BAD QUEERS
LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America
Scott De Orio
November 24th 2021
For the final seminar in our series, we gathered to discuss Scott De Orio's article "Bad Queers: LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America," forthcoming in Law & Social Inquiry. Drawn from Scott's book project, this article examines the ways non-normative gender and sexual practices were hierarchised and criminalised during the 1970s 'war on sex.' Scott places historical inquiry into conversation with queer theorists, crafting an understanding of the carceral state that is interlinked with ideas of sexual deviance and the actions of LGBTQ activists.
In his work, Scott foregrounds sexual behaviours that were left in the margins by both state reforms and queer activists. While the state grew less concerned with "consenting adults in private" - or "good queers" - Scott points out that more attention was placed on "bad queers," such as "sex workers, men who cruise for sex in public, trans and gender-nonconforming people (especially ones who do not "pass"), people who work in the queer porn industry, people with HIV, queer prisoners, and youth and adults who have sex that violates the age of consent." Law enforcement's zeal for identifying and criminalising behaviours labelled as deviant, therefore, both contributed to the increasing number of people trapped within carceral systems and forced the LGBTQ rights movement to adapt activist strategies that stressed respectability and imitated heteronormativity.
Scott's article inspired a fruitful discussion about the role that sexuality played in the rise of the carceral state, the significance of heteronormativity's impact on LGBTQ activism, and the nature of writing queer histories in the wake of the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2015.
Scott drew interesting connections to narratives that are more traditionally associated with mass incarceration, highlighting that people of colour - and especially gender non-conforming people of colour - were disproportionately policed under attempts to limit sex crime. We also considered the nature of crime itself, thinking about ideas of harm and harm prevention, particularly difficult issues to address with regard to the welfare of children and young adults.
Critically, Scott stressed that wider acceptance of queer individuals and communities in the US - particularly the legislative victory of same-sex marriage - has paved the way for historians to examine these more challenging areas of the past. The successes of the LGBTQ rights movement have opened the door for historians to critically assess the decision-making, tactics, and complicity of the movement in establishing acceptable and unacceptable forms of queer behaviour.
