Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence

by Christina B. Hanhardt

Overview

Winner, 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies

Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for "safe space" have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines.

Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822354703
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/04/2013
Series:	Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe Series
Pages:	372
Sales rank:	678,664
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Christina B. Hanhardt is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Read an Excerpt

SAFE SPACE

GAY NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE

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By Christina B. Hanhardt

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5457-4

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CHAPTER 1

"THE WHITE GHETTO"

Sexual Deviancy, Police Accountability, and the 1960s War on Poverty

Every great city has a dumping ground, a plot of land it allocates to the people it will not tolerate anywhere else. The Central City performs this function for the city of San Francisco. Into the target area have been moved all the people and problems our society, at some time in the past, decided it would ignore; the older person, the homosexual, the alcoholic, the dope user, the black (and just about every other minority group), the immigrant, the uneducated, the dislocated alienated youth.

—Tom Ramsay

The observation quoted in the epigraph was made by Tom Ramsay, a political organizer active in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood after he was asked in 1968 to assess the viability of San Francisco's downtown Central City area for mass community action. In turning to the Western Addition for advice, Central City activists—many of whom were associated with homosexual advocacy groups then known as homophile organizations—hoped to build on a connection that they had already suggested existed between the two areas. Two years earlier, the Central City activists had won their fight for a piece of the meager benefits provided by President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and its Community Action Program. The War on Poverty had been implemented as a part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, passed the same year as the Civil Rights Act, and its approach reflected an increasing public recognition that people of color lived in disproportionate poverty in U.S. cities. The San Francisco neighborhoods originally chosen for the program, such as the Western Addition, were areas so identified. Yet the demographics of the Central City hardly matched: the majority of the Western Addition's residents were African American, but the dominant identity of the Central City, especially the section known as the Tenderloin, was as a place of white homosexuals, sex workers, itinerants, and drug users.

Advocates for the Central City argued to the San Francisco Economic Opportunity Council (EOC), established as part of the federal War on Poverty, that the stigmatization of social deviancy, in particular nonnormative sexuality, might—like racial inequality—be implicated in producing urban poverty. At the core of their argument was the contention that it was the conditions of the so-called ghetto—rampant poverty, inadequate infrastructure and services, and police misconduct—that promised this result: what they would call a "white ghetto," to be exact. In addition to seeking funding to address poverty, homophile activists collaborated to found Citizens Alert, a citywide police watchdog organization. And during these same years, Vanguard, a group of youth active in downtown street economies, mobilized those who lived on the fringes of urban policy and homophile organizing. None of these campaigns took violence as their primary point of challenge. Yet their focused critiques of abusive policing and profit-oriented development—rather than street crime, a key target of gay activism in the following decades—meant that accusations of violence were more consistently directed at what they called dominant society than at private individuals.

Focusing on the years 1965 through 1969, the years just prior to the Stonewall rebellion in New York City and the avowed birth of a gay liberation movement, this chapter looks at a moment in which homophile and affiliated activists focused their aim at poverty and policing and, in doing so, found an opportunity to fight systematic forms of inequality faced by a variety of San Francisco's most marginalized. Multiple forces converged to shape these campaigns. The first was an existing legacy of gay activism in the San Francisco Bay Area that had gained momentum in response to police arrests following a 1965 New Year's dance in the Tenderloin. The incident is credited with changing the tenor of activism by drawing more pointed attention to the problem of unjust policing and solidifying ties between religious and homophile advocates.

In addition, 1965 was the year of the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles—one of many confrontations between the police and African American residents in cities across the United States—an event that secured the place of police and interpersonal violence on activist and policy agendas. Three years later, in 1968, the concern about police abuse of African Americans would be both aired and contained with the publication of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Report. Although the report noted the existence of "two societies, separate and unequal," it also narrated a crisis of violence among black residents and social movement actors. Also in 1968 the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act was passed, establishing the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The bill expanded federal policing powers while distributing funds for state-based antidisorder initiatives; it also further formalized the newly prioritized place of victims and social research within police practice.

The third primary context for Central City activism in 1965 was provided by the aforementioned War on Poverty, which had started seeding programs in San Francisco by the start of that year. The Economic Opportunity Act mandated "maximum feasible participation" of the poor in economic development programs. Local initiatives soon were engaged with a constellation of social movements dedicated to the varied goals of rights, redistribution, or, even, revolution: from civil rights to welfare rights, from the New Left to Black Power. Indeed, the War on Poverty was the scene for many negotiations between radicalism and liberalism in the late years of the civil rights movement, and Central City activists' efforts to analogize sexuality to race reflected many of the same contradictions—such as between calls for the end to an unjust market economy and the opportunity for greater participation; between an indictment of the police and a call for their protection; between the goal of freedom and that of equality; between claims for the group and those for the individual. Furthermore, the structure of the War on Poverty provided an opportunity for state administrators and activists to ground—and rework—abstract concepts about culture and identity diagnosed by social scientists affiliated with the lasting project of postwar liberalism. In sum, the mid-to late 1960s saw both the creeping expansion of the penal state and local calls for empowerment. The election of President Richard Nixon in 1968 would extend the former and reroute the latter, casting the poor and their advocates as criminal and the white middle class as in need of and central to regimes of protection.

Centered on the seedy streets of the Central City, the campaigns for War on Poverty funding and Citizens Alert each framed sexual oppression as a product of discrimination but also of unchecked profit motive enforced through violent state forces. This analytic opening allowed for collaborations between homosexuals (and, less so, trans people) and other social minorities; in forming these coalitions, activists did not always parse identities nor distill antigay sentiment from other expressions of social domination. Neither did this approach present an individual's place in the economic structure as transcending exploitation based on race, gender, or sexuality. The approaches of these campaigns were therefore in contrast to the more privacy-oriented solution to entrapment that was most associated with homophile activism of the era. Yet in line with the prevailing liberal framework, activists ultimately sought explanation for nonconformity and exclusion in individual psyches and found remedy in the expanded role of proper citizen: a mode of analysis and strategy that would prove durable in the years to come.

1965: Central City

In order to understand these campaigns, it is essential to first place them in the history of U.S. homophile activism and on a map of San Francisco. The origins of the homophile movement are most associated with the Mattachine Society, founded in Hollywood, California, in 1951. Modeled on the Communist Party USA—of which its founder, Harry Hay, was a member—the society initially adopted a secret cell structure for sponsored discussions. Members also pursued a few high-profile campaigns, such as when Mattachine formed the Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapment in 1952 in support of Dale Jennings, a member who had been arrested for indecency. In the years that followed, Mattachine members debated ideology and strategy while focusing on the pursuit of legal reforms (such as the decriminalization of sodomy and an end to police entrapment, vagrancy charges, workplace discrimination, and censorship) and a shift in popular values (via mass culture and the word of the expert). Chapters opened across the country, and other homophile organizations were founded; in San Francisco these included the Daughters of Bilitis (1955), League for Civil Education (1961), and Society for Individual Rights (1964).

Notwithstanding its later centrality to the LGBT movement, the issue of street violence was not at the top of homophile organizations' agendas, even if it was a sustained concern of their members. To be sure, violence was a structuring feature in the lives of many who lived outside dominant heterosexuality in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Be it domestic, vigilante, or state-practiced, violence was common, especially for women and men who refused gender norms or those who lacked the privileges that came with wealth or whiteness. By the 1950s, white racial violence had long been a mode of controlling sexuality; the targeting of black men in the name of protecting white women is but the most cited example. And although sexual entrapment in bars was less common for women than for men, women's bars were often targeted for antiprostitution raids. Yet these kinds of violence fell outside the bounds of the homophile movement, which tended to target the disproportionate enforcement of laws against homosexuals specifically, or to challenge the inclusion of homosexuality in otherwise uncontested regulations. Those who might be charged with sodomy, lewdness, or vagrancy, or who experienced violence, for reasons that were not singularly perceptible as antihomosexual—such as for cross-race sexual contact, sexual commerce, or itinerancy linked to poverty—were not necessarily included in homophile campaigns. This division was not only conceived by activist strategy; the separation of homosexuality from other forms of urban disorder was also a new aspect of regulatory state administration during these years. Although it is difficult to determine whether the omission of violence as such from activist agendas was substantive or tactical, it is significant that violence per se was not primary. For homophile activists, the main predicament was how to publicly acknowledge and protect homosexual practice and identity (what would later become known as coming out or becoming visible), rather than negotiating embodied displays of difference or multiple marginalized identities.

Despite the lack of focus on antiviolence in their organizations' formal plans, lesbians, gay men, and trans people did act collectively to resist violence, especially in places considered less respectable by many homophile organizations. Informal group dynamics were strongest in what Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis call "street bars" that catered to, in the words of one person they interviewed, "straights, colored, pimps, whores, and gay people." Bar patrons often responded to violence through everyday refusals, be it by fighting back, breaking a window, or boldly flouting a law. Bar owners, too, organized to protect these spaces, forming business alliances to safeguard their property interests from state interference. Nan Alamilla Boyd argues that one result in San Francisco is that lesbians and gay men often depended more on each other and on bar owners for their safety than they did on homophile organizations, and thus bar culture—rather than incipient activist groups—might be seen as the early foundation of unapologetic lesbian, gay, and transgender political communities.

Yet this profile of the homophile movement would change in San Francisco after the 1965 New Year's Day arrests at California Hall. A costume ball fund-raiser had been organized by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which had been founded in 1964 by homophile and religious activists hoping to build a broad coalition for local action. Police officers photographed attendees, and the lawyers who challenged them were among those arrested. Homophile and religious leaders were outraged, and a group of ministers, many associated with Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin—a Methodist congregation that had been largely responsible for the founding of the council—spoke out, while the group further homed in on the problem of policing. The church's urban mission had been concretized in the Glide Urban Center for community outreach, founded in 1962 by Rev. Lewis Durham. Durham and the head of youth outreach, Rev. Ted McIlvenna, both played a central role in the council. In the years that followed, Glide ministers and homophile activists would continue to be key partners in the Central City area, as the church's ministrations to the urban poor melded well with the homophile movement's dedication to providing social services. Phyllis Lyon, cofounder of the Daughters of Bilitis, worked for years at Glide, first as McIlvenna's assistant and later helping to found the National Sex and Drug Forum, in 1968. Glide Publications released Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's classic 1972 book Lesbian/Woman. In 1963 an African American activist minister, Rev. Cecil Williams, joined the majority-white congregation and soon became head pastor. Under his leadership, Glide would sustain church and homophile cooperation and further cultivate cross-constituency organizing.

Glide's location in the Tenderloin put it at the literal crossroad of San Francisco politics and culture. Physically speaking (see appendix), the Tenderloin was in the broad impact zone of some of the most sweeping urban renewal projects of the time, including the neighboring Yerba Buena Center plan, a convention complex. As Chester Hartman describes in his history of San Francisco's growth machine, the groundwork to build the Yerba Buena Center had been laid in the 1950s, when corporate and city interests first prepared to expand the city's central business district to serve a restructuring service economy. (This would also include the building of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the 1960s, to link the suburbs with downtown.) The area chosen for the center was the Central City neighborhood known as South of Market, which included, as Hartman explains, "hundreds of acres of flat land with low-density use, low land prices, and, to the corporate eye, expendable people and businesses." The neighborhood was home to a growing number of Filipino families as well as many who depended on single room occupancy housing, such as elderly people and male dockworkers —ranging from longshoremen to merchant marines. South of Market also included Sixth Street, San Francisco's skid row, and South Park, an isolated, economically impoverished neighborhood with a sizable population of African Americans and new immigrants. The other areas close to downtown were hilly and thus less amenable to office development. The broader Central City area was also affected by an ongoing renewal plan for the Embarcadero area to the north and the so-called slum clearance of the nearby Western Addition. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had sponsored two major urban renewal projects in the Western Addition: the project called a1 was approved in 1956 but did not go into effect until the early 1960s; a2 followed in 1966. Together, they displaced thousands of residents and businesses. As James Baldwin described it after touring San Francisco in 1963, it was, in essence, a program of pointed "Negro removal."

This made the Tenderloin section of the Central City in the North of Market area, like the nearby Chinatown, one of the few neighborhoods with affordable housing near the demolition zones. (Chinatown had also been designated as blighted, and the famous decade-long effort to evict the residents of the International Hotel began in the late 1960s.) Although dealing with its own encroaching hotel development to service the upgrading downtown, the Tenderloin was not (yet) considered prime real estate. This was due, in part, to its hills that proved a geographic block, but it was also because of its status as the area's red light district. The Tenderloin was a neighborhood of prostitution, strip bars, and other forms of scandalous nightlife. As Susan Stryker observes in her defining analysis of the Tenderloin during this period, the neighborhood was to absorb much of the "exodus" of socially and economically marginal people and activities forced out of the surrounding areas.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from SAFE SPACE by Christina B. Hanhardt. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. "The White Ghetto": Sexual Deviancy, Police Accountability, and the 1960s War on Poverty 35

2. Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists: Safe Streets Patrols and Militant Gay Liberalism in the 1970s 81

3. "Count the Contradictions": Challenges to Gay Gentrification at the Start of the Reagan Era 117

4. Visibility and Victimization: Hate Crime Laws and the Geography of Punishment, 1980s and 1990s 155

5. "Canaries of the Creative Age": Queer Critiques of Risk and Real Estate in the Twenty-First Century 185

Conclusion 221

Epilogue 227

Appendix: Neighborhood Maps of New York and San Francisco 231

Notes 233

Bibliography 315

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

09/30/2013
University of Maryland American studies professor Hanhardt offers a commendable revision of the LGBT story in America, in which competing conceptions of crime, violence, property, and prejudice shaped what became the urban gay neighborhood. Hanhardt argues that there is a complicated connection between calls for gay “territories” and mainstream anti-violence politics. Such territories are not safe for all, she suggests, and grew out of a multifaceted lineage of impressive diversity. The analysis complicates the simplified narratives of activist groups and political movements that often combined multi-issue politics, militancy, and accommodation with governments in contingent and shifting alliances. It is a dramatic picture of a febrile movement that had a difficult relationship with its competitors. The book further excels by demonstrating this history through the experiences of LGBT people of color, transgender individuals, and immigrants. This rich analysis serves as a useful primer on why gay neighborhoods are at the epicenter of discussions about gentrification. Though its occasional descent into Queer Theory–based obscurity clouds its analysis, the book’s argument that the LGBT movement must address complex issues of race, gender, and class is entirely persuasive. 25 illus. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Safe Space is a richly researched examination of activist organizations and less-organized activist efforts on behalf of LGBT rights in San Francisco and New York over the last fifty years. Hanhardt draws on archival materials as well as interviews and participant observation to provide a view that is close to the ground, attentive to the trees, even sometimes the weeds, without losing view of the forest.

GLQ - Miranda Joseph

Safe Space is impressive in its research and scope. . . . Safe Space is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the intersections of LGBT history, critical race and sexuality studies, and urban studies.

Journal of American History - Daniel W. Rivers

"Hanhardt challenges commonly accepted narratives about safe streets, LGBT identity, and intersections of visibility and vulnerability. . . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."

Choice - A. B. Audant

"Hanhardt’s Safe Space offers an activist historiography of urban redevelopment and displacement, where biopolitical shifts have carved the social and physical landscape of San Francisco and New York City from the 1960s to the present.... She skillfully manages a dance of scale—telling both a macro history of changing postwar American liberalism and the micro histories of the ways it all came to remake daily life."

QED - Eric A. Stanley

"Safe Space is a pathbreaking book for the interdisciplinary fields of queer studies and American studies. Offering a trenchant account of the stakes of gay (and sometimes lesbian) claims to urban geographies, this carefully researched history unsettles many of the heroic assumptions driving the current politics of sexual identity in the United States. It will make a crucial intervention in a number of scholarly and activist debates."—Siobhan B. Somerville, author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture


"A wonderful book that bursts through the usual boundaries of gay history. Christina B. Hanhardt weaves class, race, and sexuality tightly together in her urban history of the past fifty years and, in doing so, succeeds in upsetting much of the conventional wisdom about the gay movement and gay politics. Her analysis implicitly calls for the revival of a multi-issue, intersectional queer politics that challenges injustices of every sort and sees them all as linked."—John D'Emilio, author of The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture


"Christina B. Hanhardt's brilliant book should be required reading for all those interested in how the LGBT movement's politics have come to reinforce racialized governance logics and control of economically and socially marginal populations."—Urvashi Vaid, author of Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics

From the Publisher

Scholars and academics studying urban spaces, as well as grassroots activists within and outside the LGBT community, should take note of Hanhardt’s work. Her discussion of the emergence of LGBT activist claims to the protection of property and of self and the ways these protections became viewed as natural rights expected in American urban spaces helps illuminate not only specific transformations within urbanized LGBT populations in New York and San Francisco, but broader divisions which formed in liberal activist groups after the 1960s.

Geoffrey West Perspectives

Hanhardt’s voice is that of an activist saddened, sometimes enraged, by how the potential for both equality and diversity was squandered by a middle-class white gay movement. Her book, then, is itself a moral intervention, one that combines social research and utopian politics.

Public Books - Idoo Tavory

"Recommended both for its astute and never simplified analyses of social movements as well as its cautionarily optimistic political vision, Christina B. Hanhardt’s Safe Space is a necessary and welcome contribution to the field of LGBT and Queer Studies."

Sociological Review - Rachel F. Corbman

This is a deep and intriguing study of what neighborhood and safety have meant—and seemed to mean—to different facets of the gay community at different times in its development in the period following WWII. . . . While obviously written for an academic audience, Safe Space will be accessible to most readers, and offers some insights into ways that gay spaces may not have been quite what we thought they were.”

Lit/Rant - Kel Munger

The book’s extensive coverage of LGBT activism in the latter half of the 20th century illustrates how contemporary socio-legal gains were made possible by resistance-fuelled, political organising. What began as a gay backlash to victimisation soon became a platform for resistance to state violence. . . . Overall, this is a fascinating insight into lesser-known aspects of America’s gay liberation movement.

Times Higher Education - Marian Duggan

Against the fractured landscape of cities characterized by uneven development, Safe Space is a clarion call for radicals to recognize the common deterrents facing all those working for more just cities. . . . Safe Space recognizes that claiming the city as an equitable space for all will require a broader understanding of identity, its use as a tool for development, and its latent potential as a site of resistance.

Jacobin - Eric Peterson

Scholars and academics studying urban spaces, as well as grassroots activists within and outside the LGBT community, should take note of Hanhardt’s work. Her discussion of the emergence of LGBT activist claims to the protection of property and of self and the ways these protections became viewed as natural rights expected in American urban spaces helps illuminate not only specific transformations within urbanized LGBT populations in New York and San Francisco, but broader divisions which formed in liberal activist groups after the 1960s.

Planning Perspectives - Geoffrey West