HLS Library Book Talk: Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall

Join the HLS Library on Tuesday March 8 at 12:30pm in Milstein West AB Wasserstein Hall for a HLS Library Book Talk! This event features a discussion on Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall with author Anna Lvovsky and panelists Janet Halley, Jill Lepore, and Ari Waldman. This event is free and will be recorded, and is open to all Harvard ID holders. A grab-and-go-lunch will be served after the event. If you, or an event participant, require disability-related accommodations, please contact Accessibility Services at [email protected]

More about the book from The University of Chicago Press: “In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky…[traces] the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.”

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