From Stonewall to Knoxville

February 2007

Last month, police in Knoxville, Tennessee, arrested 15 men after an undercover sting operation in a park popular with cruisers. Most of those arrested were charged with "indecent exposure." Local media reported the names and ages of those arrested, and Knoxville politicians pontificated about the need to make city parks "safe for families." Those arrested face hefty fines and legal fees as well as possible jail time and lifelong registration as "sexually dangerous persons."

Careful consideration of police actions, media coverage, and community response to the cruising crackdown reveals that much work remains in the struggle for gay liberation.

It appears certain that Knoxville police engaged in entrapment: "decoy" officers wandered in the woods, flirting with those there to cruise, soliciting the very actions for which they then arrested their unsuspecting would-be partners. Police were not "protecting" the public: anyone familiar with park cruising knows that participants look for attention from like-minded guys and seek privacy once a visual "connect" has been made; had the decoys (like anyone else visiting the park) shown no interest, they would have received no attention and witnessed no "exposure." And the police were undoubtedly motivated by anti-gay animus: heterosexual couples making out on lovers' lanes or caught fooling around in parkland are not routinely arrested and are never targeted for similar sting operations.

Knoxville media extensively covered the "news" of men masturbating in the woods, with television and radio stations repeatedly broadcasting the names of those ensnared by amorous police decoys.

Such tawdry scandal-mongering does more than demonstrate pathetic journalistic standards: many of those trumpeted as queer-sex offenders will face loss of employment and estrangement from family and friends. Indeed, suicides frequently follow such entrapment schemes and the resultant frenzied media attention. Anti-gay sentiment also permeates media coverage of the arrests, with gay men presented as a threat to families and children, in need of eradication from public space.

But most disturbing in the Knoxville sex sting debacle is the response, or lack thereof, from the gay community.

Several gay people have been quoted in the press saying that park cruisers give all gay people a "bad rep." Others have suggested that those frequenting cruisy parks are not really gay, but rather married men just looking for sex.

Such folks miss the point. Police and media are targeting homosexual expression for unequal and heavy-handed repression. Men of any sexual identity should not be subjected to condemnation or abuse for seeking out mutually desired homosexual activity.

Take a look at the websites for the two largest national GLBT political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Clogged with marriage folderol, neither even mentions anti-gay entrapment or other discriminatory police practices. Ditto for the websites for two leading GLBT organizations ostensibly concerned with legal issues facing gay people, Lambda Legal and Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. And The Advocate, the country's most widely distributed gay "news" magazine, notes the Knoxville arrests in a blurb completely uncritical of police practices and the sensational media coverage.

There is, of course, a poignant irony in gay political, legal, and media institutions now ignoring police harassment issues: come June, all those same groups will have floats and banners in Pride parades commemorating Stonewall, a series of riots rebelling against anti-gay police sting operations!

The recent Knoxville arrests underscore that amidst today's rainbow marketing hoopla, men– many men, when one counts across the country– are still being targeted for arrest by police and for public humiliation by the press. All because they sought out gay sex.

We've got a lot of work to do.

Know your rights and avoid unnecessary legal miseries: check out the American Civil Liberties fact sheet "What to do if You're Stopped by the Police."

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=4398F4B5-DA71-4E7E-9EE569D6A2E32657 >