Policing of bohemian culture met organized cross-profession resistance in early 1960s New York

Evidence

Doc Humes, Buckley’s newly appointed agent, had planned to feature him (as well as Ornette Coleman) in an “improvisational” movie, an update on Cervantes titled Don Peyote. The thirty-four-year-old writer called for a grand jury investigation into the NYPD Cabaret Bureau. To that end, he organized a Citizens Emergency Committee. As the co-founder of The Paris Review, Humes was well connected, rallying Norman Mailer, Norman Podhoretz, George Plimpton, Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, playwright Jack Gelber, and Assemblyman Mark Lane. The NYPD responded with a massive investigation of the city’s cabarets, finding hundreds of violations, and fourteen outstanding parking tickets issued to Humes, who was briefly jailed as a scofflaw. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1855

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on how avant-garde scenes mobilize elite connections against policing — the mechanism by which a scene becomes politically legible.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s shelf claims about why culture stagnates — here, institutional attack and defense are part of what energizes a scene’s self-organization.