Roger Rea is a gay attorney who was badly beaten up last year.
The night before he was badly beaten up, he made his first visit to a gay bar since he and his longterm lover had parted ways months before. He chose Apollo's, a well-known joint on Seventh Street, and he shot pool for a couple of hours with two strangers. He felt something of a connection to one of the men, Tim, because Tim was as avid a fisherman as Rea himself. "You don't find that in the gay community very often," Rea says.
The very next night, he again ran across Tim and his friend David at Apollo's, and this time he invited them back to his home in Ahwatukee for steaks and beer. He admits that he was hoping for some romance with Tim eventually, since Tim was young and blond and stocky as a wrestler. Rea planned no immediate moves, however, since David's presence made everything a little awkward. Rea figured he would serve some dinner to his guests, and show them a few photos of his fishing cabin near Payson, and maybe arrange something for later.
Because he is one of the most out-of-the-closet men in Arizona, he also figured something else: that he'd better be careful. The reality of homophobic violence--a reality that has caused the U.S. Department of Justice to estimate that more hate crimes are aimed at homosexuals than at any other minority group in America--was something he'd been living with since '74, when he first "came out" as a law student at ASU in a manner so verbal and explosive that a former professor remembers "it was an event." And the threat of assault seemed particularly keen to Rea that night. He was haunted by the fact that, only a few weeks before, Phoenix attorney Jack Rowe, who also was gay, had been murdered in his home by two assailants.
When David and Tim pulled their red Camaro up to a gas pump en route, Rea jotted down his new friends' license plate number.
It was a smart move. A little later, Rea had barely popped open three beers and settled onto the family room sofa when the attack began.
Moving like light, Tim slid up behind Rea and pinned the lawyer's arms expertly to his sides. At nearly the same time, David slugged him in the face.
Rea struggled free and tried to make it through the arcadia doors, but the latch slowed him down. His assailants dragged him away from the door, clear back into the living room, and this time Tim kept Rea compliant by holding a knife to his throat. Having been transformed into a sitting duck, there was nothing for Rea to do but submit to the men's slugs and kicks that cracked a rib and split his face open until he was lying face down in a pool of blood that was spreading into the pale peach carpeting. Finally, Tim and David yanked wires out of Rea's stereo and bound his hands and feet with them.
He remembers that they said two things during the attack. One thing, from David, was this: "You raped my brother and now you're going to pay for it."
Rea has never met David's brother.
The other thing, from Tim, was, "If you're not quiet, we're going to kill you."
As he lay listening to the ruckus of two men hurriedly loading into their car every piece of electronic equipment he owned--including the telephone and the $15 clock radio--the late Jack Rowe was much on Rea's mind. "I thought I was fighting for my life," he says. As it turned out, though, he was only another fleeting conquest in the career of David Griswold, a parole violator from Colorado with a long criminal history and, according to court records, a record as a "prostitute who solicited homosexual men so he could roll them." Once Griswold and Tim Hayes had rolled this particular homosexual man, they growled a final order not to call the police and left him alone, so unceremoniously that they didn't even close the front door. Rea worked himself loose and stumbled outdoors, where a neighbor saw him and called 911. Within minutes the police had arrived, and within days Rea had identified David Griswold and Timothy Hayes from photographs pulled out of a detective's file. At that point, Rea thought the jail door would soon be clanging behind Griswold and Hayes.
If you believe Rea's version of this story, the county attorney's office had other plans, though--plans to deep-six the entire matter because it was, after all, only an assault against a gay male.
Rea says that, only two weeks after the crime, he was told by Detective Art Stokes that the prosecutor's office had classified the case "stale" and decided not to file charges. Rea felt it was a clear-cut case of bias. "There is no doubt in my mind," he says.
It is, admittedly, the sort of slight that Rea looks for. His twenty years of activism in the name of gay rights, his years of defending the gay men who are rounded up in local parks and bookstores on public sexual indecency charges, have sensitized him to the special problems gays face in trying to wring justice out of the agencies of law enforcement. Another gay lawyer, who asked not to be identified, characterizes Rea as "permeated with this incredible anger that he has."
But other associates say that "he is an advocate, but a credible advocate" and believe he is more informed about the interactions of the gay community and law enforcement than just about anyone else in Arizona. "He doesn't really shoot from the hip," says a friend in state government. All of which makes it difficult to sort out the truth of what really happened when Rea was told his case was "stale." The deputy county attorney in charge of the fate of David Griswold at the time, Jim Charnell, says that he never turned the case down; that he simply labeled the file with the wrong computer "coding" number so that it appeared to the police he'd turned it down, who then misinformed Rea. Another gay activist, Bruce Kurtz of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), was told a similar thing at the time when he called the county attorney's office on Rea's behalf to protest what he thought was a clear-cut case of prejudice.
So maybe what Rea was up against was an innocent mistake. Once he complained to Charnell, charges were certainly filed. David Griswold was put away for five years last March, and the case against Timothy Hayes is still pending.
Then again, maybe it wasn't innocent. Roger Rea is not alone in his history of finding inequity in the system, and even observers who question his objectivity don't criticize what he perceived in this case. For instance, the same attorney who pointed to Rea's "incredible anger" is quick to sketch out what he thinks may well have happened at the county attorney's office, based on his own experiences with justice.
He says, "It isn't hard to imagine that they made the objective judgment that, with limited resources, that since juries are not likely to be sympathetic to this kind of case, that since the person who was victimized was in a situation where he should have realized he was assuming some risk, we can reasonably conclude that we should not prosecute this because it isn't a real high priority. You can imagine someone going through that analysis without admitting even to themselves that it was based on some kind of bias."
The attorney's evaluation, whether it's what really happened in the prosecutor's office, points to the most important aspect of the story of Roger Rea, gay attorney/activist/victim: After years of dealing with the legal system as an insider, Rea is so drenched in doubt about the motives of law enforcement toward the gay community that he can't even entertain the notion that the county attorney's office may have meant him no harm.
Is that what it's like? Is it such a nerve-racking experience to be gay in Arizona, and to fear that you're a special case to the soldiers of law enforcement, that you see that long arm reaching out for you wherever you go? You bet. TWENTY-ONE HATE CRIMES against gays were reported to Phoenix's Gay and Lesbian Community Switchboard last year, and ten of them were assaults. Some of them made the attack on Roger Rea seem as harmless as a massage. One of the worst ones recounted by Ron Barnes, the switchboard's director, is the case of a teenage boy who was pulled into a van against his will and worked over by an assailant who brutally forced his fist up the boy's rectum. Damage to the boy was so extensive that he required reconstructive surgery.
In the Nineties, when the phenomenon called gay-bashing is well-known, the number 21 isn't surprising in a city where the gay and lesbian population is estimated by the gay community itself at 150,000. Nationally, the 1990 figure of reported hate crimes against gays and lesbians stands at 1,588 episodes from harassment to homicide in the six major cities where the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force keeps track--a 42 percent increase over 1989 that the task force credits to both increased reporting and higher levels of violence. Barnes MDRV doesn't think that 21 begins to represent the number of incidents in this city. He says that the vast majority of such crimes goes unreported by people who are either still closeted or distrustful that sharing the details will result in anything like follow-through by the boys in blue.
Their distrust has a history, and some of it is fairly ancient history. Leaders in the gay community say that their relationship with the Phoenix Police Department has improved since the early Eighties, when it was not unusual to see squad cars pulled into the parking lots of gay bars and the cops within the cars scribbling down license plate numbers. When there were reports of officers who swaggered threateningly through the gay bars on "walk-throughs," or even outright did not respond to incidents of gay-bashing.
Observers say that such behavior was rooted in simple homophobia. "I knew at the time what the police thought about gay people because I would hear them talking," says Bob Hegyi, a gay activist who worked as a dispatcher at the police department during the Sixties. "They would refer to them as `faggots' and `queers' and `homos.' I would have to tell you I think it is just macho-ism."
Perhaps Hegyi is being kind: There's some evidence that Phoenix Police Chief Ruben Ortega's attitude toward gays approaches persecMDRVution. An insider who was present at a meeting between Ortega and a city government official remembers clearly how Ortega responded to the question, "How much gay-bashing goes on in Phoenix?"
According to the source, Ortega said, "Not enough." He passed the comment off as a joke, quickly amending it to, "I mean, not much." Other officers present tittered at the chief's attempt at humor.
It is impossible to confirm the extent to which police officers have acted out this attitude, or whether they have done so officially, since its dealings with the gay community are not something the Phoenix Police Department is even willing to discuss. In response to a detailed list of questions that sought a reaction to the memories and charges of gay community members and others who are quoted in this article, a one-sentence letter was sent from Chief Ortega to New Times: " . . . I see no significant value for the Phoenix Police Department to respond to your inquiries."
Whatever the tensions between the police and the gay community have been in the past, they have cooled down a little. Gay-bar owners report today that police harassment no longer occurs at their establishments, and that the officers who respond to their calls behave professionally. According to Ron Peterson, a psychologist and gay activist who headed up a police liaison committee five years ago, the outright antagonism eased following a series of meetings that allowed gay leaders to air their complaints and resulted in more open communication. Then the liaison committee disbanded when its umbrella organization in the gay community went under, and the dialogue died.
The difficult relationship between the law enforcement and gay communities remained, even if it was tempered. Arizona is one of 25 states where sodomy is still illegal, and gay community leaders believe that gays are barred from the police force on the basis that they are lawbreakers. They remember the case of former officer Karen Ashley, who was fired from the Phoenix force in '86 after rumors began to fly that she was a lesbian, and after she had endured an interrogation that questioned her closely about her sex life and that of her patrol partner, Donna Rossi. (The police department would not confirm or deny its employment policies for gays and lesbians.) And there are no civil rights laws in Arizona to protect gays and lesbians in terms of housing and employment. It is not a very reassuring scenario for the many citizens who are pursuing an alternative lifestyle. "I know that a lot of people feel very terrorized," says a gay-community insider.
The terror stems from more than paranoia: Gay locals know that the eyes of law enforcement have fixated on them in the very recent past, wanting to know exactly who they are. In 1988, it was revealed in a media flurry that both the police department and the sheriff's office were keeping computerized files of locals who were HIV positive. Well, not HIV positive for sure, but quite possibly HIV positive. The whole scandal came to light when a crime victim summoned the police to his home, and had his name pop up back at headquarters as a man with AIDS. This man didn't have AIDS--only friends who were gay--but that category was close enough for the police department.
Once found out, the public relations men of law enforcement insisted that tracking AIDS was an important health concern for officers who are often confronted with open wounds. They insisted even though the local paramedics, who have blood on their hands far more frequently than the police, did not find it necessary to keep files identifying Phoenix citizens according to the company they keep.
The members of the gay community were unconvinced of the police's pure motives, and many of them remain unconvinced that such practices are a thing of the past. A young Scottsdale man who asks to remain anonymous, for instance, describes the way he was approached by a police officer early in May.
He lives in the condominium development that shares a driveway with Bike Path Park at 78th Street and Thomas, a park that is a noted gay cruising area. While pulling out of his driveway at noon on a Monday, he was stopped by a uniformed officer in an unmarked car who said he was a member of the Scottsdale Police Department.
"He told me that they were looking for gay men, that there had been complaints," the man says. "The officer's comment to me was that any single men in the parks are immediately under suspicion." The officer asked for the man's name, address, employer, and the nature of his "living arrangement," the source says. The officer called the number on the man's driver's license into the state's computer system, although he was not charging the man with anything.
"This guy's questions were too incredibly detailed for me to ignore," the source says. "He was writing all this stuff down. I definitely feel like the police are keeping files."
Officer E. Haddad, a station officer and spokesperson for the Scottsdale Police Department, says there is no special emphasis placed on apprehending single men in parks or on gathering information about them. "It sounds to me like it could have been one officer's opinion," he says.
Other gay community members feel not so much terrorized by the police as simply blockaded by them. One of these, Bruce Kurtz of ACT UP, phoned the Phoenix Police Department last year to inquire whether the hate-crimes unit investigates crimes committed on the basis of sexual orientation. He says he was told "no" by an Officer Hatounian, who added that only racial and religious crimes are the special unit's purview.
Why not sexual orientation? Kurtz wanted to know. He says Hatounian responded that the police department doesn't have the proper statutory authority.
"But what statutory authority do they have for pursuing racial and religious crimes?" asks Kurtz, who points out that no hate-crime legislation of any kind exists in Arizona. "It seems to be up to the discretion of the police department."
These forms of subtle bias are the sort with which even observers who disapprove of homosexuality may be able to sympathize. But there is another kind of prejudice that is much more difficult for the straight community to get worked up over, and that is the prejudice that attorney Rea and others say is perpetrated against gay men who are arrested on charges of public sexual indecency.
It is at this point--the point at which behavior quits violating onlookers' finer sensibilities and begins to actually revolt them--that even society's liberals can quit caring about discrimination. Disgust with "perverts" who've been caught masturbating in the video booths at adult bookstores, or been entrapped at Papago Park when they've reached for the crotch of a police officer, can obscure Rea's voice when he is claiming that again and again he has seen these lawbreakers being abused.
The gay population is the easiest of all minority groups to mistreat because of what its members do in the dark. It's a cinch to ignore the real violation against them.
"The problem," says Rea, "is that heterosexual people are not busted for the same conduct. I have known heterosexual people caught having sex by the Phoenix Police Department who have been let go. I have never known a gay couple that has been let go. With gay men, they always run them through the system."
It isn't his perception alone. The police department didn't respond to a request for figures, but a public defender who defended many such cases in private practice before going to the police department's office agrees that the police seem to target gays. Says Rebecca Potter, "Yeah, I do see inequities. The cases that I handled for Phoenix almost all were homosexual. I only had one woman client the whole time. I also had one straight male, but the only reason they went after him was because he was having sex with a prostitute, and they hoped to get him to implicate the woman.
"I have never once gotten a case from a bookstore that involved a straight- couple sex act. I had one lover's-lane straight couple, but it was only because they were closing down the park, and these people had fallen asleep in their truck, and the police wanted them to leave."
Even if it can be argued that more gays than heterosexuals are arrested because more guilty gay men are encountered, the rationale does not explain away the problem. "You know why [they find more gays], don't you?" asks a city prosecutor in Tempe who has handled many of Tempe's cases of public sexual indecency. "That's because the Phoenix vice cops stake out and spend their time sitting in restrooms looking for gays. They proposition them. And so of course that is what you are going to get.
"The Tempe vice squad doesn't do that. Our public sexual indecency cases tend to be men who are masturbating in front of women. I have seen very few gays."
One observer believes that the Phoenix police go further than merely seeking out gay lawbreakers--that they actually ignore out-in-the-open Romeos whose sexual tastes mirror their own. Taylor Coleman, owner of the Castle Boutique adult bookstore, estimates that about a third of the sex offenses committed in his store have come from heterosexuals, and yet the number of arrests has been "95 percent" or "virtually all" gay. He says that he once saw a police officer watching a heterosexual couple having sex in a booth, but that the officer never arrested them. He says that two of his longtime employees have also seen the police pass over straight couples, but that the police always arrest gay violators. Attorney Neal Bassett, a frequent defender of sex offenders and himself a former cop, finds it difficult to believe Coleman's estimations of bookstore arrests--he says his experience is that the police sweep through the bookstores apprehending offenders willy-nilly in an attempt to close the stores down. But he doesn't deny that the police target gay sex offenders in a more general way. "Cops are just a reflection of society, and most of society thinks it is okay to criticize homosexuals," he says. "When a cop sees a lover's-lane situation and it is a guy and a girl, they give them the high sign or shine their flashlight. If it is a couple of guys, they go to jail immediately.
"Discrimination toward homosexuals is expected today."
According to some critics, the discrimination that's thinly veiled as arrest isn't even the end of it. Rea thinks also that the punishments don't always fit the crimes. He points out that, in Phoenix, those convicted of public sexual indecency must register with local authorities as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. They cannot so much as change their addresses without notifying the government.
It's a regulation that may make sense for the child molester, who poses a threat to the community, but what about a guy who was spotted while he was alone in a video booth or who engaged in a sex act with another willing adult?
"None of the 150 cases I have had in five years has involved a child, or even a teenager, and yet they all have to register," says Rea. "These arrests don't have to be dealt with the way they're dealt with."
And they aren't dealt with the same way everywhere. Tim Drake, a spokesperson for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C., an organization that keeps track of laws affecting gay men and women, actually snorts in disgust when he hears that Phoenix has a reporting provision. "Why doesn't that surprise me?" he asks about the city with a growing national reputation for prejudice. He calls reporting "an uncommon practice" when it comes to sexual-indecency charges and says that it has existed in "very few places."
Even in the Valley, reporting isn't always required. The City of Tempe, for instance, offers a diversion program that allows charges to be dismissed on a host of first-time offenses, public sexual indecency among them, in exchange for participation in intensive counseling. In Phoenix, there's no such option available to the Casanovas caught in parks.
Is that what it's like to be gay in Phoenix? Does it often seem that the lawmakers want to punish you, almost in a personal way?
HERE IS WHAT ONE PART of the gay community looks like on the surface, and just beneath.
Every day and night, the parking lots at Papago, Moeur, Bike Path and other parks fill up with solitary men cruising in their Jaguars and Isuzus. It is a frantic scene on the weekends, but even during the middle of a workday--a Monday afternoon--a deeply tanned man in a muscle shirt is stretched out on a blanket he has spread on a table at the edge of a car lot in Papago. Behind his wraparound sunglasses, his eyes examine the drivers who buzz past him; his head tracks each car until it has pulled back onto the parkway.
Over at Moeur Park in Tempe on the same afternoon, five cars are parked in one of the blacktopped areas well-known to gay cruisers. Every vehicle is empty. It is not unlikely that the owners have hiked into the saucer-shaped ravines below the blacktop, where the desert is pocked with clumps of brush, crushed cigarette packs, beer bottles and condom wrappers. Or the drivers may be in the public restroom, another hub of gay sexual activity, which someone has enlivened with this graffiti: "The guy in the red truck has AIDS."
One good-looking 28-year-old man who is tooling through the parking lots on this weekday explains that he "doesn't have a lot of respect for other gay people because they do not want to stick with a relationship." He says that even when he meets someone interesting, he doesn't sleep around. Nonetheless, cruising is a way in which this fellow who seeks faithfulness whiles away his time. "I was here two years ago and met a man who was just back from his Mormon mission to Portugal," he says. "He was from a big Mormon family, he took me on a tour of the Mormon temple, he gave me a Book of Mormon and wrote in it in Portuguese. So I always come out here thinking possibly there is a chance of meeting somebody quality."
Many members of the gay community would tell you that the men who prowl these parks tend to be the desperate and the desperately lonely. They would say there is a high percentage of married men who can't or won't admit they're gay. "Not a lot of openly gay men would take the risk of AIDS," says Ron Peterson, psychologist and gay activist. "It is the suppressed or closeted gays who are not aware of what is going on, or who are frustrated and that say, `The hell with it.'"
Many gay men are as disturbed by their friends who cruise as are their straight counterparts. "There is a real attitude that we want to put our best foot forward, and people who are doing this in the parks shouldn't be doing it because it damages everyone," says an observer.
The damage has to do with stereotypes, of course. "The observation of my extended circle of gay friends doesn't bear out the popular perception of a lot of anonymous sex in parks and bath houses," says a gay man in his thirties who is prominent in town. "The pattern is more like the pattern of straight, single people of the same age--serial monogamy, dating relationships that include sex and don't necessarily last a long time."
He points out that longterm relationships are often achieved between gay men as well, and that when it happens it's against all the odds. Where straight society encourages marriage through weddings, religions, family pressures, and the desire to succeed in business, there's not a societal force in the world that compels two men to get together. In fact, law and society alike forbid it.
There isn't even anything but stilted language available to describe it. Referring to his own "life partner," the man asks, "What do you think of Matthew's chances to effectively continue his career teaching eleven-year-olds in South Phoenix if he attends an awards ceremony with me at his side?"
As for staying together, gay couples are not held fast by the realities of community property, children, and divorce lawyers' high fees. "In the face of such odds, how do so many gay men manage to nevertheless connect and live good lives? Could the answer be that, for them, the relationship is enough? How many straight people can say that?"
Society at large is not yet clamoring to know the inner truths about gay life. It would rather just ignore the whole thing and the accompanying questions about prejudice, where it might actually object to bigotry that's based on skin color.
The part of the gay psyche that's understood, and that's certainly real in some cases, is personified by the notion of gay promiscuity and the scenes at public parks that Phoenix police love to interrupt. That part makes "normal" people feel awfully uneasy, and willing to continue sidestepping the fact that members of the gay population are fighting discrimination with their very lives. The sidestepping happened again this year at the Arizona legislature, when Attorney General Grant Woods' hate-crimes bill died in the Arizona House of Representatives Rules Committee.
Woods' bill would have increased sanctions against the perpetrators of crime based on race, religion or sexual orientation. (As of 1990, there were hate-crime laws that included sexual orientation in nine states and the District of Columbia, and hate-crime laws that exclude crimes based on sexual orientation in thirteen.) As soon as this news became public, Woods' office was deluged with calls. "People were phoning for weeks saying that they didn't want this bill and didn't want me because of this bill. Every one of them said it was because of the sexual orientation thing," says Woods. "But the largest category of hate crimes in the country is against gays. We wouldn't compromise on that."
The bill went down in Rules after hearings characterized by rather bizarre scenes. In response to the suggestion that gays and lesbians should be protected from senseless beatings, local ministers rose and protested that the bill would prohibit their preaching against homosexuality from the pulpit. (It wouldn't have.) Prayerful protectors of the Far Right stopped gay activists on their way to their seats to intone, "Jesus loves you even though you're a homosexual."
The bill also went down after several Democrats who had already voted for it changed their minds--and their votes. Woods thinks the reversal happened once the Democrats saw there wasn't enough Republican support to allow the bill to pass. He says they realized that, without having actually accomplished anything, they'd be on record for championing a hot-potato policy. Representative Debbie McCune-Davis remembers leaving the hearing and being told by a fellow legislator, "I just don't want to have to deal with the constituents on this one."
Now another hate-crimes bill, one that provides only for collecting statistics about the trend so that it may be studied, has passed the Senate and gone to the House. In open committee meetings last week, some legislators were lobbing questions at the representative from the Attorney General's Office in a way that revealed their deepest feelings about gay life.
Perhaps most tellingly, Representative Mark Killian snidely wanted to know this: Since the bill seeks to protect homosexuals, and since sodomy is against the law, why don't we just add prostitutes to this list of hate-crimes victims?
It's the sort of attitude Woods is addressing when he says, "You can think anything you want about homosexuals, but don't commit crimes against them. Even people who break the law have constitutional rights and the right to be free from crime themselves." In a world that confuses questions of human rights with those of sanctimonious morality, the right of gays and lesbians to be free from bodily harm is not a matter that Arizona legislators are willing to protect. What is the likelihood that anyone will stand up for this group against the police?
And what is the cost if they don't? Roger Rea thinks he knows. He thinks the fearful, closeted, anonymous sex scene that straight society finds so loathsome may be around forever.
"When you do not have job protection or probate protection or church sanction of your relationships, you end up with a group of people who are not embraced by the law," he says. "And if they're not embraced by the law, they're going to act contrary to the law.
"It is about time that straight society recognizes that there is a very large gay and lesbian community, and if you want us to embrace some of the same values as the heterosexual community, then you need to treat us with respect."
He jotted down his new friends' license plate number. It was a smart move.
After years of dealing as an insider with the legal system, Rea is drenched in doubt about the motives of law enforcement toward the gay community.
"I know that a lot of people feel very terrorized," says a gay community insider.
"The officer's comment to me was that any single men in the parks are immediately under suspicion."
The gay population is the easiest of all minority groups to mistreat because of what its members do in the dark.
"Cops are just a reflection of society, and most of society thinks it is okay to criticize homosexuals."
Local ministers rose and protested that the bill would prohibit their preaching against homosexuality from the pulpit.
Attorney General Woods says, "You can think anything you want about homosexuals, but don't commit crimes against them."
The right of gays and lesbians to be free from bodily harm is not a matter that Arizona legislators are willing to protect.
