ABSTRACT
Policing of the homosexual community led to its rise and was the very “defining” of that community by virtue of a shared adversity. Labeled and targeted by sexual and behavioral deviance, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer community was shaped in tandem with policing pressures. Circumstance corralled the sexually transgressive into the bar, yet it was within such crepuscular harbors that a community was able to develop. The earliest gay bars, drinking establishments that primarily, or exclusively, catered to a homosexual clientele, emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century coinciding with the subsequent medicalization of homosexuality. As the nineteenth century began drawing to a close, so too did late Victorian categorizations of same-sex love based on biblically rooted conceptions of “natural” laws. The perception of the homosexual as a sick and diseased individual to be pitied was to firmly plant itself in the psyche of the dominant culture, particularly after the war, in the 1950s.
