Fashion Model Named Rusty in the 60s
Rusty Brown started dressing as a man, first every bit a disguise to get a factory chore since she lost her war-time position as a machinist at the shut of World War II, so in order to piece of work as a drag king. This is when her troubles began.
"I have been arrested in New York more times than I have fingers and toes," she told an interviewer from the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project in 1983, "for wearing pants and a shirt." At that time, she says, "y'all had to have iii pieces of female attire" in social club to avoid being arrested for cross-dressing.
In LGBTQ circles around the country, this was known equally the three-commodity rule—or the three-piece law. Information technology was referenced everywhere—including in reports about arrests in Greenwich Hamlet in the weeks and months leading up to the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
The problem is, the law technically never existed. Instead, accounts suggest that constabulary generally used sometime, often unrelated laws to target LGBT people throughout the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
A police officer arrests a male cross-dresser in a ball gown, circa 1940.
Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Masquerade Laws Revived to Target LGBTQ
Laws criminalizing cross-dressing spread like wildfire around the United states of america in the mid-19th century. New York'due south, dating back to 1845, was one of the oldest. It declared it a crime to have your "face painted, discolored, covered, or curtained, or [be] otherwise bearded… [while] in a road or public highway."
The country originally intended the law to punish rural farmers, who had taken to dressing like Native Americans to fight off taxation collectors. Only every bit scholar William N. Eskridge, Jr. recounts in his encyclopedic book Gaylaw, "past the get-go of the 20 century, gender inappropriateness… was increasingly considered a sickness and public offense."
Existing laws against costumed dress, even if they didn't specifically mention cantankerous dressing—collectively referred to as "masquerade laws"—were increasingly pressed into service around the country to punish gender variance.
That these laws were oft sick-suited to the task didn't affair.
In Brooklyn in 1913, for instance, a person who we would today telephone call a transgender man was arrested for "masquerading in men's clothes," smoking and drinking in a bar. When the magistrate noted that the state'southward masquerade law was intended only to criminalize costumed wearing apparel used as a cover for another crime, the police were forced to allow the human go. However, they promptly re-arrested him, charged him with "associating with idle and vicious persons," and constitute a new magistrate to endeavor the case.
When he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in a reformatory, the estimate fabricated it clear that despite the new accuse, he was being punished for his dress. "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 September 3, 1913 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Many men dressed as women were locked upwards on charges of masquerading and indecent exposure at the National Diversity Artists' Exotic Carnival and Ball held at the Manhattan Center in 1962. Constabulary and detectives herded the costumed guests into police wagons in front end of the brawl.
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Three-Article Rule Becomes Lawmaking
Every bit America's fear and panic over LGBTQ people became increasingly vocal and widespread in the mid-20 century, arrests like this became more than and more than common. Still, those arrests primarily revolved around 19th-century masquerade laws, none of which specified a number of articles of clothing to avoid arrest. So where does the idea of the iii-article rule come from?
Kate Redburn, a JD/PhD candidate in queer and trans legal history at Yale University (who uses the gender-neutral pronoun, "they"), has discovered a few clues in their research. Showtime, they say that mentions of the three-article dominion are almost all retrospective, meaning they come upward in interviews and memoirs about the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, but non in documents actually produced in those years.
2nd, none of the cross-dressing laws they could find mentioned a specific number of clothing articles. Curious, they turned to more than esoteric sources of legal codes, including military machine law and police procedural manuals (which lay out how a law on the books should be put into practice on the footing). When those likewise turned up nothing, they came upwardly with two explanations: either the iii-article police was an breezy rule of thumb used by the police, or, essentially, a term used by the LGBTQ community as a way to easily warn each other.
Christopher Adam Mitchell, who researches LGBTQ history at New York City's Hunter College, came to a similar conclusion. In the mid 20th century, he said, both the police and LGBTQ communities around the country were condign more than interconnected, making it easier for this kind of data to flow between localities, which explains why it gets referenced everywhere. Mitchell likewise noticed an boosted wrinkle: gay men and transgender women who mention the three-commodity rule were usually being arrested in bar raids. Lesbians and trans men, on the other manus, were beingness accosted in bars and on the streets.
"Police were using this to check their underwear," Mitchell says, using the law as an excuse for street-level sexual assail and sexual humiliation.
However, the greater danger to gender nonconforming people during this period, Mitchell suggests, was street violence, which was much more than prevalent than street cantankerous-dressing arrests—although the two sometimes went hand in hand.
New York City resident Martin Boyce recalls that on Halloween, 1968, a cop collared him in Queens because his Oscar Wilde costume was too feminine. Boyce argued back, brandishing the receipts from the unisex shop where he'd bought his wearing apparel. Their argument attracted the attention of a nearby gang. The police force officeholder, frustrated by Boyce's resistance, acquiesced to Boyce'southward arguments—and so turned to the gang, saying. "He's all yours." The gang was then amused past Boyce'due south defiant mental attitude, they let him pass unharmed.
Stonewall Riots Adjourn Cross-Dressing Arrests
The side by side yr, Boyce would be ane of the many people involved with the Stonewall insurgence, spending days rebelling against just this kind of police harassment. Afterwards, he says, cross-dressing arrests stale up almost immediately. Redburn and Mitchell agree that arrests decreased—although some continued after Stonewall, they became much less widespread.
READ More than: What Happened at the Stonewall Riots? A Timeline of the 1969 Uprising
In the absence of regular arrests, neither the cops nor the LGBTQ community needed the kind of informal reminder of the 3-article rule, and the phrase quickly roughshod out of circulation. But the masquerade law itself remains on the books. In fact, police force found new applications for the police force in 2011, when it was used to abort protestors (who wore masks) in the Occupy Wall Street move—showing in one case again that enforcement and the bodily diction of the law can vary.
Meanwhile, in June 2019, NYPD law commissioner James P. O'Neill offered an apology on behalf of the city's police strength for their actions at Stonewall some 50 years earlier. "The actions taken past the Due north.Y.P.D. were wrong—apparently and unproblematic," O'Neill said. "I vow to the LGBTQ community that this would never happen in the NYPD in 2019. Nosotros have, and we do, comprehend all New Yorkers."
Hugh Ryan ( @Hugh_Ryan) is the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer.
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