Columnists :: Reality Check
Fort Worth bar raid was badly executed, but not shocking by Jeff Epperly
contributing editorWednesday Jul 1, 2009 I’m having a difficult time working up any of the shock that is ricocheting around the web surrounding the Fort Worth, Texas, police department’s justification of a 1960’s-style raid on a gay club by suggesting that patrons groped the unsuspecting officers when they allegedly entered the establishment to look for, of all things, drunk people in a bar in Texas.
After the June 28 raid -- on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York, no less -- by six members of the police department and two members of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC), "the police statement said [that] while walking through the Rainbow Lounge, an ’extremely intoxicated patron made sexually explicit movements toward the police supervisor,’" according to a June 28 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The article said, "another intoxicated individual also made sexually explicit movements toward another officer, and he was arrested for public intoxication, the [police] statement said. A third individual inside the lounge assaulted a TABC agent by grabbing the agent’s groin, according to the [police] statement. He was escorted outside and arrested for public intoxication. He was released to paramedics because of his extreme intoxication as he was repeatedly vomiting, police reported."
The patron who allegedly groped an officer is now in the hospital in intensive care with a blood clot on his brain, and is unable to defend himself against the police allegations. Police say he was so drunk -- after having reportedly been drinking bottled water inside the bar -- he fell and hit his head on the pavement after being taken outdoors, out of sight of anyone but police who can confirm their side of the story.
According to a report by Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA, "police chief Jeff Halstead ... said that officers that entered the bar during the scheduled inspection were touched inappropriately."
"You’re touched and advanced in certain ways by people inside the bar, that’s offensive," Halstead told WFAA, contradicting with his preposterous claims every non-police eyewitness account. "I’m happy with the restraint used when they were contacted like that."
It’s important to note here the blinders many of us who live in liberal coastal enclaves wear when it comes to people who live in places that aren’t so enlightened. The Fort Worth bar raid was the work of a police department that wasn’t smart enough to hide its bigotry, but police harassment continues in other places all the time under more subtle circumstances. Whether it’s officers who lie in wait in their cruisers outside the parking lots of gay bars to pull over patrons to look for -- or simply invent on the spot -- any slight infraction of traffic laws, or some other ruse in other locations where gays congregate, these sorts of targeted police actions aren’t uncommon.
But it’s not just the Deep South where police still have it in for members of this community. It was only last Feb. 13 when activists in New York City staged a rally "to draw attention to a series of undercover stings targeting older gay men at sex shops and video stores."
Members of the Gay Justice League said in a statement that "scores of innocent men have been swept up in these false arrests. ... Young undercover cops go up to middle-aged gay men, cruise them, ask for consensual sex, and then offer to pay the older men to have sex with them. Though none of the men agree to the offer, they are then arrested by a gang of undercover cops and put through the system. None of the men have prior arrests."
You might think that there is little that connects a raid on a gay bar and arrests in an adult bookstore, but they all stem from the notion that we are somehow alien from the scores of straight people who innocently get drunk in bars or meet to have anonymous sex in parking lots and bathrooms across the country. I’ve worked security in straight nightclubs and at concerts, and none of us was ever shocked to find straight couples having sex anywhere they thought they could pull off a quick one.
If you don’t believe me, just go to the June 30 edition of the Toronto Star and an article headlined, "6 public makeout spots in the city." The article notes with wry good humor and not a hint of shame that, among the public spots in the city where people can get it on are: the "family washrooms at Pearson Airport," according to airport security; the beach at Ashbridge’s Bay; the CN Tower and the GO Train.
You can bet there won’t be any police raids on those places.
So wake up, people: as angry as the Texas bar raid should make us, it’s only the latest and most inartful example of police actions that are happening elsewhere with a frequency to which we seem oblivious.
Jeff Epperly is the former editor of Bay Windows. He can be reached at jepperly@laquidas.com
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