October 1926, Police Chief AW Reynolds raided a ranch four miles northeast of Porterville, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, and arrested forty-eight-year-old ranch hand Arjan Singh for attempting the" crime against nature" on a seventeen-year-old white" local boy," Alexander Quinn. The local newspaper reported Singh's arrest as a" statutory crime," but Alexander Quinn was hardly shielded from police suspicions. The Porterville police arrested Quinn and held him in jail on the charge of va-grancy pending a hearing in juvenile court. Although Singh declared that he would fight the sodomy charge, at the trial he pled guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. 1

Arjan Singh and Alexander Quinn were among thousands of seasonal field workers-foreign migrants, tramps, and casual local laborers-engaged in the yearlong cycle of planting, pruning, and harvesting up and down the Pacific Coast in the early twentieth century. 2 This narrative culled from Tulare County Superior Court records could be considered predictable. Arjan Singh's arrest for sodomy fit a pattern of intergenerational, working-class, same-sex relations that early-twentieth-century sociologists, sexologists, and labor economists have conventionally described as situational" homosexuality" common in" mining districts, lumber camps, wheat fields, and fruit ranches." Sodomy was considered a prevailing immoral practice" wherever a large number of men [were] grouped together apart from women." 3 The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney WC Haight, blamed the crimes on socializing between" low down whites and Hindus of the same type." Haight's ability to explain the crimes did not diminish his outrage at Singh's" disgusting Oriental de-pravity" or temper his ambivalence toward Quinn's behavior. Despite the newspaper's invocation of statutory crime, the prosecutor appeared reluctant to treat Quinn as an innocent victim. 4 What made the Porterville case simultaneously predictable and outrageous?