breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (bathtime)
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Usually, immigration officials used the public charge clause [deportation of those likely to become a burden on the state] against aliens suspected of sodomy without much investigation into their actual economic circumstances. The assumption of these officials was that men who were not self-governing in their sexual practices could not be self-governing in their labor. Sexual perversion, linked in this way to crime and vagrancy, would one way or another lead its practitioners to public charge status. In a reversal of this logic, vagrancy charges against a pair of Latin American aliens stood in for actual evidence that sodomy had been committed. “While there is no direct proof…that these aliens and their associates have been practicing sodomy or other unnatural crimes in…the Mint Hotel,” Assistant Commissioner-General Hampton wrote in the 1916 case of Guillermo Castillo and Marcos Cervellos, “the indications are that the aliens are a worthless lot of vagabonds.”
—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

This book continues to be absolutely gripping. Not to mention incredibly useful from a writing-of-historical-fiction perspective. (NB this passage concerns the early decades of the twentieth century: pre-WWI and early 1920s.)

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