The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles

As an enforcing agent of heteronormativity, obscenity law has often been used to stigmatize and suppress queer texts. This article examines the mechanics of such deployments in mid-twentiethcentury Los Angeles, where the national domestic politics of the cold war found shape and expression at the local level. While a study of obscenity case law alone might suggest more victories than losses for queer texts, this article emphasizes the cultural work accomplished by the incessant deployment of such charges, regardless of outcome, as they served to reify mainstream assumptions about the perversity and prurience of dissident sexualities. This policing served a variety of interlocking ends: the literal erasure of homosexual visibility, the cultural conflation of the queer with the obscene, and the targeting of queer community formations for destruction. From male physique magazines to avant-garde Kenneth Anger films, authorities deemed queer texts inherently obscene, regardless of their levels of graphic depictions of sexuality, as a sustained antigay moral panic engulfed cold war Los Angeles. Even public space defined as queer proved vulnerable to such efforts, as the marginalization of queer communities that pushed them into proximity with disreputable straight films and publications also allowed the heightened policing of those straight texts as cover for the actual combating of queer community formations. While this conflation of queerness and obscenity seemingly faded in the liberal 1970s, its legacy was to set the framework for the antigay agenda of the New Right, which continues to exploit such tropes into the present day.