Three-Article Rule Becomes CodeĪs America’s fear and panic over LGBTQ people became increasingly vocal and widespread in the mid-20 century, arrests like this became more and more common. ![]() Police and detectives herded the costumed guests into police wagons in front of the ball. Many men dressed as women were locked up on charges of masquerading and indecent exposure at the National Variety Artists' Exotic Carnival and Ball held at the Manhattan Center in 1962. “No girl would dress in men’s clothing unless she is twisted in her moral viewpoint,” the magistrate proclaimed from the bench, according to a Septemarticle in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. When he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in a reformatory, the judge made it clear that despite the new charge, he was being punished for his dress. However, they promptly re-arrested him, charged him with “associating with idle and vicious persons,” and found a new magistrate to try the case. When the magistrate noted that the state’s masquerade law was intended only to criminalize costumed dress used as a cover for another crime, the police were forced to let the man go. In Brooklyn in 1913, for instance, a person who we would today call a transgender man was arrested for “masquerading in men’s clothes,” smoking and drinking in a bar. That these laws were often ill-suited to the task didn’t matter. recounts in his encyclopedic book Gaylaw, “by the beginning of the 20 century, gender inappropriateness… was increasingly considered a sickness and public offense.”Įxisting laws against costumed dress, even if they didn’t specifically mention cross dressing-collectively referred to as “masquerade laws”-were increasingly pressed into service around the country to punish gender variance. The state originally intended the law to punish rural farmers, who had taken to dressing like Native Americans to fight off tax collectors. ![]() It declared it a crime to have your “face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or otherwise disguised… in a road or public highway.” New York’s, dating back to 1845, was one of the oldest. ![]() Laws criminalizing cross-dressing spread like wildfire around the United States in the mid-19th century. A police officer arrests a male cross-dresser in a ball gown, circa 1940.
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