of homosexuals being poorly treated by police in the state of New York in the 1990s). In the United Kingdom, the law still allows the British police to intervene when gay sexual relations include more than two participants or is “tainted” by sadomasochism (as shown in the 1993 Hoylandswaine affair, when police raided a private gay party, and the 1998 Bolton Seven affair, in which two men were charged after making a private porn movie). But despite this, there has been a general liberalization in Britain too: in 1990, gay British policemen created the LAGP (Lesbian and Gay Police Association), and, since 1998, some district authorities began recruiting gay police officers in an effort to combat the homophobic traditions of the profession and to make the police more effective in dealing with gay bashing incidents. The British police were inspired by the Dutch model: the Netherlands indeed offered a rare and early example of a determinedly gay-friendly police.