Ninety-nine men in skirts
A ballroom, six police vans and an 1845 law against disguised faces.
On 21 October 1939, shortly after half past one in the morning, plain-clothes police stormed the seventh-floor ballroom of the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street in New York. The sixteenth Keansburg-Mandalay costume ball, a private party, was taking place there. Lieutenant Hugh McGovern had cleared the operation in advance with a night court judge. Then he gave the order to move in.
The police arrested ninety-nine men wearing women's clothes. A few other guests managed to escape to the fifth floor, change and leave the building unhindered. By then a crowd had gathered outside. It watched as those arrested were led to six police vans.
The legal basis was a vagrancy provision from 1845: Section 887, subsection seven, of the New York Code of Criminal Procedure. It prohibited appearing in public with a painted, masked or otherwise disguised face in order to conceal one's identity. The law said nothing about clothing. Moreover, the offence required those concerned to be on the street. The police therefore parked the vans some distance from the entrance and forced the arrested men to walk there.
The records note the age distribution precisely: two of those arrested were nineteen, seventy-eight were in their twenties, fourteen in their thirties and five over forty. At the station on West 30th Street, friends who wanted to post bail or bring clothes were turned away. The sentence was ten days in the workhouse. Apparently none of the sentences was carried out.
Twenty-three years later, the same ballroom was the scene of another raid. In 1962, police arrested forty-four men there. This time the police chief himself had ordered the operation because he considered the sight of the guests indecent. The section was not repealed until 1967. From 1970, drag balls in New York were finally legal.