Policing Sex and Desire

This chapter argues that day-to-day policing in St. Petersburg frequently involved the use of nuisance laws and administrative prerogatives but was also instanced in thinly veiled refusals to carry out direct orders to manage the spaces and environments in which queer men acted out their desires. This regime involved the exercise of broad police discretion and can be plausibly reconstructed based on the surviving evidence of police activity—or inactivity—in relation to queer spatial practices in the city. This regime can be referred to as queer sexual policing, which includes the decisions and actions of constables and officers in conducting surveillance of men presumed to be amenable to having sex with other men, curtailing opportunities for sex between men, or targeting behavior understood as a precursor to sex between men. More generally, queer sexual policing encompasses a revealing range of modalities of informal policing. It addresses the liminal space between law and lawlessness in the city, taking into account the obvious difficulty of detecting, let alone preventing, actual breaches of sodomy laws. Understanding and providing plausible interpretive models of queer policing helps reveal how a vision of spatial order held by the city's administrative elites was made operational on the streets.