40 Years after Stonewall police are still raiding gay bars? Really?!
And looking for… er… drunk people? If you can’t be drunk in bar, my God, where can you be drunk? Apparently some police were looking for gay men to beat up.
The Fort Worth police chief said, “You’re touched and advanced in certain ways by people inside the bar, that’s offensive…. I’m happy with the restraint used when they were contacted like that.” Can you imagine if women started using that excuse? Meanwhile one guy was put in intensive care with a serious brain injury.
Dan Savage makes a good point related to the “Gay Panic Defense”: “Gay men don’t grope police officers when they enter gay bars.”
I’ll go a step further and say that gay men don’t grope non-police officers when they enter gay bars.
I have a close gay friend I know from being a boat captain in Amsterdam. Zora and I have have made a little tradition of spending Thanksgiving with him and his boyfriend in Savannah. And then maybe once every other year Bob comes up to New York to visit me.
When Bob and I see each other we often end up in gay bars because 1) he likes gay bars, 2) I like bars, and 3) we both like pinball. Many gay bars still have pinball. So we end up at some place called Ramrod or Rawhide and drink cheap drinks. We talk and play pinball. I’ve never been groped.
I’m sure a lot of women wished straightmen behaved so well.
What's confusing to me is that…it's illegal to be drunk in a bar in Texas? Except for the gay-bashing part, everyone quoted in the stories is acting like the police raid concept is normal.
Maybe we've just lived in New York too long?