Many men caught in these entrapment schemes were closeted and accepted fines and plea deals rather than fighting charges in a public trial, where they could be outed and harassed. Jennings made history by fighting his charge in court, a rarity for a lewd-conduct arrest in that age. Once they arrived, the stranger revealed himself as a police officer and arrested Jennings for lewd misconduct. When Jennings left, the man followed him home, making small talk about the Navy. Jennings claimed the stranger had grabbed his hand and placed it down the front of his pants. There, another man at the stalls made eye contact. Years earlier, in late-spring 1952, Dale Jennings, a World War II veteran and playwright, had stopped to use a bathroom in a D.C. Police could see everyone using the bathroom and arrested anyone they wanted. In Toronto in 1979, a vice officer was assigned to peer through grates in the bathroom of the Parkside Tavern, a well-known gay bar and cruising site. This wasn’t an entirely uncommon practice. Officers angled the lenses so as to see the faces of all the men who entered, arresting the men they found having sex and spying on dozens who simply stopped to use the restroom. With no warrant, no witnesses, and certainly no victims, police installed hidden cameras behind the bathroom mirror. In 1962, police in Mansfield, Ohio, received complaints that men were cruising in a public bathroom late at night. As queer folks receded into the closet to survive, police developed concealed tactics to find them. Homophobic laws and political tactics forced LGBTQ people to hide themselves-while at the same time, police agencies and conservative groups spread fears that predatory gays were hidden among upstanding citizens. Read: The forgotten history of gay entrapment The intense surveillance of gay bars for such routine behavior as kissing has been likened by contemporary legal scholars to apartheid. Each city created positions for “vice officers” or “morality officers,” who used decoy and entrapment techniques to arrest gay men. As many gay men moved to metropolitan areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., police in these cities endeavored to look tough on gay life. It was never the individual homophobia of police officers that caused the Stonewall riots, but the homophobia enshrined in the law.īy the 1960s, every state in the U.S. Those policies all served as pretense for continual police surveillance and frequent raids. For decades, the city selectively enforced liquor regulations to discriminate against gay bars. New York City imposed anti-sodomy laws on its residents until 1980 and cross-dressing bans until 2011. Now the laws are gone, but the surveillance continues. But because they were breaking the law-no matter how unjust-surveilling them was, in that era, a sign of a safe community. Before the riots at the Stonewall Inn, queer people across the country were sacrificed to these initiatives, marked as criminals. The apology was surprising after a long legacy of “ broken windows” policing and “cleaning up the streets” initiatives targeted at LGBTQ New Yorkers.
“The actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive,” he said, “and for that, I apologize.” In early June, during an otherwise unremarkable safety briefing at New York Police Department headquarters in Lower Manhattan, Police Commissioner James O’Neill stood in front of a crowd and apologized for his department’s behavior during the Stonewall riots, some 50 years ago.
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Xmas media: The Grinch Jim Carey version, any bobs burgers Christmas episodeįor more from The Frontroom Podcast you can find is on these platformsįollow on Twitter: To Website: Note: This article is part of a series about the gay-rights movement and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Ratchet: Gay men doing nothing in Tiktok videos except badly lip syncing a speech and expecting compliments / other gay men that compliment these gay men Xmas present: I don’t like getting presents and I forget them all Xmas song: One I’ve Been Missing, Little Mix Xmas Diva: Kelly Clarkson (it’s Mariah but Nick said that) Name & Do: Dan James, Event Planner, Podcaster Rachet: YT gayz who are loud and stupid, can we not! Xmas joyful noise: one more sleep, Leona Lewis So to start of i thought id bring some fun back to the podcast and invited back the boys from the 802podcast for a xmas special
After a short break The Frontroom podcast is back with the first of 6 episode some are light and fun other are possibly triggering.