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In Late 1992 the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force (hereafter
the Task Force) unveiled a victory more than fifteen years in the making: the publication
of a gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) awareness training manual for the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD). Its appearance coincided with the LAPD?s decision to recruit
openly gay police officers and the emergence of Pride Behind the Badge, an association
of previously closeted officers recently formed to staff LAPD recruitment events and
trainings. As an apparent reversal of the LAPD's long-standing hostility toward homosexuals,
the manual signaled the LAPD's growing willingness to protect white gay and lesbian
privacy and property through policing. The manual, for instance, reminded officers
that "self-identified," or out, gays "have higher average household incomes" and "significantly
higher educational achievements," and they "vote more than non-gays." Such statements
indirectly described the predominantly white, professional, and openly gay and lesbian
urbanites who, since the 1970s, had mobilized voters like themselves into a voting
bloc capable of swaying police allocations in city budgets. By the late 1980s white
gays and their political clout, as many scholars have argued, began serving as an
economic base to gentrify deteriorating downtown neighborhoods in global cities like
Los Angeles. In short, the training taught officers that white gay and lesbian professionals
were productive and law-abiding citizens who, like white suburbanites, motored the
mechanisms filling police paychecks.
The manual also interpreted the HIV/AIDS epidemic as no longer a threat to white gay
and lesbian urbanites' newfound political and economic power. Since 1981 politicians
and public health officials, falsely operating under Christian Right claims that HIV/AIDS
was a gay disease, had targeted gay neighborhoods as epicenters for disease and crime.
A multiple choice test on HIV/AIDS at the end of the manual instructed officers that
"most of the world's HIV infected people" were not "Homosexual" but were now "Heterosexual,"
"In Africa," and "Not Being Treated." The manual further supported these claims by
warning officers of "liquid blood product exposure" during "riot control" and to expect
most trans people and people of color to be secretive about their sexual practices.
Given that the 1992 Rodney King Riots recently took place in neighborhoods of color,
the training encouraged officers to protect white gay people under the belief that
they were now harmless and disease-free while encouraging officers to be anxious about
protecting trans people, sexually closeted people, and poor people of color (irrespective
of their stated sexual identity) because they and their neighborhoods were still considered
threats to property and prone to be secretive about their sexuality and/ or HIV status.
To understand why the Task Force and the LAPD agreed upon such major policing objectives,
our article examines two decades of propolice activism led by a predominantly white,
middle-class coalition of gay organizations and voters we call "gay moderates." Following
Clayton Howard's call to investigate "moderation as an ideology with its own politics
and history," we use the term "gay moderates" because it highlights centrist and even
conservative strands of LGBT activism that are otherwise obscured by framing LGBT
politics as exclusively progressive, liberal, or leftist.8 Gay moderates in Los Angeles
rejected the ?extremism? of the homophobic Christian Right and the antiracist queer
Left while advancing a politics of respectability centered around distinguishing openly
gay and lesbian white gender-conforming professionals from poor people of color, sexually
closeted people, and trans and gender-nonconforming people, whose sex practices in
mainstream society were still considered criminally suspect, diseased, and risky.
Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and police violence against poor people of
color, gay moderates consistently priori-tized gay community policing and helped redefine
popular meanings of gay citizenship so that hiring an out gay cop seemed like a commonsense
response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Gay moderates' activism, we argue, eventually conjoined
HIV/AIDS public health.
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