Law and Order: Sodemy Violations Unit

Knobson walked up to the front of the Metropolitan Police Headquarters in London. He checked his newly issued badge; it was shined to perfection, along with his shoes. His shirt had been painstakingly ironed. It was the 15th of November 1870, but more importantly, his first day on the force. All his life, Knobson wanted to be a police officer. When he was a toddler, his first words were, “You’re nicked”. In school, he whittled himself a truncheon and took it upon himself to enforce order on the playground. Despite the injuries to many children, the teachers allowed it as it meant there was less work for them to do. After finishing his schooling, he went straight into the police academy and studied and trained hard for years until, eventually, he graduated first in his class. And now here he was, about to get his first assignment.

As he walked through the offices of the Met HQ, he wondered what assignment he would get. Usually, new recruits are just put on patrolling the street or basic guard duties. But he was first in his class! Surely, he deserved his choice of assignment. Knobson dreamed of working murder investigations. He loved problem-solving, and there was no harder problem than hunting murderers. Sleuthing clues, chasing leads, he could just imagine it now.

Knobson knocked on the Superintendent’s door, “Come!” bellowed from within.

Opening the door, he found the Superintendent behind his desk, engrossed in a giant pile of paperwork, “Knobson! How are you? Please sit down,” he motioned to the empty chair in front of the desk.

“Good, sir,” Knobson said as he took a seat.

“Always knew you’d be top of your class. Never seen truncheon work like yours. Aren’t going to be many intact skulls on the street with you out there,” he laughed.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, I’m sure you’re keen to know what your first assignment is.”

“Yes, sir! Just keen to get out there and get to work!”

“Excellent. Well, seeing as you were top of your class, I have a special assignment for you.”

Knobson’s heart rose, “this is it!” he thought, trying to contain his excitement.

“I’m assigning you to our Sodomy Violations Unit.” 

Knobson’s heart sank, “Sodomy?”

“Yes, you sound upset?”

“Well, I was kind of hoping for something a bit more prestigious, like the murder investigation unit.”

“This is prestigious! The higher-ups, the politicians, the church, everyone has impressed upon me how important it is to rid our communities of this scourge.”

“Yes, I understand that, sir, but I just personally feel that, maybe, murder is a slightly more pressing issue.”

“Have you read the bible, son?”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“Well then, you should understand. You must know the story of Cain and Abel?”

“Yes, Cain murdered Abel.”

“And what punishment did Cain get? He was made to wander the Earth. He even eventually settles down with a wife and a kid. Compare that to Sodom. God sends a few Angels down to check it out, finds out they’re bumming each other, so he incinerates the city. Tell me, which crime do you suppose God thinks is worse?”

“Well, I think there might be some other verses about murder that rate it over sodomy. If you give me some time-”

“Are you refusing an order, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Your new unit is expecting you. Be on your way,” said the superintendent and went back to his paperwork.

Knobson paced angrily down the corridor towards the Sodomy Investigations Unit. What an insult! The top of his class, possibly the best policeman the force had ever seen, forced to go around chasing queers, seeing if they were bumming each other. Absurd! Well, he would show them! He would do his job so well that there’d be no more buggery in the whole of London, and they’d be forced to put him on murder investigations!

He burst through the door to the Sodemy Violations Unit full of energy, “Hi, I’m Knobson. I’ve just been assigned here.”

Looking at him were the only other two officers of the SVU. Both middle-aged police officers, sitting down and having a cup of tea.

“Hi, welcome to the team,” said the older and greyer of the two, “I’m Sergeant Dobson, and this is Private Johnson.”

“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Knobson. I’m keen to get started. Should I go knock down some deviant's door?”

“Calm down, son,” said Dobson, “We’re just having some tea. Want a cup?”

“With all due respect, sir, I really want to get to work.”

Dobson sighed, “A good officer knows when to take a break.”

Knobson gripped his hand in frustration, but decided he would play it their way for now, “Fine, I’ll take my tea black, no sugar,” he relented, and Johnson went off to pour him a cup.

“I guess I can just take this time to get to know where our workload is at,” Knobson said as Johnson handed him his tea and took a seat with the other two officers, “What’s our caseload like? How many open files do we have?”

“Uh,” Dobson said, pausing to sip his tea, “Well, none I suppose.”

“What an efficient unit!” said Knobson, seeing some hope yet, “How many arrests has this unit made?”

“Well, uh, zero,” admitted Dobson.

“Zero arrests! How? There are plenty of stories out there about known deviants. You can go to any molly house in Soho and find a gaggle of them!”

“Well, see, the problem is the Buggery Act.”

“What do you mean?”

He had to wait for Dobson to take another sip, “Well, it’s very specific in that it’s only an offence if the act of buggery has taken place. Just being fairly obviously gay isn’t actually a crime, it turns out.”

“I see. But zero arrests? Really?”

“Unfortunately, most of the fags we know of have been devilishly clever and have made sure not to have sex in front of any police officers. As such, it has been rather hard to prove that anyone in London has ever engaged in sodomy.“

Knobson sighed. He hadn’t expected this to be a difficult task. How was he going to get to murder investigations now?

“Look,” said Johnson, “On the bright side. We have it easy here.”

“What do you mean?”

“We barely have to do anything except sit around and drink tea all day. Just kick the door down to a molly house every now and then to satisfy the higher-ups and keep the deviants in check.”

Knobson sighed. He didn’t want to give up, “Sir,” he turned to Dobson, “I’d like to give catching some deviants in the act a go.”

Dobson looked concerned, “I don’t know, sounds like a lot of work.”

“Please, sir, just give me a chance.”

“Well, alright, I suppose it’ll show the superintendent that the unit is doing good work.”

While Dobson was officially in charge, Knobson took the lead and drove several operations. At first, they tried simple raids. Wait outside a known centre of deviants, follow two to their lair, then try to catch them in the act. But no matter how fast they moved, they could never catch them in the act. Even their best time for door kicking down was three seconds, a time Knobson was proud of the squad for achieving, but still far slower than it takes to remove oneself from someone else’s anus. All that would happen is they would break in, find two naked men standing in front of a bed, and they’d all stand around awkwardly for a bit before the cops gave it a night and went home. Eventually, the queers figured out what was going on and learned how to spot a tail. They tried paying off informants, but no one in the gay community would dare talk to a police officer. There seemed to be no way forward.

Eventually, he realised he was doing things the wrong way. Dobson and Johnson had already tried the traditional policing approach to all this. He needed to do something new. Knobson was a keen follower of the burgeoning science of forensic policing. He was beginning to see the appeal of this unit. The science of murder was relatively straightforward most of the time. A knife belonging to X was found in Y, fairly simple stuff. But how do you use science to prove that some buggery had happened? Knobson saw a challenge and dove into it. He poured over anatomy textbooks, talked to local doctors, went to the university and interviewed professors of medical science. But there was scant information on what anal sex would do to a body, and no one he talked to wanted anything to do with such debauchery.

“There must be some way to detect such a thing,” Knobson mused over one of the unit’s many tea breaks.

“We already tried,” said Johnson, “We took measurements of their dicks, their anuses. We argued to the judge that the elongation of their phallus combined with the dilation of the sphincter show buggery had occurred. But he said it was inconclusive. And he was right! We don’t have enough data. The science isn’t there yet. We can’t yet look at someone’s butthole and tell if they’ve used it for sex or not.”

Knobson looked in deep thought for a bit, “We just need some hard data. Then we could do some analysis and figure out some hard signs.”

“Possibly, but you can’t get that data; it would be illegal!”

Knobson sighed, “Yes, technically. I can’t ask anyone to commit buggery without people thinking I’m entrapping them.”

It was then that Knobson realised he would have to take this off the books. If he could go out and collect data on buggery, he could figure out a forensic test for it and then pitch it to the higher-ups to get an exemption for official tests.

The problem was there was only one person he could trust to be the test subject in an off-the-books unofficial investigation: himself. He would have to commit buggery in order to get the data he needed. He didn’t like it, but it was the only way he saw to get out of this unit and to his dream of murder investigations. He was just desperate enough to do it.

So, when he had a free evening, he went down to a molly house that was on his to-raid list that the unit hadn’t got to yet. Hopefully, no one would know who he was. 

He sat at the bar for a while, making sure he was drunk enough that he could go through with it. It didn’t take too long for someone to approach him.

“Never seen you here before,” said the man.

“No,” Knobson replied nervously, “I’ve heard this place caters to certain tastes,” he took a hasty swig of his whisky, hardly believing he had said such a thing.

“Mmmm, I think I can help with that,” the man said, rubbing his leg.

“Would you like to come back to my place,” Knobson managed to say, hiding his disgust with himself. He needed them to come to his place as he had all his measuring and note-taking equipment there to collect the data afterwards.

The man agreed, and they left the molly house. Thankfully, the man wasn’t interested in conversation, so Knobson didn’t have to figure out what gays liked to talk about.

They arrived at his house. It was late enough that he didn’t have to worry about any nosy neighbours. He invited the man inside, took a deep breath and closed the door after them.

Knobson lay in his bed, unable to sleep. He never knew that sex could be that good. To think of all that time he had wasted penetrating other people. All that time wasted on his dick when it was his prostate where the true fruits of passion lay. No wonder it was illegal, Knobson thought; if people knew how amazing buggery actually was, they would want to do it constantly. Society would probably collapse. And men, men were so much better to sleep with than women. He should have known. Men were generally better at everything, why should sex be any different? He completely forgot to take any of the data that he had planned.

At first, he tried to forget about it, but it was hard. He almost blew his cover when he was out for lunch with the squad when a colleague asked if he would like a sausage with his lunch.

“What are you insinuating!” he snapped back.

“Sorry, Knobson, I thought you liked bangers and mash.”

He would go on long patrols, claiming that he was out looking for degenerates, but really, they were to clear his head. It never worked. Everywhere he looked, there were reminders of the joys of sodomy. He never realised how many things in London looked phallic before. Big Ben, Nelson’s Column, the hats on the King’s Guards.

Eventually, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he cracked. Being in the sodomy unit meant he knew the patrol schedules and could easily time his visits to various molly houses without running into any cops. Weeks became months as he couldn’t stop his habit. Every attempt at going clean just resulted in another late night at a queer bar.

Eventually, his desperation led to recklessness, and he forgot to keep an eye out for known deviants. 

“What’s that copper doing here,” one man muttered to another as they watched Knobson sitting at the bar on one of his relapses.

“Him? Oh, he’s not a cop. Just some sad bottom. Had my way with him the other week.”

“No, I definitely remember him for a raid a few months ago. You never forget the face of one of those pricks!”

“Huh,” said the other, “A faggot cop. How could you live with yourself doing that to other gays? What a cunt.”

“Maybe we should teach him a lesson. Rat him out to his cop buddies.”

“Yeah, not a bad idea.”

There was a knock on Knobson’s door. He opened it to find a glum-looking Dobson, “Hi, Knobson. I always liked you, you made a good cup of tea, and you really seemed to care about good police work. I’ve been sent to arrest you because, apparently, there’s been some rumours you might be a faggot.”

Knobson was suddenly terrified. How did they know? He must have gotten sloppy.

“But I’m going to tell them I came here, and you had already cleared out. So if I were you, I would get out of here quickly before they start searching for you.”

“Thanks, Dobson.”

“Don’t thank me, just run.”

“It’s been two months!” The superintendent yelled, “How can there be no leads!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” stammered Dobson, “We’ve knocked down the door of every known deviant in the city, and nothing has turned up.”

“We can’t just let this happen! Betrayed by one of our own! It’s humiliating!” he raged, knocking over the stack of papers on his desk.

“Sir!” yelled Johnson as he burst in through the door, “You have to see this! A copy of the newspaper La France from last week!”

The private threw the paper down on the desk, and everyone in the room huddled around it. 

It showed a black and white photo of someone on a stage in front of a very excitable crowd. The figure was dressed in a heavily modified London metropolitan police uniform. The legs were now nothing but extremely short shorts. Stiletto heels had replaced the standard-issue boots. Pantyhose covering the rest of the legs. The top was now very low cut. And most spectacular of all, the helmet was now covered completely in sequins. The figure appeared to be doing abhorrent deviant things with a truncheon. The caption read: “The marvellous Knobelina has become a hit in Parisian nightlife!”