GROSS INDECENCY BETWEEN WOMEN - POLICING LESBIANS OR POLICING LESBIANPOLICE

The subject of criminalizing lesbianism actually entered the official record of parliamentary proceedings earlier than 1921, when in 1920 a London magistrate requested that a clause be extended to 'cover cases of gross indecency between women'. Such legislation may not have const ituted a direct attack on female homosexuality as an immoral behavior or abnormal sexual category, so much as signaled how the struggle for hegemony over law enforcement and the control of public space resulted in a pragmatic strategy enacted against certain women, such as the Wo men Police Sen ice, who refused to be constructed either as culturally feminine or as heterosexual.