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Queer Numbers: Tracing the Origins of a Misleading Statistic

5/2/2022

7 Comments

 
​As part of the research for the new book I am crafting out of parts of the one that didn’t garner much interest, I have been researching government persecution of queer people in the postwar era. In so doing, I came across a rather dramatic fact that led me down a statistical rabbit-hole as I hunted the source of a seemingly dramatic fact that turned out not be what it seemed.
​A couple of years ago, historian Eric Cervini’s The Deviant’s War (2020), about an astronomer’s involvement in the midcentury gay rights movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won a bunch of awards. Cervini, who bills himself online as “author / historian / homosexual,” is now the executive producer of The Book of Queer, a Discovery Plus documentary series about queer history premiering in a few weeks. I’m not too thrilled with the show since it is extremely campy and overtly conflates sexual orientation with camp culture and gender-nonconforming self-presentation, neither of which is particularly helpful in raising queer issues above the level of a nonthreatening, candy-colored theatrical performance for straight people. It also does nothing to help young queer people who would benefit from learning about queer history but don’t identify with twentieth-century-style urban camp culture.
Picture
Eric Cervini in "The Book of Queer" (Discovery Plus)
​Anyway, on the first page of Cervini’s book (well—the first screen of the digital edition), he makes a rather dramatic claim: “After World War II, homosexual arrests—including those for sodomy, dancing, kissing, or holding hands—occurred at the rate of one every ten minutes, each hour, each day, for fifteen years. In sum, one million citizens found themselves persecuted by the American state for sexual deviation.” 
 
That’s an impressively horrific statistic—but I discovered that nobody actually knows if it’s true. And most writers don’t care.
 
One million gay people persecuted over fifteen years would mean that, by the best data about sexual orientation in midcentury America calculated against the 1950 U.S. population of 151 million, somewhere between one in five and one in three Americans who acted on their queer desires had been arrested for gay sex. (Obviously, many queer people in those days were closeted and never acted on their desires.)
 
I don’t believe that. American policing was never that efficient.
 
Now, even the numbers I just cited are a little squishy. In the 1950s, the media estimated—wrongly—that there were 15 million lesbians and 15 million gay men in America, totaling 20% of the U.S. population. One magazine ludicrously claimed more than one-third of Americans were homosexuals. These numbers derived from a misreading of Alfred Kinsey’s famous report on male sexuality, which found that 37% of men had had a same-sex experience at least once in their lives and 13% lived as homosexuals for 3 years or more. And even those numbers tell us little because Kinsey defined a homosexual experience strictly as genital stimulation to orgasm. Kissing alone, for example, wouldn’t count. Better estimates suggested that somewhere between 1% and 5% of Americans actively engaged in same-sex relations, though the number who never acted on their desires, and never told researchers about them, is unknowable.
 
Incidentally, the 1950s media estimates stuck in the popular mind, despite being wildly wrong. According to Gallup, even today Americans wrongly believe than 20% or more of American are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. (Gallup blamed it on there being too many queers on TV, despite their own data showing that the false estimate has held true since the days when virtually no queer characters were on primetime TV.)
 
Most estimates of past behavior attempt to model it from modern population data, but modern self-reports have shifted dramatically over the past twenty years, suggesting how difficult it is to estimate actual behavior vs. what people are willing to admit to in surveys. Today, for example, one in five young adults today identifies as queer, but much of this is definitional, since the majority of those young people say they have not been in same-sex relationships and primarily seek opposite-sex partners. In past times, they would typically have identified as straight.
 
With so much uncertainty about numbers, I was necessarily concerned about Cervini’s claim that a queer person was arrested every ten minutes for fifteen years. (And why stop at 15 years? Mass arrests continued into the 1970s, and occasionally down to the 1990s, notably the sodomy arrest in 1998 that led to the 2003 Supreme Court decision decriminalizing gay sex.) So, I checked out his end notes, which pointed me to his source, Yale law professor William Eskridge’s 1996 book Gaylaw. There, on page 60, Eskridge provides this claim: “The state between 1946 and 1961 imposed criminal punishments on as many as a million lesbians and gay men engaged in consensual adult intercourse, dancing, kissing, or holding hands.” 
 
Now, that is quite the claim, specifying “criminal punishments” and asserting that such punishments were in part for “kissing,” “holding hands,” etc.
 
Imagine my surprise that Eskridge does not cite a source for the number nor explain it.
 
I did, therefore, what I always do, and I tried to find the source. I read through the articles and books Eskridge cited in the surrounding paragraphs. Nothing. I won’t belabor the point too much. The fact is that there were no national statistics kept for arrests related to homosexual conduct, or even for the more general categories of lewd conduct or “sexual perversion.” Indeed, “perversion” wasn’t specifically a crime in many locations until the late 1940s. The closest data I could find cited anywhere were the published annual reports of police departments in major American cities, which reported the number of lewd conduct or perversion arrests made each year. For example, in 1947, the Los Angeles Police Department made 1,656 “perversion” arrests, and the number rose 86.5% by 1950. In the same period, the Philadelphia police department reported 200 monthly perversion arrests (~2,400 annually), while Washington, D.C. bragged of 1,000 per year. These cities, with their large gay populations and virulently anti-gay police forces were, however, the most extreme.
 
But the numbers the local cops reported don’t translate easily into data about gay persecution. There are a number of problems. First, arrests for “lewd conduct” or “sexual perversion” do not necessarily overlap 100% with homosexual persecution. The categories also include heterosexual misconduct, for example. Beyond this, abstracting from these numbers data on persecution is equally problematic because some of the people arrested actually committed real crimes we would still consider crimes today, including child molestation, sexual assault, indecent exposure, public sex acts, etc. Because the data do not allow us to discriminate between what for convenience I’ll term “real” crimes and what were merely efforts to drive out queers, we can’t just add up the arrests.*

[* Update: Since writing this, I found that in Los Angeles at least, crime statistics broke out sodomy, sex perversion, and lewdness separately from other sex crimes, so we can reasonably assume most of those arrests were for homosexuality and gender-nonconforming behavior.]
​
Third, arrests are not convictions, so it isn’t necessarily correct to use any of this data to claim “criminal punishments,” unless you are defining an arrest as a “criminal” punishment in and of itself. They certainly can be—and were—used punitively as a form of harassment, but it isn’t usually how the term is meant. Finally, the raw data on arrests do not account for repeat offenders. Many men who were arrested for gay sex acts became habitual offenders. Some were arrested regularly. Consider, for example, “Big Bill” Tilden, the middle-aged professional tennis player who was arrested and convicted on three separate occasions during this period of, to be indelicate, giving hand jobs to underage teen boys. (Modern writers, grossly, characterize Tilden as the “confused” “victim” of “zealous” police and blame the boys for orchestrating their own abuse.) In the raw data, Tilden would count as three arrests and thus three people despite being one pedophile.
 
Of course, these statistics also fail to capture the use of parking tickets, noise violations, health code violations, and myriad other laws to harass and penalize queer people and the businesses that catered to them.
 
Unable to find any statistical information that would let me calculate a total number of “punishments” meted out to queer people, particularly involving hand-holding, kissing, and dancing, I contacted Eskridge to see if he could direct me to his source.
 
There was no source.
 
This weekend, he told me that the number was his “extrapolation” from the types of data I cited above, but did not represent a formal statistical analysis. There was no numerical data he could provide to support his estimate.
 
It’s not a wholly unreasonable estimate, of course. It would translate to 67,000 “punishments” per year, which is less than 1,400 per state at a time when a few major cities were arresting people by the thousand. But without solid data to discriminate between real crimes and persecution, or to prove that the numbers in a few urban centers translated nationwide, the 1 million “punishments” number isn’t a fact but a feeling. It feels true, but we don’t have the statistical support to assert that it is. I may not be a Pulitzer Prize nominee or a Yale professor, but I’m not going to put a number in my book that I can’t back up with primary sources.
7 Comments
P.G. Grenadine
5/9/2022 07:45:50 pm

Is there a connection to the asteroid that's making a near pass to Earth in 6 days? I keep calling NASA about this but they never call me back.

In other news, Pepsodent Biden has moved to outlaw the previously legal guns without serial numbers. You see, if something's already illegal you can't make it illegal.

Los Angeles remains east of Las Vegas and Alaska remains the easternmost U.S. state. Fun fact: parts of England are in the Eastern Hemisphere.

I've got stone holes in my heart.

Reply
Jim
5/10/2022 05:01:20 pm

Change your name again Kent ?

Biden has moved to outlaw the previously legal guns without serial numbers. You see, if something's already illegal you can't make it illegal."

Laws change Kent, in most states abortion was illegal, then it became legal, now they are passing laws to make it illegal in states that it was illegal,,, go figure.

"Los Angeles remains east of Las Vegas"

Sorry Kent, if you go west from L.A. you are in the ocean, not in Las Vegas,,,,yikes.

Reply
Kent
5/10/2022 10:33:36 pm

Pretty obvious it's me. Unlike some folks I'm not impersonating anyone. And I like Grenadine and Wodehouse.

So you admit you were repeatedly wrong about "previously legal" unnumbered guns being illegal. There might be hope for you yet.

If you fly west from Alaska, the easternmost state in the U.S. you eventually get to England. So what? Typically, when I put in something wrong you miss it, it's Reno not Vegas. Latitude. It's a thing. You should check it out. Then when you get older you can look into stuff like SSE.

Then if you're very good we can have the "what continent is Mexico part of?" conversation. Hint: same as Greenland.

Darold K.
5/13/2022 08:04:10 pm

I don’t think I’ve witnessed nuttier arguments since I visited a relative in a nursing home a few years ago and I saw two 90 year old men get into a fist fight in the cafeteria over whether the City of Washington and the District of Columbia occupy the exact same area. lol

Jim
5/12/2022 04:00:26 pm

- Las Vegas remains Northeast of L.A., not west as you claimed,, yikes.

-Reno remains North north north west of L.A., not west as you claimed.
Latitude. It's a thing. You should check it out. Then when you get older you can look into stuff like NNW or cardinal directions.

You still have a problem understanding the difference between compass directions and place names. The eastern hemisphere is a place name, not a direction.
For example, if you go west from Nome Alaska you will encounter Russia, it doesn't matter whether you pass over the part of Russia in the western hemisphere or continue into the eastern hemisphere YOU ARE STILL GOING WEST.
Like Russia, the Aleutian Islands are in both the eastern and western hemispheres but will always remain west of mainland Alaska, thus being the westernmost point of the N. American Continent.
Riddle me this Kent, which is farther east,,, Greenwich England or the Aleutian Islands

Reply
Kent
5/21/2022 02:17:05 pm

Just look at a map and draw a line straight down from Los Angeles. I thought after your abysmal failure with the gun thing this being wrong stuff woulf get easier for you.

I'm not making up the LA / Reno thing, It existed before I came along, you're just too stupid to google it, like the gun thing.

It's a trick question of course, Greenwich is in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

Jim.

Jim
5/25/2022 03:12:29 pm

I haven't had this much fun since the aliens ate my dingo.

Kent: "Just look at a map and draw a line straight down from Los Angeles."

O.K. if by down you mean south (maps don't have up and down as directions), I have drawn a line all the way to the south pole, I can go no further "down" without going "up". what now ???

Kent: "I thought after your abysmal failure with the gun thing this being wrong stuff woulf get easier for you."

Firearms manufactured without serial numbers remain illegal to sell as per the law enacted in the sixties.
New laws are to be enacted designating "gun kits" as firearms, not just parts, thereby closing the loophole of ghost gun kits not being legally regarded as firearms.
This is exactly as I have argued with you for millennia.
You are too egotistical to admit you are wrong.

https://www.bbc.com/news/61075086

"The new rules require self-assembled "buy build shoot" kits to have serial numbers - legally making them a firearm."

Educate yourself !!!!

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/18/1093351548/the-biden-administration-just-regulated-ghost-guns-what-does-that-mean

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/11/biden-ghost-guns-crackdown

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-ghost-gun-rules-steve-dettelbach-alcohol-tobacco-and-firearms-nominee/

Kent: "I'm not making up the LA / Reno thing, It existed before I came along, you're just too stupid to google it, like the gun thing."

Reno is further west than L.A. but still remains N.N.N.W. of L.A., not "west" as you continue to proclaim. West is a specific exact direction. (270 degrees)

To recap, west is 270 degrees.
From LA to Reno the direction is approx. 348 degrees.
Reno is not west of L.A.
You have been searching for this word for years now. It is "westerly".


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