Queer Law and Order
Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5704601 |
|---|---|
| Authors | T Stewart-Winter, Timothy Stewart‐winter (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 102 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 61-72 |
| Publication date | 2015-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jav283 |
| OpenAlex | W1894695461 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
In November 1970, after a lengthy foot chase, two Chicago police officers apprehended James Clay Jr., a twenty-four-year-old African American man, and fired eight shots into his back, killing him. Clay, who was wearing women’s clothing when police encountered him, had a long arrest record that included charges for impersonating the opposite sex and solicitation to commit prostitution. The killing was covered by the local Chicago newspapers, including the Sun-Times, the countercultural biweekly Seed, and on the front page of the black-owned Defender. The Chicago Gay Alliance, founded a few months earlier, demanded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation look into whether Clay’s rights had been violated. The officers have never been brought to trial. At the time of Clay’s shooting, Chicagoans had been mobilizing for nearly a year, since the police killing of the Illinois Black Panther party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to protest surveillance and infiltration of the black power movement. On the first anniversary of Clay’s death, Ortez Alderson, a twenty-year-old black man raised on the city’s South Side and the co-founder of the Black Caucus of Chicago Gay Liberation, organized a memorial march on the city’s Eighteenth District police station in his memory. Clay’s death led to the formation in 1971 of the Transvestites Legal Committee, Chicago’s first transgender political organization.1 The protests against Clay’s death offer a window onto the neglected intersection of the histories of sexuality and the carceral state by highlighting a missing link in the trajectory of gay politics: black-gay coalitions against police harassment. The rise of the gay rights movement and the emergence of the carceral state coexist uneasily in the historiography of the late twentieth-century United States. In the 1970s, as the nation embarked upon its unprecedented experiment in tightened drug enforcement and racialized mass incarceration, half the states repealed their sodomy laws, yet historians have only just begun to
Caucus · Convict · Criminology · Lesbian · Newspaper · Police brutality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Transgender · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy
LGBTQ+ History in High School Classes in the United States since 1990
The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans
Racial/ethnic differences in the association between transgender-related U.S. state policies and self-rated health of transgender women
It’s another gay disease”
A protracted war for order
Experiences of a gender non-conforming lesbian in the “ladies’ (rest)room”
The Invention of Bad Gay Sex
To Protect and to Serve
Experiences of police‐related stress among a U.S. national cohort of gay and bisexual men
| Citations per year | 0.9 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2024 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |