Which brings me, finally, to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a program that is unique in making manifest this underlying connection between the most masculine genre and the most private form of violence by dealing almost exclusively with “sexually-based offenses.” Resonances between its stated epistemological mandate to search out the truths of criminal sexuality and a televisually-inflected vigilance around more subterranean investments in family and heteronormativity are typical of SVU, and I’d like to illustrate some of these structuring principles through a detailed discussion of a single episode. This episode, “Sacrifce” (3.7/#50), which involves a case of gay misidentification, is not classified as one of SVU’s “handful of gay-related episodes” by AfterEllen.com. And, as author Angie B. points out, “it seems odd that in five seasons, no lesbian or bisexual women have been featured characters” — a telling absence in a series that has had to treat an imaginative smorgasbord of perversions in order to fill, to date, more than 100 episodes. I have argued that lesbian desire has an especially troubled relationship to shows that feature professional women, and I’d suggest that this apparent reluctance to include it in the range of sexual themes that SVU mediates for the television public is symptomatic of the hazardous undertow of lesbian desire pulling at the show already, which it would be risky for the program to scrutinize too closely. If “Sacrifce” is necessarily not an officially lesbian text, then, nor is it one of the episodes that make frequent appearances in fan dialogue about onscreen “subtext” between Olivia and Alex (first and foremost, “Loss”). In choosing “Sacrifice” as my example, in other words, I’m examining an episode that has only a tangential connection to this paper’s topic of Olivia as lesbian object and subject. I’m interested in analyzing how the logics of SVU overall set up epistemological frameworks that put forward this possibility, even when it doesn’t surface in obvious ways. “Sacrifice” demonstrates how homosexuality tends to alternately emerge and disappear in conjunction with violence, family crisis, consumerism and spectacle, and epistemological uncertainty more generally.
“Sacrifice” opens with what we might imagine is a stereotypical scene from gay life: a crowd of men loitering outside a bar, as two negotiate their first date. Just as they are making plans to continue the evening, gunshots ring out, and the incipient romance is disrupted. This sort of association of transgressive (in this case, homosexual) desire with violence is obviously constitutive of SVU as a show about sex crimes. When the shots go off, one of the men pulls his gun and dashes away — he’s a cop, we are to assume, so personal life is also interrupted by the professional, here.
Next, this gay officer (called Steve) meets up with Olivia and her partner Elliot at the hospital where the unconscious gunshot victim was taken. Their conversation establishes, first of all, the detectives’ fluency with the city’s licentious gay subculture, perhaps a necessary part of their purview as “panty police” (or, one might speculate, a particular competency of Olivia’s, as she does most of the talking). Steve informs them he believes he spotted the victim in “Puffy’s” (near the scene of the crime), and Olivia responds with surprise, “Inside the bar?” “I was on a date,” Steve confesses, clarifying what he was doing in what she evidently knows to be a gay establishment, and activating the significance of inside vs. outside so characteristic of the closet. Elliot’s main role is to ask, after they’ve gotten the facts out of the way, if Steve “wants a little discretion on this,” making clear the intersection of this incident with the figures of the homophobic police department and the closeted gay cop (where we can’t help wondering about Olivia).
The initial phase of their investigation reveals several assumptions typical of the hermeneutics of SVU’s sex detectives. First, the unit is involved because “copious fluids” were found (in the victim), raising the suspicion of gang rape — as if any non-normative sexual behavior (in this case, having multiple partners) must be the result of violence. Second, their reading of the victim as gay, which you’ll recall is based solely on the location of the crime (as they’re presuming the sex with men was non-consensual), is unshaken when they note he’s wearing a wedding ring. “If he’s in a committed relationship,” Elliot muses, to which Olivia replies derisively, “He was in a meat market bar. Let’s hope his partner’s more committed than he is” — they rely here on stereotypical models of homosexual partnerships (both positive and negative) to interpret the evidence. Third, they immediately verify that the victim has no prior arrests for solicitation (i.e. prostitution), cluing us in to an implicit connection between (homo)sexual criminality and commercialism. Fourth, Detective Munch’s opinion is that “Good money’s on a hate crime. Perps are usually hetero or closeted and in denial,” referencing an awareness of the very real violence that can be provoked by the closet’s oppressive architecture. And most importantly, what the discussion of the facts of the case among the SVU team exhibits is that their procedures for investigating sex consist in large part of applying imagination to the evidence to tell speculative stories that fit the crime (e.g. Elliot’s: “maybe he was cheating, went out, picked up the wrong guys in the meat market”). One might say that the pleasure of being a detective (particularly for those detectives playing along in the audience) lies in this creative exercise of conjecture.
