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Policing Outlawed Desire: ‘Homocriminality’ in Beat Spaces in Australia

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Abstract

Drawing on interview data of gay men who have had their behavior in public spaces scrutinised by agents of the law for signs deviance, this article explores the historical characteristics of police animosity towards such conduct in Australia. This entails examining encounters between police and gay men who pursue desire in ‘beat’ (or ‘cottage’ to the use the UK term) spaces. Exploring why these outlaw gay male subjects are so abject and troubling to the law, the discussion documents how law’s desire to regulate gay men plays out in the masquerade of ‘plain-clothes’ agent provocateur operations where police entrap gay men by mimicking gay bodily appearances, gestures and mannerisms. This article also examines how police regulation of gay desire functions as a form of violence that delimits expressions of same sex desire in public spaces. A key theme that underpins the analyses in this paper is that the policing of desire in ‘beat’ spaces helps produce qualities of illicitness and dangerousness and that this, in turn, fuels the circuit of desire at play between gay men and agents of the law.

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Notes

  1. Other countries have different terms for beats. In the United Kingdom such places are called ‘cottages’ (although this term specifically refers to public lavatory spaces) and in the United States they are often referred to as ‘tearooms’. It should be noted that the Australian term ‘beat’ is a more expansive term in that it also refers to parks, beaches or other places where men meet for sexual purposes. Beats can be ephemeral in the sense that two men might encounter each other in a public place that is not strictly designated or ‘known’ to be a beat.

  2. For a précis of police hostility to beat sex in Australia see M. Swivel, ‘Public Convenience, Public Nuisance: Criminological Perspectives on the Beat’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice 5 (1991), 237–249.

  3. On the general theme of the desire of the law, see C.F. Stychin, Law’s Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice (London: Routledge, 1995).

  4. Interview with LS.

  5. Interview with TR.

  6. Interview with RN.

  7. For a discussion of traces and signs of desire in beat spaces as revealed by photographic practice see D. Dalton, ‘Arresting Images/Fugitive Testimony: The Resistant Photography of Evergon’, in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society – ‘An Aesthetics of Law and Culture’ 34 (2004), 73–107.

  8. P. Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 6.

  9. L. Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 168–169.

  10. M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 2.

  11. Interview with RN.

  12. Interview with TR.

  13. Interview with HD.

  14. J. Grube, ‘No More Shit: The Struggle for Democratic Gay Space in Toronto’, in Queers in Space: Communities/Public Spaces/Sites of resistance, G.B. Ingram, A. Bouthillette and Y. Retter, eds (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997), 137.

  15. Such warnings are by no means unique to Australian police regulating public space. Delph provides an account of a New York police officer telling two men to ‘get the fuck out and don’t let me see you here again’: E.W. Delph, The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1978), 61.

  16. Detailed by Peter Horsley, member of the Victorian Police Lesbian and Gay Liaison Committee, in a letter to the author dated 24 February 2001.

  17. W. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), 19.

  18. Miller argues that of all the sex-linked disgust substances, semen is the most revolting to men. This is partly because the appearance of semen signals the evanescence and end of pleasure, a prelude to the mini-shames attendant on post-ejaculatory tristesse: Miller, ibid., at 104.

  19. G. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (London: Allison & Busby, 1978), 93.

  20. Interview with LS.

  21. S. Maynard, ‘Though a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994), 215.

  22. J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

  23. See P. MacCormack, ‘Pleasure, Perversion and Death: Three Lines of Flight for the Viewing Body’ at: http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/MacCormack/PPDintro2.htm.

  24. The term homocriminality conjoins two separate words – ‘homo’ (the abbreviation of homosexual) and ‘criminality’ (that which relates to crime). I deploy this term as a deliberate tactic that serves to remind us that in the juridico-cultural imagination, homosexuality and criminality are often attached to each other. See D. Dalton, ‘Surveying Deviance, Figuring Disgust: Locating the Homocriminal Body in Time and Space’, Social & Legal Studies 15/2 (2006), 277–299.

  25. This colloquial English term is commonly deployed to describe police officers’ walking – and thereby policing – a particular geographical area or precinct.

  26. This colloquial term is used in Australia to describe gay men who seek desire in beat spaces. See G. Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991).

  27. Hocquenghem, supra n. 19, at 117.

  28. B. Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 44. For a reading of how the mapping of subjects continually reveals ruptures, tears and fraying see S. Pile and N. Thrift, eds, Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995), 49.

  29. S. Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), 90.

  30. This idea relates to a key concept that underpins psychoanalytical theories of abjection. That is, the desire to be completely clean all the time cannot be fulfilled. See Pile, ibid., at 90, and Kristeva, supra n. 22.

  31. J. Hollister, ‘A Highway Rest Area as a Socially Reproducible Site’, in Public Sex/Gay Space, W. Leap, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

  32. Interview with GR.

  33. J. Pearsall, Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 876.

  34. D. Bell, ‘Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy’, in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, D. Bell and G. Valentine, eds (London: Routledge, 1995), 306.

  35. D. McGhee, Homosexuality, Law and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2001), 22.

  36. E.W. Delph, The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1978); L. Humphreys, Tearoom Trade (London: Duckworth, 1970).

  37. L.J. Moran, ‘The Gaze of the Law: Technologies, Bodies, Representation’, in Contested Bodies, R. Holliday and J. Hassard, eds (London: Routledge, 2001), 111.

  38. M. Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, R. Young, ed. (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 45.

  39. L.J. Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law (London: Routledge, 1996), 119.

  40. M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, N.Y.; Cornell University Press, 1977), 160–64.

  41. ‘Police Go Gay to Lure Homosexuals’ , The Age, January 12, 1977, 3.

  42. The stereotypical idea that gay men have an identifiable walk has long held currency. Nunokawa notes that Robert Hitchen’s parodic novel about Oscar Wilde, ‘The Green Carnation’, describes Wilde’s coterie as having ‘the same walk, or rather waggle’: J. Nunokawa, Oscar Wilde (New York: Chelsea House, 1995), 67.

  43. ‘Police Go Gay to Lure Homosexuals’, supra n. 41, at 3. The plain-clothed operation deployed at beaches in the Sandringham area of Melbourne resulted in 68 arrests for various public offences (ranging from public nudity to acts of indecency).

  44. Moran, supra n. 39, at 150.

  45. In Australia the term ‘wanking’ is slang for masturbation.

  46. Interview with HD.

  47. Interview with LS.

  48. Interview with WG.

  49. Interview with WG.

  50. Interview with LS.

  51. Interview with LS.

  52. For a discussion of the concept of homosociality see E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: Penguin, 1990).

  53. Moran, supra n. 39, at 125. For a reading of law’s obsession to hear homosexuality spoken about in Australian contexts, see the discussion of the South Australian agent provocateur case in D. Dalton, ‘Genealogy of the Australian Homocriminal Subject: A Study of Two Explanatory Models of Deviance’, Griffith Law Review 16/1 (2007 forthcoming).

  54. Interview with RN.

  55. Interview with RN.

  56. Interview with RN.

  57. Interview with RN.

  58. Interview with DB.

  59. Moran, ‘The Gaze of the Law’, supra n. 37, at 113.

  60. Interview with HS.

  61. Moran, ‘The Gaze of the Law: Technologies, Bodies, Representation’, in Contested Bodies, R. Holliday and J. Hassard, eds (London: Routledge 2001), 113.

  62. Interview with HS.

  63. Interview with HD.

  64. Interview with RN.

  65. Interview with LS.

  66. Moran, supra n. 39, at 146.

  67. Moran, supra n. 39, at 144.

  68. ‘Police Go Gay to Lure Homosexuals’, supra n. 41, at 3.

  69. Delph, supra n. 15, at 38.

  70. Interview with WG.

  71. See Moran and McGhee for a reading of how public conveniences operate as liminal spaces (neither wholly ‘public’ nor ‘private’), which, in turn, produce liminal personae: L.J. Moran and D. McGhee ‘Perverting London: The Cartographic Practices of Law’, Law and Critique 9 (1998), 221.

  72. Moran, supra n. 39, 150.

  73. Interview with HS.

  74. Moran and McGhee, supra n. 71, at 220.

  75. Hocquenghem, supra n. 19, at 128.

  76. Moran, supra n. 39, at 162.

  77. For a discussion of the violent nature of law see J. Derrida, ‘The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), 919.

  78. Interview with HS.

  79. Interview with HS.

  80. Hocquenghem, supra n. 19, at 117.

  81. Interview with HD.

  82. Interview with PB. PB supported his belief, pointing out that he became familiar with the faces of many police officers who policed the district where he was working (providing ‘protection’ for sex workers).

  83. Moran, supra n. 39, 139.

  84. Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, supra n. 38, 82, 85.

  85. Hocquenghem, supra n. 19, at 51.

  86. Moran, supra n. 39, 143.

  87. Moran, supra n. 39, 167.

  88. Interview with HS.

  89. Interview with HD.

  90. R. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal 95 (1986), 1601.

  91. Cover, at 601.

  92. A. Young, ‘Into the Blue: The Image Written on Law’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 13 (2001), 326.

  93. P. Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.

  94. Interview with SD.

  95. Interview with SD.

  96. Interview with SD.

  97. Interview with SD.

  98. Interview with SD.

  99. Interview with SD.

  100. Interview with SD.

  101. Interview with SD.

  102. C. Douzinas, ‘Violence, Justice, Deconstruction’, German Law Journal 6 (2005), 173.

  103. Cover, supra n. 90, at 1604.

  104. Interview with RN.

  105. Interview with RN.

  106. Interview with RN.

  107. Interview with RN.

  108. Interview with DB.

  109. Interview with RG.

  110. Interview with RN.

  111. Interview with GR.

  112. Interview with GR.

  113. Interview with SP.

  114. Interview with JB.

  115. Edelman, supra n. 9, at 6.

  116. Interview with GR.

  117. Interview with SD.

  118. M. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 149.

  119. Ibid., at 140.

  120. E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 14.

  121. On the role newspapers play spectacularising crime, see Chapter Two, ‘Spectacularising Crime, Ghostwriting the Law’, in P.J. Hutchings, The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics: Incriminating Subjects (London: Routledge, 2001).

  122. M. Foucault, ‘The Life of Infamous Men’, in Michel Foucault, Power, Truth, Strategy, M. Morris and P. Patton, eds (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979), 79.

  123. H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1984), 63.

  124. Whilst researching this article by reading newspaper accounts of men charged with, or convicted of, ‘homosexual’ offences, I composed this list. It covers the period of 1930–1970 and is randomly arranged.

  125. P. Cheah and E. Grosz, ‘The Body of the Law: Notes Towards a Theory of Corporeal Justice’, in Thinking Through the Body of the Law, P. Cheah, D. Fraser and J. Grbich, eds (St Leonard’s, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 4.

  126. On the performative force of law’s violence, see S. McVeigh, P. Rush and A. Young, ‘A Judgment Dwelling in Law: Violence and the Relation of Legal Thought’, in Law, Violence and the Possibility of Justice, A. Sarat, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

  127. L.J. Moran, ‘Oscar Wilde, Law, Memory and the Proper Name’, in Legal Queeries: Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Legal Issues, L.J Moran, D. Monk and S. Beresford, eds (London: Cassell, 1998), 12.

  128. See ‘Dealer Gaoled’, Adelaide Advertiser, 29 July 1954, 14.

  129. R. Barthes, ‘Preface’, in R. Camus, Tricks: 25 Encounters (New York: St Martins Press, 1981), vii.

  130. D Meure, ‘Hetero-Homo Panic in the High Court (or Hubris in the High Court)’, paper presented at the 10th Annual Law and Literature Association of Australia, 7–9 July, 2000, Sydney: University of Technology. Paper on file with author.

  131. Hocquenghem, supra n. 19, at 78.

  132. Kristeva, supra n. 22, 1.

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  1. School of Law, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, 5001, Australia

    Derek Dalton

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Correspondence to Derek Dalton.

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I offer my heartfelt thanks to Alison Young, Leslie J. Moran, William MacNeil, Rebecca Scott Bray, Katherine Biber and the anonymous referees whose constructive insights helped shape my thinking about the elusive nature of law’s desire.

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Dalton, D. Policing Outlawed Desire: ‘Homocriminality’ in Beat Spaces in Australia. Law Critique 18, 375–405 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-007-9018-2

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