Research Interests
LGBTQ+ history
Political, legal, and carceral history
Twentieth-century U.S. and transnational history
Book Projects
Book 1: Policing Gay Sex: Male Homosexuality and the Carceral State in Modern America (in production)
My first book project examines the construction of carceral power over forms of male homosexuality and shows how the policing of gay sex has been implicated in the expansion of the carceral state and the rise of mass incarceration. From the 1950s to the 2000s, I argue, gay activists and other social movements, state officials, and experts constructed a system of policing of a matrix of categories of male sexual behavior that were criminalized or decriminalized to varying degrees. The book’s six chapters focus on three states (Texas, California, Massachusetts) where political struggles were particularly significant for the development of federal carceral power over three broad areas of sexual conduct (gay sex between “consenting adults in private,” gay sex in public places, and gay sex that violated the age of consent).
Book 2: The Children’s Crusade: The International Pedophile Movement and the Expansion of Global Police Power in the 1970s (in production)
My next book project is a study of America in the world and the power of grassroots social movements to motivate the expansion of global law enforcement networks for the policing of child sexual abuse. In the “long” 1970s, or the period from about 1965 to 1985, new social movements took shape in the United States, Germany, France, the U.K., Australia, and Holland for the sexual liberation of “pedophiles” and “boy-lovers.” As law-enforcement officials cracked down on those movements, I argue, they created new forms of police power over child sexual abuse that were increasingly transnational in scope.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“A Queer Constitutional History of Loss: Mayes v. Texas (1974), Privacy, and the Struggle for the Right to be Trans in Public in the 1970s,” Journal of American Constitutional History (forthcoming Fall 2025).
“The Invention of Bad Gay Sex: Texas and the Creation of a Criminal Underclass of Gay People,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 1 (2017): 53–87.
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Book Chapters
“The Creation of the Modern Sex Offender,” in The War on Sex, ed. David Halperin and Trevor Hoppe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 247–267.
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Review Essays
“Bad Queers: LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America,” Law & Social Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2022): 691–711, https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2021.59.