The panel focuses on the history of policing and criminal justice from an international/comparative perspective, and specifically on intersections between police studies and queer history. One important goal of this exchange is to evaluate the problem of methodology and the value of penal sources for queer history (and vice versa). While many historians have expressed the desirability of moving beyond a punitive/disciplinary source framework for understanding queer history, it has long been true that given the erasure and silencing of so many people with non-normative gender or sexuality behaviors and identities, police records have been and continue to be an important primary source base for researchers. But has this expertise and knowledge built by queer historians who find so much of their archival sourcebase in police/criminal justice records been reflected in the field of police history and criminal justice studies? What does it look like when the history of policing is analyzed from a gendered and queer perspective? With research drawn from European and U.S. sources, the presenters will articulate the ways that these lenses of police history and queer history engage each other, or fail to.