I mean… In the US it was illegal to have anal sex. Ok, weird laws… but how did they enforce it? If two willing adults wanted to do it in the butt it would still be a crime, but I really don’t think there would be a cop hiding in the closet (or maybe there would be, who knows). Also, I can kinda understand that law on conservative countries where religion is really important/dominant, but the US should be a “free” country, right?
There was a US Senator who could give you first-hand (so to speak) testimony about “cops everywhere”
Also, one of the stars of the TV series “Route 66” (whatever) was busted for engaging in a homosexual act in a men’s room of a gas station. The Senator gets points for location - an airport with shiny marble is much classier than a filthy tiled box.
Maybe the actor should have tutored the Senator - at least he completed the act before getting busted (IIRC).
Just FYI, contrary to popular belief the term ‘sodomy’ does **NOT **just mean anal sex, but rather any sex act deemed by those in power to be immoral. It has included everything from bestiality to, in the most conservative venues, simply the woman being on top!
Well, every assumption in the OP is wrong, but that’s somewhat understandable since the subject has gotten caught up in modern cultural battles.
First, the U.S. is not a “free” country, in quotes or out. No country is. Laws concerning morality appear in every culture and every time. But anyone who thinks that religion is not totally “important/dominant” in U.S. history should either apologize to every history teacher they’ve ever had or sue their school systems. Religion, defined as Protestant denominations, was behind the foundation of American colonies by ex-Brits who wanted the freedom to persecute anyone who didn’t think like them and continued to be the presumptive font of all moral judgements and laws until very recently.
Second, the laws being asked about were sodomy laws, and sodomy has had a multitude of definitions over the years, with anal sex being a very minor subset.
A fascinating discussion can be found in The Strange History of Sodomy Laws, which doesn’t like my trying to cut and paste.
It says that sodomy laws targeted bestiality in the early days, although anal sex was illegal but even so rarely enforced. The reason was not because of homosexuality but because any sex that was non-procreative - designed to make babies - went against church doctrine.
When the laws started becoming enforced, they were handled like most other crime. The police didn’t do real detective work, they merely relied on someone providing evidence or testimony. One partner could also easily be pressured to name the other as well. The laws became useful to prosecuting homosexuals, because by definition two people of the same sex could not be engaged in procreative sex - therefore sodomy had to be involved. Mere presence in a known homosexual hot spot could be prima facie proof of guilt.
Because the laws were almost always written without specific reference to homosexuality, heterosexual couples started to realize that they were technically breaking the law and a few were prosecuted. Well, you can’t have that. Laws in all free countries are designed to protect the majority from the criminal classes. (This is, by sheer coincidence no doubt, also true in unfree countries.) When the same law is applied to the majority it must be modified.
This is cynical, to be sure. It is also unfortunately an accurate summation of history.
Actually, sometimes there was. Police would stake out and spy on places that were known to be or suspected as places where homosexuals would meet to have sex. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s aide Walter Jenkins was caught giving oral sex to another man in a YMCA bathroom by two vice squad cops watching through a peephole from an adjacent shower room. Jenkins was charged with disorderly conduct rather than sodomy, but this shows the lengths to which police would go to try to suppress such “deviant” acts.
Both of those guys ran afoul of public indecency or disorderly conduct laws, not sodomy laws. In the case of the senator (assuming we’re talking about the gentleman from Idaho) it happened after they’d been struck down by Lawrence. If they’d done their thing in private, they would have been fine.
Well, by free I meant not a place with no law, of course. I might not be from the USA, nor a native speaker, which would explain the confusion about sodomy/anal sex.
By religion I meant countries where religion really defines all the laws - theocracies.
This just says the same thing in different words. The authorities use whatever laws happen to be on the books that they think they can get a conviction for to persecute Others. The title of the law is of small importance. It only becomes an issue when the majority decides that the action is not a crime under any variation of wordage.
The Larry Craig scandal occurred because the police were cracking down on alleged gay rendezvous in the airport bathrooms. The police report read:
Craig did not engage in lewd conduct, the actual title of the offense. He gave a signal that was perceived to be his intention to do so. It was prosecuted as a public crime although no public action was taken and if, hypothetically, Craig was trying to hook up with someone, it wouldn’t necessarily have been in public. (A tryst in an airport hotel could have been the consequence. Nobody can tell what might have happened in a theoretical future.) This is thought crime and would be unacceptable by today’s public for any other reason. But it is exactly what police for the last century or so have committed against homosexuals. I choose those words carefully.
Until earlier this year, the police in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana were still arresting people for agreeing to have consensual sex in private residences. (The sheriff’s office claims to have been totally unaware of Lawrence v Texas. I’m not sure if I believe that, but even if it’s true it’s still unacceptable.)
Yes and no. While certainly the cops tended to have it in for gays (how frequently did they raid bathhouses in SF and NYC, for example?) the Larry Craig issue points to something different. A straight male should be able to go to the bathroom without being harassed by someone looking for a hookup, just as a young lady should be able to walk down some streets in the city without being harassed by men in passing cars looking for paid bunga. what’s acceptable if strange behaviour outside the door of the men’s room - starting conversations, trying to introduce yourself to strangers, being overly friendly - is embarrassingly uncomfortably unwelcome inside the men’s room. If Craig wanted a hookup, there are plenty of other venues.
Yeah, it’s similar to the persistence straight men show trying to meet women, but we don’t (or at least, I don’t) follow them into the bathroom and try to make advances while they have their pants down.
In fact there’s a whole long joke about how most men will go out of their way to avoid using an adjacent urinal or stall, so the ideal men’s room has an odd number of fixtures and men never use the even numbered ones… and will use an open stall in preference to an adjacent urinal.
So the Craig charge was akin to soliciting in a public place, not performing sodomy.
I don’t disagree, but for the purposes of the OP’s question there is a rather large difference between a sodomy law which regulates things happening behind closed doors and one of the public lewdness/disorderly conduct laws that came into play in those cases.
How do you convict on any private consensual act that is illegal? You have to rely on testimony or other types of evidence. There are also inchoate offenses that can be prosecuted (attempt, conspiracy, incitement, solicitation, etc.). Some jurisdictions limit inchoate crimes to specific types of criminal activity, though, and I don’t know if sodomy was typically included or not.
I have seen movies where back in ye olden days the authorities would do some type of anal examination to determine if sodomy had occurred, but I don’t know if that’s an accurate depiction, and I’m not sure what exactly they would have been looking for prior to modern chemical analysis/testing regimes arriving on the scene. Anyone know?
If they did physical examinations of that kind at all, I imagine it would have been exceptionally. As other have pointed out, sodomy is not confined to anal intercourse; anything non-procreative will do, so sodomy could be inferred from circumstantial evidence, e.g. the defendants (of the same sex) spent the night in a double bed, grunts overheard, stains on the sheets - whatever.
Plus, it used to be the case that sodomy offences were an exception to the rule against admitting evidence of previous convictions; sodomy was considered so exceptionally bizarre and revolting that only an incorrigible deviant would perpetrate it (I know, I know, but that was the argument) so if you had prior convictions for similar offences that was admissible as evidence tending to show your guilt on this occasion too, because you were The Kind Of Person Who Did This Kind Of Thing.
My feeling is that many laws were simply on the books to make a point but were generally not enforced except in very few cases. The rich or upper class could get away with technically illegal conduct as long as they were reasonably discrete about it. There were cases of Hollywood actors living as “roommates” where everybody knew the truth but it was just politely ignored.
On the other hand, if a dead body appeared after a party full of drugs and sex, then the police might decide is a good time to use anti-sodomy laws to advantage.
And, like always, the poor got the short end of the stick and had to be much more discrete and secretive.
And, just like now, it was a useful accusation for divorce cases. “Yes your honor, he wanted me to take it up the butt, and I cried and I pleaded but he was violent and drunk and you cannot imagine the misery I have had to endure from this brute”.
This level of “investigation” comes into play when the people in power have targeted someone and are fishing for a charge to pin on him. For obvious reasons, spottily enforced laws that are routinely violated are useful tools for this purpose.
As for what they’re looking for – nothing, really, but it’s necessary to go through the motions to maintain the pretense of due process.
Relevant to the OP is the status of “fornication” in Utah. This is simply sex between unmarried people. It’s also one that, I’m certain, is broken with great regularity in The Beehive State. I recall hearing about a case several years ago where the state of Utah was prosecuting two people for this.
How? you have to ask. This wasn’t lewd public behavior or rape. It was consensual sex in a private location. Something most people would, I think, regard as pretty usual and harmless, but something definitely against the letter of Utah state law. Somehow they had gotten one person to agree to testify against the other. How they did this, I have no idea. Presumably the testifier was offered immunity. Maybe this was a very extreme case of a lover’s spat. I understand the case had to be dropped when the testifier finally said they wouldn’t give evidence against their partner.
I’ve looked for references to this case online, but my rapid search didn’t find anything. Nevertheless, you can find references to Utah’s fornication laws, which are still on the books. Although damnably hard to prosecute, for the above reasons.
In the UK buggery (as opposed to fornication) was made illegal by Henry VIII ( the Buggery Act 1533) The Sexual Offences Act 1967 maintained general prohibitions on buggery and indecency (and beastiality) between men in England but not Scotland or N Ireland, but provided for a limited decriminalisation of homosexual acts where three conditions were fulfilled: 1) the act had to be consensual, 2) the act had to take place in private and 3) the act could involve only people that had attained the age of 21.
The Sexual Offences Act 2003 swept away all of the previous sex-specific legislation, including the 1967 Act, and introduced instead neutral offences. Thus, the previous conditions relating to privacy were removed, and sexual acts were viewed by the law without regard to the sex of the participants.
This is somewhat simplified as various bits of legislation between these dates continued to chip away at the discrimination.
In the Lawrence v Texas case (the one in which the Supreme Court struck down the Texas anti-sodomy law), the police were called to the apartment by someone there. Here is the description from Wikipedia:
"On September 17, 1998, John Lawrence, a gay 55-year-old medical technologist, was hosting two gay acquaintances, Tyron Garner, age 31, and Robert Eubanks, 40, at his apartment on the outskirts of Houston. Lawrence and Eubanks had been friends for more than 20 years. Garner and Eubanks had a tempestuous on-again off-again romantic relationship since 1990. Lacking transportation home, the couple were preparing to spend the night. Eubanks, who had been drinking heavily, left to purchase a soda from a nearby vending machine. Apparently outraged that Lawrence had been flirting with Garner, he called police and reported ‘a black male going crazy with a gun’ at Lawrence’s apartment.
Four Harris County sheriff’s deputies responded within minutes and Eubanks pointed them to the apartment. They entered the unlocked apartment toward 11 pm with their weapons drawn. In accordance with police procedures, the first to arrive, Joseph Quinn, took the lead both in approaching the scene and in later determining what charges to bring, if any. He later reported seeing Lawrence and Garner having anal sex in the bedroom. A second officer reported seeing them engaged in oral sex, and two others did not report seeing the pair having sex."
So in that case, it was eyewitness testimony of the police officer.
Cite?
Joseph Wambaugh, a former vice cop, wrote about such stakeouts in fictionalized form, in The Choirboys. By the early Seventies, when the book was written, the idea was not so much to arrest gays as to let them know “Cops are watching, we COULD bust you, but we’d rather you just stopped coming here and annoying ordinary customers who just need to tinkle.”
In the book, lead Vice detective Scuzzi would hide in a room adjacent to the mens’ room and squirt offenders with a spray bottle, while they were in the act. Generally, they took the hint to go away quietly.
Now, I remember Jimmy Breslin writing that DECADES ago, undercover cops in Greenwich Village would go into bathhouses with tubes of lipstick, and would mark the buttocks of men engaged in specific acts that they could be prosecuted for. Later, the whole squad would bust in and arrest guys with the telltale lipstick on their behinds.