Police Harassment of LGBTQ Communities
Colfax & Williams
Created By: Jonett & Issac
Sponsored By: Uptown on the Hill
The police raid of the Stonewall Inn was not a historically unique event. Harassment by police of LGBTQ establishments and hang-outs can be found in the decades before Stonewall all over the country. In the late 1930s, the push to remove a corrupt Los Angeles mayor led to “vice crackdowns” all over the city, including raids on gay bars.
Both Federal and local law enforcement were involved in the policing of LGBTQ communities in the United States. A ball fundraiser in San Francisco for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual was the site of police harassment and an attempted raid on January 1, 1965. Having been told about the event by organizers, San Francisco Police patrolled the outside of the event location, photographing those who entered and exited, and ultimately arresting three lawyers and a ticket taker when they were denied entry.
In Denver in the early 1960s, police arrested six men for wearing women’s clothing in a local gay bar in violation of a local ordinance against such behavior. Of eight gay bars in Denver in the mid-1960s, six were off limits to members of the armed services, so military police would regularly go in to check for GIs.
A few years later, in 1968, Denver police made twenty-one arrests in three weeks of homosexual men caught in public restrooms in the city’s parks. Sixteen men were arrested in a single bathroom in City Park. Many of those arrested were faced with charges of felony and misdemeanor lewd acts.
These were all just a few of the events happening around the country in the years leading up to the Stonewall Riots involving police harassment of popular LGBTQ hang-outs.