Anna Lvovsky

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In her stunning new book, Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky . . . introduces much-needed nuance to the broader history of the surveillance and prosecuting of same-sex desiring people . . . Lvovsky demonstrates that individual agents and agencies of the criminal justice system, alongside same-sex desiring people and "experts", shaped and reshaped the public and legal concept of the ‘homosexual’ . . . A fascinating analysis of the mid-century criminal justice system.  

 

― Journal of Urban History
 
A page turner of legal history . . . This painstakingly researched and exhaustive account of the criminalization of sexual identity . . . offers powerful lessons for today’s civil rights battles, both in the courts and online. The book uses a case study of state enforcement of anti-vice laws against gay people to tell a larger story about an epistemological struggle over facts and knowledge, as well as the limits, if any, they place on power . . . Brilliant.

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― Michigan Law Review
 
Blending impressive archival research with sophisticated theoretical analysis . . . Lvovsky brilliantly disentangles the forms of cultural salience, stereotype, and self-representation that often fly under the banner of "visibility" . . . As a case study in the life and role of truth claims in the operation of a repressive regime, the book makes an important contribution to legal history beyond the history of sexuality . . . Extraordinary.

 

― University of Chicago Law Review
 

Vice Patrol offers an exciting, novel contribution to the fast-growing field of police history in the United States  . . . with groundbreaking insights into the relationship between police knowledge and police power . . .  An incisive policing history written with a storytelling flair, Vice Patrol will be of tremendous interest to experts and nonexperts alike.

 

― American Journal of Legal History



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Lvovksy’s important innovation is demonstrating how . . . this law enforcement project was not a monolith. . . . Focusing on the evolving strategies and disputes in three realms of antigay law enforcement . . . Vice Patrol delivers fresh and provocative interpretations of familiar turning points in mid-twentieth-century LGBTQ+ history . . . [and] offers crucial insights about the role of the “epistemology of law enforcement” in shaping the legal rights of gay men . . . A model of creative archival research and interdisciplinary analysis.

― American Historical Review



 

Lvovsky’s masterful book provides a necessary correction by tracking the way police officials, alcohol regulators, and judicial actors all interacted to define a spectrum of ‘‘normality’’ that excluded gay and lesbian Americans and subjected them to unusual constraints and oppression . . .  A work of impressive and fascinating scholarship that will not only speak to scholars but also to our students.

 

― Contemporary Sociology

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In this sophisticated and original work, Anna Lvovsky interrogates the policing of queer sexual and cultural expression in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s.  Without trivializing the harm perpetrated through such efforts, she persuasively demon­strates that midcentury antivice policing "was not a monolithic enterprise" [but] “a complex, deep-seated struggle among multiple branches of the legal system."

 

― Journal of American History

 

With precise details and careful analysis, Vice Patrol tells a fascinating story about how the policing of homosexuality from the 1940s to the 1960s was far more contradictory and contested than we might think, and how courts of law played a crucial role in the emerging understanding and visibility of LGBT life . . . A compelling and important book.

 

― The Gay & Lesbian Review

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An important history of antigay policing . . . Lvovsky dives into municipal archives, court records, and psychological literature to interrogate queer tropes, taking care to guide readers through this narrative . . . with nuance and compassion. Those studying law, history, gender and sexuality, and political science will benefit from her work in terms of understanding queer life in the 20th century, the professionalization of policing, and how the two intersected to shape (mis) understandings about the other. . . . Essential.

 

― Choice

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Lvovsky has done incredible detective work to take us deep inside the machinery of antigay policing during its peak years. Focusing on three distinct sites—the regulation of gay bars by state liquor agencies, the work of plainclothes decoys, and the policing of public restrooms through "peepholes"—Lvovsky shows that a legal system we assumed to be monolithically repressive was in fact internally divided about these practices. This subtle and smart book not only illuminates the boundaries around sexual difference but criminal justice as well. Revelatory in every sense of the word.

 

—Margot Canaday, Princeton University

Lvovsky takes the vice patrolman—the villain who lurks at the edges of virtually every work of the queer communities that flourished in twentieth-century U.S. cities—and insistently pulls him into the spotlight. Vice Patrol is ambitious, meticulously researched, exceptionally well-conceived, and startlingly original. It deserves a wide readership among historians of law and legal history, LGBTQ history, urban history, and the history of policing and punishment. It is, in fact, a tour de force that will be read and reread by every scholar in the field and will lead us to ask new questions of our sources in the years to come.

 

—Timothy Stewart-Winter, Rutgers University

Lvovsky has written a splendid, insightful history of anti-gay policing in mid-twentieth century America. Vice Patrol shows how investigatory tactics evolved and how they prompted and were in turn shaped by debates about the nature and prevalence of same-sex desire, the appropriate limits on law enforcement, and the kinds of authority and expertise that should matter in answering those questions. It's a gripping read, combining rich, ground-level detail with sober assessments of what those decades-old struggles signified and what lessons they hold for us today.

 

—David Sklansky, Stanford Law School

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 "The police" and "the gay community" are often portrayed as monolithic entities. In Vice Patrol, Lvovsky shows how each entity revealed the extraordinary diversity of the other through their interactions in the pre-Stonewall United States. This is the debut of an important new scholar, who can etch a legal world in scrimshaw with strokes that are both bold and sure.

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—Kenji Yoshino, New York University School of Law

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In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky examines with both precision and breadth a time period during which litigants in queer society encountered considerably greater difficulty in the justice system . . . This important book casts new light on the legal intricacies and political realities of anti-gay legislation several generations before courts began looking with disfavor on laws stigmatizing or even criminalizing members of the queer community.

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― Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books


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