Mori Reithmayr discusses how gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming gays were policed differently in mid-twentieth century San Francisco, California. 

It is well-documented that antigay police harassment in the mid-twentieth century United States was quotidian, pervasive, and brutal. [1] Less historical attention has been devoted to how the post-WWII US state did not police all gay bodies equally. [2] While police terror made the mid-century a ‘frightening period’ for all gay groups, the fervour, frequency, and form of state harassment often depended on the victims’ social position: factors such as their race, class, gender, and gender performance. [3]

We can only begin to explore the heterogenous nature of antigay policing here. We might do so by focusing on one vector of difference - gender performance - and one city - San Francisco. Long-known as the United States’ “gay capital," the history of antigay policing is particularly well-documented in San Francisco, not least thanks to the dedicated volunteers, historians, and archivists at the GLBT Historical Society. 

San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) officers routinely singled out gender-nonconforming gay women and men for especially egregious treatment. Police conduct toward gender-nonconforming gays was so predictably violent that masculine gay men felt ‘terrified’ when they were caught in the company of effeminate men during police raids. [4] Although antigay policing is often portrayed as a predominantly male issue, masculine-presenting ‘dykes’ were regularly targeted, too. Among lesbians, it was common knowledge that dykes ‘got harassed more often’ than feminine-presenting gay women and ‘got into a lot of trouble’ with the police. [5] For Pat Bond, police brutality was part and parcel of her life as a bar-going dyke. ‘[G]ood God! - the times when we've been beaten up, run over by the cops, persecuted by the police,’ she recounted. ‘So many times. There was no recourse; you just had to put up with that crap.’ [6] Police officers often acted as viciously toward people they read as gender-nonconforming gay women as toward their male counterparts, particularly if their victims were also marginalised on other counts. This is illustrated by their ghastly abuse of one lesbian sex worker’s masculine-presenting partner, whom police forces arrested in 1959 (the police report gives no cause beyond their gender-nonconformity) and subjected to a gruesome medical examination to determine their victim’s sex. [7] Such genital inspections were a common police practice as the experiences of another victim in the late 1960s, trans activist Suzan Cooke, confirm. [8]

Police terrorising of gender-nonconforming gays was not the work of isolated individuals or small groups of officers who violated their professional and legal standards. These assaults were systematic. They occurred on the direction of police leadership and with the sanction of the city’s legal code. In a 1955 missive, SFPD acting chief George Healy instructed his district captains to arrest ‘obvious homosexuals of the effeminate type’ they encountered. [9] Section 440 of the Police Code - which had originally been introduced in 1863 as an anti-prostitution bill -  was one tool police officers often employed for this purpose. [10] The section made it a misdemeanour to appear in public ‘in the dress, clothing or apparel not belonging to or usually worn by persons of his or her sex.’ [11] Although it criminalized only gender-nonconforming attire worn with ‘the intent to deceive,’ police agents used this and other statutes to target any gender-nonconforming gays. 

Occasionally, gender conformity even harnessed the power of opening up miraculous escape routes from antigay harassment. During police raids of gay bars, officers sometimes asked gender conforming patrons whether they knew ‘what kind of a place that was,’ expressed confusion at their presence inside a gay bar, or even told that them that they ‘don’t belong in this place’ – and then sent them away unpunished, in few cases even with an apology. In some settings, gender conformity could be enough to stop whole police actions in their tracks. In a well-known episode of lesbian history, two police agents arrived unannounced at the first national lesbian convention organised by the pioneering lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis in 1960 in San Francisco. Their first question to organiser Del Martin was whether there were any women wearing men’s clothes among the participants. After Martin introduced them to the attendees, all of whom had followed DOB’s instructions to dress in the outfits of middle-class matrons - their ‘best dress or skirt and blouse, stockings, and heels’ – the officers left immediately and without taking any further action.  [15]

Gender conforming gays were far from guaranteed to experience less violent treatment, let alone escape punishment altogether, in their interactions with police agents. Many did not, and suffered tremendously at the hands of the violent state. But there was always a chance, particularly if they weren’t poor, BIPOC, sex workers, or otherwise further marginalised, that gender conformity would grant them an extra layer of protection. 

A closer look at the differential policing of gender-conforming and -nonconforming gays ultimately opens up a window into the broader historical patterns of heterogenous antigay policing that warrant further research.

[1] See for example, Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill, 1990); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley, 2003); Christopher Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (Chicago, 2016); John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, second ed. (Chicago, 1998 [1983]). I use the term ‘gay’ in the sense it carried at this time as an umbrella term for a broad array of sexual practices and gendered embodiments (see, for instance, Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (New York, 2012), 5-6).

[2] On the lack of historical attention devoted to the differential policing of gay gender non-conformity in particular, see Kate Redburn, “Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963–86,” Law and History Review, 40/4 (2022), 685. 

[3] George Mendenhall, “George,” in Nancy Adair and Casey Adair, eds., Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (San Francisco: 1978), 72. 

[4] Jim Duggins, interview by Jim Duggins, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 30 June 1995, 13. On the harsher police treatment of effeminate gay men see also Ron Williams, interview by Paul Gabriel, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 19 April 1998, 47; Rick Stokes, interview by Paul Gabriel, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 19 September 1996, 22. 

[5] Boyd, Wide-Open Town, 64-5. 

[6] Pat Bond, “Pat,” in Adair and Adair, eds., Word is out, 65. For other example of gay women patrons being singled out for arrest because of wearing ‘men’s clothing’, see Agee, The Streets of San Francisco, 79; Boyd, Wide-Open Town, 217. 

[7] San Francisco Police: Official Publication San Francisco Police Officers’ Association, September 1959, 4/7, 9, cited in Agee, The Streets of San Francisco, 79. 

[8] Suzan Cooke, interview by Susan Stryker, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 10 January 1998, 16-17. 

[9] Ernest Lenn, ‘Police Order Renews Drive on Sex Deviates’, San Francisco Examiner,  26 May 1955, 8. 

[10] On the early history of this section, see Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-century San Francisco (Durham, NC., 2015). 

[11] The full text of the section read, ‘Sec. 440. Wearing of Apparel of Opposite Sex with Intent to Deceive Prohibited. It shall be unlawful for any person to appear in public, with intent to deceive, in the dress, clothing or apparel not belonging to or usually worn by persons of his or her sex.’ The section was repealed on July 24, 1974, per Ordinance 377-74 of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (see San Francisco Municipal Code: Housing-1973, Police-1973, Traffic-1974 in the San Francisco Law Library). 

[12] James (Robbie) Robinson, My Story, One Gay’s Fight: From Hate To Acceptance, 2017, San Francisco Public Library, unpublished manuscript, 51. See also Larry Buttwinick, interview by Martin Meeker, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 25 February 2004 and 1 March 2004, 25-6. 

[13] Bond, “Word is out,” 63. See also Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York, 1993), 82ff; D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 106-7; San Francisco Police: Official Publication San Francisco Police Officers’ Association, May 1954, 28 and March 1958, 30, cited in Helen P. Branson, Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and her Boys in the 1950s, ed. Will Fellows (Madison, WI, 2010), 50,53. For a contemporary sociological study of a Canadian city that showed that covert, gender-conforming gays frequently occupied higher socioeconomic positions vis-à-vis overt, often gender-nonconforming homosexuals who often relied on low status jobs for survival where their sexuality did not require to be concealed, see Maurice Leznoff and William A. Westley, “The Homosexual Community,” Social Problems, 3/4 (1956). 

[14] Reba Hudson, interview by Jim Breeden, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 23 August 1995, 49-51; Bob Ross, interview by Paul Gabriel, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 13 March 1998, 52. 

[15] Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York, 2007), 62; Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, interview by Nan Alamilla Boyd, Oral History Collection, GLBT Historical Society, 2 December 1992. 

Mori Reithmayr completed their DPhil in Politics at New College, Oxford, in 2023. They are currently working on their first book project, Ideas for Power: The Invention of Gay Community, 1953-1969, the first in-depth study of the early history of gay ideas of ‘community’.