One Out Gay Cop: AIDS, Community Policing, and the Late 20th-Century Transformation of Gay Urban Politics

In 1992, after decades of hostility towards homosexual and gender nonconforming people, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) began recruiting openly gay cops and training officers on “Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual” issues. This paper explains how and why the LAPD extended affirmative action to gay people by examining over two decades of pro-police activism led by a predominantly white, middle-class, and male coalition of gay organizations and voters who I call gay moderates. Gay moderates in Los Angeles rejected the “extremism” of the homophobic Christian Right and the anti-racist queer left while advancing a politics of respectability centered around distinguishing openly gay white professionals from poor people of color, sexually closeted people, and trans and gender nonconforming people. During the 1970’s, gay moderates fought vigorously with gay liberationists and Christian conservatives as they sparred for influence over the LAPD and urban redevelopment, particularly in working-class neighborhoods famous for attracting unsheltered trans and gender nonconforming youth of color. As the AIDS crisis dominated the political landscape during the 1980’s and 1990’s, gay moderates continue prioritizing gay community policing and successfully redefined the meaning of gay citizenship so that hiring an out gay cop seemed like a commonsense response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Their activism, I argue, eventually conjoined HIV/AIDS public health objectives with the War on Crime to police queer, gender non-conforming, and poor people of color as both suspected criminals and HIV carriers while protect the privacy and property of sexually and civically responsible out white gays and lesbians and straight people, literally and figuratively, through an out gay cop.