Several police officers sat at her table. More than six decades later, Faderman sat at the Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast, a fundraiser for LGBTQ people in San Diego. When Lillian Faderman came out as a gay woman in the 1950s, she thought of police as “the enemy.” There was good reason for that: Police enforced anti-gay laws that banned homosexual acts, cops regularly raided gay bars, and LGBTQ communities often resorted to policing and taking care of themselves because they knew a lot of society, including cops, would simply dismiss their problems or make them worse.
