Policing homosexual acts in the mid-twentieth century: ‘whether or not whipping would have the desired effect is a matter of conjecture’

This article examines a 1949 police training text written by Glasgow City Police Detective Constable Douglas Hamilton, published in The Police Journal, to analyse one way in which homosexuality was rendered visible and policeable in the immediate post-war period. Through a close textual and discursive analysis, the paper argues that Hamilton’s article functioned as an example of a practical technology of police visuality: it instructed officers how to identify and entrap homosexual men in public and semi-public spaces at a time of intensified concern with crime detection, moral order, and internal security. Situating the analysis within literatures on police culture, detection, and discretion, as well as queer and cultural criminology, the article demonstrates how police knowledge about homosexuality was operationalised through narrative description rather than formal law alone. By foregrounding this police training literature as an historically significant site of cultural and institutional power, the paper contributes to policing studies by showing how everyday police practices of looking and detection helped construct sexual deviance as an object of governance. While grounded in historical analysis, the article also highlights the enduring relevance of these visual tropes for understanding the fragility of subsequent sexual liberalisation and the persistence of moral policing through processes other than law.