This situation and the one with the hyper-vigilance over patrolling gay cruising areas are very much related. Regardless of lack of harm, police and other officials remain to this day anxious to prohibit any public whiff of gay sex. For example, I wrote not long ago about an active campaign to arrest, publish the names of, and jail cruising gay men at a particular park in Washington D.C. The Washington Blade first broke the story based on an examination of public arrest records after somebody tipped them off. The police department, pressed to explain their actions, claimed they were doing what was necessary to keep the park safe for families and children. When a Blade reporter asked them how any children might be at risk of witnessing sexual behavior late at night deep in the wooded interior of the park where few people ever ventured, they had no response. Nor had they received complaints from the public.
They were simply doing what police all over the United States do as a matter of course — work to suppress gay male sexuality in situations where they always ignore men and women couples.
When I wrote about the D.C. situation, I brought up many other examples, including of a police department in California with a vice department that openly entraps same-sex couples even in the absence of complaints while literally ignoring actual complaints about opposite-sex couples offending families with children on the beach with heavy petting.
Asked why they never responded to such incidents, the commander of the vice squad seemed confused, as if wondering why that ought to be his job — even though he had previously cited public sexuality harming children as one of his squad's primary reasons for existing.
Lately, by the way, this policing of gay male sexuality has moved on-line, with cops trumping up "prostitution" charges in Grindr entrapment schemes. One man in Georgia was arrested for soliciting prostitution when an undercover cop on Grindr asked him if he would bring a marijuana cigarette to a hotel so they could smoke it together before they had sex.
The charging document cited the marijuana as an exchange of goods of value in return for sex. One wonders if they have ever charged a man for solicitation for taking a woman out to dinner and paying a tab far higher than the price of a joint.
