Arriving home from work last Friday afternoon, my partner was immediately met by our next door neighbor. He wasn’t on his way over to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. He wanted to warn us that his house had been robbed just hours before — in the middle of the day.
The brazen burglar even waved to another neighbor, an elderly woman who was weeding her flowerbed when he pulled up on our usually quiet cul-de-sac. When she went inside for a glass of water, he backed up our neighbors’ drive, jumped their fence, and smashed their back door.
My parents, who live just a few blocks away, experienced a similar burglary about a year ago. Their burglar alarm company reached my father, who was out of town and told them to call police immediately — which they said they had already done. He then began frantically trying to reach my stepmother, who was working late and due home any minute. He warned her not to enter the house without the police, and she ended up waiting in her car on the street for quite some time.
It took DeKalb County Police more than 30 minutes to arrive. Thank God my stepmother hadn’t been in the home at the time, too injured to answer the phone for the alarm company and waiting desperately for help. And thank God my neighbors weren’t there during last week’s break in, or more might have been taken than just some electronics.
But at least we can all sleep easier at night knowing DeKalb police are doing their best to prevent men from having sex in an “adult” theater.
MY NEIGHBORS’ BREAK-IN didn’t make the evening news. Unfortunately, such events are becoming so common, even in relatively safe areas like my north DeKalb neighborhood, that without anyone injured they aren’t considered newsworthy.
Perhaps if they lived in a porn theater, the crime might have gotten more attention.
Last Wednesday, WSB-TV titillated viewers with an exposé on arrests at the Belvedere Theatre, an adult film theater also in DeKalb County. The local ABC television affiliate’s cameras were conveniently rolling as the DeKalb Police vice squad arrested several men for allegedly engaging in sexual activity in the theater.
During the heavily hyped “investigation,” the WSB reporter interviewed her own undercover cameraman about the shocking — shocking! — reality that more sex takes place at the theater than just that on the screen. The station showed one elderly man’s arrest repeatedly throughout the afternoon of May 7 in promotional spots leading up to the 5 p.m. newscast.
To be certain, having sex in public places is illegal, and should be. But the punishment should also fit the severity of the crime. Men caught up in these sting operations routinely lose their jobs, their friends or families, or worse.
In just one example, back in 1998, a man committed suicide when the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published his name as someone arrested in a sex raid. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation monitored the case, and said the man left a suicide note for his partner of more than three decades: "My name and everything is in the paper this morning. ... Goodbye. I love you."
The Democrat-Gazette did not report the suicide and declined to meet with GLAAD representatives, according to a “GLAAD Alert” from the time. A similar suicide occurred after a previous report on gay men arrested on sex charges, GLAAD officials said then.
YEARS AGO, GAY ORGANIZATIONS would have immediately denounced as homophobic both the police raid on the Belvedere and WSB’s coverage of it. These days, we don’t want to discuss public sex unless it involves a hypocritical, anti-gay public official getting caught.
When those arrested are closeted (or just lonely or thrill-seeking) gay men, the subject is both less funny and more difficult.
Back in 1998, GLAAD urged its supporters to “tell the Democrat-Gazette that the policy of singling out and humiliating men who have public sex with other men — frequently married men who are the most fragile and closeted members of our community — must go.”
“The Democrat-Gazette has made no indication that they understand that societal forces of homophobia lead deeply closeted men to seek out such furtive sexual encounters,” GLAAD warned then.
Contrast that to the recommendations the gay media group released almost 10 years later, in 0ctober 2007, to help media avoid “sensationalistic or inaccurate reporting” on Sen. Larry Craig, who caused a media frenzy when he was arrested for allegedly soliciting sex (by such innocuous acts as tapping his foot) in a Minneapolis airport restroom.
“GLAAD urges media covering the Larry Craig story to place it in context by consulting credible experts who can discuss whether such behavior is reflective of any healthy orientation, gay or straight. …
“Additionally noteworthy is the fact that such behavior is being condemned by gay and straight people alike. Intimations that gay Americans broadly object to the enforcement of laws against this kind of activity simply are not supported by the facts and should be avoided,” the organization said.
The later GLAAD press release made no mention of “societal forces of homophobia,” and instead quoted an expert opining that cruising is practiced mainly by men with “a lot of self-hatred and shame.”
That may be true, but note the shift in blame from society to the individual. Instead of sympathizing with the men caught up in these unnecessarily punitive sting operations, GLAAD is more concerned with stressing that most gay people aren’t like that.
AND GLAAD IS RIGHT: Most gay people don’t engage in public sex acts. Now that many gay people can lead open, fulfilling lives (and those who want casual hook-ups have the Internet to find them), cruising public spaces for sex partners is much less common.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to speak out against the police and media focus on these types of sex stings. In fact, the relative rarity of such behavior today makes the homophobia behind these “exposés” even more clear. This is hardly a public safety crisis. And when was the last time you saw a similar report on heterosexual behavior that involved acts between consenting adults and not prostitutes?
Some people who live near the Belvedere Theatre claim it contributes to unsafe conditions in their neighborhood, but the men who frequent the theater and its proprietors (one of whom was recently killed by a robber) are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than perpetrators.
With the country at war, the economy flailing, the city budget in shambles and myriad other problems, what public good was advanced by WSB devoting such breathless attention to men having sex in a theater where people go to see sex on screen anyway?
And with home break-ins and robberies on the rise in DeKalb County, why waste police officers’ valuable time on victimless crimes and made-for-TV sting operations?
If the DeKalb vice squad has no more pressing problems to pursue than men having sex at an adult theater, some of their officers should be reassigned to neighborhood precincts, where their more visible presence on patrols and faster response to calls could help deter crimes like those my neighbors and parents faced.
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kenatku82 on 5/16/0811:37 AM:
Perhaps men should stop having sex with men (or with anybody for that matter) in public. IT IS AGAINST THE LAW! Yeah, that seems to be the one thing that most gay men forget about when they are busy doing their "business". Also, some newspaper editors forget this too when they are attempting to show yet another blatant discrimination move against our community.
When we as men who happen to be gay stop acting as sex starved, hormone driven sluts, then perhaps the police will focus on catching your neighbors robbers.
Richard on 5/20/0810:21 AM:
Now that DeKalb has busted the harmless senior members of the gay community who would attend the Belvedere theatre, the neighborhood is much safer for the loud, drug dealing patrons of the nightclub next door. Wasn't it one of those patrons that robbed the owner of the Belvedere and murdered her son?
