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Creators/Authors contains: "Nolan Kline, Stephanie Gonzalez"

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  1. Public attention to law enforcement officers’ violent interactions with people who are minorized due to their racial, ethnic, and gender identities has grown in recent years, policing has come under increased scrutiny and critique in the United States. Existing scholarship on law enforcement underscores how policing is a key feature of governmentality and upholds power inequalities based on race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, and other social constructions of difference. Scant scholarship, however, examines experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identifying (LGBTQ+) law enforcement officers, who are simultaneously agents of the state and also subjected to governing regimes that perpetuate social exclusions based on their identities. While research on LGBTQ+ officers has examined community perceptions of officers, workplace inclusivity, and masculinized employment settings, it has largely ignored the complexities and ambivalent sentiments of LGBTQ+ officers who are complicit with governing objectives but also disenfranchised due to their identities. In this paper, we report findings from participant observation with an LGBTQ+ law enforcement organization and semi-structured interviews with Lesbian and Gay law enforcement officers (n=7) who were recruited as part of a larger study focused on activism following the 2016 Pulse Shooting in Orlando, Florida. Findings underscore Lesbian and Gay officers’ tensions between embracing professional loyalty and experiences of trauma and exclusion due to their identities. Moreover, interviewees underscore the complex political and economic factors that reinforce their loyalty, including proximity to neoliberal economic ideals such as attractive wages and perceived prestige. Overall, we argue that Lesbian and Gay officers’ loyalty to policing obfuscates larger neoliberal economic failings and reinforces social and political differences. 
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