Research Interests
LGBTQ+ history and queer theory
Political and legal history and the history of the carceral state
Twentieth-century U.S. and transnational history
Book Projects
Book 1: Policing Gay Sex: Male Homosexuality and the Carceral State in Modern America (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press)
Policing Gay Sex examines the development of a hierarchical system of police power that functioned by punishing, normalizing, and hierarchizing male same-sex practices in the United States from the 1950s to the 2000s. During this period, gay activists and other social movements, experts, and state officials engaged in political struggles that led to the total or partial decriminalization of some forms of gay male sexual practice, particularly gay sex between “consenting adults in private” and intimacy in gay bars. At the same time, the decriminalization of some practices was intertwined with the persistence or intensification of the policing of many others, including public gay cruising, gay and trans sex work, the conduct of HIV-positive men who had sex with men, and underage gay sex. Pieces of this story have been told before, but Policing Gay Sex offers the first synthetic history of an overall carceral regime targeting categories of male homosexuality that was even more extensive than scholars have previously recognized.
Book 2: The Children’s Crusade: Policing Pedophilia in the Modern Transatlantic World (in production)
The Children’s Crusade examines the creation of a global system of police power directed at pedophilia and underage gay sex. During the “long” twentieth century, social movements, experts, and state officials engaged in political struggles that established the categories of “the pedophile” and “the boy molester” as objects of policing and punishment, while strengthening a transnational web of law enforcement agencies and practices of surveillance and incarceration. The crackdown on pedophilia cast stigmatized categories of individuals as the root cause of sexual harm while obscuring the role of deeper structural inequalities, including victims’ economic dependence on abusers within their families. It also had the effect of subjecting many young people themselves, the same population that child protection laws purported to protect, to punishment and state violence.
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.
Click here to view
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.
Click here to view
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.