ABSTRACT
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) histories have characterized a series of sex crime panics in the United States since the 1930s as crackdowns on queer communities and individuals. Either implicitly or often explicitly, these crackdowns have been condemned as expressions of popular punitiveness that used gay men as vehicles for drawing moral boundaries and deriving political benefit (see, for example, Bottoms 1995). Such accounts reflect anger about public and political support for laws that focused on sexual deviance and certainly reflect the lived experience of many people who were harassed by the police and prosecuted and sentenced under laws criminalizing consensual homosexual conduct. But they also overgeneralize the punitive effects of the new laws as well as the punitive intentions of those who implemented new laws and enforced existing criminal codes.
