“Broken Windows at Blue’s: A Queer History of Gentrification and Policing”

This essay uses the 1982 police raid of a gay bar in New York City’s Time’s Square to outline how LGBTQ political movements engaged with and were transformed by law-and-order politics that helped enable large projects of urban gentrification. It notes how a process of political struggle led to predominant a gay politics that abandoned police violence as an issue in favor of the fear of street violence from strangers, aligning with certain militant liberal conceptions of neighborhood safety that suited more narrowly the class interests of professional white gay men.