Last June, as David was returning from visiting friends in New Jersey, he stopped to use a restroom in New York City’s Penn Station. He told Out Magazine that as he approached a urinal, he noticed one man watching him, while two others traded glances over the urinals’ dividers. David didn’t engage with any of them. However, before he knew it, the first man he noticed pulled out a badge and said, “All three of you are under arrest.” They were quickly escorted out of the bathroom in handcuffs and charged with public lewdness. David (whose real name was not used in Out) and the two others were just three of over 200 men arrested last summer as part of an Amtrak Police Department operation targeting the bathroom, which was listed as a “hotspot” on Sniffies, a map-based cruising platform. David’s charges would later be dropped after he completed a pre-court diversion program, but that didn’t make the experience any less traumatizing.

Among the 200 arrested last summer, at least 20 of the men were taken into ICE custody, the Gothamist reported. New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal told Out the arrests were “a rather frightening callback to a period that we thought had long passed in queer American history.”

That history is explored in writer Carmen Emmi’s directorial debut Plainclothes. Though the film has been overlooked by some of the major awards shows this season, it’s up for the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film this week, and it’s well worth a watch if you missed it when it was in theaters last fall. Set in Emmi’s hometown of Syracuse during the 1990s, the film follows Lucas (played by Tom Blyth), an undercover cop who entraps men in lewd conduct sting operations in the local mall bathroom. It’s during one of these stings that Lucas surprises himself by stumbling into a fleeting romance with a man named Andrew, played by Russell Tovey. Lucas’s life quickly descends into turmoil as he reckons with the ethical complications of his job, his sexuality, perceptions of masculinity, and the death of his father.

As much a psychological thriller as it is a romance, at its heart Plainclothes is a coming out story that interrogates the toll of policing your feelings to adhere to societal norms. The film shines a light on the extensive history of over-policing suffered by the LGBTQ community—a history that continues to this day.

Marc Robert Stein, a San Francisco State University history professor whose research focuses on constitutional law, social movements, gender, race and sexuality, said the history of cruising dates back to the 19th century in the United States. During periods of repression, popular cruising spots became targets of local police.

These sting operations reached their height during the Lavender Scare in the 1950s and ’60s, when allegations of homosexuality led to the firing of government and private sector employees. During this time, police surveilled gay bars, using entrapment techniques to arrest queer men who were looking not........

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