Gay Neighborhood History and

the Politics of Violence

safe
space

Christina B. Hanhardt
Perverse Modernities
A series edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
 Christina B. Hanhardt

SAFE SPACE
GAY NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY
AND THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2013

© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on
acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Copperline Book
Services, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Hanhardt, Christina B.
Safe space : gay neighborhood history and the
politics of violence / Christina B. Hanhardt.
pages cm  —  (Perverse modernities)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5457-­4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5470-­3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Gay liberation movement — New York
(State) — New York.  2. Gay liberation
movement — California — San Francisco. 
3. Gentrification — New York (State) — New York. 
4. Gentrification — California — San Francisco. 
5. Community policing — New York (State) — 
New York.  6. Community policing — 
California — San Francisco.  I. Title.  II. Series:
Perverse modernities.
hq76.8.u5h37 2013
306.76'609747  — dc23   2013013825
CONTENTS

vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 INTRODUCTION

35 
1. “THE WHITE GHETTO”: Sexual Deviancy, Police Accountability,
and the 1960s War on Poverty
81 
2. BUTTERFLIES, WHISTLES, AND FISTS: Safe Streets Patrols and Militant
Gay Liberalism in the 1970s
117 
3. “COUNT THE CONTRADICTIONS”: Challenges to Gay Gentrification at
the Start of the Reagan Era
155 
4. VISIBILITY AND VICTIMIZATION: Hate Crime Laws and the Geography
of Punishment, 1980s and 1990s
185 
5. “CANARIES OF THE CREATIVE AGE”: Queer Critiques of Risk and
Real Estate in the Twenty-­First Century
221 CONCLUSION
227 EPILOGUE

231 APPENDIX: Neighborhood Maps of San Francisco and New York

233 NOTES
315 BIBLIOGRAPHY
335 INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost I thank all of the activists from whom I’ve
learned. It is no exaggeration when I write that their vision and la-
bor has given clarity of purpose not only to this book but to my own
life. The activists whom I interviewed include, in order of appear-
ance, Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Randy Alfred, Hank Wilson, Ben
Gardiner, Michael Shernoff, Ali Marrero, Ruth Mahaney, Maggie
Jochild (Meg Barnett), Pamela David, Lois Helmbold, Lenn Keller,
Joan Gibbs, Bran Fenner, and Krystal Portalatin. Extra thanks to
Maggie and Lenn for their exceptional generosity and memory,
and to Joan Annsfire, with whom I had invaluable exchanges as
well. I also thank those who chose to remain anonymous and the
many individuals whose interviews did not make it into this narra-
tive, including Rickke Mananzala, Yasmeen Perez, and others. I am
thankful to all of the members and staff of Fabulous Independent
Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (fierce), past
and present. Those active in the early 2000s deserve special men-
tion, such as Krystal, Bran, and Rickke, as well as Aries Dela Cruz,
Lucia Leandro Gimeno, Jesse Ehrensaft-­Hawley, Mervyn Marcano,
J. D. Melendez, Justin Rosado, and many more. I am also thankful
for exchanges with other former and present fierce staff mem-
bers, including Emerson Brisbon and Naa Hammond. Many thanks
to fierce allies and other fellow travelers, especially Kai Barrow,
Kenyon Farrow, and Joo-­Hyun Kang. I have been honored to work
alongside more people than I could mention here who are involved
in social movements inside and outside New York and Washington,
D.C. I thank them all.
 I am tremendously grateful to the archivists, staff, and volunteers at
the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society (glbths) in
San Francisco; the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell
University; the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn; the Sexual Minor-
ity Archive of Northampton, Massachusetts; the New York and San Fran-
cisco Public Libraries; the June Mazer Lesbian Collection in Los Angeles,
now at the University of California, Los Angeles; the one National Gay and
Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, now a part of the University of Southern
California; the Fales Library of New York University; the Bancroft Library of
the University of California, Berkeley; and the National Archive of Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History of the lgbt Community Center in
New York. Special thanks go to Susan Stryker, who pointed me to many of
the sources on which the first and second chapters of this book are based
and whose research on San Francisco’s history has been so foundational. I
owe extra recognition to Brenda Marston, curator of the Human Sexuality
Collection at Cornell; Rebekah Kim and Marjorie Bryer, archivists at the
glbths; and the entire collective of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
I am lucky to have had the opportunity to study at the Program in Ameri-
can Studies at New York University (nyu). I am most grateful to have learned
so much from Lisa Duggan. It is because of her example that I sharpened my
feminist and queer analysis, first thought conceptually about the state, pur-
sued historical research, and believed that one day I would be done. Andrew
Ross was also an important guide, who gave me knowledge and confidence
that inspired me to identify as an urbanist, taught me invaluable lessons
about writing clearly, and cheered me on with genuine encouragement. They
are exemplars of engaged scholars, and they understood what was at stake
for me as I pursued this path. Without them, none of this would have been
possible. Phillip Brian Harper was a key advisor, especially in my first years
of graduate school, when he encouraged me to direct my close readings at
the social world. I am thankful for Adam Green’s example of historical analy-
sis joined by cultural critique. In those years, I learned from a remarkable
group of faculty members, including Arlene Dávila, Steven Gregory, Robin
D. G. Kelley, Anna McCarthy, Toby Miller, José Esteban Muñoz, and George
Yúdice. It was in a class with Cathy Cohen, then a visiting faculty member
at nyu, that I first began to think about the ideas that would become this
book. I will be forever grateful for Alyssa Burke’s expertise during the years
she served as the administrative head of the Program in American Studies.
Madala Hilaire combined humor and generosity, making me laugh as she
assured me that smooth sailing was ahead. I cannot thank them enough.
My coconspirators from nyu are many, and I thank in particular Alyosha
Goldstein, Laura Harris, Richard Kim, Sujani Reddy, Mariel Rose, and Emily

viii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thuma. Rich Blint, Rebecca Sumner Burgos, Sybil Cooksey, Carlos Ulises
Decena, Mireille Miller-­Young, and Alison Redick were also invaluable think-
ing partners. I have appreciated the opportunity to continue to learn from
people I first met at nyu who were years ahead of me in the program, such
as Davarian Baldwin, Tanya Erzen, Alondra Nelson, Julie Sze, Thuy Linh Tu,
and many more. The year I wrote my dissertation proposal was a very lucky
one for me. It was then that I met Dayo Folayan Gore, who was finishing her
dissertation in history at nyu. Ever since, she has been my most important
colleague and friend. Her sharp thinking, kind patience, and great fun have
kept me out of trouble and in this game.
A network of scholars has inspired, supported, and challenged me. In par-
ticular, I am tremendously grateful for the example and generosity of Jack
Halberstam, Regina Kunzel, and Siobhan Somerville. Through visits to the
University of Maryland, invitations for me to speak at their institutions, on
panels and in the rare breaks of various conferences, and via other exchanges
and collaborations I have been inspired by the scholarship and collegiality
of Eduardo Contreras, Beth Currans, John D’Emilio, Kirstie Dorr, Roderick
Ferguson, Gill Frank, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Laura Gutiérrez, Yukiko Hanawa,
Gillian Harkins, Scott Herring, Lucas Hilderbrand, Colin Johnson, Miranda
Joseph, Sara Clarke Kaplan, Roshy Kheshti, Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Ian
Lekus, Adela Licona, Martin Manalansan, Joanne Meyerowitz, Nick Mitchell,
Kevin Murphy, Tavia Nyong’o, Marcia Ochoa, Jasbir Puar, Jordana Rosen-
berg, Nayan Shah, Svati Shah, Andrea Smith, Sandra Soto, Dean Spade, Marc
Stein, Karen Tongson, and Ara Wilson, and many more (as well as others
whom I mention elsewhere). Extra appreciation goes to Mimi Thi Nguyen
and Hiram Perez. Three people are owed special mention for their close en-
gagements with this book: Emily Hobson, Kwame Holmes, and Emily Thuma.
Their respective, and shared, knowledge about the history of the left, sexual
and racial politics of the city, and vexed terms of antiviolence have been in-
valuable, although, of course, all errors remain my own. I also give thanks for
astute research assistance from Aaron Allen, Douglas Ishii, Emerson Brisbon,
Abram J. Lewis, Justin Maher, and Mary White.
I was fortunate to have amazing colleagues and students when I taught
classes at Barnard College and Hampshire College while finishing my dis-
sertation. Tally Kampen (at Barnard) and Barbara Yngvesson and Margaret
Cerullo (at Hampshire) were supportive as I balanced teaching and writing.
While I was in western Massachusetts, Kara Lynch and Wilson Valentín-­
Escobar brought me good politics and conversation. E. B. Lehman magically
made a year at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center produc-
tive and relaxing. I am very fortunate that Janice Irvine had just become the
center’s new director; she is now an important friend.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  ix 
 At the University of Maryland, I benefit from the support of many indi-
viduals, programs, and other units. The chair of the Department of American
Studies, Nancy Struna, has been a stalwart source of support and humor; I
am also very happy to work alongside my colleagues John Caughey, Jason
Farman, Perla Guerrero, R. Gordon Kelly, Jeffrey McCune, Jan Padios, Sheri
Parks, Jo Paoletti, Mary Corbin Sies, Psyche Williams-­Forson, and Janelle
Wong. Nothing would be possible in the department without the skills and
acumen of Julia John and Betsy Yuen. In the lgbt Studies Program, I have
benefited from the leadership of Marilee Lindemann and affiliates Martha
Nell Smith, Katie King, Luke Jensen, and Jason Rudy. J. V. Sapinoso, assistant
director of lgbt Studies, is an ideal colleague. I also thank other close col-
leagues at the University of Maryland, most especially Hilary Jones, Keguro
Macharia, Michele Mason, Randy Ontiveros, Sangeeta Ray, Tara Rodgers, Mi-
chelle Rowley, and David Sartorius. Bill Cohen has been a very important (and
patient) mentor. I miss seeing Kandice Chuh and Laura Mamo on campus. In
addition to those already named, I acknowledge my colleagues in the Depart-
ment of Women’s Studies and those associated with the Consortium on Race,
Gender, and Ethnicity: Lynn Bolles, Elsa Barkley Brown, Seung-­kyung Kim,
Debby Rosenfelt, Ashwini Tambe, Ruth Zambrana, and Bonnie Thornton
Dill, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. The students in American
Studies, lgbt Studies, and Women’s Studies make it all worthwhile.
I recognize various institutions for the economic resources that made
this research possible, from dissertation through book: the Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences at New York University for the MacCracken Fellowship,
Summer Predoctoral Fellowship, Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, Penfield
Award, and travel grants; the Social Science Research Council for the Sexu-
ality Research Dissertation Fellowship, with funds provided by the Ford
Foundation; the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation and
the Human Sexuality Collection of the Kroch Library of Cornell University
for two Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grants; the Five College Women’s
Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College for the support of the
Research Associateship; the Graduate Research Board and the Consortium
on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity for research grants and the office of the
Dean of Arts and Humanities, especially Associate Dean Sheri Parks, and
the Department of American Studies, all at the University of Maryland, for
grants to help cover publication costs; and the Bill and Carol Fox Center for
Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, then directed by Martine Watson
Brownley, for a one-­year residential fellowship. I also thank Keith Anthony,
Amy Erbil, and Colette Barlow at Emory.
The D.C. Queer Studies Consortium has been a source of intellectual de-
bate, fun, and more. The group includes many of my colleagues from Mary-

x  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
land whom I have already mentioned, as well as scholars from across Wash-
ington, D.C. I have enjoyed spirited conversations and friendships with
Libby Anker, Kristin Bergen, Mandy Berry, Fiona Brideoke, Kate Drabinski,
Lázaro Lima, Dana Luciano, Carla Marcantonio, Robert McRuer, Ricardo
Ortiz, Craig Willse, and more.
Many thanks go to Ken Wissoker, who has supported this book since
before it was one and who was essential to making its final realization pos-
sible. I have no doubt that without Ken’s prodding, this book would not
have been done in the time frame it needed to be. I am also indebted for his
selection of two very helpful readers; I can only hope to have done justice
to their excellent feedback. Many thanks, too, to Jade Brooks, as well as to
all of the Duke University Press team, including Liz Smith, Jeanne Ferris,
Heather Hensley, and Katie Courtland.
I have terrific friends who indulge my neuroses, buoy my spirits, and,
most important, are inspiring thinkers and makers. Yoruba Richen has
long provided astute breakdowns of the personal and the political, and I
have eagerly awaited the completion of this book so that we might return
to late-­night drinks and talk. Renee Gladman gives me perfect words and
long walks that promise intimacy even though we are so often far apart. I
have learned the most about history, politics, and friendship from Dayo
Gore; although she and Arianne Miller now live quite far away, the promise
of conversations, cocktails, and card games with them both will always get
me through. The first years of graduate school were aided by the smarts and
enthusiasm of Julia Bryan-­Wilson. I have been lucky to enjoy lengthy talks
on Brooklyn stoops with Stephanie Pope; I hope for many more. I will always
cherish my memories of conversations and adventures with Kyle Goen, both
characterized by his steadfast care. Other invaluable friends in New York
include Lucia Leandro Gimeno, Judy Yu, Laurie Prendergast, Leyla Mei, and
Amaha Kassa. The best aspects of my life in D.C. are my friends. I would
be lost and lonely if it were not for Bill Cohen’s sharp wit and kind heart,
David Sartorius’s camaraderie and cookery, Carla Marcantonio’s long walks,
and Salvador Vidal-­Ortiz’s good humor. I have relished and look forward to
many more outings with Craig Willse and Dana Luciano, and I always learn
from Johonna McCants. My friends at Different Avenues throughout the
years — in particular Kelli Dorsey, Darby Hickey, and Skytrinia Berkeley — 
made me laugh, worry, and feel less unmoored.
The love, support, and intellectual influence of my family — my father,
John G. Hanhardt; my mother, Eva B. Hanhardt; and my sister, Lydia B.
Hanhardt, brother-­in-­law, Jeremiah Dyehouse, and their children, Chloe
and Asa — are reflected on every page of this book. My mother’s vision of
a just city provided the ethical base of this project. My father’s expansive

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  xi 
understanding of cultural politics focused its analytic lens. My sister’s no-­
nonsense sensibility tethered me to the ground where she, Jeremiah, Chloe,
and Asa continue to provide me with loving care. I grew up in the New York
neighborhoods about which I write. I am deeply grateful to my mother, for
taking me to protests in support of public institutions as well as broad-­based
social movements, and to my father, with whom I spent long hours in book-
stores and galleries. It was in these contexts that I first learned the values
of that which is unfamiliar and often uncomfortable and the importance of
being curious and generous. With them I have walked more city blocks than
I could count, learning about people, places, and politics through genuine
interest and engagement. My family members are excellent cheerleaders, al-
though I am a terrible athlete. Their enthusiasm and endurance are true gifts.
I am so very fortunate that Jane Hageman has shared her love and care
with me, not to mention her home, car, and some really great food. Her
generosity was exceptional as she housed me during my more-­than-­annual
research visits and invited me along to join her friends for coffee and donuts
before I took off for long days at the archive or doing interviews. Her quilts
keep me warm in all the places I consider home.
By the time this book is published, it will have been over ten years since
I first met Eva Hageman at a political protest against the U.S. bombing of
Iraq. Her brilliance and passion have taught and sustained me. It is her
analysis of the world from which I most learn, and it is her hand that I most
want to hold on protest lines. It is difficult to express how much I admire her
insight, wit, determination, and beauty; but it is also she who has taught me
that words — of which I am mightily fond — are just that. It is a life of action,
of movement and change, with her that I most cherish.

xii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION

On May 6, 2002, residents, business owners, and politicians staged

an anticrime rally called “Take Back Our Streets” in Christopher
Park, in New York City’s Greenwich Village.1 The location chosen
was symbolic; the park is located at what had been the center of
the uprising at the Stonewall Inn bar, the famed riots of June 1969
that have been central to many legacies of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (lgbt) political organizing.2 Yet in recent years
the memory of “Stonewall” (as the riots are now called) as a long
overdue, passionate expression of selfhood often omits the facts
that it was a collective challenge to the police and that it was just
the latest clash in an ongoing struggle. Furthermore, the gay libera-
tion organizations that arose in the aftermath of the riots believed
that protection from the police would depend on their forming
coalitions with other social movements, including Black Power,
radical feminisms, and Third World decolonization. This was in
contrast to the approach adopted by their immediate predecessors,
homophile activists who largely advocated for police accountabil-
ity through liberal reform measures. Consequently, the refusal of
Stonewall’s participants to collaborate with dominant institutions
not only marked a rejection of social assimilation (in which, for
example, the adoption of gender norms might promise protection)
but was also in defiance of the partnership solutions to urban con-
flict that had been popular with policymakers in the 1960s, such as
community policing and War on Poverty initiatives.
Over thirty years later, the 2002 rally had a very different aim
in mind.3 It was linked to a broad, ad hoc campaign for the en-
forcement of quality-­of-­life laws, which target low-­level offenses
such as noise and loitering and had been the hallmark of former New York
mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s anticrime policy.4 Proponents included Residents
in Distress (rid; the name was inspired by an insecticide), the Christopher
Street Patrol (a neighborhood anticrime group supported by the Guardian
Angels), block associations (representing residents and business owners),
and officials from the local community board (New York’s neighborhood-­
based governing structure). Supporters claimed that boisterous crowds and
sex and drug trades were fomenting a threatening culture of crime and vio-
lence in their neighborhood, that part of Greenwich Village also known as
the West Village.5 In meetings, rallies, and media blitzes that would stretch
throughout the first decade of the 2000s, residents complained that their
neighborhood had been taken over by “the Bloods and the Crips,” “the deal-
ers, the hookers, the pimps, the johns,”6 “vicious drug dealers and hostile
transgender prostitutes,” and “rowdies,”7 all of whom constituted “an army
of occupation” (fig. intro. 1).8
The most public members of the campaign were white, and the areas they
cited as needing to be cleaned up were the very same places where people of
color — many of whom identify as lgbt — long have socialized.9 Residents’
primary focus were the neighborhood’s waterfront piers at the end of the
famed Christopher Street, the place of an active, largely black and Latino
social scene that had been pushed out of nearby Washington Square Park
under resident and police pressure during previous decades.10 Residents also
cited what they considered undesirable activity outside the entrance to the
Port Authority Trans-­Hudson (path) train station, which connects the New
Jersey cities of Newark and Jersey City (both of which are significantly black
and Latino in population) with lower Manhattan;11 some residents were also
involved in a campaign against the expansion of path exits into a desig-
nated Stonewall Historic District.12
The fact that residents’ primary opposition was to lgbt youth and adult
transgender women of color was not only coded in the choice of targeted
geography. One public resolution explicitly named the problem as “rowdy-
ism resulting from large crowds of young people, mostly lesbian, gay, bi-
sexual, and transgender youth of African-­American and Hispanic origin.”13
Although in public venues residents denied that their complaints were “ra-
cial,” almost all media coverage of the situation — both sympathetic and crit-
ical — made it clear that those considered a problem were people of color and
that those presumed to be engaged in prostitution were also transgender.14
Yet residents were also insistent that their efforts were not anti-­lgbt. This
claim was supported by those who called for the protection of the Stone-
wall Historic District as well as by those who invoked the history of antigay
violence to bolster their fight against undesirable street life. Moreover, resi-

2  INTRODUCTION
FIGURE INTRO.1  “Notice of Public Hearing: Take Back Our Streets,” City of New York
(COMMUNITY BOARD 2, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK)

dents advocated for the use of strategies that have been promoted by lgbt
antiviolence activists since the 1970s, from safe streets patrols and com-
munity watch efforts to calls for increased police presence and enhanced
criminal penalties — tactics that also parallel shifting approaches to urban
crime control during these same years. The result is that the demands of
Greenwich Village residents and a mainstream lgbt antiviolence movement
can look strikingly alike.
Safe Space asks how this neighborhood-­based convergence of anticrime
and lgbt rights strategies came to pass, and why it matters. Far from co­
incidental, these overlapping responses to perceived threats bring into focus

INTRODUCTION  3 
an entwined history of lgbt activism, urban development, and U.S. policy
responses to poverty and crime. By treating the construction of violence as
central to both U.S. lgbt and urban politics, I ask how the ideal of safe space
has shaped the transformation of lgbt social movements and the adminis-
tration of cities where related policies often coalesce.15 I explore how inter-
pretations of violence and safety have influenced changing concepts of lgbt
identity as well as urban policy and social science research on neighbor­hoods
and social deviancy — ranging from War on Poverty programs to quality-­of-­
life laws, and from debates about the so-­called culture of poverty to the idea
of homophobia. Thus, this book is not a history of gay neighborhoods per
se but an urban history of the encounters between gay and neighborhood in
U.S. cities and social movements over the past fifty years.

Stonewall Redux?
On the surface, the challenge championed by Greenwich Village residents
at the start of the 2000s appeared to be a return to the conditions that had
given rise to Stonewall in the first place. In the late 1960s, Christopher Park
had been a hangout for youths — many queer and some of color — who used
drugs, hustled, and found themselves in trouble with the law. Unlike many
other Greenwich Village gay bars, Stonewall opened its doors —  if only by
a crack — to those active in street economies, as it also did to a steady if
small number of the gender nonconforming.16 These groups stood outside
a normative gay culture — often standing outside its literal doors — and they
were frequently the recipients of Greenwich Village residents’ ire.17 Right
after Stonewall, many gay men and lesbians disassociated themselves from
the riots, and reform-­oriented organizations like the homophile Matta-
chine Society beseeched fellow “homosexuals” to “maintain peaceful and
quiet conduct on the streets of the Village.”18 It was within this context that
Stonewall provided the impetus for the founding of a radical organization,
the Gay Liberation Front, which sought to forge gay politics within a multi-­
issue left.19
Similarly, in the Greenwich Village of the early twenty-­first century,
many white, middle-­class lesbian and gay residents remained silent or ab-
sent during community meetings or supported organizations like rid and
the Christopher Street Patrol. No major lgbt groups came out on behalf
of those targeted, although residents’ efforts were countered by the birth
of a radical queer youth of color organization, Fabulous Independent Ed-
ucated Radicals for Community Empowerment (fierce), which became
a loud and unrelenting foe. The neighborhood was still seen by many to
be a magnet for queer life, but during the day children’s strollers had be-

4  INTRODUCTION
come more visible than hustlers, and Two Potato — once a gay bar with a
significant black and drag scene — would become Bar Nocetti, owned by and
catering to those native West Villagers who were a part of the Italian com-
munity that has long been another dominant aspect of the neighborhood’s
identity.20
But these two moments are also very different, for reasons that are both
obvious and counterintuitive. First, in the 1960s, antisodomy laws still
existed in many states, including New York, and crossed racial and class
lines — in their letter, if not in their uneven enforcement; in addition, laws
against lewdness, vagrancy, solicitation, and cross-­dressing were routinely
used to target a wide range of sexual and gender nonnormative people.21
Thus, an imagined solidarity existed between many of those arrested at
the Stonewall Inn.22 Although in its early years the homophile movement
had pursued some high-­profile campaigns against the entrapment of homo­
sexuals using such charges, gay men and lesbians were still considered a
criminal class, and homophile efforts were dedicated to distinguishing them
from others in that category.23
In the years following, things changed. Decades of activism produced in-
numerable organizations and agencies to deal with “homophobia” — whether
expressed by police misconduct, antigay violence, or even unneighborly hos-
tility. Laws against private, consensual sodomy were eliminated as a gen-
eral criminal category, and lgbt activists largely succeeded in dissociating
the generic terms of homosexuality — and, to a lesser degree, transsexu-
ality — from the broad category of the criminal. The enforcement of laws
against lewdness, loitering, and solicitation continued to be used against
lgbt people, but most often they were applied to those also targeted along
other lines — significantly, race and class but also age, gender expression,
and sexual subculture.24 Insofar as these laws disproportionately affected
lgbt youth, low-­income people, and people of color, they were not neces-
sarily still seen years later as shared concerns of white, middle-­class, gender
normative gay residents. Thus, in the early 2000s there were more organiza-
tions than ever prepared to respond to an anti-­lgbt situation in an environ-
ment that did not appear to many to be anti-­lgbt.
Second, during the late 1960s, solutions to the problems of so-­called
juvenile delinquency were still at least somewhat influenced by the analysis
of poverty put forth by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s differential op-
portunity theory, which was the basis of the 1961 Juvenile Delinquency and
Youth Offenses Control Act. The theory argued for structural rather than
individual solutions and called for increasing institutional opportunities for
low-­income youth.25 It was first put into practice in the organization Mobi-
lization for Youth, which was based in New York’s Lower East Side, not far

INTRODUCTION  5 
from Greenwich Village. The organization provided the model for the Com-
munity Action Program that was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War
on Poverty. The program exemplified the ongoing call for “community con-
trol” that was central to the War on Poverty; this ideal also led the charge for
the development of neighborhood-­based community boards in New York
City during the mid-­1960s.26
Although by the end of the decade War on Poverty programs were under
attack, and, in many cases, critiques of unequal social and economic structure
were cast as indictments of unhealthy kinship and intimate relations (and
used to uphold the normative valuation of liberal citizenship), the Stonewall-
era response to youth and crime stands in contrast to the conservative ratio-
nal choice approach that has supported the “zero tolerance” youth policing
and education policies popular since the 1990s.27 Furthermore, the broad
influence of ideologies based in the primacy of the free market have worked
in neighborhoods with rising rents to further secure the use of liberal insti-
tutions like community boards as mechanisms to protect property rights. As
a result, community board members in Greenwich Village in the early 2000s
often used the terms of community in order to restrict membership in the
neighborhood. In addition, programs that serve lgbt youth have been un-
evenly developed across race and class lines in school districts and neighbor-
hoods and are often concentrated in white, middle-­and upper-­income areas
like Greenwich Village.28 Thus, although youth who socialize on the streets
of Greenwich Village have always been racially and economically mixed, by
the last decades of the twentieth century the neighborhood was serving a
crucial function for young people from areas without lgbt services from
across the New York City region. The fact that this neighborhood was the
ground zero for new draconian policing strategies — for example, quality-­of-­
life policing in the city was initiated in Greenwich Village — must be under-
stood as part of this broader cultural and economic geography.
Third, after Stonewall, Greenwich Village’s reputation as a gay enclave
grew, despite the fact that its queer history long preceded the riots.29 By the
end of the 1970s, the area’s gay identity was not only a product of its gay resi­
dents and nightlife denizens, but also of its commerce, as more gay-­owned
and gay-­oriented businesses were established there. Since then, Greenwich
Village’s gay identity has lasted despite the fact that many gay businesses
have not, pushed out since the 1990s by rising rents and antisex zoning re-
strictions.30 In 2007 the New York Times declared on its front page that gay
neighborhoods were “passé” and had, in places like San Francisco’s Castro
District, “gone from a gay-­ghetto mentality to a family mentality.”31 None-
theless, for many of these neighborhoods, their gay reputations have been
durable enough to continue to attract local visitors and tourists. New York

6  INTRODUCTION
City’s largest lgbt community center is based in Greenwich Village, and
when the city’s tourism marketing agency launched the international Rain-
bow Pilgrimage campaign centered on the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall,
its website heavily featured Greenwich Village spots.32
As a result, although the neighborhood’s gay identity continues in some
ways to decline and many (although not all) of the residents who spoke up
against lgbt youth in recent years were not publicly identified as gay, many
observers saw the actions of the local community board as representing the
viewpoint of a gay neighborhood.33 Thus, regardless of the actual identities
of the key actors, the dominant identity of the neighborhood supported
both a broad assumption that a residents-­based campaign against lgbt
youth and transgender adult women of color was not anti-­lgbt as well as a
counteractivist argument that residents’ efforts fundamentally represented
white, middle-­class, lesbian and gay interests that collude with those of the
police.34 The fact that residents deployed the same tactics as lgbt antivio-
lence activists — and often declared their actions to be in the name of gay
protection — further cemented the latter association. It is this dualism — 
in which lgbt politics and property politics can be so indistinguishable — 
that outlines the history between the 1960s and the contemporary moment
that I tell here.

Although the cross-­temporal juxtaposition of the growth of radical libera-

tion movements and the entrenchment of rearguard actions on behalf of
property owners in Greenwich Village does not tell the whole story behind
the politics of sexual identity, violence, and neighborhood, it does point
to a significant overlap. The call for safe streets has been a rallying cry of
social minorities and property owners in the eras of postwar urban decline
and neoliberal development in the United States. In the early twenty-­first
century, this call became louder as national protection entered the center of
U.S. public debate. The increased attention paid to security has revealed the
disparate understandings of threat held by those considered representative
of and marginal to the national body politic. This disjunction points to the
need for deeper knowledge about violence and the quest for safety within
local communities and contemporary social movements.
Whether to prevent crime, allay political uprisings, or assert the right to
equal mobility, the fight against urban violence has been waged by the state
and the disenfranchised alike — crossing lines of race, class, gender, and sex-
ual identity — and has inspired much urban research since the tumult of the
1960s.35 Scholars have focused on the conditions leading to and following
the riots of the 1960s: some frame the problem of violence in terms of police

INTRODUCTION  7 
repression and the conditions of racism and poverty; others cast the city
as the site of violent crime with, since the 1970s in particular, women, out-­
of-­towners, and a generalized white, middle-­class populace as its victims.36
Studies on formal lgbt efforts to combat violence have been few. Historians
have discussed the informal ways in which lgbt communities have fought
back against physical threat as well as the legacy of homophile and gay lib-
eration opposition to zealous policing, but the latter has been in the frame
of entrapment more than violence, and there has been little coverage of the
response to violence since.37 Sociologists have given some attention to the
official lgbt antiviolence movement begun in the 1980s and its advocacy
of laws against hate crimes (crimes motivated by bias), and psychologists’
studies of the rates, causes, and impacts of violence have supported policy
efforts to name and address the problem of anti-­lgbt violence.38 Yet this
empirical research is more likely to assess the effectiveness of advocacy than
the ideologies of activism, and it almost never considers the broad context
of the urban environment in which most of these movements have been
staged.39 Queer theory has provided a key framework for understanding
how violence or the claim of injury has structured left and queer politics.
Nonetheless, the majority of this scholarship is based on readings of nar-
rative or visual representation, the law, and normative political claims.40
Although this approach has been invaluable, there is less work that provides
a kind of “thick description” of how grassroots and national movements
construct the agents and victims of the violence that they hope to prevent
and the spaces that they aim to protect.41
An analysis of the goal of lgbt safety in the city is important to under-
standing not only the transformation of lgbt politics since the 1960s, but
also the development and management of space at various scales during the
decline of a certain model of liberalism in the United States.42 Since the late
1960s, the state-­based policies of social welfare and economic regulation
that characterized postwar liberalism have been targeted by the ideals (if
not always the practice) of a pure free market championed by neoliber-
alism.43 One feature was the continued decimation of and then selective
re­investment in central cities, a process that has been repeated over the
years.44 Recurrent, too, in this cycle has been the declaration by policy­
makers and political pundits that (white) gay populations might hold the
key for the rejuvenation of struggling metropolitan areas. In the 1970s, gay
men were extolled for saving declining cities as vanguard members of the
vaunted back-­to-­the-city movement; in the late 1990s and early 2000s, gay
populations were invoked as enticements for the creative class of workers to
settle in, and thus revitalize, restructured urban regions.45 In each example,
gay men (and, to a lesser degree, lesbians) are seen as the arbiters of risk,

8  INTRODUCTION
their vulnerability to violence — or their protected presence — a measure of
an urban region’s vitality.46 Thus, central to this history is the assessment
of risk — the risk of violence associated with gay vulnerability that calls for
crime control, as well as the risk of lost profit associated with real estate
speculation — and how it shapes the conditions of possibility for normative
gay community belonging and the land market.
Ultimately, this book argues that in mooring a dominant understanding of
sexual identity to place, the promotion and protection of gay neighborhoods
have reinforced the race and class stratification of postwar urban space. As
I show, this has been enabled by the simultaneously flexible and fixed lan-
guage of threat, in which violence is imagined as the central risk — and thus
the defining feature — of gay visibility: the key term of mainstream lgbt
politics since the 1970s. It is therefore impossible to understand lgbt politi-
cal history outside of the social and spatial restructuring of U.S. cities during
this time.47 Nor can one fully understand changing spatial development pat-
terns apart from lgbt politics, especially as white gay men continue to be
invoked as arbiters of quality in urban life. Finally, these dynamics are not
restricted to cities or to the United States, as they speak to both the global
processes and the local effects of uneven development alongside the travels
of U.S.-­centered models of lgbt identity and social movements.
But this book is not only a story of the vexed legacies of postwar liberal
policy and triumph of neoliberal ideology; it is also an analysis of organi-
zations that struggled with and against each of those in imagining lgbt
and queer futures in all sorts of places. Although I assert that mainstream
lgbt political discourse has substantively transformed the category of anti-­
lgbt violence from the social to the criminological, and that this shift was
grounded in privatized claims to neighborhood, the process was neither
foretold nor total. Activists debated different definitions of violence and
staged their critiques in varied contexts — in cooperation with civil rights
leaders and in solidarity with revolutionary nationalists, alongside femi-
nists as well as crime victims, through public agencies and in radical collec-
tives, in the name of state-­based redistribution and for the end of the U.S.
nation-state. Although my coverage is far from complete, I signal the exis-
tence of a wide mix of lgbt and queer-­identified urban activist responses to
the pointed theme of violence.

Sex and the City

Recent scholarship in queer studies has rightly set the city to the side, un-
derscoring that the central place afforded to a privileged urbanity in domi-
nant lesbian and gay cultures and their historiography has created, to use

INTRODUCTION  9 
Judith Halberstam’s term, a “metronormative” ideal that is applied to all
other places not at equal scale.48 Scott Herring specifies the operations
of metronormativity as based in “the narratological, the racial, the socio­
economic, the temporal, the epistemological, and the aesthetic” and argues
that it “facilitates the ongoing commodification, corporatization, and de-­
politicization of U.S.-­based queer cultures.”49 Depoliticization might be in-
terpreted as a rather precise form of politics — one that, in this case, values
an exclusive cosmopolitanism or consumer power.50 In addition, as Herring
agrees, those excluded from — or critical of — the metronormative promise
often live well within city lines. A critical analysis of a politics of the city not
only goes out of town; it also asks to whom the city belongs.
The narrow dominance afforded to the city (and to only certain cities,
at that) is also reflected by the fact that many contemporary national lgbt
organizations trace their roots to groups or campaigns founded in two U.S.
urban centers — New York and San Francisco — in the 1970s and 1980s. This
is particularly so in the case of violence: in the 1970s, the prevailing story may
have held that the so-­called gay ghetto provided salvation from an inhospi-
table small town and alienating suburb, but to many this also made it a clear
target. Lesbian and gay activists took on the problem of street violence and
developed theories and strategies that shaped the national approaches still in
use today. This line of influence has been sustained even as some of the most
well-­publicized cases of anti-­lgbt violence in recent years have taken place
in small cities situated in more rural and midcontinent regions, such as the
murders of Brandon Teena in Humboldt, Nebraska, in 1993 and of Matthew
Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.51 In many ways, these events affirmed
the dominant movement’s claims of coastal urban refuge while confounding
its reliance on models of protection based in threats imagined to lurk in East
and West Coast central cities.52 Although this might be explained as the very
contradiction of the metronormative, the facts that Shepard and Teena were
white, their killers’ hatred of them explained as products of self-­perpetuating
cultures of poverty, and their deaths used to advocate for the passage of hate
crime laws and the application of the death penalty — all features of the his-
tory that I tell here — demonstrate that these issues are less related to urban
form per se than to other modes of differentiation.53 Nonetheless, the stub-
born focus on the urban in early national movement building has meant that
a variety of local responses to anti-­lgbt violence — which have their own, al-
beit less institutionalized, histories — often have had to contend with models
forged far from their social worlds.54 These activist solutions are sometimes
perpendicular, rather than parallel, to the story I tell here.55
Today many national activist visions look not only metronormative but
also homonormative — Lisa Duggan’s term for gay politics rooted in the

10  INTRODUCTION
ideal of privatization — insofar as they focus on individual rights, ask the
state to adjudicate, and maintain faith in the equalizing power of the free
market.56 This is the case despite the fact that many of the first activists
to challenge violence did so as part of movements in the late 1960s and
1970s that highlighted systemic inequality. Moreover, prior to that period,
homophile organizations did not strategize to address individual violence
as much as they responded to police abuse and broad anti – lesbian and gay
sentiment. And among sexual and gender outsiders not in organizations,
the reaction to one-­on-­one street violence was often more informal, with
a direct return of violence such as that described by Elizabeth Lapovsky
Kennedy and Madeline Davis in their study of working-­class lesbians in Buf-
falo, New York, in the 1930s through 1960s; or by Susan Stryker about trans
women at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria in the mid-­1960s.57 In other
words, even as a dominant, national movement has sought privatization
through the homogenization of people and state-­and market-­based solu-
tions, a wide mix of individuals inside and outside the city have pursued
safety through strategies of discretion, individual self-­protection, and var-
ied, often unofficial group measures.58
This book argues for the centrality of the city, not as a natural or pre-
ferred place for homosexuality or for lgbt identities, but as a critical nexus
for analyzing how politics, policy, and property have indelibly shaped lgbt
social movements, in particular in response to violence. And it also con-
tends the reverse: the defining function of violence within lgbt politics has
influenced the life of U.S. cities.
There is a rich archive to draw on here. Since at least the nineteenth
century, cultural production, academic research, and social policy in the
West have associated sexual nonnormativity with the urban vice and alien-
ation assumed to be negative by-­products of industrialization. Julie Abra-
ham describes Charles Baudelaire’s lesbiennes and flâneurs in the streets
of nineteenth-­century Paris and Friedrich Engels’s fear that industrializa-
tion’s factories might turn women into prostitutes (even as he defended
cities themselves).59 In his famed essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” John
D’Emilio argues that it was the growth of the industrial city that produced
the conditions of possibility for homosexual identities and, later, gay and
lesbian communities.60 And artists, scholars, and politicians have continued
to hold up the vice-­ridden city as the preeminent site of sexual perversion.
This characterization has not only been used to discipline; the traction of
the urban-­homosexuality connection was also used to forge a sense of com-
munity. George Chauncey writes: “The men who built New York’s gay world
at the turn of the century and those who sought to suppress it shared the
conviction that it was a distinctly urban phenomenon.”61

INTRODUCTION  11 
 Yet homosexuality is not the only marker of identity presumed to be in
a relationship of equivalence with the city, especially in the United States
since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Black and urban are
often treated as interchangeable adjectives, based on a correlation that
has been most strongly asserted in periods of urban growth (such as the
Great Migration); contraction (such as postwar urban renewal and subur-
banization); and crisis (such as the uprisings of the 1960s). As Hazel Carby,
Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Mumford, and Marlon Ross have shown, the
enterprises of urban sociology and progressive charity emerged in part by
interlocking sexual, racial, and gender regulation in efforts to control the
forces of social disorganization in the city.62 Reform and research took fam-
ily and neighborhood as key sites of intervention for a variety of supposed
deviancies, and racial hierarchies were often asserted through sexual dis-
courses of normalization. As Ferguson notes, these associations also drove
professionalized approaches to mapping the city: “While sociology estab-
lished an epistemological proximity to blackness and homosexuality, vice
districts helped to render them as materially proximate.”63 Siobhan Somer-
ville charts the entwined and contradictory discourses of racial and sexual
deviance that were present not only in social research and the law at the
start of this period, but also in diverse forms of cultural production, such as
literature and film.64 Unsurprisingly, then, sites of leisure were among the
most studied and targeted; but, as Shane Vogel demonstrates in his look at
the cabarets of the Harlem Renaissance, they were also places in which per-
formances that refused the paired imperatives of respectability and know-
ability were, quite literally, staged.65
From the late nineteenth century onward, the U.S. city also was a preemi-
nent site for the regulation of other racialized migrant populations, and the
impoverished neighborhoods to which they were confined were often de-
scribed by those in power as spatial expressions of residents’ “true nature.”
Nayan Shah shows how places like San Francisco’s Chinatown were treated
by municipal managers as physical manifestations of the “perversions” of
Chinese immigrant men and women — whose domestic patterns were, in
part, shaped by the restrictions mandated by the 1875 Page Law and 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act.66 And starting in 1952, the Urban Indian Relocation
Program of the Bureau of Indian Affairs moved Native Americans into ur-
ban centers just as the white middle ­class was taking flight to the suburbs.67
Arriving in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles with limited economic oppor-
tunities, many Native people would soon be living near to or in — and then
increasingly associated with — areas described as skid rows. These are but
two of numerous examples of how racial segregation and economic stratifi-
cation have been charted as biological and cultural phenomena.68

12  INTRODUCTION
 Although the correlation between homosexuality and vice has appeared
in many contexts, most organized activism on behalf of lesbians and gay
men has been dedicated to tearing this association apart. After World War
II, homophile activists slowly — yet inconsistently — moved to distinguish
homosexuality from other forms of social deviancy, especially those asso-
ciated with the racialized poverty of the city. By the 1970s, in the midst
of a much-­hyped crime crisis, activist efforts to assert that lesbians and
gay men were victims rather than perpetrators of crime widened the dis-
tance. Although this book argues that the process of distinguishing between
gay identity and racialized ideas of urban disorder must be understood in
the context of the restructuring of central cities and the expansion of the
penal state, it also outlines this dynamic as a product of activist engage-
ment with federal policy. As Margot Canaday demonstrates, it was during
the World War II era that the federal government began to constitute homo-
sexuals as an explicit category to be regulated in immigration, welfare, and
military policy. Prior to that point, homosexuality had been policed by the
state alongside other social problems such as “poverty, disorder, violence, or
crime.”69 In this book, I trace how the disaggregation of homosexuality from
other social problems was pursued by activists eager to create a new politi-
cal identity in similarly separate terms — a strategy adopted, for example,
by early homophile organizers who directed their actions both against and
in collaboration with federal powers. Furthermore, the emergence of homo-
sexuality as an autonomous regulatory category did not mean that others
marked deviant, such as the racialized poor, were no longer criminalized
and subject to policing. Nonetheless, these other outsiders were not uni-
formly considered a part of a new social movement that would largely be
cast in terms of identity, respectability, and rights — rather than the refusal
of normalization that might be in affinity with what Cathy Cohen describes
as “deviance as resistance.”70
Thus Safe Space looks to the city not only because of its connection to the
now dominant lgbt movement it studies, but also because of whom this
movement has defined itself against. When the antigay-­marriage Proposi-
tion 8 passed in California in November 2008, many white gay commenta-
tors suggested that it was African Americans’ fault. The assumption that
people of color of all economic classes are more homophobic than whites has
been durable within mainstream lgbt politics — a view often held across
racial lines — and this book argues that these ideas are linked to how lgbt
organizations imagined their relationship to low-­income people of color
within urban centers in the early years of the consolidation of the lgbt
rights movement.71 Furthermore, this association was sutured in place by
the central role of social science research in postwar liberal politics, which

INTRODUCTION  13 
provided an explanation — and a mode of quantification — for inequality in
cultural pathology and damaged psychology and thus outlined its terms
of proper social and personal remediation. The result today is that even as
organizations and scholarship have expanded to include the experiences of
lgbt and queer people of color in the United States and around the world,
the idea that poverty and/or nonwhiteness is at the crux of homophobia
and thus outside of idealized lgbt identities has been central to main-
stream lgbt political discourse.72
The implications of this cultural map for homophobia within anti­
violence politics cannot be overstated; two of the primary activist solutions
to anti-­lgbt violence since the 1970s — the establishment of protected
gay territories and the identification of anti-­lgbt violence as a designated
criminal category — must be paired with two of global capital’s own “spa-
tial fixes”: gentrification and mass imprisonment.73 These are processes
that have involved the containment and exclusion of the racialized poor: in
neighborhoods marked for cycles of disinvestment and then selective rein-
vestment, and, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has shown, in prisons built to ab-
sorb surpluses of labor, land, and capital.74 By the 1980s anti-­lgbt violence
had become most recognizable as hate crimes, and the risk of anti-­lgbt
violence was increasingly understood as the risk of being a crime victim.
In gentrifying neighborhoods in which the speculative risk of investment
was lessened by the elimination of those deemed criminal, the fight against
anti-­lgbt violence might achieve such an effect. As the dynamics of crimi-
nalization are not reducible to economic structure alone, those indicted by
mainstream homophobia discourse constitute a simultaneously broad and
precise group that accommodates shifting dynamics of racialization. Fur-
thermore, spatial-­temporal fixes operate as part of uneven development on
a local and a global scale. Thus, although laws against hate crimes emerged
in the context of the primacy of antiblackness within devalued U.S. central
cities, they also have become a part of efforts to outline as a threat racialized
migrant and religious groups in multiple spatial contexts across the globe.75
This is not to say that anti-­lgbt violence is not a problem, nor is it to
downplay the effects of violence, especially among those who are left out of
dominant lgbt politics. The violence of poverty and white supremacy carry
a brutal force for those who also stand outside heterosexuality or gender
conformity, and the very acts of consolidating and parsing identities can
constitute a kind of epistemic injury. Furthermore, I do not mean to sug-
gest a mere reversal: that low-­income or of color communities are never
homophobic, or that lgbt organizations should not fight various forms of
anti-­lgbt violence. What I hope to stress, instead, is that the history of
criminalization and spatial development must be considered as part of the

14  INTRODUCTION
equation. This is because as the category of what constitutes a crime has
grown to become more inclusive, it has also condensed what counts as vio-
lence so that those things that are not legible within juridical modes are not
acknowledged at all.
Thus, another key piece of this book is to analyze the role empirical evi-
dence has played in legitimizing injury. One of the antiviolence movement’s
most significant contributions was the formalization of independent and
U.S. Department of Justice mechanisms for reporting hate crimes. These
annual reports both replace and supplement narrative understandings of
violence. The effect is to narrow the field of focus through a figuration of
all that it hopes to make “visible”; as Mary Poovey writes of statistical rep-
resentation, “it . . . both limits what it will depict and necessarily produces
an uncontrollable excess.”76 The consequences I explore include the ways
in which the social science of cause and effect can transform the field of
radical politics into a rubric for social service delivery. Furthermore, in a
liberal analytic that sees group inequality to be based on an enumeration of
individual injuries, key terms of distinction — such as between individual
self-­help and group self-­determination — become increasingly blurred.77
This book narrates the history of lgbt liberalism as one fundamentally in-
debted, then, to the elaboration of the social sciences.

A Tale of Two Cities

My critique of empiricism follows José Esteban Muñoz’s call for a “utopian
hermeneutics” as I reach across time and geography to mark the past in the
present, and to find the future there as well.78 As a result, this book is not
a singular, progressive history of the formal lgbt antiviolence movement
founded in the early 1980s, nor is it a comparative urban study. Rather, the
book sketches a light and jagged line for analyzing lgbt activism against
violence as framed by questions of neighborhood and crime. Through case
studies, I examine campaigns against violence since the 1960s — the years in
which organized lesbian and gay activism against the police began to gather
broad, public momentum — and outline their ideological and organizational
links and breaks. I highlight moments in which violence functioned as the
principal term of organizing, as well as when it was used as shorthand for
other concerns. In addition, I focus on aspects of the formal lgbt anti­
violence movement that have rarely been included in the secondary litera-
ture, such as the influence of small, grassroots activist groups as well as
related forms of urban crime control and economic policy. Although I ulti-
mately trace the emergence of a mainstream lgbt movement, I set it within
a complicated history of political developments that imagined a variety of

INTRODUCTION  15 
solutions to the problem of violence. This includes homophile activists who
considered poverty and state violence as important points of intervention. I
also look at organizations from the late 1970s and early 1980s that inverted
the terms of antiviolence organizing by critiquing calls for gay territory and
refusing the promises of police protection. Often centered in people of color
and lesbian feminist collectives, these efforts developed across the country
and pursued goals outside the visibility mandate. Finally, I consider contem-
porary groups that draw on the legacy of antiracist, multi-­issue organizing
and that maintain a troubled relationship to the goal of inclusion. As much
of the scholarship on lgbt movements has emphasized visibility, coalitional
groups or those with other goals have received less attention. Indeed, an
unintended development of the literature on homonormativity is the over-
shadowing of long-­standing challengers to homonormative political visions.
Thus, although its full scope is beyond the reach of this book, I gesture
toward a genealogy for activism against violence that has sought strategies
outside of state protection and property and that has been forged in small
collectives, often outside my featured cities.
That noted, the book is focused on New York and San Francisco, the two
cities most key to the career of mainstream U.S. lgbt antiviolence organiz-
ing. Although Los Angeles has played an equally significant role in lgbt ac-
tivist history as the other two cities, it was not as central to the antiviolence
movement’s origins and subsequent national consolidation. This is due, in
part, to the status of San Francisco and New York as pedestrian-­oriented cit-
ies with strong community responses to street violence. In neighborhoods
across New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, 1960s social movements
were bound up with local solutions to violence and crime.79 Activists and
residents alike responded to the call of President Johnson’s Great Soci-
ety, hoping that the promise of militancy might be realized alongside local
liberal reform. It is interesting, then, that it was during this period that
some of the earliest sustained lgbt activist efforts to challenge violence in
designated urban areas began. Other cities that shared San Francisco’s and
New York’s dense development, neighborhood campaigns, and active lgbt
politics — such as Chicago and Philadelphia — did not make as early a mark
on the national antiviolence movement.80 This is not to say that responses
to violence, both formal and informal, did not flourish in these and other
cities, small towns, and rural regions. Rather, it is to highlight the fact that
the formal movement was initiated in the cities that would continue to be
so centered in lgbt political activism and history. To this day, New York’s
and San Francisco’s antiviolence projects are among the largest and most
developed, and the National Coalition of Anti-­Violence Programs shares an
office with the New York Anti-­Violence Project.81

16  INTRODUCTION
 There are many risks to my approach. First, it keeps the field of what con-
stitutes politics narrow, excluding a range of activities that do not announce
themselves as lgbt activism. This book, for example, does not analyze the
broad range of cultural productions that radically rearticulate the political
sphere.82 It also does not include activism that advocated for sexual justice
without ever naming lgbt subjects.83 It thus accepts the limited terms of
social movements, even as it does so to gesture toward and even highlight
other interpretations. In many ways this tack can affirm that which the
dominant approach has already affirmed: to tell a story about the main-
stream and its critics is to leave the former in the center.84 These are some
of the dynamics Karen Tongson describes through which the literature of
lgbt studies creates the very parameters by which it recognizes the queer
subject in space. Tongson points to the narrow dominance of New York and
San Francisco in lgbt history, and she shows how easily a description of a
given city’s particular features can slip into a naturalization of that city’s
supposed “cultural style” and its “quality of queer life” as “a prototype for
the exemplary queer.”85 This book addresses this issue by considering the
antiviolence movement as a locus for the institutionalization of a “special
character” of gay politics — which I dub militant gay liberalism — that found
particular momentum in the 1970s around the question of violence in the
gay enclaves of New York and San Francisco.86
Tongson’s critique highlights the limitations not only of a mainstream
lesbian and gay politics but also of a queer antinormativity that figures itself
in opposition to the other of the suburbs. Pointing to suburbs as not only ho-
mogeneous spaces of white wealth but also as home to working-­and middle-­
class people of color, Tongson questions the neat divisions made between
that which is supposedly critical versus the allegedly complicit, between the
fashionable and the out of it. Although not the focus of this book, Tongson’s
observation here is crucial, given that the waves of gentrification in U.S.
cities since the 1970s have been in part responsible for the flip (often via
the “flipping” of real estate) in land values between urban core and periph-
ery. Cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., for example, are small
seas of speculative growth marked by pockets of intense poverty, both of
which are defined along racial lines. Inner suburban rings have become the
sites of capital flight and the places where poor and working-­and middle-­
class people, both of color and white — and inclusive of lgbt people — 
increasingly may be found.87 (In New York, the core of Manhattan and near
parts of Queens and Brooklyn are contrasted to the outer boroughs, which
also function somewhat like close suburbs.) These are also the places where
strip bars, prostitution and drug houses, adult bookstores, and gambling
clubs are increasingly located. Thus the investment in a hip queer urbanity

INTRODUCTION  17 
must be seen as a rejection both of purportedly earnest and unfashionable
suburbanites and of those other queer subjects that tend to be deemed risks
for capital investment and at risk, in need of social intervention.88 In these
cases, the race and class markers associated with the city are shown to be
less about urban form than about patterns of racial segregation and capital
investment that prescribe who lives where; this is in part why the word
ghetto is now used as often as a free-­floating, derogatory term for a racialized
class position as it is for a race-­and class-­bounded urban area.
As a national political agenda item, antiviolence activism has not been
primarily associated with neighborhood history or spatial development re-
gimes. Rather, since the 1980s, the lgbt movement has combated violence
by demanding the inclusion first of sexual orientation and later of gender
identity as protected categories under local and federal statutes against hate
crimes. My research considers the history of cities alongside the move to
legislate violence and, in doing so, argues for a link that is rarely acknowl-
edged. Here I hope to demonstrate that the connection between neighbor-
hood transformation and antiviolence ideologies is both conceptual and
organizational. Conceptually, I show that urban politics since the 1960s
has hinged on the operation of violence as an individualized threat that
then justifies calls for forms of state violence, such as criminalization and
privatization. Thus, certain lesbians and gay men, as they move out of the
category of criminal and turn to the language and strategies of state pro-
tection (in the call for rights or responsive policing) necessarily play a key
role in this urban transformation. These links between neighborhood and
antiviolence activity have also been demonstrated on the level of the activ-
ist organization: the earliest movers and shakers of the formal antiviolence
movement learned from the examples of safe streets patrols in the so-­called
gay ghettos of New York and San Francisco in the 1970s.89 Founded in op-
position to homophile activists who had followed a more quietist approach
to piecemeal state reformism, as well as to gay liberationists who refused a
gay-­only focus, these efforts inaugurated a shift from multi-­issue organizing
against state abuse to a vigilant concern with individualized threats found
on the streets. The fact that this fear and strategy continued to circulate in
gay enclaves like New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro
demonstrates the central role violence has played in defining neighborhood
as one of the most prized expressions of lgbt community.90 In unraveling
this history, this book asks some of the less common questions put to these
movements: How is violence assessed? What counts as safety? Who is part
of the lgbt community? And in what social collectives and physical spaces
does belonging bring security?

18  INTRODUCTION
The book is structured to engage key moments in lgbt activist history
without drawing a straight or progressive line between them (both puns in-
tended). It also brings together a range of literatures, including the history
of U.S. lgbt activism, postwar cities, and left/liberal social movements; the
sociology of urban development and crime; critical debates about race, capi-
tal, and space; and queer theoretical takes on identity, normativity, and po-
litical cultures. This approach manifests the benefits and limits of a mode of
scholarship that leads with questions and seeks answers across disciplines.
My hope is that a wide variety of readers might find themselves in conver-
sation with me, although I invariably do not do justice to the full breadth
of scholarship on each topic or from a given field. My goal, instead, is to
forge connections between areas of study and to elaborate what emerges
from those intersections. Thus, rather than provide an introduction to the
book with an overarching framework for any one or all of these contexts, I
open each chapter with a review of the most relevant background needed
for the reader to understand its case studies. Nonetheless, the book’s key
arguments are cumulative, so although each chapter stands alone, it refers
to the histories and analyses outlined by the previous ones.
It is also important to note that insofar as I tell and dislodge a story of
homonormativity, this book is in many ways a gesture of recovery, itself a
visibility claim made legible by historical narrative in particular. Indeed,
that is the structure that organizes and propels this book; one of the main
contributions I offer is a historical, social movement – centered analysis of
questions that are often taken up by more literary-­critical queer studies
scholarship. But should you make it through to the end of this book you
will find yourself in another register of academic ordering, one that tries to
address the moment in which it is written. As I describe later in this intro-
duction, the book’s research began near the point at which it ends, and thus
it constitutes not only improper history but, I hope, a push back at social
movements’ singular end-­driven impulses.91 Along the way, I strive to make
the road bumpy, refusing stories of constant improvement as well as those
of determined demise: claims that lgbt or queer activism has gotten more
inclusive or more exclusive, less radical than ever or less strategic than it
could have been. I try to paint a picture that is at once messier and more in
focus, not only so that I may mix my metaphors and my methods, but also
so that I might ask what has changed, what has remained the same, and why
we might care.92
My first chapter features two campaigns from the mid-­to late 1960s that
included the leading participation of homophile activists in San Francisco’s
Central City. In the first, homophile activists collaborated with other social

INTRODUCTION  19 
reformers to demand that the neighborhood be designated a target area
under the Community Action Program of the Johnson administration’s
War on Poverty. They did so in part by asserting that one part of the Cen-
tral City — the Tenderloin — was a “white ghetto” of “prostitutes,” “trans-
sexuals,” “hotel loners,” and “homosexuals” who faced the same problems
as did people in low-­income areas where people of color were the major-
ity. In the second case study, homophile activists were among those who
banded together to found Citizen’s Alert, one of the nation’s first citywide,
homosexual-­inclusive police watchdog organizations. In this chapter I show
how the mid-­1960s San Francisco fight against poverty and state violence
provided an opportunity for white homophile activists to participate in
forms of cross-­identity coalition at the same time as they leaned on a lim-
ited analogy between the social regulation of (white) sexual “outcasts” and
people of color. In particular, I examine how the focus on psychology central
to the legacy of postwar racial liberalism facilitated these connections and
provided the groundwork for a model of gay liberalism that would prove
lasting in the decades to come. The chapter also considers the activities of a
small radical youth organization, Vanguard, which both inverted and repli-
cated many of the terms of homophile activism.
Because none of these coalitions were exclusively focused on homosexu-
als and they took place during the years that the homophile movement has
been described as fading, they have received little attention until recently.93
Moreover, the combination of social justice theology, Saul Alinsky – style
community organizing, countercultural expressions, and varying degrees
of state-­sponsored uplift delegates these efforts to an indeterminate, if also
familiar, place in 1960s left/liberal politics. This is especially the case since
the key players did not abide by many of the standard definitions of radical
and conservative, collaborating with activists who called for the end of state
institutions at the same time as they forged state-­participatory solutions,
or advocating assimilation while assailing cultural norms. To be sure, these
seeming oppositions were a product of the conflicted promises posed by the
War on Poverty’s emphasis on community participation. They also reflected
many of the debates that marked the history of the civil rights movement,
which Central City activists held as a model. Ultimately, I argue that these
dynamics demonstrate the contradiction involved in consolidating gay iden-
tity while gaining recognition from a federal antipoverty program; a process
that unhooked, even as it depended on, the links between homosexuality,
transsexuality, and other categories of deviancy associated with urban pov-
erty as well as the shared experience of state violence among a variety of
marginalized city dwellers.
In contrast to the homophile drive for state recognition, gay liberation-

20  INTRODUCTION
ists at the end of the 1960s refused to accept what they saw as the placating
efforts of urban social policy, despite a shared conviction that violence was
linked to unchecked police power. Early gay liberation was closely linked
to the New Left and, in general, stood in solidarity with anti-­imperialist,
revolutionary nationalist, and radical indigenous activisms. These political
movements tended to focus on a critique of state violence and to support
self-­determination and place claims. Gay liberationists extended this stance
through an interpretation of violence as that both practiced and sanctioned
by the state, and they trumpeted the reclamation of gay neighborhoods
from Mafia and police control. But as this was increasingly conjoined by
a call to see gay men and lesbians as on the side of the law rather than as
criminals, individual violence remained an amorphous category, as did the
potential locales (urban and rural) for new gay territories. Chapter 2 opens
with a discussion of the shifting definitions of and approaches to violence
held by gay liberationists, and it shows how, in particular, analogies between
race and sexuality were used to theorize the problem of violence and to
stake land claims.
As the 1970s continued, lesbian and gay organizations multiplied, as did
divisions between them. Activists debated core ideological issues, including
multi-­issue versus gay-­centered approaches, the place of communist and
socialist visions, and the role of race and gender in structuring anti-­lgbt
oppression. Chapter 2 considers the growth of a new gay rights model in the
mid-­1970s that I call militant gay liberalism, which combined the militancy
and countercultural performativity of gay liberation with a gay-­focused,
reform-­oriented agenda. Neither far to the left nor complacent in their lib-
eral goals, these organizations arose to address a range of issues that activ-
ists understood to directly and uniquely affect all gays and lesbians, such
as street violence and the need for designated neighborhoods. The chapter
focuses on a series of gay safe streets patrols — such as the Lavender Pan-
thers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the Butterfly Brigade in that city’s Cas-
tro, and the Society to Make America Safe for Homosexuals in New York’s
Chelsea — that postdated the heyday of gay liberation and predated the
consolidation of national civil rights organizations. These patrols ranged
from quests for self-­determination to ad hoc gatherings of self-­proclaimed
vigilantes, all of whom hoped to assert and protect gay space.
Here the book also explores the parallels between social-­scientific studies
of urban violence and poverty and the growing circulation of the term homo­
phobia. I examine how the lasting influence of the psychological bases of
postwar liberalism — in particular, their sedimentation in the culture of pov-
erty thesis — shaped the consolidation of the new discourse of homophobia
through a shared emphasis on the psychopathologies of damaged masculin-

INTRODUCTION  21 
ity and low self-­esteem. During these same years, community policing in
the form of neighborhood patrols became popular among both middle-­class
communities and gay activists. I consider how these patrols were inspired
by the participatory ideals of postwar liberalism but took shape in the 1970s
in the context of the rising influence of conservative rational choice theo-
ries, which take crime as a given and shift the focus to punishment and the
management of victims. Thus, gay safe streets patrols were part of a broad
process that saw the transformation of gay spaces from places of residential
concentration to expanding visible niche markets for retail commerce and
real estate speculation, each firmly in place by the end of the 1970s.
Gay safe streets patrols learned from feminist models, in particular anti­
rape activism. Yet at the time, many lesbian feminist organizations were tak-
ing a very different approach to issues of violence and urban space. Around
the same years as militant gay liberal visions were congealing and achieving
some power — most famously with the 1977 election of gay supervisor Har-
vey Milk in San Francisco — others were pointing to the contradictions in-
herent in trying to solve street violence by relying on crime control and the
protection of gay neighborhoods. This was a critique sustained by a variety
of organizations, especially lgbt groups whose members were also active in
other movements, including the black freedom struggle, radical feminisms,
anti-­imperialism, and Marxist-­Leninist and Maoist parties. Chapter 3 be-
gins by returning to the time of Stonewall and then moving quickly through
the 1970s to identify organizations that focused on analyses of race and
gender in their explanations for lgbt marginalization. The chapter then
homes in on 1980, around when many of these trajectories merged and
gained traction in a series of organizations that theorized the place of race,
gender, and sexual identity in public contestations over antigay violence and
gay participation in gentrification. I show how these groups pointed to the
contradictions of militant gay liberalism as part of the history of criminal-
ization and uneven development, while they also posited models of activism
outside the instrumentalism of scientific measurement, social reform, and
dominant leftist visions.
Organizations such as the Third World Gay Coalition in Berkeley, Les-
bians Against Police Violence in San Francisco, and Dykes Against Racism
Every­where in New York, among others, were also key for how they chal-
lenged economic programs that pushed ahead with the election of Ronald
Reagan. Reagan’s policies of privatization and market freedom helped to
formalize the U.S. role in the global ascension of neoliberalism. Neoliberal-
ism not only transformed the structure of accumulation under capitalism,
but it — along with the attendant growth of financialization — also reshaped
the ideologies of everyday life to naturalize the market and downplay group

22  INTRODUCTION
inequality. The organizations featured in this chapter claimed identity while
disavowing its singularity, called on structural analyses while refusing the
will to tabulate, and, therefore, helped to point to the crisis in liberalism
during those years. Furthermore, I show that these examples of radical les-
bian and gay organizing should not be dismissed due to their admittedly
short life and small scale. Rather, by considering these groups cumulatively,
I suggest that they constituted a social movement that has not only been
lost in the archive, but that has been disaggregated in its narration into
false camps that place identity and culture on one side and class structure
and organized movements on the other. The groups profiled in this chapter
insisted, for example, that white identity held economic value in an urban
land market, while they also saw a sweaty softball game to be part of the
struggle. Activists would follow a protest against the police with a poem, not
only so that they could then hand it out at the next rally but also as a way to
talk about how language makes history.
Also at the start of the 1980s, activists who had become frustrated by
the limits of grassroots organizing — including some members of the street
patrols described in chapter 2 — were central to the founding of a new wave
of policy-­oriented antiviolence organizations, such as Community United
Against Violence in San Francisco and the Chelsea Anti-­Crime Task Force
(which eventually became the New York Anti-­Violence Project). Chapter 4
marks the birth of these organizations and their influence on the founding
of the national antiviolence movement in the 1980s. Although the impetus
for local campaigns came from on-­the-­ground action, the institutionaliza-
tion of antiviolence politics was fueled by a reliance on social research. The
inspiration for many studies was the National Gay (and Lesbian) Task Force
and their (Anti-­)Violence Project, which was established in 1982 to address
the issue of antigay violence nationwide. Federal policies and agencies pro-
tecting crime victims also first came into effect during these years — for
example, the federal Office for Victims of Crime was established in 1983.
Fighting for laws that target hate crimes soon became a top priority of the
antiviolence movement. In this chapter, I sketch a history of this move-
ment, considering how advocacy for sexual orientation – inclusive (and,
later, gender identity – inclusive) hate crime laws took center stage.
One of the ambiguities of hate crime designations is proof of intent; lan-
guage tends to be the main determinant. Yet another factor is geography,
and how the location of violence, coupled with the identity of the accused,
might prove violence has been spurred by bias. As a result, hate crime desig-
nations are effectively in the position to label certain areas as “gay” and cer-
tain individuals as insiders or outsiders. Chapter 4 looks at how gay visibility
was cast as a goal and a risk of neighborhood growth, and how this dual set

INTRODUCTION  23 
of assumptions helped to define the essence of antigay violence as a crime.
This convergence of ideas was aided by two of the leading partnerships
formed by the lesbian and gay antiviolence movement in the 1980s: with
the National Organization for Victim Assistance and the Anti-­Defamation
League of B’nai B’rith. The former group helped to provide a framework
for understanding that the injury of the individual crime victim was also
an attack on a broader group, and the latter developed the model legisla-
tion for hate crime laws. It is also important to note that the antiviolence
movement’s collaboration with the Anti-­Defamation League occurred at the
same time that the league expanded its campaigns on college campuses to
assert that many emerging critiques of Zionism constituted anti-­Semitism.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s talking tours during these years
gestured at this link, citing as shared between gay and Jewish people the
experience of the Holocaust, life with invisible marginalized identities, and
the need for safety in protected territories. I analyze the implications of
these connections to the development of a national antiviolence movement.
Also central is the fact that although the first hate crime statutes man-
dated government documentation of bias, by the early 1990s the thrust had
shifted to the enhancement of punishment. Chapter 4 analyzes the signifi-
cance of empowering the state to arbitrate hate. By considering hate crime
laws as but one strategy of constructing uneven geographies, this chapter
forces discussions of violence in a culture of bias to include — in the plain-
est of terms — a history of real estate. The chapter ends in the early 1990s,
highlighting how the understanding of anti-­lgbt violence as first and fore-
most a crime had become so widespread as to be central to otherwise var-
ied political visions. Specifically, I look at the activities of groups spun off
from the organization Queer Nation that were modeling new patrols after
the Guardian Angels in the streets of gay enclaves and gentrifying counter­
cultural zones in San Francisco and New York (among other cities). I mark
here the founding of another safe streets patrol — the Christopher Street
Patrol — that remained active in New York’s Greenwich Village in the de-
cades to follow. Primarily run by residents and business associations, the
Christopher Street Patrol emerged as nonaffiliated yet often complementary
to activist-­oriented patrols like the Queer Nation – affiliated Pink Panthers.
Over the next decade the Christopher Street Patrol’s targets narrowed.
By 2000 Greenwich Village residents were making heated claims that social
service providers and nonresidents were to blame for residents’ low qual-
ity of life and lack of safety, and calling for police crackdowns on minor
infractions like noise and loitering. Those most targeted were lgbt youth
and transgender adult women, both of color — who saw gay enclaves as

24  INTRODUCTION
providing the safety of community and anonymity. But Greenwich Village
residents were not without opposition; chapter 5 looks at the challenges
put to them by activists associated with the group Fabulous Independent
Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (fierce). The 1990s saw
the founding of numerous community-­based organizations in the United
States dedicated to racial, sexual, economic, and gender justice that often
kept issues of violence and neighborhood at the top of their agendas. This
was also the period in which there was a substantial growth in transgender
activism, and the vulnerability of trans and gender nonconforming people
to violence became a major activist theme. Organizations such as the Audre
Lorde Project in New York and TransAction in San Francisco were initiated
in 1994 and 1997, respectively, just as the national antiviolence movement
was sharpening its focus on penalty-­oriented hate crime laws. In the early
2000s groups such as fierce, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Trans­
Justice Project of the Audre Lorde Project — all in New York — and, later, a
retooled Community United Against Violence in San Francisco, provided
alternatives to the dominant script of violence and safety circulating in the
mainstream movement. This chapter looks closely at fierce and its cam-
paigns in Greenwich Village, demonstrating how activists extended the
kinds of critiques of violence featured in chapter 3.
Chapter 5 also considers how fierce activists rewrote (and sustained)
many of the terms of urban reform that frame this book. Specifically, the
chapter places the debates between residents and activists over who can
make claims to Greenwich Village within a history of neighborhood-­based
governance. It demonstrates how the 1960s liberal reforms with which the
book opens can provide the very mechanisms through which marginal-
ized populations continue to be excluded from an increasingly privatized
urban landscape. I analyze this in the context of policy claims that gay
tolerance — presumably a measure of safety — increases the success of the
so-­called new (now old) economy in U.S. cities. Ultimately, I show that the
uneven value attributed to safety by activists and residents in Greenwich
Village underscores the tenuous, rather than commonplace, understand-
ing of violence and the unstable link between individual and group benefit
behind both hate crime laws and neoliberalism. In the book’s conclusion, I
examine how some of the primary themes of this book — place claiming and
uneven development, risk and speculation, social services and social move-
ments, vulnerability and visibility — continue to be mobilized together and
torn apart, and I speculate about how queer organizing that takes on the
terms of violence and safety might redefine those structures of injury and
belonging that I have traced.

INTRODUCTION  25 
Looking “Backward”
Although the book’s case studies unfold in chronological succession, they
were captured through a process of tracing history backward and of mark-
ing what some would deem to be backward or shameful history.94 My inter-
est in the topic first began with two small case studies of lesbian bars in
gentrifying neighborhoods — the first in San Francisco, in 1996; the second
in Brooklyn, New York, in 1999 — that were using the terms of safety to ad-
vocate for new development and policing, respectively. Several years later,
I again found myself in community meetings that were debating the same
issues in New York’s Greenwich Village. I set out to find the backstory, so to
speak, of these recurring conflicts. This investigation would send me on in-
numerable trips to archives to find the records of earlier activist campaigns.
These archives included collections at both New York City’s main public
library and its Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center;
crowded repositories of lesbian “herstory” and new transgender movement
artifacts in lived-­in homes from Brooklyn, New York, to Northampton, Mas-
sachusetts; established archives at New York University and Cornell Univer-
sity; early community archiving projects such as the June Mazer Lesbian Ar-
chives and one National Gay and Lesbian Archives, both in Los Angeles, and
the Rainbow History Project, in Washington, D.C.; the massive collections
of the San Francisco Public Library and that city’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender Historical Society; and the small holdings of nonprofits like
the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland, California, and those of
numerous individuals.95 Along the way, I interviewed Del Martin and Phyl-
lis Lyon, who founded the first lesbian organization in the United States;
gay safe streets activists from the 1970s, many of whom became leading
players in the fight against aids in the 1980s and 1990s; lesbian feminists
from the 1980s who have traveled down roads much wider than I could
have ever imagined; lgbt policy advocates from the 1990s who continue
their hard work in diverse milieus; and contemporary queer youth organiz-
ers who are, to this day, reinventing the politics of gender and sexuality. I
also had discussions with activists, archivists, nonprofit workers, and fellow
researchers — on phones, in homes, on panels, and on street corners — whose
stories enlivened the policy documents, correspondence, meeting minutes,
and other ephemera I found. Throughout this process, I would return to my
home in New York, attending rallies and direct actions and helping organiz-
ers carry bottles of water to youth-­run speak-­outs and protests.
When I began to write up this research, I found the following words I
had written in italics and set aside from my innumerable pages of notes
taken while I was in various archives: “There is no way to deny the intense

26  INTRODUCTION
emotional response of someone’s murder, their lover’s loss, a sense of community
injury. I’m trying to capture this feeling.” The desire to capture this feeling was
not because emotions were absent from my research process. More often
than not, feelings of anger and upset would alternate with those of excite-
ment and optimism as I moved between studying political cultures that I
found deeply troubling and those that I found incredibly meaningful (and,
of course, those that were not so simple to categorize). Rather, I wrote these
words because it had become easy to minimize the pain of individual vio-
lence while crafting a critique of what I often understood to be organized
retribution, and I needed to remember that these two things were not the
same. In refusing to write a singularly celebratory story of lgbt history, I
also wanted to resist a drive to shame those whose actions I might analyze
in ways different than they do.96
This is not only because of a desire to maintain empathy in the context
of study. Rather, many of the political actors I encountered were passionate
about the rights not only of lgbt people, but also of numerous individuals
at the dominant culture’s margins. Although this book sometimes differs
in its analysis of the consequences of certain movement actions, it does not
doubt the genuineness of activists’ individual intentions. It is thus neces-
sary to state clearly that this is not a history of individual activists per se,
but a historical study of collective, public action. I conducted original in-
terviews with twenty-­one individuals, and I draw on additional interviews
done by others.97 I use this material to highlight activists’ individual experi-
ences, which are often downplayed by the collective form of activism. But
those of us who have participated in social movements know that many
actions do not represent individual beliefs, and that in retrospect good ideas
can seem . . . well . . . less so.98 This is one of the risks of the model of par-
ticipatory democracy that most of the organizations I studied followed.99
Furthermore, I spoke with a broad political spectrum of individuals whose
interpretations of events — let alone memories of them — can diverge and
have changed. For all of these reasons and more, the majority of my nar-
rative is culled from archived documents and ephemera, as I focus my lens
on actions, mission statements, meeting minutes, correspondence, strategy
sessions, manifestos, and policy reports.100 That noted, in those cases in
which there is an absence of accessible written materials, I rely more heav-
ily on interviews, including activists’ narration of their own private col-
lections.101 In sum, this book hopes to avoid an approach that flattens the
dynamic struggles of movement actors and that takes frozen targets out
of context, while also contending that a focus on the individual activist’s
intention too can provide for a limited reading. And, importantly, I want to
note that many of the people I interviewed have since died and others fight

INTRODUCTION  27 
in political struggles with marginal support every day.102 They plan actions
with limited resources, and they do not always get the opportunity to debate
analyses with each other, let alone with academic audiences.
The method I adopt also extends into the final chapter, which features
political campaigns that are still ongoing. In 2003, while a graduate student,
I affiliated with fierce as an “ally,” meaning someone who is supportive
of the group’s aims but not a member of its named constituency — in this
instance, queer youth of color. My role mostly involved administrative sup-
port in the office and logistical assistance at events, which were useful tasks
for someone with the skills and schedule of a full-­time student. I also par-
ticipated in the planning (mostly silently) and execution (often loudly) of
rallies, marches, and other actions. But I did not do a sustained study of
the organization and its members. Furthermore, the organization assigned
me, in my role as ally, the task of speaking to other researchers about how
we might work to support rather than only advise or study the group. As a
result, this final chapter is based in a combination of observations I made at
public protests as well as public meetings hosted by residents and business
owners (with and without the presence of fierce), in addition to municipal
documents, journalistic coverage, and interviews, many conducted years
after I was most actively involved with the organization.103 I also draw from
the extensive written and visual materials produced by fierce. Thus, this
chapter, like the others, does not seek to be a representative look at the lives
of those creating political arguments in the West Village but, rather, a study
of how those arguments took shape in the public sphere.104

Violence, Safety, and Risk

This book is fundamentally concerned with the tricky character of both
queer and left politics and, especially, the messy places in which they meet.
The liberal state has denied homosexuals some of what full citizenship im-
plicitly promises, and for many activists otherwise committed to a leftist
critique the terms of equality have been hard to refuse.105 In turn, leftists
have not in general incorporated a critique of normalization and of the fam-
ily and have, as a result, supported liberal gay agendas despite the contradic-
tions they represent to anticapitalist analyses.106 Moreover, the assault since
the 1970s on the institutions central to liberal democracy have been joined
by the rise of what Wendy Brown, among others, calls “neoliberal rational-
ity,” with its voracious appetite for “all aspects of social, cultural and politi-
cal life.”107 One outcome is that lgbt and queer leftist visions vary widely
between seeing liberal political reforms such as rights or social welfare pro-
grams as complicit with neoliberal agendas or as something that must be

28  INTRODUCTION
saved. This also underscores the fact that the supposed line that marks what
is included in the category of neoliberalism cannot be drawn so neatly. A key
theme of this book, then, is to trace the transformation of liberal politics as
they have found expression in lgbt/queer social movements. I begin with a
look at the influence of racial liberalism on homophile advocacy in the 1960s
and the emergence of militant gay liberalism in the 1970s; I also examine
how lgbt politics transformed itself, and was challenged, first in the con-
text of Reaganism and later in the current security era.
Political responses to violence are particularly difficult here because, as
Frantz Fanon and others have noted, violence is the means by which power
is often both asserted and resisted.108 And because of violence’s ability to
undo a person, the response to violence can often cloud its scenes of ad-
dress. In this book, I do not theorize the paired concepts of violence and
safety as much as I trace their variable use. That said, I strive to be consis-
tent, but the contradictory mentions of these terms in other sources means
that I am at times precise and at others admittedly vague. In general, I use
violence for acts that cause immediate bodily harm. lgbt antiviolence activ-
ist discourse frequently folds hateful language into its definitions of hateful
violence or recasts both under the general category of victimization. When
discussing such examples, I try to parse language from physical acts without
denying either the fact that a verbal threat can be the first stage of physi-
cal violence or the injurious power of words. To not acknowledge the latter
would be to accept the dominant epistemology that constructs the psyche
and the body as separate, even opposite, affects. Furthermore, the logic of
cause and effect, a product of this same worldview, has itself shown that
emotional harm can lead to bodily disintegration; thus, to imagine the dis-
tinction between immediate and delayed harm is significant is to forget that
time is but a constructed relation. In addition, the structure of language is
itself part of the administration of knowledge and power. All that noted,
in order to effectively show how different activisms have built their argu-
ments, these distinctions are helpful. In addition, while the aggregation and
disaggregation of data that claim to distinguish among categories of injury
is more often than not the ruse of statistics, I want to avoid leveling particu-
lar harms into universalized claims of shared vulnerability.
My use of the term state violence is similarly both straightforward and
complicated. I use it to mark the routineness of police and prison brutality
as well as the fact of incarceration through the circuit that runs from the law
to policing to imprisonment. The inclusion of law and incarceration might
confuse some readers, since both are within the terms of the state’s social
contract and many of my other examples of violence point to acts outside
those terms. I say many here, since much violence is tacitly accepted; for

INTRODUCTION  29 
violence to count as violence against a person, those bodies must be under-
stood as belonging to humans, and we cannot assume that all people are
granted their humanity. And the immediate enforced immobility and stolen
bodily autonomy involved in arrest and caging cannot be made null by argu-
ing that it is justified, for that is to accept the belief that crime categories
and the idea of crime itself are just.109 Finally, I describe racism and poverty
(together and separately) as premised in the promise of injury. Most ef-
fective is Gilmore’s definition of racism: that which puts certain groups at
greater “vulnerability to premature death.”110 Vulnerability to death that is
premature but not always immediate is a much better way to get at exploi-
tation and harm and its temporal features than the word violence alone;
nonetheless, I often do refer to these structures as violence.
Safety, and by extension safe space, are even trickier concepts. James
Baldwin often spoke about safety and its status as an “illusion” on which
the dominant society depends.111 I, too, am not convinced that safety or
safe space in their most popular usages can or even should exist. Safety
is commonly imagined as a condition of no challenge or stakes, a state of
being that might be best described as protectionist (or, perhaps, isolation-
ist). This is not to say that the ideal of finding or developing environments
in which one might be free of violence should not be a goal. Most libera-
tion movements call for freedom from such exploitations of power, and
Baldwin saw the role of the artist as one who must “disturb the peace.”112
Ultimately, I argue that the quest for safety that is collective rather than
individualized requires an analysis of who or what constitutes a threat and
why, and a recognition that those forces maintain their might by being in
flux. And among the most transformative visions are those driven less by a
fixed goal of safety than by the admittedly abstract concept of freedom. This
is all, I might add, to say nothing about the benefits or limits of a stance of
nonviolence.113
Safety is a key term in lgbt politics, colloquially as well as in political
organizing and social service provision. At many colleges and universities
the mere words safe space on a sticker on a door may signal that those inside
are sympathetic to lgbt students without naming those very identities.
And then there is safe sex: some public health advocates like to clarify the
point that no sex is without risk and thus prefer the term safer sex.114 Yet this
nomenclature does not displace the idealization of safety; for sexual conser-
vatives, it can translate into a call for abstinence (the only truly safe sex is
no sex); for sex-­positive activists, as they are often called, sex is then cast
as a project of risk management.115 Tim Dean takes on the politics of risk
as it relates to hiv as part of a broader cultural “imperative of health” that
finds its roots in a moral discourse of responsibility over oneself. Moreover,

30  INTRODUCTION
as Dean argues, the elaboration of scientific knowledge has “not produced a
greater sense of security but, on the contrary, a heightened sense of risk.”116
Today, life in the so-­called West is full of risk; as Anthony Giddens puts it,
there have long been hazards, but this “is a society increasingly preoccupied
with the future (and also with safety) which generates the notion of risk.”117
At the same time, risks as dangers are more and more uneven in their dis-
tribution.118 One result is that individuals are asked to manage their own
risks while relying on the rule of the expert to determine what is a threat.
The call for self-­control and deference to the sciences of social explana-
tion must be considered alongside another use of risk: as the central term
for economic regimes that have led to the financialization of everyday life.119
Here risk taking is both celebrated and stigmatized: you are either a success-
ful speculator or a stupid spender. (Take, for example, the narrative of the
mortgage crisis in which the deregulation that fostered wild market spec-
ulation, that in turn inflated the housing market bubble, is cast as a lost
gamble, while those people who were sold subprime mortgages and later
lost their homes to foreclosure are represented as having made irresponsible
purchases.) As a result, marking the queerness of risk taking is difficult. Is
it displacing the very idea of risk by dispensing with the idealization of fu-
turity or safety? Or is it embracing risk so as to reap speculative rewards?120
Given all this, a central contention of this book is that violence and safety
have been the not-­always-­spoken-­about yet defining motors of mainstream
lgbt political life since the 1970s. Paralleling the approach of this book,
this claim is based in history and in theory. First, as I show in chapters 2
and 4, the antiviolence movement was the first model of gay activism to
receive public and corporate monies, and it was following these initiatives
that other forms of lgbt politics entered the streams of nonprofit and pri-
vate funding.121 Second, throughout this book I outline how the threat of
violence has functioned as a sort of moral bookend to queer deviancy that
promises redemption, if only for some. The dual insistences that the les-
bian or gay man is not the criminal and that antigay violence is the act of
the criminal have largely succeeded in making lesbians and gay men not
otherwise associated with criminality into legitimate subjects, although it
has not removed the threat of violence for many people who identify as
gay or who participate in same-­sex sexuality.122 I exclude transgender here
since those so identified have not achieved the same legitimacy; nonethe-
less, trans­gender activism too can claim a totalizing experience of abjection
and violation, with similar if not parallel political results.123
The resorting of criminality has happened while leaving intact its at-
tendant categories and geographies, in particular those defined by race and
class. The result is to quite literally secure the definition of lesbian and gay

INTRODUCTION  31 
as those threatened by illegitimate violence and to find solution in risk ne-
gotiations: as calls for self-­regulation, scientific experts, and open financial
markets. Furthermore, the assessment of rational choice has been central
to liberalism’s individualism and profit motive. Thus, of central impor-
tance to this book is the argument that lgbt political goals based on the
terms of protection and safety are inextricable from spatial development
and crime control strategies in which U.S. urban regions have played a lead-
ing role. This is not to suggest that gay identity per se is complicit with
urban-­centered capital accumulation and criminalization — here it is worth
remembering that D’Emilio’s field-­defining argument about the industrial
city and gay possibility concludes with a socialist feminist vision — but that
political goals that call for these forms of state protection must be under-
stood at least in part as expressions of the risk management that is central
to those processes.124
The dynamics of risk are also why the comparison to aids activism is so
useful. In the late 1980s and 1990s many chapters of the aids Coalition to
Unleash Power (act up) focused on vulnerability, by highlighting whose
bodies were vulnerable to the vagaries of the medical establishment and fed-
eral policy but also by using the vulnerability of their own bodies in dramatic
direct actions. Of course, vulnerability can be used as another word for risk,
but it doesn’t have the same link to probability and thus statistics. Judith
Butler has argued that being human involves a primary vulnerability — one
present even before individuation — and so the recognition of vulnerability
might, in a way, be an acknowledgment of one’s status as human.125 act up’s
die-­ins, in which activists lay as if dead in public streets, or their political
funerals, in which the bodies of recently passed loved ones were brought to
protests in caskets, could be seen as making a demand for such a recogni-
tion. Butler argues that in critiquing humanism, one need not dismiss the
question of who is made human; yet the example of act up also raises the
question of how those excluded from the category might make a variety of
political claims that exceed the limited terms of recognition.126
The issue of recognition is important, though, because the majority of
people who are most vulnerable to violence are not held up by policymakers,
lgbt organizations, or even queer collectives. Furthermore, the experience
of violence is often invoked as an equalizing mode of identification even as
different lgbt people are made more or less vulnerable to it. And the it of
violence remains an amorphous category, the definition of which may, in
turn, define who is included in lgbt.127 In an early interview, Butler praised
act up’s die-­in model as resisting a kind of easy legibility: “The act posed a
set of questions without giving you the tools to read off the answers.”128 In
the context of antiviolence organizing, contemporary grassroots organiza-

32  INTRODUCTION
tions continue to try to create alternative systems of protection, but they
often struggle to understand vulnerability in ways that neither flatten dif-
ference nor rely on the impulse toward knowable identity. In other words,
the solidarity of a more inclusive we may collapse important differences
when the act of naming identity as contingent is done only to reorganize it,
or when the celebration of actions demeaned as inchoate transforms them
into types of affirmation that are just as distancing.
To turn one more time to Baldwin: “Any real change implies the break
up of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an
identity, the end of safety.”129 I must repeat that this is not a book about
the history of violence against lgbt or a range of other sex/gender non-
conforming or nonnormative people, on the street or by the state. I do not
restage scenes of brutality experienced in schools, homes, workplaces, and
other institutions, or on street corners. But it is through the effort to write
a history of activism and not an account of violation that I strive to con-
tribute to broad-­based efforts to make the operations of violence legible for
critique, without fixing those whom violence targets.130 And I consider that
which is driven by the confident promise of what is simply not yet.131

INTRODUCTION  33 
NOTES

Introduction
1. Christopher Park is in the area also known as Sheridan Square; it is located in the
triangle created by Christopher Street, West 4th Street, and Grove Street, just off 7th
Avenue.
2. The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village during the 1960s. In
the early morning of June 28, 1969, its patrons challenged a police raid — then a routine
feature of gay bar life — and a series of riots ensued. Scholars and activists debate who
was at the center of the uprisings, varying in their assessment of the participation of
gay men, transgender people, street youth, and lesbians, as well as their calculations of
how many were people of color. The elision of people of color, women, and the gender
nonconforming from the story of Stonewall is often cited to support arguments that
those at the center of the now mythical riot have been left out of the consolidation of
a mainstream movement. For different versions of the riots, see Donn Teal, The Gay
Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969 – 1971 (1971; New York: St. Martin’s,
1995); Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981);
John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minor­
ity in the United States, 1940 – 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Mar-
tin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1993); David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots
that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004). For discussions of the
treatment of Stonewall as myth, see Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History,
Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John D’Emilio,
“Stonewall: Myth and Meaning,” in John D’Emilio, The World Turned: Essays on Gay His­
tory, Politics, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 146 – 53; Elizabeth A.
Armstrong and Susanna M. Crage, “Meaning and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall
Myth,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 7 (2006): 724 – 51.
3. This section is based on field notes I took at the event as well as media coverage.
The rally has been also cited in publications about the activist group Fabulous Indepen-
dent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment, known as fierce (Justin Anton
Rosado, “Corroding Our Quality of Life,” in That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resist­
ing Assimilation, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore [New York: Soft Scull, 2004], 299);
youth organizing (Daniel Martinez HoSang, “Beyond Policy: Ideology, Race and the
Reimagining of Youth,” in Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change, ed.
Shawn Ginwright, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota [New York: Routledge, 2006],
13); transgender identity (David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a
Category [Durham: Duke University Press, 2007], 196 – 200); and young gay men of color
in New York (Kai Wright, Drifting toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on
the Streets of New York [Boston: Beacon, 2008], 215).
4. For a history of quality-­of-­life policing in New York, see Tanya Erzen, “Turnstile
Jumpers and Broken Windows: Policing Disorder in New York City,” in Zero Tolerance:
Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, ed. Andrea McArdle and
Tanya Erzen (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 19 – 49.
5. The West Village is part of the greater Greenwich Village neighborhood and most
often defined as the area bounded by 6th Avenue to the east, the Hudson River to the
west, 14th Street to the north, and Houston Street to the south.
6. “Notice of Public Hearing: Take Back Our Streets,” City of New York, Community
Board 2 Manhattan, undated document with fax stamp indicating that it was sent from
Community Board 2’s office on April 24, 2002. In author’s possession; also on file at
Community Board 2, New York.
7. Wendy Dixon, “Alice Certainly Doesn’t Live Here,” Greenwich Village Block Asso­
ciation News, Summer 2002, 3, http://www.gvba.org/PDFs/GVBANewspdfs/GVBAnews
_summer_02.pdf.
8. Albert Amateau, “Queer Youth and Residents Still at Odds on Park Use,” Villager,
December 14 – 20, 2005.
9. In this book, I use lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer for those who so
identify. Often, I use nonnormative or nonconforming to refer to those whose identities
or practices place them outside of dominant categories of sexuality or gender but who
may or may not identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (historically or in
the present context). I use queer and trans and, more rarely, sexual or gender minority,
for this same purpose. Relatedly, I use both African American and black. In general, I
use African American to refer to U.S.-­born people of African descent, and I use black to
signal a broader category that is also more inclusive of new immigrant communities;
nonetheless, since these two identities frequently overlap, I often use the two terms
interchangeably. Similarly, I use Puerto Rican and Latino. Although black is not exclusive
of these categories, nor they of each other, I often repeat terms for specificity. Thus,
I repeat general categories that also intersect; for example, women and people of color
or lesbians and transgender people. There are limits to generalization and to specificity:
for example, the phrase women and people of color may seem to omit the recognition of
women of color, but to add women of color to the list is not only redundant but enforces
their exclusion from either category. Similarly, the phrase lesbians and transgender women
may seem to ignore the fact that some lesbians are transgender women, but to specify
transgender lesbians may stigmatize transgender women as a separate category of les-
bian. In other words, combinations can naturalize exclusions even when done for the
goal of inclusion. I aim for complexity and inclusivity while using the clearest language
possible.
10. For a discussion of queer life on the piers, see Rosado, “Corroding Our Quality
of Life”; Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in
the Global City,” Social Text 23, nos. 3 – 4 (2005): 141 – 55. A history is also provided by
the documentary Fenced Out! produced and directed by fierce, Paper Tiger Television,
and the New Neutral Zone (2001). For a study of house ball culture in New York and its
move from Washington Square Park to the piers, see Frank Leon Roberts, “ ‘ There’s No

234  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Place Like Home’: A History of Butch Queens, Femme Queens, and House Ball Culture,”
Wiretap, June 6, 2007, http://wiretapmag.org/stories/43120/.
11. In both the 2000 and 2010 censuses, Newark was majority black (53.5 percent
in 2000, 52.4 percent in 2010). Jersey City’s single largest racial group was white ( 34.1
percent in 2000, 32.7 percent in 2010), but its combined black population (28.3 percent
in 2000, 25.9 percent in 2010) and Hispanic/Latino of any race population (28.3 percent
in 2000, 27.6 percent in 2010) together composed a majority.
12. Many residents joined the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation to
oppose a plan for a new path exit, citing its potential damage to the Stonewall Historic
District — which surrounds the Stonewall bar and Christopher Park and was granted Na-
tional Historic Landmark status in 1999. See the aptly titled article by Margery Reifler,
“Village Alert — PATHology,” Greenwich Village Block Association News, Summer 2002, 2,
http://www.gvba.org/PDFs/GVBANewspdfs/GVBAnews_summer_02.pdf.
13. Quoted in Duncan Osborne, “Piers Fears Go Racial: With No Christopher Street
Solution, Community Board Faults lgbt Youth of Color,” Gay City News, March 9 – 15,
2006.
14. A small sample of articles from the first decade of the 2000s includes Osborne,
“Piers Fears Go Racial”; Robert F. Worth, “Tolerance in Village Wears Thin,” New York
Times, January 19, 2001; Richard Goldstein, “Street Hassle: New Skool versus Old School
in Greenwich Village,” Village Voice, April 24 – 30, 2002; Mike Lavers, “Gay Youth Oppose
Police in Village,” New York Blade, October 22, 2004; Kristen Lombardi, “Gay and Loud:
The New Battle over Queer Kids’ Ruckus in Greenwich Village,” Village Voice, March 14,
2006; Laurie Mittelmann, “Bagel Man Battles Hookers, but Needs a Hole Lot of Help,”
Villager, July 23 – 29, 2008.
15. Although this book does not explicitly trace the emergence and circulation of
the term safe space since the 1960s, it attempts to mark some of its varied appearances.
16. One might also say that Stonewall took their money; Stonewall’s open-­door
policy might be considered as much an act of Mafia-­sponsored profiteering as one of
benevolence. For the role of the Mafia at Stonewall, see Carter, Stonewall, esp. 80 – 84.
17. Carter, Stonewall; Duberman, Stonewall.
18. Quoted in Duberman, Stonewall, 207, and Carter, Stonewall, 196. Teal also re-
ports gay and straight Villagers’ complaints about “homosexual ruffians.” In addition, he
shows how this issue was taken up in other cities and by varied political sensibilities — 
for example, the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front issued warnings in 1970 that “Resi-
dents Have the Right to Sleep and You Have the Right to Cruise! Cruise Early or on
Business Streets!” as a way to avoid the vice squad (The Gay Militants, 185).
19. Terence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York’s Gay Liberation
Front, 1969 – 1971,” Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 104 – 35.
20. Lincoln Anderson, “Potatoes to Pizza: Complaint-­Plagued Bar Is No More,” Vil­
lager, January 28 – February 3, 2004. In a piece about its opening, Bar Nocetti is de-
scribed as run by a network of Italian neighborhood residents who “transform[ed] what
used to be a transvestite burlesque club into a place of their own” (Robin Raisfeld and
Rob Patronite, “Village People . . . Later, Gator . . . Navigating Little Italy,” New York
Magazine, March 1, 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/food/openings/n_9918/).
21. See William Eskridge, Gay Law: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Clare Sears, “Electric Brilliancy: Cross-­Dressing
Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-­Century San Francisco,” Women Studies
Quarterly 36, nos. 3 – 4 (2008): 170 – 87. It bears repeating that this targeting was not
evenly experienced across race, class, and gender lines. For example, George Chauncey

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  235 

describes gay men’s unequal vulnerability to policing in early twentieth-­century New
York City (Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World,
1890 – 1940 [New York: Basic Books, 1994]).
22. That said, Stonewall was not the most popular bar for African American and
Puerto Rican trans women who exchanged sex for money; that economic activity was
centered in Times Square (Duberman, Stonewall, 181 – 83).
23. The most famous early case is that of Dale Jennings, who was arrested in 1952
for soliciting homosexual sex and then challenged these charges with the backing of the
Mattachine Society. For a detailed analysis of this case, see Emily Hobson, “Policing Gay
L.A.: Mapping Racial Divides in the Homophile Era, 1950 – 1967,” in The Rising Tide of
Color: Race, Radicalism, and Repression on the Pacific Coast and Beyond, ed. Moon-­Ho Jung
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming). It is also discussed in D’Emilio,
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, and Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.:
A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic, 2006).
24. A recent example is the Crimes against Nature by Solicitation statute in New
Orleans that had required those convicted of exchanging (only) oral and anal sex for
money to register as sex offenders (see Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock,
Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of lgbt People in the United States [Boston: Beacon,
2011], 157); it was later successfully challenged in court. For other examples, see Michael
Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free
Press, 1999); Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “It’s War in Here: A Report on the Treatment
of Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons,” 2007, http://srlp
.org/files/warinhere.pdf; Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “Tips for Trans People Dealing with
Cops,” http://archive.srlp.org/node/382. Here it is worth noting that even legal gains
can have limited benefits. For example, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558) overturned sodomy laws, essentially decriminalizing
same-­sex sexual activity. But as Teemu Ruskola and David Eng both argue, this decision
emphasized the protection of privacy and still left many queer acts subject to regulation
and disapprobation. See Teemu Ruskola, “Gay Rights versus Queer Theory,” Social Text
23, nos. 3 – 4 (2005): 235 – 49; David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the
Racialization of Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
25. Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of
Delinquent Gangs (New York: Free Press, 1960).
26. For a discussion of Mobilization for Youth and the War on Poverty, see Noel A.
Cazenave, Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community
Action Programs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Alyosha Goldstein,
Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2012).
27. See Erzen, “Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Windows”; Henry A. Giroux, “Racial
Injustice and Disposable Youth in the Age of Zero Tolerance,” Qualitative Studies in Edu­
cation 16, no. 4 (2003): 553 – 65.
28. See Melinda Miceli, Standing Out, Standing Together: The Social and Political Impact
of Gay-­Straight Alliances (New York: Routledge, 2005); Sarah Mountz, “Revolving Doors:
lgbtq Youth at the Interface of the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Systems,” lgbtq
Policy Journal, 2011, http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k78405&pageid=icb
.page414421.
29. For a longer history of gay Greenwich Village, see Chauncey, Gay New York.
30. In 1995 the New York City Council approved a zoning amendment initiated by
Giuliani that redefined and limited the siting of adult businesses. For an analysis of the

236  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

impacts of this amendment, see Warner, The Trouble with Normal; Samuel R. Delany,
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Dan-
gerous Bedfellows Collective, Policing Public Sex (Boston: South End, 1996).
31. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passé,” New York
Times, October 30, 2007. The quote is from real estate broker Wes Freas. For an analysis
of the decline of gay neighborhoods and the rise of “post-­gay” identities, see Amin Gha-
ziani, “There Goes the Gayborhood?,” Contexts 9, no. 3 (2010): 64 – 66.
32. The Rainbow Pilgrimage is described on the NYC.com website at http://www
.nyc.com/visitor_guide/the_rainbow_pilgrimage.75900/editorial_review.aspx. Also see
Sewell Chan, “Stonewall Uprising Given Role in Tourism Campaign,” New York Times,
April 7, 2009.
33. In Imagining Transgender, Valentine also notes that those opposing the 2002 Take
Back Our Streets rally saw residents as “representative of a white, middle-­class gay and
lesbian elite” (196). Valentine argues that the activist response to residents — specifi-
cally, the call for “transgender inclusion” (199) —  risked sidestepping other issues coded
in residents’ complaints, in particular race and class. Valentine cites this as an example
of the limits of a discourse based in “inclusion” and “diversity,” whether that is the claim
of residents that they are inclusive and that they value diversity or the argument of
activists demanding more inclusivity or diversity — because both approaches ultimately
parse and contain identities rather than challenge social structures. I agree with Valen-
tine’s argument here, and much of the project of this book is to ask how the landscape of
lgbt politics has come to be as he describes it. But, as Valentine notes, certain contexts
can dilute complex arguments. I argue that a rally can be one such site, and that rallies
are best analyzed as parts of ongoing campaigns. In the case of the 2002 rally, a variety
of people showed up, many of whose signs and chants did narrow the field of critique.
But for organizations such as fierce, this was just one event in an ongoing campaign
against the privatization of space and criminalization, and not only a call for the inclu-
sion of youth and transgender women of color in the West Village. That said, Valentine’s
observations — and my own example — point to the tricky ways in which liberal politics
can treat identities as discrete and then fail to recognize other hierarchies of power in
operation (195 – 203).
34. In the documentary Fenced Out! the late activist Sylvia Rivera recalls an era in
which white gay men enjoyed public sex along the waterfront and “Christopher Street
was their playground.” She concludes: “For them to turn the tides around on the people
of color and trans community now in the year 2001, thirty-­two years after Stonewall . . .
I find it completely unacceptable.”
35. See David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi, eds., Cities under Siege: An Anatomy of the
Ghetto Riots, 1964 – 1968 (New York: Basic Books, 1971); John Mollenkopf, The Contested
City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Roger Friedland, Power and Crisis in
the City (London: Schocken, 1983); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race
and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); George
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Poli­
tics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Rhonda Williams, The Politics of Public
Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oak­
land (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Christopher Rhomberg, No There
There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004); Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America
(New York: New York University Press, 2007). On mobility rights in disability, see

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  237 

Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity
to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
36. For a broad range of perspectives in addition to those cited above, see Thomas E.
Cronin, Tania Z. Cronin, and Michael E. Milakovich, U.S. v. Crime in the Streets (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Wesley Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and
the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990); Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and
Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Elizabeth A. Stanko, “Women,
Crime, and Fear,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 539 (May
1995): 46 – 58; Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary
American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Elizabeth A. Stanko, “Vic-
tims r us: The Life History of ‘Fear of Crime’ and the Politicisation of Violence,” in
Crime, Risk and Insecurity: Law and Order in Everyday Life and Political Discourse, ed. Tim
Hope and Richard Sparks (London: Routledge, 2000), 13 – 30; Michael Flamm, Law and
Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2005).
37. But a few examples include D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; Fader-
man and Timmons, Gay L.A.; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin, 1994).
Other examples are provided in later chapters.
38. See Gregory M. Herek and Kevin T. Berrill, eds., Hate Crimes: Confronting Vio­
lence against Lesbians and Gay Men (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); Valerie Jenness and
Kendal Broad, Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence (New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1997); David M. Wertheimer, “The Emergence of a Gay and Lesbian
Antiviolence Movement,” in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights,
ed. John D’Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000),
261 – 79; Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet, Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement
to Law Enforcement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).
39. New work in sociology has analyzed the strategies and ideologies of local and
national lgbt movement building that includes antiviolence but does not focus on it.
See Tina Fetner, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jane Ward, Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture
in lgbt Activist Organizations (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008); Amin
Ghaziani, The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay
Marches on Washington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Deborah B. Gould,
Moving Politics: Emotion and act up’s Fight against aids (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009). An earlier example is Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Orga­
nizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950 – 1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
40. For some excellent examples among many, see Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Wendy Brown, States of Injury:
Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ja-
net E. Halley and Wendy Brown, eds., Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2002); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004); Siobhan B.
Somerville, “Queer Loving,” glq 11, no. 3 (2005): 355 – 70; Eng, The Feeling of Kinship;
Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011). There is also a new generation of activist-­oriented scholarship
that has highlighted the complicities between lgbt social movements and law-­and-­
order politics by critiquing the emphasis of present-­day mainstream lgbt organiza-
tions on policy-­based solutions rooted in inclusion. Examples include Ryan Conrad, ed.,

238  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, with an introduction by Yasmin Nair
(Lewiston, ME: Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010); Dean Spade, Normal Life:
Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law (Brooklyn, NY:
South End, 2011); Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment
and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: ak, 2011); Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock,
Queer (In)Justice.
41. On thick description, see Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Inter-
pretive Theory of Culture,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3 – 32. For examples of scholarship that analyze
the dynamics of sexuality, space, social movements, and violence in variable combina-
tions, see John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999); Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay
Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Nayan Shah, Contagious Di­
vides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Pub­
lic Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Manalansan, “Race, Violence, and
Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City”; Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and
Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005);
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New
York University Press, 2006); Valentine, Imagining Transgender; Regina Kunzel, Criminal
Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2008); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality,
and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
42. David Harvey specifically discusses the decline of “embedded liberalism” after the
1970s in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
43. Here it is important to note that although neoliberalism casts itself as a pure
free market, its realization depends on the state’s participation in fostering the condi-
tions for private profit. On the neoliberal city, see Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City:
Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2006); Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, eds. Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restruc­
turing in North America and Western Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
44. My use of the term central city can be confusing since it can refer to major cities
within metropolitan regions or to central business districts or to what is often called
the inner city; furthermore, the first chapter of this book is about a San Francisco area
referred to as the Central City. I tend to avoid inner city, which carries a more deroga-
tory connotation and does not adequately cover the range, and changing dynamics, of
the areas I describe. Thus I use central city as my general term and use other language
to specify a given area’s features.
45. On the 1970s, see David Rothenberg, “Can Gays Save New York City?,” Christo­
pher Street, September 1977, 6 – 10, and Manuel Castells, “City and Culture: The San Fran-
cisco Experience,” in Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-­Cultural Theory
of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 97 – 172. In
the article “Can Gays Save New York City?” the author writes, “How many neighbor-
hoods in Manhattan would be slums by now had gay singles and couples not moved in
and helped maintain and upgrade them? A thriving Manhattan-­based gay community
has become necessary to New York City’s survival” (9). The cover of the magazine that
month features the title of the article above a photograph of two white gay men with
mustaches, their arms encircling an image of lower Manhattan. On the late 1990s and
early 2000s, see Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It’s Transform­

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  239 

ing Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). It is
interesting to note that in the 1970s, researchers and popular commentators used the
same terms that Florida would years later, highlighting the “creativity” of gay men as a
positive factor in the new economy. See, for example, “Out & Around: Brownstoning,”
Christopher Street, August 1976, 3 – 5.
46. Following Jasbir Puar’s writings on homonationalism, this is one example of how
certain lesbian and gay subjects are constituted as life giving within dominant national
cultures (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times [Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2007]). Jin Haritaworn has recently elaborated on this connection in the
essay “Colorful Bodies in the Multikulti Metropolis: Vitality, Victimology and Transgres-
sive Citizenship in Berlin,” in Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of
Transition, ed. Trystan Cotton (New York: Routledge, 2012), 11 – 31. Haritaworn’s essay
analyzes the travels of hate crime discourse within Europe via a case study of Berlin; also
see Jin Haritaworn, “Queer Injuries: The Racial Politics of ‘Homophobic Hate Crime’ in
Germany,” Social Justice 37, no. 1 (2010 – 11): 69 – 87.
47. For a helpful analysis of the politics of sexuality and risk under neoliberal re-
gimes, see Geeta Patel, “Risky Subjects: Insurance, Sexuality, and Capital,” Social Text
24, no. 4 (2006): 25 – 65.
48. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 36.
49. Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-­Urbanism (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 16.
50. On metronormativity and queer cosmopolitanism, see also Karen Tongson, Relo­
cations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
51. I want to note that two other people, Philip DeVine and Lisa Lambert, were mur-
dered alongside Brandon Teena, a fact often obscured in the coverage and representa-
tion of the event.
52. For an early example of activist concern about rural violence, see National Gay
Task Force Press Release, “Brydon Expressed ngtf Concern for Rural Gays at Confer-
ence in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,” May 2, 1979, Box 36, Folder 118, National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force Records (Collection 7301), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collec-
tions, Kroch Library, Cornell University.
53. For an analysis of the response to the murder of Matthew Shepard based on the
politics of place, violence, and masculinity, see JoAnn Wypijewski, “A Boy’s Life: For
Matthew Shepard’s Killers, What Does It Take to Pass as a Man?,” Harper’s, September
1999, 61 – 74.
54. Mary Gray examines the relationship between rural lgbt politics and national
agendas in Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New
York: New York University Press, 2009). For other analyses of rural, noncoastal, and/or
small-­city models of lgbt activism, also see Lisa Duggan, “What’s Right with Utah,” Na­
tion, July 13, 2009, http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-­right-­utah; Mab Segrest,
Memoir of a Race Traitor (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1994).
55. In a conversation, Mab Segrest helpfully reminded me that rural activism in
the South during the 1980s and 1990s often merged anti-­lgbt violence activism with
movements against racist violence and thus led to different models. Organizations like
Southerners on New Ground have often sidestepped the logics of the national lgbt
movement. See also Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor.
56. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the At­
tack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2004). In a footnote to “Sex in Public” (n2), Lauren
Berlant and Michael Warner defined heteronormativity as follows: “By heteronormativ-

240  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

ity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations
that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent — that is, organized as a sexuality — 
but also privileged. . . . It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body
of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations — 
often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. . . . Because homosexual-
ity can never have the invisible, tacit, society-­founding rightness that heterosexuality
has, it would not be possible to speak of ‘homonormativity’ in the same sense” (Critical
Inquiry 24, no. 2 [1998]: 548). For Duggan, “the new homonormativity” is “a politics that
does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds
and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency
and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption”
(The Twilight of Equality?, 50). There has been a proliferation of overlapping yet distinct
terms to describe the imbrication of the lgbt/queer and neo/liberal. This includes the
concept of “virtual equality” (Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay
and Lesbian Liberation [New York: Anchor, 1995]); the reference to a “virtual gay move-
ment” (Michael Warner, “We’re Queer, Remember?,” Advocate, September 30, 1997,
7); the description of “selling out” (Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian
Movement Goes to Market [New York: St. Martin’s, 2000]; the construction of a “Gay
International” (Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007]); the function of “gay imperialism” (Jin Haritaworn, with Tamsila Tauqir and Esra
Erdem, “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror,’ ” in
Out of Place, ed. Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake [York, UK: Raw Nerve Books,
2008], 71 – 95); the theory of “queer white patriarchy” (Heidi J. Nast, “Queer Patriar-
chies, Queer Racisms, International,” Antipode 34, no. 5 [2002]: 881]); the variant uses
of “queer liberalism” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Eng, The Feeling of Kinship), and the
concept of “homonationalism” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages). Here it is worth noting that
some of these terms signal a precise political ideology or program that might be adopted
or dispensed with, while others (such as homonationalism) seek to emphasize a shared
logic or condition of possibility. Finally, I want to highlight that one of Duggan’s defin-
ing examples of homonormativity is drawn from the antiviolence movement: in 2001,
the National Coalition of Anti-­Violence Programs protested antigay graffiti on a bomb
destined for Afghanistan without noting the violence promised by the bomb itself (46).
57. Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; Susan Stryker, Transgender
History (Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2008). For additional examples of early acts of informal
defiance, such as in Philadelphia, see Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves; and Arm-
strong and Crage, “Meaning and Memory.”
58. In Fenced Out! the late activist Regina Shavers summarized the approach she and
fellow lesbians of color were forced to adopt in response to harassment and violence
in the streets of New York during the 1950s and 1960s: “We kicked their fucking ass.”
59. Julie Abraham, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For other discussions of the flâneur, see Sally
Munt, Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (London: Cassell, 1998); Diane
Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
60. John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics
of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100 – 113.
61. Chauncey, Gay New York, 131.
62. Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  241 

Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 738 – 55; Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a
Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Kevin Mum-
ford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth
Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race:
Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
63. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 41.
64. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homo­
sexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
65. Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009).
66. Shah, Contagious Divides, 31 (“true nature”), 78 (“perversions”).
67. This policy was begun in response to the federal government’s termination pro-
gram that cut all economic support to sovereign Native lands (it was initiated in 1948,
and formalized by 1952). A fascinating document of urban Native life right after this
period can be found in the 1961 film The Exiles (directed by Kent Mackenzie). For an
astute analysis of the film, see Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, “Domestic Containment: Japa-
nese Americans, Native Americans, and the Cultural Politics of Relocation,” PhD diss.,
University of Southern California, 2011.
68. These phenomena were often asserted through biological metaphors. The most
famous example is Ernest Burgess’s concentric circle map of the city, a key text of the
ecological model of the early Chicago School. The map was first published in Robert E.
Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in
the Urban Environment (1925) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967; repr. 1984), 51.
69. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3.
70. Cathy Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study
of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27 – 45. Writing of black communities
that have been labeled “deviant,” Cohen responds to the work of Robin D. G. Kelley and
James Scott to consider how “deviant choices that are repeated by groups or subgroups
of people can create a space where normative myths of how the society is naturally
structured are challenged in practices . . . and in speech” ( 38). Ultimately, though, Co-
hen argues for the importance of “intent” for the effective mobilization of such choices
into new collective movements. Following a very different line of argument, Puar in
Terrorist Assemblages critiques an approach to queerness based in an individualism that
chooses “freedom from norms” (22); here she highlights the limits of a liberal conception
of agency that undergirds the normative terms of “resistance” (23). Drawing on both
Cohen and Puar, I am interested in the possibilities of deviancy that might not invest
in the model of resistance critiqued by Puar, but that may still engage in the project of
collective social movements as described by Cohen.
71. For a foundational critique of the racial politics of gay marriage activism that
highlights how normativity has been cast as white and in opposition to black kinship
relations, see Kenyon Farrow, “Is Gay Marriage Anti-­Black?,” 2004, http://kenyonfarrow
.com/2005/06/14/is-­gay-­marriage-­anti-­black/.
72. These assumptions were popularized not only in policy but in the blurring be-
tween social scientific and popular writing. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel shows
how representations of prison sexuality in diverse textual sources contributed to broad
cultural knowledge about race, poverty, and sexuality throughout the twentieth century.
73. On the concept of “spatial fix,” see David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a
Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001) and “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix,’ ”

242  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Geographische Review 2 (2001): 23 – 30. In short, a spatial fix is an internal structure of
repair (fix) for capitalist crises that grounds (fixes) capital in land. On the concept of
“prison fix,” see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposi­
tion in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
74. Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalization and U.S. Prison
Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism,” Race and Class 40,
nos. 2–3 (1998–99): 177–88. On gentrification, see Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier:
Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).
75. For a study of hate crime laws in Germany and how they target migrant popula-
tions, see Haritaworn, “Queer Injuries” and “Colorful Bodies in the Multikulti Metropo-
lis.” For another analysis of homonormativity in Europe, see Fatima El-­Tayeb, European
Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011). Also see Reddy, Freedom with Violence.
76. Mary Poovey, “Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statis-
tics in the 1830s,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Dis­
ciplines, ed. by James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 420.
77. Self-­determination itself can be a contradictory concept, moored to the logics of
settler or imperial sovereignty. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
78. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York: New York University Press, 2009).
79. See Self, American Babylon; Rhomberg, No There There; Eric Schneider, Vampires,
Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999).
80. For a history of lgbt activism in Los Angeles, see Faderman and Timmons, Gay
L.A.; in Philadelphia, see Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves; in Chicago, see Timo-
thy Stewart-­Winter, “Raids, Rights, and Rainbow Coalitions: Sexuality and Race in Chi-
cago Politics, 1950 – 2000,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009; in Washington, D.C.,
see Kwame Holmes, “Chocolate to Rainbow City: The Dialectics of Black and Gay Com-
munity Formation in Postwar Washington, D.C., 1946 – 1978,” PhD diss., University of
Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, 2011. In many cities, activists made deft use of the media
to critique policing. See Martin D. Meeker Jr., Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Com­
munications and Community, 1940s – 1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
81. An uneven treatment of each city is manifested in this book. The first chapter
looks primarily at San Francisco, reflecting the early emphasis on police violence among
homophile activists there. Chapters 2 and 3 examine both cities, with a slight emphasis on
the San Francisco area. Chapter 4 focuses on a national organization that began in New
York and moved to Washington, D.C. The final chapter is on New York; the site of the
only national organization dedicated to lgbt antiviolence activism and the ground zero
of quality-­of-­life policing. I repeat that this book is not a movement history nor a com-
parative urban study, but a series of historical case studies with distinctly spatial features.
82. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996).
83. For a brilliant analysis of second-­wave feminism that is inclusive of the politi-
cal work done by those not necessarily identified as feminist per se, see Anne Enke,
Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007).
84. For a discussion of how announcing the limits of centering whiteness recenters

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  243 

whiteness, see Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered
Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), xxvi – xxvii.
85. Tongson, Relocations, 50. The term cultural style is Tongson citing Chauncey, Gay
New York.
86. Tongson, Relocations, 48.
87. In recent years the far rings of development in formerly rural areas have also
faltered, while the middle places — often referred to as exurbs — have maintained more
of the exclusive economic and racial characteristics formerly associated with suburbs.
See Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820 – 2000 (New
York: Vintage, 2004).
88. With this use of risk, I hope to complement Tongson’s critique of the turn to risk
in queer studies by highlighting those queer subjects who are considered risky and thus
are disavowed by or appropriated within dominant queer cultures.
89. In much the same way that this book does not extensively analyze the varied
uses of the phrase safe space, it also does not trace the travels of the concept of gay
ghetto. There is much to analyze here, from the use of ghetto as a term that is at once
affirmative and derogatory, to the different (and often contradictory) understandings of
forced containment behind the most popular modifications of that term (Jewish versus
black versus gay). In addition, as Emily Hobson pointed out to me, the concept has been
used to refer to aspects of gay life not necessarily staged on the neighborhood level: as
a locked-­in mind-­set or forced set of cultural practices. For all of those reasons, I use
gay enclave or gay neighborhood unless I am trying to point to a specific use of gay ghetto.
90. For speculation as to whether neighborhoods still are — and will remain — so
prized among lesbians and gays, see Ghaziani, “There Goes the Gayborhood?” This book
argues that even as gay neighborhoods decline in gay residence and business, the gay
identity of many of these neighborhoods sustains and continues to work on behalf of
anticrime efforts.
91. For an analysis of how teleology structures narratives of history and homosexual-
ity, see Madhavi Menon, “Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis,” glq 11, no. 4 (2005):
491 – 519; Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). For other important work on sexuality and
temporality, see Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth
Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Freeman, Time
Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
92. For an essay about some of the limits of narratives of improvement, see Kevin P.
Murphy, “Gay Was Good: Progress, Homonormativity, and Oral History,” in Queer Twin
Cities: Twin Cities glbt Oral History Project, ed. Kevin P. Murphy, Jennifer L. Pierce, and
Larry Knopp (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 305 – 18.
93. Early and foundational work on this topic was done by Susan Stryker and ap-
peared in Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California,
“mtf Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966 – 1975,” glq 4, no. 2
(1998): 349 – 72; Stryker, Transgender History; and Screaming Queens: The Riot at Comp­
ton’s Cafeteria (directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, 2005). Also see Kathleen
Connell and Paul Gabriel, “The Power of Broken Hearts: The Origin and Evolution of
the Folsom Street Fair,” http://folsomstreetfair.org/history/. More recent scholarship
includes Carter, Stonewall; Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of
Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jonathan Bell, “ ‘To
Strive for Economic and Social Justice’: Welfare, Sexuality, and Liberal Politics in San
Francisco in the 1960s,” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 2 (2010): 192 – 225; Jonathan Bell,

244  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Martin D. Meeker Jr., “The Queerly Disadvantaged
and the Making of San Francisco’s War on Poverty, 1964 – 1967,” Pacific Historical Review
81, no. 1 (2012): 21 – 59. On the organization Vanguard, see Stryker, Transgender History;
Screaming Queens; Justin Suran, “Coming Out against the War: Antimilitarism and the
Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam,” American Quarterly 53, no. 3
(2001): 452 – 88; Jennifer Worley, “ ‘Street Power’ and the Claiming of Public Space: San
Francisco’s ‘Vanguard’ and Pre-­Stonewall Queer Radicalism,” in Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oak-
land, CA: ak, 2011), 41 – 56; Betty Luther Hillman, “ ‘ The Most Profoundly Revolutionary
Act a Homosexual Can Engage In’: Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the
San Francisco Liberation Movement, 1964 – 1972,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20,
no. 1 (January 2011): 153 – 81; and Joey Plaster, “Imagined Conversations and Activist
Lineages: Public Histories of Queer Homeless Youth Organizing and the Policing of
Public Space in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, 1960s and Present,” Radical History Review
113 (Spring 2012): 99 – 109.
94. Heather Love, Feeling Backward. My use of the terms backward and shameful are
borrowed from Love, but what I describe here are not those who feel shame about their
queerness or who are considered backward for their shame. Instead, I describe those
who are named as shameful for expressing pride as they exclude others. Radical com-
mentators often see such examples of activism as backward (that is, not progressive)
and seek to shame such pride; although I tend to be in agreement, I am trying to ap-
proach writing this history differently. As I suggest later, self-­hate and alienation are
the scorned targets not only of prideful but also of much antipride activism, and they
often overlap in the affirmation of the healthy self. I also want to make the related point
that although shaming remains a powerful activist strategy, it is not the same as sitting
within shame, a fact also noted by Love.
95. For a discussion of queer archives and the place of feelings within them, see
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings.
96. In Moving Politics, Gould highlights how act up activists turned shame into
shaming to mixed effect.
97. I only list in the bibliography those interviews that I ultimately used; I conducted
an additional six interviews that did not make it into the final project.
98. The tension between individual intention and collective action serves as testi-
mony to the wide influence of liberal political ideals. Although the individual choices
that activists made are significant, especially as they pressed themselves into public
view and reflected the viewpoints of those who would replicate strategies and visions
in organizations that followed, my approach diverges from those that buffer collective
actions from criticism by contextualizing individuals’ motives or from those that sug-
gest individual intention to be the primary lens for understanding political movements.
My method does not seek to dispense with the question of responsibility or agency nor
to deny the significance of experience; rather, I focus my lens on group actions over
individual intentions, while highlighting original participants’ perspectives.
99. See Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American So­
cial Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
100. It is important to note that this book is organized around case studies of ac-
tivist organizations rather than intellectual debates within print sources. Although I
include examples from these sources, I do not review the full editorial history of the
politics of violence and neighborhood.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  245 

 101. Archives less frequently hold the papers of groups whose members were primar-
ily women of color or were far-­left identified. This is a reflection of archives’ collecting
tendencies as well as the distrust felt by marginalized peoples and movements. As I
discuss in chapter 3, many women of color and radicals moved between movements;
this too contributes to the absence of such sources in lgbt archives. I will also add here
that I noted authorship of documents cited here when that information was missing in
the archives but revealed to me through interviews and I was able to confirm that the
attribution was likely correct.
102. For an analysis of how the politics of aids has affected queer political organiz-
ing, see Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
103. Here it is worth mentioning that while there is long-­term continuity provided
by members who later became staff, the membership itself changes quite frequently.
As a result, I primarily interviewed individuals on staff who also had been members.
104. On the mixed dynamics of representation, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Carey Nel-
son and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271 – 313. For
different approaches to the ethnography of social movements, see Michael Burawoy
et al., Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991); June Nash, ed. Social Movements: An Anthropologi­
cal Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, eds. The
Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009).
105. For a recent critique of the terms of equality in lgbt/queer politics, see the
writings of the collective Against Equality at www.againstequality.org. Their written ar-
chive is organized around three themes: marriage, the military, and prison. Also see the
individual writings of Yasmin Nair, a member of the collective, at www.yasminnair.net.
106. One exception is the history of the feminist left, which has critiqued the family
if not sexual normalization. For a fuller discussion of the sexual politics of the left in
the United States, see Svati P. Shah, “Sexuality and ‘The Left’: Thoughts on Intersec-
tions and Visceral Others,” Scholar and the Feminist Online 7, no. 3 (2009), http://sfonline
.barnard.edu/sexecon/shah_01.htm. For an analysis of the continuity between liberal-
ism and Marxism in the treatment of identity see Ferguson, Aberrations in Black.
107. Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and
Event 7, no. 1 (2003), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.1brown
.html.
108. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1965;
New York: Grove, 2005).
109. This is not to idealize bodily autonomy nor to stigmatize immobility, but to
value self-­determination. See McRuer, Crip Theory.
110. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28.
111. Studs Terkel, “An Interview with James Baldwin,” in Conversations with James
Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 1989), 21.
112. Terkel, “An Interview with James Baldwin,” 21.
113. Butler discusses the issue of nonviolence throughout the chapter “The Question
of Social Transformation” in Undoing Gender, 204 – 31.
114. For a history of safe sex see the documentary, Sex in an Epidemic (directed by
Jean Carlomusto, 2010), as well as the book from which the documentary takes its title:
Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach

246  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

(New York: News from the Front Publications, 1983). Michael Shernoff, a former mem-
ber of a safe streets patrol discussed in chapter 2, is included in the documentary dis-
cussing the term safer sex.
115. See Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on aids and Queer Politics
(Cambridge: mit Press, 2002).
116. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 60, 62. Noting that all activities involve some
risk, Dean posits the acceptance of sexual risk as a challenge to “ ‘health’ as an instru-
ment of power” and its morality and responsibility mandates (63).
117. Anthony Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility,” Modern Law Review 62, no. 1
(1999): 3.
118. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
119. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
120. It is interesting that many safe streets activists moved into public health advo-
cacy and approached aids via risk reduction. Michael Shernoff and Hank Wilson, two
1970s safe streets activists whom I interviewed, later became, respectively, the author of
the only book on barebacking aside from Tim Dean (Michael Shernoff, Without Condoms:
Unprotected Sex, Gay Men, and Barebacking [New York: Routledge, 2005]) and a zealous
campaigner against poppers (Hank Wilson and John Lauritsen, Death Rush: Poppers
and aids [New York: Pagan, 1986]). Both men passed away soon after I interviewed
them.
121. As I clarify later, the homophile movement’s ability to advocate for inclusion
in public programs was distinct from the types of state funding that the antiviolence
movement would achieve.
122. Although I name the pairing of violence and criminality as most central here,
these dynamics regarding legitimacy are also instructive for understanding debates
about gay marriage. Marriage is not only an institution of exclusion but also one of
discipline — in particular of women, poor people, and people of color. It is a structure
that people have been forced to enter in order to receive benefits, avoid criminal status,
or achieve legitimation. For a group to demand entry into such an institution is to au-
thorize that discipline and its structures of exclusion, even if the group seeking entry
includes members who have been punished by or suffered from their previous exclusion
from it. For a more detailed critique, see Farrow, “Is Gay Marriage Anti-­Black?”
123. See Valentine, Imagining Transgender; Spade, Normal Life; Gayle Salamon, As­
suming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010).
124. D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity.”
125. Butler, Undoing Gender, 23.
126. Butler, Undoing Gender, 13.
127. This contention is also central to Valentine’s argument. Because so much trans-
gender activism since the 1990s has been organized around the claim that trans people
are uniquely vulnerable to violence, this warrants a fuller treatment than I can provide
here. Spade (Normal Life), Salamon (Assuming a Body), Halberstam (In a Queer Time and
Place), and Valentine (Imagining Transgender) have all discussed related issues.
128. Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Gender as Performance: An Interview with Ju-
dith Butler,” Radical Philosophy 67 (Summer 1994): 38. This is not to idealize act up but
to hold it as one cited example; there are multiple forms of aids and antipoverty activ-
ism that have pushed in this direction. The Treatment Action Coalition in South Africa

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  247 

is another organization that has pursued creative and militant forms of protest based
on highlighted vulnerability. This is also a feature of the long legacy of hunger-­strike
activism; one recent example is the Mapuche nation in Chile (see Macarena Gómez-­
Barris, “Mapuche Hunger Acts: Epistemology of the Decolonial,” Transmodernity 1, no.
3 [2012], http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6305p8vr).
129. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1961), 117.
130. Lisa Duggan writes: “In responding to pathologizing representations of sexual
minorities as violent or dangerous, it is important to resist the countermove of repre-
senting exclusion as innocence violated or nobility scorned. The moral terms of such
melodramas limited the scope of political resistances in the United States throughout
the twentieth century. At the start of the twenty-­first, we need new narratives to claim
greater equality without qualification or exclusion” (Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and
American Modernity [Durham: Duke University Press, 2000], 200). I offer this as one
such story.
131. I borrow the “not yet” from Muñoz’s use of Ernest Bloch in Cruising Utopia.

1. “The White Ghetto”

Epigraph: Tom Ramsay, untitled and undated document, Box 15, Folder 4, Donald S.
Lucas Papers, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, San Francisco, CA
(hereafter Don Lucas Papers, glbths).
1. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam,
1968), 396. It was best known as the Kerner Report, named after the commission’s chair,
Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois. See also David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi, eds.,
Cities under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964 – 1968 (New York: Basic Books,
1971); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
2. The phrases maximum feasible participation and community control were central to
War on Poverty rhetoric. For an insider discussion of the War on Poverty, see Daniel P.
Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty
(New York: Free Press, 1970). For critical perspectives see Ralph M. Kramer, Participa­
tion of the Poor: Comparative Community Case Studies in the War on Poverty (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s
Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977), and Regulating
the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, updated ed. (New York: Vintage, 1993); Alice
O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-­
Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Noel A. Cazenave,
Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Pro­
grams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in
Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012). For a close look at San Francisco, see Kramer, Participation of
the Poor; Daniel Crowe, Prophets of Rage: The Black Freedom Struggle in San Francisco,
1945 – 1969 (New York: Garland, 2000). For nearby Oakland, see Robert O. Self, Ameri­
can Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003); Christopher Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community
in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Alondra Nelson, Body and
Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2011). Kramer’s detailed study of the San Francisco eoc dis-
cusses the Central City campaign within the context of the citywide program but does
not name the leading participation of homophile advocates.

248  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1