The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

From the height of the pansy craze through the post-Prohibition crackdown, vice officers, liquor agents, journalists, and lay observers repeatedly testified to the supposed hallmarks of “vocal homosexuality.” But how did vocal manner come to be heard as diagnostic of sexual deviance? On what grounds did courts accept auditory impressions, often framed as “what one might hear with one’s eyes closed,” as damming evidence of homosexuality? And why, long after visible “gender codes” were discredited as indices of homosexuality—after gay men unsettled, parodied, and multiplied the categories meant to contain them, and after psychiatric, military, and intellectual authorities conceded that no fixed sign could define “the homosexual”—did courts continue to admit testimony about the sound of queerness?  Why did the ear remain credible long after the eye had been discredited, and why does it remain so today? Through an analysis of popular press coverage from the “pansy craze,” medical writings of the 1930s, and post-Prohibition liquor-license revocation hearings, this paper traces how voice became a legally actionable marker of sexual deviance in early twentieth-century America. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s critique of sonic essentialism, it argues that auditory impressions were not incidental observations but historically produced forms of power/knowledge that authorized anti-gay policing in the absence of proof of illicit conduct. Courts treated high-pitched or “off-tune” voices as common-sense indicators of homosexuality. In doing so, they collapsed distinctions between expert and lay listening and codified aural stereotypes into law.