Abstract
The mid-twentieth century witnessed a boom in policing against homosexual cruising, the practitioners of which relied on a set of robust defense tactics to avoid detection by strangers. Frustrated by the difficulties of catching suspected cruisers, police departments developed a variety of surreptitious, deeply intrusive surveillance tactics for monitoring public bathrooms. Yet while necessitated by the insularity of modern cruising culture, these surveillance tactics were legitimized in court partly through judges’ very skepticism of that culture. Weighing the utility of clandestine surveillance against its intrusion on innocent citizens, judges frequently justified surveillance by characterizing cruisers as sexual predators eager to expose themselves to innocent victims. From inception to conviction, the utility of clandestine surveillance thus depended partly on an epistemic lag between the arms of the criminal justice system: a disconnect between the police’s sensitivity to contemporary homosexual practices and judges’ continuing insistence on an older paradigm of perverse predation.
In the summer of 1962, investigators with the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department sat down with a local prosecutor to plot out what they expected to be a controversial new operation: a surveillance station in the men’s room of a local park, hidden behind a two-way mirror and equipped with a running camera that filmed patrons having illicit sex in the stalls. The technique was not the Department’s first choice. It initially tried to disperse cruisers by staffing the park with undercover cops, but that approach “proved fruitless” in uncovering criminal activity. Frustrated, the police turned to the more sordid option of surveillance, with its potential legal pitfalls, as “the only type of investigation that would be of any use.” 1
The limits of Mansfield’s plainclothes patrols reflected a key feature of cruising culture in the mid-twentieth century. Around these same years, indeed, sociologist Laud Humphreys marveled at the complex and systematic signals men used to pursue sexual encounters in public spaces. “Like any deviant group,” Humphreys wrote in his groundbreaking study of cruising conducted in the mid-1960s, “homosexuals have developed defenses against outsiders,” including eye contact, body language, spatial positioning, and other audio signals to initiate sexual encounters and, just as quickly, conceal them upon a stranger’s approach. Cruising codes allowed men to protect robust sites of sexual activity against a public hostile to their practices—to maintain, as Humphreys put it, “privacy in public.” 2
As Mansfield’s experience bore out, however, men seeking sexual encounters were not the only ones who appreciated the stealth and insularity of cruising signals in the 1950s and 1960s. Following World War II, as growing numbers of gay men flocked to urban centers and coastal cities around the United States, police squads dedicated to patrolling sexual misconduct grew aware of the sophistication of local homosexual subcultures—not least, among bathroom cruisers. Frustrated in their attempts to catch suspected cruisers through uniformed patrols or even undercover decoys, police departments marshaled their manpower, equipment, and ingenuity—and often the cooperation of local business owners—to devise increasingly surreptitious tactics for surveilling the interiors of public bathrooms. From two-way mirrors to peepholes directly behind toilets to false air vents overlooking bathroom stalls, officers adopted a variety of profoundly intrusive tactics to ferret out evidence of sexual encounters—tactics that laid bare not only criminalized acts, but also hundreds of law-abiding citizens unaware that their most intimate bodily functions were being watched by the state.
Necessitated by the sheer robustness of contemporary cruising practices, the police’s surveillance tactics were, however, legitimized in court in part through the broader public’s very ignorance of those practices. Clandestine surveillance raised close questions of legality under the Fourth Amendment, splitting courts between their desire to support the police’s campaigns against public indecency and their duty to protect the privacy of innocent citizens. And here, one core consideration weighing in favor of the police was many judges’ persisting belief that men who had sex in public bathrooms, far from carefully avoiding exposure to the public, were constantly on the cusp of self-revelation. Drawing on lingering stereotypes of gay men as sexual psychopaths and child molesters, judges approving the police’s clandestine tactics frequently justified their decisions by casting urban cruisers as sexual predators: shameless, exhibitionistic, always on the lookout for new recruits and especially vulnerable children. From inception to conviction, in short, the utility of the police’s clandestine campaigns depended on something of an epistemic lag between the different arms of the criminal justice system: a disconnect between the police’s sensitivity to the stealth and insularity of urban homosexual practices and many judges’ continuing insistence on an older paradigm of homosexuality as perverse predation.
The policing of gay communities is integral to any history of homosexuality in the United States, a central element of gay men’s lives in the twentieth century. Essentially every such history includes some significant discussion of the practice. 3 For the most part, however, historians have focused their attention on the emergence and triumphs of gay communities themselves, figuring policing largely as a foil to this narrative: an antagonistic force spurring innovation and solidarity among gay men. Those who have focused on antihomosexual regulation itself have typically done so at either the federal level or legislative level, tracing the formation of antihomosexual policies by the state. 4
This articles peers inside the vice squad, examining the techniques and logistics of antihomosexual policing on the ground. The specter of the policeman helped catalyze the rise of a robust gay community in the 1950s, pushing men to adopt a variety of codes to identify kindred spirits while avoiding detection. But police tactics did not simply spark the growing sophistication of gay life; they also responded to it. As gay men grew sensitive to the vagaries of antihomosexual policing and adapted their cultural practices to preserve their social spaces, the police in turn recognized the burgeoning complexity of local homosexual enclaves. While legislators and policymakers debated the dangers and social significance of homosexual conduct, vice officers and patrolmen stood at the front lines of shifting gay practices in American cities, gathering new insights about contemporary homosexual cultures—and adapting their tactics accordingly.
The sheer diversity and laboriousness of those tactics are notable in their own right—a case study in the complex struggle between police and gay men over the use of public spaces in the Cold War years. Yet that study also illuminates the broader politics of antihomosexual regulation. The police’s wide-ranging surveillance campaigns bring an important reminder of the extent to which the state’s antihomosexual measures during the Cold War extended beyond gay men themselves, often intruding on the public more broadly. The police’s surveillance operations exposed the bodies and intimate functions on all men in public bathrooms, trading in the risk that citizens might be exposed to careless cruisers with the near-certainty that they would be exposed to peering policemen. While historians have examined how gay communities amassed power by strategically linking their economic interests to more dominant groups, or have drawn connections between the policing of gay men and other minorities, the very insularity of the gay world has often meant that tales of antihomosexual policing rarely touch on the broader public. 5 More than any other tool of antigay policing, clandestine surveillance demonstrates how the excesses of the state’s campaigns against sexual minorities in the United States redounded to the offense of all citizens, gay and straight.
Recognizing this impact on—and contemporary concern with—the general public illuminates an under-appreciated debate surrounding the police’s antihomosexual campaigns: how such operations participated in the dissemination of cultural knowledge about homosexuality. Throughout the twentieth century, gay men’s public and legal standing in the United States reflected a series of shifting paradigms for understanding the roots and social dimensions of homosexuality—a battle waged, in the traditional narrative, largely though not exclusively among scientists and before a presumptive audience of lawmakers and the public. 6 Once denounced as a moral failing, homosexuality was by the twentieth century essentially colonized by medical men, who characterized it first as a physiological deficiency and eventually as a psychological illness—emerging initially, and most destructively, in the conflation of gay men with sexual psychopaths, and subsequently in their more benign dismissal as neurotics. Only in the 1960s was the reign of psychiatry effectively challenged by sociologists, who broke from the disease model and characterized homosexual men as neither patients nor predators but members of a functional subculture. 7
Yet well before sociologists and ethnographers began publicizing their research into gay culture as a plea for greater tolerance, a very similar body of knowledge was being put to a different use by the police. Alongside and often even ahead of academic researchers in the midcentury, police officers whose duties put them in contact with gay men and cruisers often emerged as astute students of urban homosexual culture, from its fashions and verbal codes to its defenses against strangers. Exposed to urban gay life in a way neither the general public nor the judges who supervised them could appreciate, vice officers by the end of the 1950s recognized that most homosexual conduct took the form, not of violent predation or solitary struggle, but of a systematic and insular social practice. 8
Far from ushering in greater lenience for gay men, however, the police’s sociological insights into the complexity of homosexual subcultures only expanded the power of their campaigns—based not simply on what the police themselves saw of gay men’s social practices but also on what others, including within the criminal justice system, did not see. The police’s unique sensitivity to the stealth of contemporary cruising culture broadened the possibility of law enforcement against gay men during the Cold War, leading departments to adopt controversial surveillance tactics that survived legal challenge in part due to the courts’ continuing skepticism of the cultural conditions that necessitated them. As courts tackled the trade-off between the privacy of innocent citizens and the importance of the police’s campaigns, their decisions often reflected their particular understandings of both the police’s surveillance tactics and modern cruising practices themselves. In this sense, the history of clandestine surveillance illuminates how the social value and political uses of knowledge about gay men in the twentieth century depended not only on its content, but also on how and when such knowledge reached different audiences—both among the state and the public, and within the state itself. 9
The Postwar Gay Boom and the Vice Squad
The end of World War II created a boom in the gay and lesbian populations of America’s cities, as service members who found kindred spirits in the military declined to return home and instead settled in urban centers to maintain their new communities. Homosexual-friendly bars multiplied in urban hubs like New York and San Francisco and in smaller cities like Kansas City, Richmond, San Jose, and Cleveland. 10 On the coasts, homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society organized meetings to draw together local gay men. 11 Publications like ONE and the Mattachine Review spread among gay readers in southern and midwestern towns. 12
Alongside the rise of urban gay life came a corresponding rise in law enforcement activities. Beyond the growing numbers of the gay world, a number of cultural and political factors in the early Cold War focused the police’s attention on the ostensible problem of sexual deviance in America. Beginning in the late 1930s, a series of high-profile assaults against children spawned a national panic about “sexual psychopaths,” which resurged as the end of World War II sent waves of unattached men into major cities. In the political arena, Senate Republicans eager to discredit the Truman administration embarked on a vocal campaign to weed out homosexual federal employees as “security risks,” lending newfound publicity and significance to the police’s campaigns. 13 And among police administrators themselves, an ongoing effort to “professionalize” the police force encouraged local departments to divide their duties among specialized units dedicated to specific categories of crime. 14
By the early 1950s, these factors had led every major American city—and many smaller ones—to adopt a “sex detail” or “morals squad.” Such units were typically responsible for investigating a variety of crimes, from prostitution to drug trafficking to gambling, or at the very least a range of sexual offenses, including child molestation, prostitution, and violent assault. But in practice, their operations tended to target nonviolent activity by gay men. Often evaluated based on their arrest rates—and, in some cities, operating under strict quotas for nightly charges—officers pressured to crack down on sexual “degenerates” frequently found that their simplest option was targeting homosexual men. 15
Conveniently, police departments in the postwar years enjoyed a wealth of legal tools against the public manifestations of gay life. Liquor regulations allowed state agents to raid and shut down bars simply for serving homosexual patrons. Disorderly conduct and loitering laws authorized policemen to disperse suspected gay men from popular parks and street corners. Laws against solicitation let undercover officers arrest men for ostensible sexual advances. And, of course, felony sodomy laws attached harsh penalties to sexual activity itself. 16 By the mid-1950s, the police’s growing resources for patrolling sexual degeneracy had combined into a robust regulatory apparatus, sending both uniformed patrolmen and plainclothes officers wearing the latest queer fashions to ferret out homosexuality in restaurants, night clubs, parks, theaters, train stations, and public bathrooms. 17
Bathrooms, indeed, posed a unique concern for police departments. More than simply a place for gay men to congregate or meet potential partners, they provided a convenient setting for sex itself—an unusually public site for typically private acts. That semiprivate quality had long made restrooms a popular ground for homosexual encounters. In New York City, the first reports of men having sex in public bathrooms dated back as early as 1896—right after the first facilities opened in City Hall and Battery Park. 18 Yet the growing size and visibility of urban gay life following World War II brought with it new concerns about cruising practices, both among police officers and among business owners who suspected, based on their customers’ demeanor or on marks in the toilet stalls, that their facilities were being used as “hangouts” for homosexual men. 19
For all the complaints about suspected misconduct inside public bathroom stalls, men having sex in such facilities were often surprisingly difficult to catch in the act. The post-war years did not simply feature a demographic shift among homosexual men drawn toward urban centers; they also featured a cultural one, as these new transplants cleaved into something resembling organized communities, centered around their own favorite bars and neighborhoods and marked by unique fashions, codes, and customs. Allowing gay men to identify kindred spirits without attracting the attention of unfriendly strangers, these codes were characterized in large part by their deliberate stealth. On the streets, men eschewed more flamboyant clothing and instead communicated their identities through tailored slacks, pullovers, sport coats, and tennis shoes. In bars, patrons looking for sexual partners often avoided overt advances and simply stood with their backs against the wall. Homosexual men in the United States had, of course, long used internal codes to find each other in the crowds: the rouged cheek, sloping wrist, and cheeky phrases associated with the effeminate fairy themselves originated as a means of self-expression and communication. 20 Yet while many early codes involved a self-conscious theatricality, the cultural cues of the 1950s avoided such conspicuous shows of difference, reflecting an urban gay world that was both increasingly complex and increasingly insular.
In many ways, cruising in public bathrooms remained separate from this burgeoning culture. Most homophile groups shunned the convention of public sex, which hardly aided their attempts to recast gay men as respectable citizens. Even the more casual, lower-class communities that sprouted around popular bars—themselves disdained by homophiles for their flamboyance and overt sexuality—looked down on bathroom cruising as the nadir of the queer social hierarchy. 21 Nor did bathroom cruisers necessarily seek the affinity of the organized “gay” world. At a time when social stigma led some men to downplay their sexual practices not simply to others but even to themselves, many individuals who looked for anonymous sexual partners in public bathrooms declined to identify as “homosexual” in their daily lives. As late as 1967, an article in the gay magazine DRUM observed that “most persons who cruise public places do not regularly associate with other homosexuals.” 22
Yet these worlds were not entirely distinct. Even if they did not admit it publicly, many gay men cruised in public bathrooms; even a homophile organization like ONE commonly referenced cruising in its publications. 23 More broadly, cruisers shared the gay community’s incentives toward stealth, which demanded the development of some systematic and insular language for identifying partners. Unsurprisingly, by the 1960s, the cruising world had itself cohered into something of an established subculture, with its own protocols for identifying partners and carrying out sexual acts. Those protocols were partly borrowed from gay pickup codes in other setting and partly specific to their particular location. Any veteran cruiser would know, for example, that a stranger who made extended eye contact or jingled keys or loose change in his pockets, or who tapped his foot inside a bathroom stall, was on the market for a partner. Glory holes—waist-high openings carved in the partitions between stalls—both facilitated discreet sexual encounters and identified specific restrooms for interested men. Where previous cruisers had cut glory holes in the walls, inserting a finger through the opening was a universal advertisement for a sexual act. Some signals were even more covert: nodding one’s head toward a bathroom stall, for instance, or glancing from a stranger’s open fly to his eyes. 24
Beyond the initial search for a willing partner, cruisers developed a number of techniques aimed at avoiding accidental exposure to passersby. Positioning themselves by lavatory windows or listening to the sounds of clanging doors, washroom regulars waited for any signal of a stranger’s approach to cut short their trysts. Around particularly trafficked sites, they enlisted third parties to act as “lookouts” outside the entrance. As Laud Humphreys would recount, cruisers typically selected their favorite facilities based on their relative difficulty of access: both a lavatory’s geographic isolation from the crowds and any physical quirks that indicated when others were entering, such as creaking entrances or sticky doors. Even having picked a relatively safe location, experienced cruisers stayed vigilant, keeping their clothing as unperturbed as possible to cover their illicit activities at a moment’s notice. 25 Researchers who studied homosexual cruising in the 1960s consistently reported that the practice was impressively discreet, initiated through subtle signals and “abruptly discontinued at the approach” of an unknown person. Humphreys himself noted the difficulty of even deliberately spotting homosexual encounters in public bathrooms: even when he successfully walked in on pairs he believed to be cruisers, they had typically abandoned any incriminating acts by his entry. 26
Many police departments were well-aware of these codes. They frequently used them when they sent undercover officers into bathrooms to entice solicitations, just as they relied on officers wearing tennis shoes and standing against walls to attract advances in bars. 27 Yet undercover enforcement was not an especially reliable tool for eliminating cruising. In rural areas and smaller towns, police departments likely lacked the manpower and sophistication to rely on undercover officers. Even where plainclothes officers mastered internal cruising codes, decoys who spent too much time in any particular bathroom risked becoming recognized by veteran cruisers—a significant problem given the vice squads’ limited ranks. And enforcement through individual enticement was, of necessity, too time-consuming a tactic to make a real dent in highly trafficked cruising sites. 28
At the same time, as departments like Mansfield’s soon discovered, the coded nature of gay cruising made it nearly impossible for officers to simply apprehend two suspects in the middle of a sexual encounter. In 1927, a vice inspector in New York expressed little surprise when he walked in upon “two sets of legs in [the] toilet enclosure” of a Harlem subway station, but by the 1950s, ferreting out cruising activities proved far less simple. 29 Like Humphreys, police chiefs who sent uniformed offers to check on suspected cruising sites, or who assigned plainclothes officers to loiter around public restrooms, found such tactics ineffectual at exposing the illicit acts they were certain occurred inside. 30 Frustrated, the police turned to a more surreptitious mode of enforcement: clandestine surveillance.
The Intricacies and Innovations of Clandestine Surveillance
Like cruising itself, clandestine surveillance was hardly new to public bathrooms in the Cold War years. As early as the 1910s, police departments in major cities had sometimes assigned officers to watch for sexual misconduct in public restrooms. Patrolmen in New York crouched in service closets and perched behind grills in subway lavatories. Officers in Boston looked through peepholes inside the city’s train stations for “open and lascivious” activities. In 1912, the Pennsylvania Railroad, showing more initiative than most, drilled a hole in the ceiling of the men’s room in Cortland Street Ferry Station and had its agents observe illicit sexual encounters from above. 31
Despite this extended pedigree, clandestine surveillance was not the most convenient law enforcement tool. While some public bathrooms were built with natural observation spots, such as open windows or air vents opening out onto the stalls, devising an effective post in most facilities required significant time, research, and resources—resources entirely wasted once word of a surveillance site got out. And because efficient surveillance was itself time intensive, police departments typically considered the practice worthwhile only in the most densely trafficked areas. 32
Yet clandestine surveillance also boasted several unmatched advantages. Most obviously, clandestine surveillance avoided the core problems of both uniformed and decoy patrol, eliding veteran cruisers’ warning systems and undercutting any concerns about facial recognition. 33 Particularly as many vice departments in the 1960s came under fire for graft in their antihomosexual operations, surveillance remained largely immune to the threat of officer corruption. 34 Although labor and time intensive, well-chosen surveillance stations rewarded vice squads with impressive numbers of arrests. A two-week campaign in a railway station in Palo Alto, for example, yielded criminal charges against twenty-three suspects; a single sting at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City led to ten arrests; one observation post in a Long Beach restroom ended in charges against seventy men. 35 Perhaps most significantly, clandestine surveillance was the vice squad’s best chance for making felony arrests. The harshest weapon in the police’s legal arsenal against gay men, sodomy laws were also notoriously hard to enforce, plagued by all the evidentiary problems of a crime typically committed indoors and among willing participants. Sex in quasi-public spaces like bathrooms provided a key exception. Unsurprisingly, a study of the Los Angeles Police Department in the mid-1960s reported that clandestine surveillance was responsible for a full 93 percent of all felony indictments in the greater Los Angeles area. 36
Buoyed by these considerations, clandestine surveillance became increasingly popular following World War II. By the early 1960s, it was a mainstay of antihomosexual policing across the country, from cosmopolitan hubs like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., to beach cities like Long Beach and Palo Alto, to smaller southern and Midwestern cities in Kansas, Georgia, and Ohio. 37 Clandestine surveillance commonly occurred on government-controlled property, such as train stations, bus terminals, and libraries, and was particularly prevalent in summer leisure sites like public parks and beaches, where loitering men could blend into the scenery while searching for sexual partners. Yet the practice also reached a broad range of private establishments. Responding to complaints by citizens or businessmen concerned by suspected cruising in their facilities, police departments instituted clandestine surveillance in theaters, department stores, restaurants, amusement parks, and gas stations. 38 The technique even made its way onto military grounds. In 1958, investigators with the Department of Defense photographed homosexual activities in a men’s room on the second floor of the Pentagon from an overheard observation post. While no agency publicly claimed responsibility for the operation, the Office of Naval Intelligence admitted that the Navy used the photographs in investigating homosexuality among its sailors. 39
The logistics of the police’s surveillance posts varied greatly. In the early 1950s, surveillance techniques were typically simple, relying on natural openings or hiding places built into the structure of a public restroom. In California in 1951, for example, police officers observed men having sex from a pair of open windows on the sides of the lavatory. 40 In one bus station in Columbus, Georgia, police officers climbed to a canopy roof abutting a men’s room and watched the interior through an open window. 41 Others hid behind unfinished walls or doors. Two Los Angeles officers in one 1951 campaign stationed themselves behind a detachable wall in a men’s room, lifting aside the wooden segment to look inside. 42 An officer in a May Company department store observed shoppers through a partition from an adjacent utility room. 43
As the decade progressed, however, vice squads adopted increasingly sophisticated techniques, repurposing hard-to-access structural openings as observation stations or building new surveillance sites specifically for law enforcement purposes. Most basically, departments drilled peepholes looking directly into toilet stalls. In one lavatory in Los Angeles, officers in an adjacent chamber could walk the length of the men’s room, alternating among a line of eyeholes to watch the intimate activities inside the stalls. 44 In New York, an officer hidden in the pipe-chamber of the West 4th Street subway station watched passing commuters through a set of openings in the wall. 45 Private businesses often collaborated closely on the planning. In San Francisco, for example, the proprietors of the Silver Rail Restaurant installed “a system of ‘peepholes’” to allow employees and police officers to monitor the interior for suspected cruisers. 46 Similarly, the owners of the city’s Paris Theatre, known for its provocative cinematic fare, drilled “observation holes” through the marble wall right behind the toilet, offering officers a particularly intimate perspective on their customers’ encounters. 47 Any ensuing sexual activities—as well as every other “uneventful” act observed by the officers—occurred “almost directly in front of” their eyes. 48
Other departments sought wider vantage points into the bathroom interiors, requiring more innovative camouflage. Louvered doors emerged as one popular alternative. In a municipal pier in St. Petersburg, Florida, for example, a slatted door installed specifically for the purpose of police surveillance opened directly onto a line of doorless stalls. 49 Other squads opted for air vents or ventilation screens. In an Emporium department store in Santa Clara, patrolmen armed with radio transmitters and video cameras climbed into a small passage space above the men’s room, looking through two air vents into the enclosed toilet stalls below. 50 In a movie theater in Los Angeles, police officers squeezed through the plumbing access hole above the lavatory, watching the stall through a screen covering their entrance. 51 In one public park in Los Angeles, officers in a shed adjacent to the men’s lavatory observed the toilets through a metal vent covered by wire mesh and hardware cloth. 52
In some cases, police departments installed false air vents purely as a cover for their observations. 53 In the summer of 1963, the manager of Camp Curry, a privately operated resort in Yosemite National Park, began receiving unusually graphic complaints: patrons in the men’s room had begun idling and sometimes even approaching other visitors for acts of “a homosexual nature.” A survey of the grounds confirmed that someone had cut waist-high holes in the toilet partitions and that men “whose appearance suggested homosexuals” loitered about the premises. 54 The walls surrounding the bathroom stalls were mounted fairly high, beginning eighteen inches above the ground—enough to tell whether an occupant “had his pants up or down in the customary fashion.” 55 Yet a law enforcement specialist at the park, Ranger Twight, concluded that the stall design prevented his agents from gathering sufficient evidence of criminal activity through basic patrols, making “undercover observation of [the] rest room . . . necessary.” 56 In consultation with Twight, the camp manager cut six-inch holes in the ceiling above each stall and covered them with wire screens to resemble air vents. Starting at roughly 11:00 p.m. each night, Twight and a photographer stationed in the attic used those vents to observe both men committing sexual acts and the dozens of men who entered simply to relieve themselves. 57
Some police departments stumbled on more unique modes of espionage. One particularly innovative operation arose in Long Beach, where the owner of the Nu-Pike Amusement Park enlisted the local vice squad to “do something” about cruisers using the men’s room. Atop the roof, police officers found a foot-long pipe extending into the bathrooms, centered directly over the wall separating two single-use lavatories. Capped when not in use to avoid letting through sunlight or rain, the pipe revealed an area extending eighteen inches into each enclosure. Throughout the summer, vice officers could climb to the roof “a lot of times” each week, often for indefinite periods; as one officer explained, the practice was to man the observation station “[u]ntil we make an arrest, or until we see that we can’t make an arrest.” 58 The pipe allowed the officers to arrest numerous men who—each thinking himself entirely shielded from view—engaged in intimacies through a glory hole in the partition. 59
Used intermittently since the early twentieth century, photo and video technologies played a growing role in clandestine surveillance in the early 1960s. 60 Sensitive to potential challenges to a single officer’s eyewitness testimony, vice squads commonly photographed cruising activities to bolster their cases. 61 Where their budgets allowed, officers brought along video cameras, capturing colored film of their targets’ sexual transgressions. 62 Some even turned to closed-circuit television. In 1962, the Philadelphia chapter of the YMCA, working alongside the local police to curtail sexual improprieties in its washrooms, invested nearly two thousand dollars in video equipment. Mounted behind one-way aluminum screens for camouflage, the cameras transmitted twenty-four hour footage of the men’s room directly to the building’s security detail. 63 Other police departments were, of course, more prudish: in Monterey County in 1966, for example, the sheriff’s office refused to photograph the interior of a public restroom, instead photographing suspects as they entered and exited the facilities. 64 Yet by the end of the 1960s, police departments from Miami and Laguna Beach to the less exotic Lake Milton, Ohio followed the YMCA’s lead and began looking into extended video surveillance. 65
Perhaps the most impressive surveillance operation of the 1960s came back to Mansfield’s video campaign against gay cruisers in 1962. The Mansfield Police Department had long seen the men’s room in Central Park as a dangerous area, a “frequent . . . site of beatings and robberies.” 66 That summer, officers also came to suspect it as a site of homosexual activity, after a young man arrested for assaulting a teenager confessed that he himself was thrown “along the path of sex deviation” after being forced to receive a blow job inside the restroom. 67 A police survey of the facility confirmed that a hole three-fourths of an inch wide had been cut in the partition between two stalls—too small to use for sexual acts, but providing a convenient signaling system for cruisers (Figure 1). Armed with this information, the Department embarked on a rigorous campaign to stamp out the lavatory’s seedier uses. Helmed by Police Chief Claire Kyler, it first sent plainclothes officer to loiter around the grounds in hopes of stumbling upon criminal activity. That strategy yielded disappointing returns. Kyler soon turned to assistant district attorney William F. McKee to help devise a state-of-the-art surveillance campaign as the department’s only hope. 68
Interior sketch of the Central Park men’s room.
Prior to the investigation, a paper towel dispenser with a small mirror had hung over a service closet on one side of the bathroom (Figure 2). Over a weekend of advertised “renovations,” the Mansfield Police Department replaced the mirror with a two-way glass and hollowed out the dispenser to fit a camera. 69 The plan was to station one officer inside the service closet, instructed to film only men “acting suspiciously or committing acts of sexual perversion.” 70 The police took every precaution to make their observation post both as inconspicuous and as effective as possible. Officers repainted the walls a lighter shade of gray and installed brighter light bulbs to optimize film quality. 71 They mounted an exhaust fan to cover the vibrations of the running camera. They even equipped the photographer with a stack of paper towels, to periodically refill the dispenser’s reduced capacity. 72 Once the finishing touches were set, Lieutenant Bill N. Spognardi and two colleagues took turns manning the observation post for a week-long trial period in July. Originally intended to last throughout the summer, Mansfield’s surveillance operation was cut short after two weeks, when Spognardi broke his cover to arrest a man exposing himself to a teenager. 73
Overhead sketch of the Central Park men’s room (right). The service closet is on the south wall.
After just two weeks of observation, the Mansfield Police Department found itself in possession of some 1,700 feet of film, capturing at least sixty-five men engaging in sexual misconduct—as well as dozens of others who committed no criminal acts. 74 The sting was a media coup for the Department. Over the next four years, the pages of the Mansfield News Journal swelled with accounts of the trials, convictions, and sentences handed down against the men caught on Spognardi’s camera. 75 Kyler himself fed the public interest adroitly, playing on the public’s lingering concerns about sexual psychopaths to aggrandize his campaign: while admitting in a professional journal that his interest in the operation began with a defendant molesting a teenage boy, he informed the Mansfield News Journal that he was inspired by the “brutal murder of two little girls.” “Any sex deviate,” he explained, “may be a potential killer.” 76
The operation in Mansfield’s Central Park, like those at the Philadelphia YMCA and the Nu-Pike, exemplified the diversity and innovativeness of the police’s campaigns against cruising in the 1960s. Vice squads sensitive to the effective camouflage provided by cruisers’ protective tactics—whether through their own reliance on such codes to elicit solicitations or through the failures of less secretive patrols to apprehend cruising activities—corralled their technological and human resources to institute a range of strategic, highly surreptitious surveillance operations aimed at bringing those activities into view. While cruisers seeking some reliable setting for sexual encounters used a set of stealthy codes to turn public bathrooms into temporarily private spaces, the police marshaled their own best resources to make those spaces public again. The complex tactics they ultimately adopted were certainly not a matter of convenience, nor merely a helpful tool in vice squads’ arsenal against gay men. They were a matter of necessity, reflecting the inability of more casual patrolling techniques to detect sexual practices that thrived through sophisticated stratagems for avoiding exposure to strangers—ordinary citizens and police officers alike.
And if the police’s best responses to those stratagems exposed all users of the public bathrooms to the police officer’s gaze—not only cruisers or even gay men who engaged in no explicit sexual behavior, but also numerous others who used the public restrooms for their designated purpose—that was simply a collateral cost. Certainly, some departments tried to reduce the exposure and humiliation of innocent individuals: in Mansfield, Spognardi ran his camera only when he spotted “suspicious” men; at Camp Curry, Ranger Twight began surveillance only at 11 p.m., after “family activities” had ceased. But even those innocent men spared the camera were exposed, in the first instance, to the view of hidden police officers—often in their most private and embarrassing acts. As Ranger Twight admitted, each night of observation revealed “probably 25 or 30” men who “just went in to use the toilet for a toilet.” 77
Clandestine Surveillance in the Courts
For the men arrested in public bathrooms, of course, the costs of the police’s surveillance tactics went beyond the humiliation of exposure. Cruisers convicted of sodomy in the midcentury faced a variety of legal penalties, from short jail terms or probation in New York and California to years of incarceration in southern and midwestern states like Texas and Ohio. 78 More lasting than the prison time was the mark left on a man’s record. Convicts were required to register as sex offenders by the police, placing them on permanent lists of suspects for sex crimes in their area. 79 And local newspapers frequently printed the names and addresses of defendants alongside their alleged offenses, costing them friendships, family members, and jobs well in advance of their trials. 80
Many defendants tried to minimize this negative publicity by pleading guilty. But some challenged their charges in court. In the 1950s, defendants most commonly questioned the sufficiency of the police’s evidence against them, pointing to the dim lighting or obscured views provided by the police’s surveillance stations, or impugning the truthfulness of police witnesses. 81 Those lucky or wealthy enough to do so introduced character witnesses, such as wives or psychiatrists, to attest to their heterosexuality. 82 Some targeted the broader cultural and racial prejudices imbedded in the legal system. In one case in San Francisco, a trial judge dismissed the charges brought against two white men caught having sex in the bathroom of a local theater but left intact the prosecutions against a Puerto Rican man and a black man arrested for similar conduct. The defendants (unsuccessfully) challenged their continuing prosecutions as racially discriminatory. 83
None of these early claims questioned the underlying legality of the police’s observation posts. Since courts in the 1950s provided scant remedies for Fourth Amendment violations, clandestine surveillance tactics survived the decade essentially without constitutional challenge. Starting in the 1960s, however, after the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment prohibited the use of unlawfully obtained evidence at trial, the guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures stepped into the center of clandestine surveillance cases. 84
The precise parameters of an “unreasonable search” were undergoing a shift in these years. The Supreme Court in the 1960s retreated from its old requirement of some physical “trespass” on a defendant’s property, eventually redefining a search as a violation of one’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Even before then, lower courts confronting Fourth Amendment challenges to restroom surveillance typically analyzed those challenges in terms of privacy. While the precise legal framework varied—most commonly revolving around a defendant’s “consent” to police surveillance or around the “plain view” exception—the core question came down to whether users of public bathrooms accepted such an obvious risk of exposure to others that they surrendered any rights against police scrutiny. Cruisers insisted that, in light of the inherent intimacy of the lavatory, an occupant’s risk of some limited exposure to fellow patrons could not justify more intrusive surveillance by the state. Prosecutors, by contrast, argued that an occupant’s constant possibility of partial exposure undercut any plausible expectations of privacy against observation—clandestine or otherwise. 85
Some judges sided with the defendants. In a pair of influential cases in 1962, Bielicki and Britt, the Supreme Court of California concluded that the intimate nature of a bathroom precluded overhead observation of that space, regardless of an individual’s foreseeable risk of exposure to other users. Throwing out evidence obtained through the spy-pipe at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park and through overhead vents in a local department store, the court rejected the claim that the defendants had surrendered any right against surveillance by having sex in a space technically accessible to the public. Even in Britt, where the men had conducted their activities on the floor beneath the stalls’ partitions—“clearly observable to any person of the general public who might have entered”—the innate intimacy of the lavatory entitled them to privacy from surreptitious surveillance by the government. 86
Suggesting that police surveillance tactics in public bathrooms were limited to reasonably foreseeable angles of observation, Britt and Bielicki had a wide impact on state courts, reaching beyond California and to jurisdictions including Ohio and Florida. Indeed, their reasoning governed the prosecutions ensuing from the Mansfield Police Department’s surveillance campaign. For all the Department’s meticulous precautions in that case, perhaps Chief Kyler’s proudest accomplishment was the specific angle of Spognardi’s camera, which was mounted at exactly eye-level and adjacent to the bathroom door. As the District Court for the Northern District of Ohio emphasized in dismissing the defendants’ Fourth Amendment challenges, that surveillance station “necessarily place[d] the officer’s view at the eye level of one who would be standing in the open part of the lavatory,” allowing him the same perspective “afforded any member of the public who might have walked” inside. Footage “taken from that position” could raise no constitutional concerns. 87
Yet other courts took a more police-friendly approach. Just weeks after the Supreme Court of California decided Britt, the Court of Appeal began to retreat from that liberal ruling, qualifying that the police could use any forms of clandestine surveillance in public toilets that lacked functional doors. Britt, of course, had dismissed the state’s contention that the police could have theoretically spied the same sexual act “had they been observing from a public, common use portion.” But the appellate court now reasoned that the police’s surreptitious techniques—a peephole and an air vent, respectively—raised no constitutional concerns because the defendants would have been visible “had the police the police entered the public part of the restroom.” 88 An appellate court in Florida echoed the same rationale. Because the defendant’s activities in the open stall could “have been easily seen by other members of the public who entered the public restroom,” he was not entitled to protection against police surveillance through a louvered door, however secretly conducted. 89
In 1965, a federal panel even approved an overhead surveillance campaign of an enclosed bathroom stall. After Ranger Twight arrested two men in the bathroom of Camp Curry, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit explicitly declined to follow Britt and Bielicki even as applied to closed toilets. Pointing to the relatively immodest construction of Camp Curry’s stalls—“wide open for . . . approximately 18 inches at the bottom” and stopping at six feet on top—the authoring judge in Smayda concluded that such meager facilities raised no meaningful expectation of privacy to be violated by the police. The dissent objected that Ranger Twight’s surveillance violated precisely that camouflage provided even by these stalls, revealing body parts that the doors in fact shielded from view—including those of least “forty innocent men.” Yet Judge Duniway refused to acknowledge that much protection: any stranger, he insisted, could have “peered over the door, or the side partitions, or under either, or pushed open the door.” 90
In a sense, of course, these cases might be seen as consistent. In Britt and Bielicki, after all, it was the relative privacy of the toilet stalls that allowed the court to parse which particular types of surveillance invaded the defendants’ right to solitude. Where, by contrast, a stall provided no meaningful cover from view to begin with, its occupants acquired no preliminary privacy rights to be violated, through surreptitious surveillance or anything else.
Yet the court in Britt had also presumed that regular men walking into the bathroom’s common space would be able to see the defendant’s amorous encounter in the space beneath the stall. It nevertheless insisted that the police had no right to watch that deed from overhead. In Mansfield, too, the court explicitly hung its holding on the naturalistic vantage point provided by Spognardi’s hideout, despite the fact that the stalls had no doors and many acts filmed by Spognardi spilled out into the common spaces. Indeed, later courts would resolve the conundrum of the open toilet stall more leniently, insisting that the intrinsic intimacy of the lavatory entitled its occupants to privacy from secret surveillance regardless of their exposure to other patrons. 91
The difference between these cases, in short, was not a matter of clear legal lines or factual distinctions. Rather, it reflected close judgment calls about how much privacy the legal system ought to accord individuals using such intimate, quasi-private spaces as public bathrooms. Those decisions weighed the importance of the police’s surveillance campaigns against their offense to the privacy and dignity of the public: whether “the nature of the place, the nature of the criminal activities,” and the public interest in their abatement, as one court tallied them, justified the “uncomfortable thought that [citizens’] legitimate activities . . . might be spied upon by the police.” 92
And here, one core factor influencing judges’ decisions was their understanding of the precise activities implicated by the police’s operations. Those who upheld the defendants’ Fourth Amendment challenges consistently focused on the innocent citizens exposed by the police’s campaigns. The intrinsic evil of clandestine surveillance, these judges emphasized, was that it “spied on [the] innocent and guilty alike,” intruding upon law-abiding citizens who “would have been quite shocked to know that they were under surveillance.” 93 These judges did not dispute that the police pursued “understandable,” even entirely “proper” motives of eradicating cruising practices. But they questioned the ultimate legality of the police’s chosen tactics. As one Minnesota judge insisted in 1970, surely “[t]here were . . . ways of eliminating such use of the facilities other than surreptitious surveillance”—from closing up glory holes to more overt observation campaigns—which would not “sacrifice” the “rights of the innocent . . . to apprehend the guilty.” 94 The relative utility of surreptitious surveillance in stamping bathroom cruising, that is, could not justify a campaign of guaranteed intrusion on the privacy of innocent men. 95
Judges who approved the police’s tactics weighed the competing interests somewhat differently. The operative paradigm was perhaps best expressed by the California Court of Appeal, which in sanctioning the clandestine surveillance of doorless stalls looked to its own understanding of homosexual practices—drawn not from the police’s experience on the ground, but from the cruising cases in the court’s own docket. “Judges can take judicial knowledge from the case files in their own courts,” the panel in Young warned, “that public toilets in metropolitan parks, terminals, theaters, department stores and in similar places . . . are often the locale of [such vices] as sexual perversion, sale of narcotics, petty thefts, robberies and assaults,” all at the peril of “immature and innocent youth.” 96 Conflating restroom cruisers with violent criminals, the court’s view harkened to the lingering suspicions of gay men as sexual predators: criminals who derive gratification by imposing their perverse desires on innocent victims, and especially young children. To the extent the authoring judge admitted some basic education on contemporary cruising codes, indeed, he suggested that their defensive stratagems made cruisers especially dangerous to the public. By “leaving a ‘spotter’ or ‘lookout’ at the door to warn other perverts or degenerates of the approach of police,” Judge Jefferson speculated, cruisers may “conduct their illicit activities in full view of impressionable youths,” causing innocent “youngsters . . . [to] witness scenes of shocking adult degeneracy such as witnessed by the police in the instant case.” 97 Exposed to the world of homosexual cruising through the deeply selective window of criminal case dockets—successful instances of the police apprehending men engaged in public sex—Jefferson readily mapped even the stealthiest aspects of cruising culture onto the familiar conception of gay men as predators looking for innocent victims.
Young’s bleak vision became a rallying cry of sorts for courts dismissing challenges to clandestine surveillance in the 1960s. Both the district court evaluating Mansfield’s surveillance operation and the Ninth Circuit in Smayda—a case that reported unusually aggressive cruising techniques—reprinted Judge Jefferson’s jeremiad in full. 98 Meanwhile, the Florida Court of Appeal added its own take on the public interests at stake, based on what it identified as “common knowledge” of the urban homosexual’s habits. “[P]ublic restrooms,” explained Judge Kanner, “are often selected by persons of sick or depraved minds as favorite locales for perpetration of indecent or illegal acts.” Indifferent to the risk of exposure, such degenerates happily performed their perverse acts in public spaces—where, he emphasized, the police officers in this case saw the defendants continue their activities even after they entered the interior of the restroom, and “where anyone who might have entered could have become witness to the same sight.” 99 In reality, the record revealed that the officers had entered the lavatory not through the public entrance but from a locked door to a private storeroom—a place they had retreated to watch the sexual act after identifying the defendant, based on “their long experience as vice squad members,” as a cruiser. Far from casually walking in upon a sexual encounter, these officers thus relied on surreptitious observation to capture evidence of a sex act they already strongly suspected of occurring, if anything confirming the necessity of clandestine tactics to reveal evidence of homosexual cruising. Nevertheless, Judge Kanner’s “common knowledge” of the recklessness of homosexual cruisers—drawn, presumably, from his case files and the media coverage of cruising arrests themselves generally unearthed by clandestine surveillance—made short work of any claim that the defendants reasonably expected privacy in a bathroom stall. 100
The vision of homosexual men expressed in such opinions, as shameful exhibitionists and predators waiting to corrupt the nation’s youth, went against the systemic reality of most cruising practices. After all, most cruisers relied on “spotters” to avoid exposure to all members of the public—police officers, ordinary adults, and, as Humphreys would report, especially minors. 101 And that vision went against the professional experience of the police. The precise reason that police departments turned to clandestine surveillance to arrest homosexual cruisers was their knowledge that most men who resorted to public toilets for sex used whatever resources they had to limit their exposure to strangers. Departments like Mansfield’s got nowhere sending plainclothes officers—dressed, by all appearances, as members of the general populace—to walk in on cruising activities in Central Park. And citizen complaints in private spaces such as restaurants and department stores generally reported physical marks and men idling around public restrooms rather than any witnessed sexual conduct. 102 Unsurprisingly, police officers and even prosecutors often emphasized the difficulty of apprehending cruisers absent intrusive tactics like clandestine surveillance. 103
Certainly, police departments were aware of cases of actual violence and predation in public bathrooms. Some men who used public bathroom for sexual encounters in fact exposed themselves to others, inadvertently or even deliberately. Some men, as at Camp Curry, did harass or even assault unwilling strangers or minors. The states’ arguments to the court often included information to that effect. 104 But such encounters were not, as a general matter, the sort of consensual, witness-free conduct that required clandestine surveillance to be investigated. And departments like the Mansfield police—whose chief, if anything, downplayed the story of the young man assaulted in Central Park in explaining his operation to the local press—did not necessarily claim that such cases drove their observation campaigns. 105 In this sense, judges’ insistence on the predatory habits of gay men and their danger to innocent victims substantially recast the underlying considerations that led police departments to turn to clandestine surveillance to begin with.
The point, in sum, is not that the courts’ concerns about public indecency or violence in cruising sites were baseless. The point, rather, is that the resolution of Fourth Amendment claims surrounding clandestine surveillance in the early 1960s frequently came down to a subjective weighing of competing equities: the relative value of the police’s surreptitious campaigns against gay men, as opposed to more prosaic tactics, against the relative cost of such intrusive tactics to the many men exposed to the state. The courts had to balance, as one Pennsylvania judge would put it, the “threat thus posed to the innocent public” against the affront of “subjecting all individuals using the facilities to a general ‘search.’” 106 And here, it mattered that the courts saw the paradigmatic cruisers who used public bathrooms not as men who sought sexual contact only with other interested cruisers, who deeply desired to limit their exposure to the public, and who designed a set of reliable mechanisms to ensure both goals—not, that is, as members of a systematic and insular sexual subculture—but rather as sexual predators looking to convert new victims to their ranks. Compared with the momentous importance of constraining such vile and destructive activity, the privacy of unknown men temporarily occupying a public toilet stalls was hardly a compelling interest.
Conclusion
Ultimately, then, the efficiency of law enforcement tactics against cruisers in the mid-twentieth century came down to something of an epistemic irony. As a practical matter, as police departments well knew, surreptitious surveillance methods were necessary to stem the phenomenon of bathroom cruising precisely because cruisers were so difficult to apprehend through other means. Frustrated by the failures of more casual patrols, police turned to clandestine surveillance, with its profound intrusions into the privacy of citizens, as the only tactic that might be of use. But as a policy matter, numerous judges concluded, surveillance tactics were necessary because cruisers were intrinsically exhibitionist, preying on unsuspecting victims, delighting in showing themselves off to innocents and especially children. Inspired by the covert and coded nature of contemporary cruising culture, the police’s innovative surveillance tactics were vindicated in court through some judges’ insistence on a competing paradigm of what homosexual men must be like: the perverse victimizers of the sexual psychopath age. The police’s continuing surveillance campaigns thus depended on an epistemic lag among the different agents of the state about the best way of understanding homosexual conduct—a disconnect between the paradigm of stealth and insularity that drove the police to adopt widely intrusive tactics and the paradigm of predation that led courts to ratify them.
In this sense, the history of clandestine surveillance against cruising is as much a story about policing as it is a story about knowledge: the accumulation, dissemination, and varying uses of social insights about homosexual communities. That story demonstrates how police officers, the most direct conduits between urban gay enclaves and the state, amassed unique information about the cultural contours of gay life during the Cold War. Like sociologists and ethnographers in the 1960s, vice officers and patrols assigned to ferret out homosexual activity put themselves at the front lines of new developments in urban gay life, privy to the internal codes and camouflages that allowed gay subcultures to thrive in hostile settings. Undoubtedly, many police officers came to these insights harboring widely shared priors about the dangers of homosexuality, including its predatory nature. But by the early 1960s, their proximity to the gay world would give them firsthand knowledge of and sensitivity to the insular nature of contemporary cruising practices.
Yet the history of clandestine surveillance history also reflects how the expansion of state power over gay men during the Cold War did not necessarily depend upon the maximization of state knowledge about gay communities. It also depended on ignorance. For it was not just the substance of what the police learned about gay practices in these years that greased their antihomosexual operations, but also the rarefied nature of that knowledge. Responding to insular signals of contemporary cruising culture, police adopted a series of deeply controversial surveillance techniques that survived constitutional challenge in large part through the courts’ continuing skepticism of that culture. In such cases, the efficiency of the police’s surveillance tactics depended not on the spread of cultural knowledge within the state, but rather on its selective distribution among state actors, creating knowledge gaps that weakened potential checks on police power on the ground.
The sociological discovery of urban gay culture is typically seen as a positive development in the gay community’s struggle for tolerance, a process spearheaded by sympathetic researchers and cooperating gay subjects, and ultimately used to encourage the public to regard gay men with some measure of cultural relativism. 107 Yet the history of the police’s surveillance campaigns adds a new wrinkle to this narrative. That story demonstrates how different groups in the mid-twentieth century, including different arms of law enforcement itself, recognized the growing sophistication of gay men’s social practices at different times, and how that relative lag changed the political valence of how such knowledge could be used. The intricacies of the police’s clandestine surveillance techniques provide a case study of not only the excesses of state campaigns against homosexuality in the Cold War, but also the many ways that gay men’s legal status in these years was shaped by competing paradigms for understanding—and misunderstanding—the nature of urban gay life.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.