The Sexual Outlaw

by John Rechy

  “Moreover … the State is not required to show that moral delinquency actually results from homosexuality,” the judges somersaulted. “It is enough … to establish that the conduct is likely to end in a contribution to moral delinquency.… It would indeed be impracticable to prove the actuality of such a consequence,” they acknowledged, but, fuck it, “the law is not so exacting,” their honors snapped testily.

  Nudging aside the doctrine of separation of church and state, the Virginia majority traced anti-homosexuality to the Bible, quoting the familiar admonishments from Leviticus and including the exhortation that homosexuals “shall surely be put to death.” Certainly their enlightened honors were not signaling the state for more drastic punishment?

  In a humane and intelligent dissent, District Judge Merhige chastised the two majority judges: “… in the absence of any legitimate interest of rational basis to support the statute's application we must, without regard to our own proclivities, … hold the statute … to be violative of … the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.… Private consensual sex acts between adults are matters … in which the State has no legitimate interest.”

  Pointing out the majority's nifty separation of heterosexual acts from homosexual acts, Judge Merhige continued: “To say … that the right of privacy … is limited in matters of marital, home, or family life is unwarranted under the law … is inconsistent with current Supreme Court opinions and is unsupportable.… That the right of privacy is not limited to the facts of Griswold is demonstrated by later Supreme Court decisions.… [In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972)] the Court declined to restrict the right of privacy in sexual matters to married couples … [and] to a great extent vitiated any implication that the State can … forbid extramarital sexuality.… The right to select consenting adult sexual partners must be considered within this category … whether heterosexual or homosexual. [The State of Virginia] … made no tender of any evidence that even impliedly demonstrated that homosexuality causes society any significant harm.… To suggest, as defendants do, that the prohibition of homosexual conduct will in some manner encourage new heterosexual marriages and prevent the dissolution of existing ones is unworthy of judicial response.… I can find no authority for intrusion by the State into the private dwelling of a citizen. … the issue centers not around morality or decency, but on the Constitutional right of privacy.”

  In words as succinctly eloquent as any pronounced in support of true judicial understanding, the dissenting judge admonished: “What we know as men is not [to be] forgotten as judges.”

  Nevertheless:

  “Judgment affirmed,” said the Supreme Court about the Virginia majority opinion—and dismissed, without hearing, the appeal. (Supreme Court Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens would have heard the matter.)

  Affirmed: The ancestral judgments of frightened men. Affirmed: The spilling of blood demanded by the Bible. Affirmed: The burnings and incarceration of the dark and “enlightened” ages. Affirmed: Prosecutions, blackmailings, muggings, attacks, literal and symbolic assassinations and murders. Affirmed: The psychological and physical torture of gay children—and adults. With two dull words the Supreme Court affirmed that grotesque spectrum of sexual ignorance.

  Even in states where private consensual sex acts between adults would continue to be protected, the impact of the upheld Virginia decision was major. In effect condoning anti-homosexuality, it goaded cops and other gay-haters everywhere on their psyche-terrified rampages, it armed quivering bigots to draw up referendum petitions to revoke legitimization of freedom of sexual choice.

  And it would certainly bestir the revolutionary fervor of sexual outlawry on the streets.

  Shortly after the Supreme Court affirmation, “straight” marauders in Los Angeles lay in wait in the parking lot of, appropriately, a church. As cars in the well-known gay area cruised the street, from the shadows gangs attacked with rocks and bottles.

  Not a single cop showed up.

  2

  Cops did show up, however, when a group of teenage female Explorer Scouts began appearing at Los Angeles precincts to help out with law-enforcement matters. After all, when dozens of men are out busting homosexuals, massage parlors, and book stores, an awful lot of work goes unattended—and these young girls would certainly aid. Ranging from fourteen to eighteen years of age, the girls were part of a group known as LEEGS—Law Enforcement Explorer Girl Scouts—numbering about 250, and affiliated not with the Girl Scouts but with the Boy Scouts. As it developed, for a few there was an extra “E” in the acronym: The girls and the overworked officers were exploring far more than “crime.”

  Or so would a small Los Angeles-area newspaper, the Valley News—scooping everyone else—proclaim in its banner headline:

  LAPD SEX SCANDAL

  MORALS PROBE REVOLVES

  AROUND POLICE, GIRL SCOUTS

  Certainly not!

  Hadn't there only a short time back been a memorandum—circulated among Los Angeles police and “constituents”—from a deputy chief, no less, warning against the employment of homosexuals as policemen and setting out with alarm the reasons why this must never, never be?

  “… The man or woman in blue is responsible for finding lost children…,” wrote the deputy chief, “instructing and counseling the young.… Police officers, like school teachers, engage in intimate and delicate relationships with children. Consider some regular Police programs.… Police Explorers, Student Workers, and Summer Camps … place an officer in the position to teach and influence young children … to mold the youthful ideals and morals of the youth of our country. All these areas pair children and the police in a very close relationship. A homosexual placed anywhere within this area would be a violation of parental and social trust. Additionally, police officers are often required to fill the role of counselor to juveniles regarding sexual matters.”

  Indeed!

  For some time, teenagers of both sexes were being used in affiliation with the Los Angeles Police Department. Among their duties was keeping watch from atop buildings on busy Hollywood streets. Equipped with smart walkie-talkies, they could communicate to patrol cars any “unusual” activity, whatever that included. They also went on cop beats and block patrols, these busy teenagers, and they learned crowd control. They were taken camping on some weekends. There, reportedly, was where “exploration” of another kind may have occurred—perhaps while one or another of the cops was filling “the role of counselor … regarding sexual matters.”

  Rumors had floated around police stations that some cops were involved with underage girls. Then one of the LEEGS girls, herself reportedly not involved, told a police lieutenant that the weekends had turned into “sex orgies.” Approximately 30 Hollywood Division uniformed officers and 6 teenage girls, some as young as fourteen, the informant to the Valley News alleged, were involved. An investigation by the internal division of the police department had been going on, quietly, for a month, a police captain acknowledged, and the results might involve criminal action. He denied that there were any “sex orgies,” that fourteen-year-old girls were involved, and that the incidents had occurred during camping trips.

  Badgered at a news conference, an assistant police chief insisted doggedly that none of this constituted “a sex scandal”: “There was no rape, no seduction, there was a lot of agreement. We don't have any outraged parents, which is kind of disappointing, I guess. We don't have any outraged young people. We've got outraged police officers. But I don't think you can call it a sex scandal.” He emphasized that only private situations were involved, all with off-duty officers, none in the LEEGS Program themselves. And so, one could at least allow a sigh of relief that no explorer perched on a rooftop had allowed her eyes to stray from the busy streets.

  Goddamnit, there was no sex scandal!

  16 FACE CHARGES IN

  LAPD SEX SCANDAL

  In its new headlined story, the scooping Valley News indicated that the
alleged 30 police had, not unexpectedly, shrunk to an alleged 16; the number of teenage girls, including 4 juveniles, was holding strong at 6. Nine of the 16 cops might face felony charges of unlawful sex with a person under eighteen, 4 to 5 might be charged with misdemeanors of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All 16—unnamed—faced disciplinary action, and some, now, insubordination and failure to cooperate with the internal-affairs investigation. Raising the age one year on each side, the deputy chief now alleged the exploring girls were fifteen to nineteen years old.

  Soon the 16 police dwindled to 3 facing felony counts, while 6 others might still be charged with misdemeanors. And: The girls, the acting chief now declared, were between sixteen and eighteen. (When? Two years ago? Now? That was left unclear.) One could expect that before the matter was over, the “girls” would be middle-aged matrons.

  The girls resigned, the cops remained on duty.

  At a press conference, the chief of police—whose refrain for opposing hiring gay cops had been What-about-when-they-deal-with-boys?—offered to discuss sex—“tomorrow.”

  There was much joking about the cops and the hypocrisy exposed. “Since when does there have to be violence in order for sexual misconduct to occur? Many a child molester is a kindly old soul,” read a letter in the Los Angeles Times. Another: “Comforting to learn that the officers have been permitted to remain on duty—hopefully protecting us from gay bars, nude beaches, and massage parlors.” And: “For those of us liberals who wanted heterosexuals to have an opportunity to prove themselves worthy of public trust, this has been a sad year: … heterosexual sex scandals in the U.S. Congress … heterosexual sex scandals in the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  Amid the understandable glee in the gay community, there was much bitterness: Had 30 gay scoutmasters been allegedly involved with 6 teenage boys, would any police spokesman have insisted there was “no sex scandal”? Would the investigation have been conducted quietly? Would the accused still be employed instead of having been taken, handcuffed, to jail cells and released, if at all, on staggering bails? Would it have mattered that the boys had given their consent—might even have sought out the scoutmasters? That there had been no violence? That there were no outraged parents?

  No. The police would have generated the outrage, names and photographs would have been released, television cameras would have explored campgrounds for discarded bubblegum wrappers, cops would lecture against the gay menace. There would not have been a promised discussion of the sex scandal … “tomorrow”—it would have been discussed yesterday, today, and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  The reality was that straight cops were involved in the scandal. The matter had been exposed only because of the chance-taking of an obscure newspaper and a daring reporter. From news story to news story it was becoming clear that the legal charges against the men involved were fading fast. (Misdemeanor—not felony—charges were finally filed against 5 cops, now identified and ranging in age from twenty-four to thirty-four, for unlawful sexual intercourse and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A one-year statute of limitations had precluded possible prosecution of any of the others; several were relieved of their duties, some suspended pending hearings, and one was totally cleared.) But the frantic hypocrisy of memorandums and rationalized bigotry, of frenzied speeches warning of the danger of gay police officers in dealing with children—that had been revealed. The hypocrisy was glaring, and that was important.

  And yet—difficult as it would be, and very, for gays relentlessly hounded by the police—it was important that homosexuals “support” the cops trapped in the “explorer-girl sex scandal” yes, to point out that to prosecute those sex-defiant cops was almost as unfair as prosecuting homosexuals (“almost,” because the cops would be dealt with a leniency not extended to homosexuals; “almost,” because the factors of hypocrisy and life-destroying persecution of gays could not be easily forgiven). After all, the sex had all been consensual between the cops and the girls, whether 14, 15, 16, 17, 18—or 45 years old; perhaps some of the girls were police groupies? It was the same hungry hypocritical evil of fake “morality” that devours homosexuals daily that was, for a change, nibbling at the cops.

  The acting chief of police had emphasized over and over: All the activities had been willing, there had been no force, there had been only consent.

  He was echoing, word for word, the basis for gay rights.

  Was it too much to hope that the prosecuted officers would see the connection between their situation and that of homosexuals? Would they see—and therefore be stirred themselves by outlaw indignation—the trap of all sexual hypocrisy?

  3

  A growing sexual hypocrisy is the chic-y pose of “glittering bisexuality.” It's everywhere, like sequined pollen. A magazine does a spread on a separated count and countess announcing their affairs with both men and women, a rock singer proclaims his bisexuality, unisex costumes flourish like space mushrooms, a resolutely gay writer insists he's “bithexual,” and the “glitter bars” are crowded with “straight” couples and singles. Not rare in such bars to hear the question put by one man to his male dancing partner:

  “Are you gay or straight?”

  Well, isn't bisexuality the ideal condition—employing “the best of both worlds”? It is only one of at least three “ideal” possible worlds; and to uphold it as the ideal is to deny the specialness of both male and female, and to diminish both the heterosexual experience and the homosexual experience—and the true bisexual experience.

  Because of its easy, safe, chic acceptability (especially among the upperclasses, i.e., hairdressers and fashion designers), the claim of “bisexuality” to mask homosexuality offers a ready escape from the need to assert one's sexual choice truly, fully—and radically. Just as no more reactionary figure exists than the member of a minority who self-protectively “passes” for one of the majority, so the homosexual posing as “bisexual” dissipates the revolutionary commitment required to smash repressive laws and attitudes. None of this is to deny the existence, nor the right of choice, of genuine bisexuals.

  And a daring word in support of the heterosexual man. At a time of often justified battering from straight women and gay men and women, and attacked as if he were not essential to the survival of the species, the heterosexual man must be granted his definitive place too. But his sexual specialness is being seriously assaulted. Her thinking fashioned increasingly by the new, slick women's magazines, a type of straight woman may even expect her heterosexual lover to look and “be” like the predominantly gay models (defined by bogus biographies, fantasies presented as real) pictured within those pages. She is in effect being “taught” to yearn for a gay man in a straight man. Here, too—as in the context of gays taught by straights—expectations and realities clash, disastrously, for all.

  To accept both the “male” and “female” aspects of one's being while finally asserting a sexual preference for one sex is liberating—and different from being homosexual and posing hypocritically as—or passing as—“bisexual” simply because it is not dangerous to do so.

  Where all sexual boundaries blur, it is at the expense of all sexual experiences.

  There are homosexuals, men and women.

  There are heterosexuals, women and men.

  There are, increasingly, transsexuals, men and women.

  And there are genuine bisexuals, women and men.

  All distinct experiences. Each different. Each unique. Each special. Each potentially “ideal.”

  1:12 P.M. Griffith Park The Hill.

  JIM LIES ON the beachmat. It wasn't Danny, he tells himself, it wasn't him. But he knows the earlier one has disappeared today. Suddenly he feels an objectless panic. He touches his muscles.

  He's grateful for the presence of someone else now: A tall husky goodlooking man waiting in the same grotto. Jim sees him snort from an inhaler. The magic sex vapor. He holds it out toward Jim, inviting. Jim moves back into the hollow. The man holds the inha
ler to Jim's nose. Jim is instantly enveloped in a wave of sensuality. Already, the man is going down on him. The chemical rush spreads—Jim imagines he is the other, and himself—that he is blowing himself, reaching the places on himself that he can't reach, seeing himself as if he were two: He feels his own hard cock in the other's throat as if it is his own throat which has opened to swallow his own cock.

  Again the amyl. Again the time-stopping, sexually isolating moments. The other has lowered his own pants, a round cock juts out. Jim snorts more deeply of the amyl and bending down sucks the other, imagining it's his own cock in his own throat.

  Now both men stand tightly pressed. Jim feels the other's cum smearing both their stomachs.

  Minutes later Jim moves along the path. The boyish youngman who lay barely concealed, legs spread inviting, is still in the same spot; but now another man crouches over him.

  The unmistakable roar of the hated helicopter!

  The cops!

  Men move for cover. Jim continues along the sheltered path.

  The helicopter circles ominously, whipping up the dirt along the paths.

  1:38 P.M. Griffith Park. The Road. A Path.

  On the main road the hunters have increased.

  Jim drives past the exhibitionistic lookout: A “U” in the road, where, parked strategically, men in cars flash naked bodies at each other across a gorge. Most of the areas along the road are taken; several cars in each—and Jim never joins others already there—an attitude as arrogant as it is defensive. Finally, on the upper part of the road, he stops in an area shaded by trees; three cars just drove away. Behind, rocks rise into a brushy hill.

  He stands exhibiting himself. A very handsome man drives by. He looks back. Jim answers the signal. The man U-turns, parks behind Jim's car, and gets out. He's even better than Jim thought; he's very muscular, obviously a bodybuilder too.