The Myth of the Queer Criminal
Location
CSU 201
Start Date
3-30-2018
End Date
3-30-2018
Description
For 150 years, criminologists, psychologists, physicians, alienists, and other scholars have treated LGBT people as innately criminal. For Cesare Lombroso (1876), they were master-criminals, leading bands of marauding outlaws across the countryside. For Max Nordau (1900), they were too disorganized and chaotic to engage in any but the most brutal crimes. The Chicago School of the 1920s found them to be simpering “pansies,” but by the 1940s, they were accused of conspiring with Nazis or Communists to destroy civilization. They were “deviants” to Howard Becker in the 1960s, and dangerously violent “militants” to Edward Sagarin in the 1970s. In the 2000s, they have become “derelicts,” wandering through the night world accompanied by prostitutes and drug addicts. This presentation explains how scholars in every era use the myth of the queer criminal to depict their own private and public anxieties.
The Myth of the Queer Criminal
CSU 201
For 150 years, criminologists, psychologists, physicians, alienists, and other scholars have treated LGBT people as innately criminal. For Cesare Lombroso (1876), they were master-criminals, leading bands of marauding outlaws across the countryside. For Max Nordau (1900), they were too disorganized and chaotic to engage in any but the most brutal crimes. The Chicago School of the 1920s found them to be simpering “pansies,” but by the 1940s, they were accused of conspiring with Nazis or Communists to destroy civilization. They were “deviants” to Howard Becker in the 1960s, and dangerously violent “militants” to Edward Sagarin in the 1970s. In the 2000s, they have become “derelicts,” wandering through the night world accompanied by prostitutes and drug addicts. This presentation explains how scholars in every era use the myth of the queer criminal to depict their own private and public anxieties.
