California Bill is Signed

By Gerald Hansen

WEST COAST CORRESPONDENT

SACRAMENTO, Calif. Without ceremony or any public statement, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. signed the Willie Brown bill May 12, repealing the state's laws against gay sex, fornication and cohabitation between consenting adults in private.

The new law takes effect Jan. 1, 1976.

California is the ninth state to repeal its laws against consentual sex. And it's the first state to do it with a law directed solely at sex. Illinois, Connecticut, Delaware, Ohio, North Dakota, Colorado, Oregon and Hawaii did so via comprehensive reforms of their entire criminal codes.

The reforms, pending before the Legislature in Sacramento for six years, were adopted only after a dramatic series of events in the State Senate, during which four senators had to be rounded up to create a tie, the senators were locked in the chamber and the lieutenant governor flown in from a speech in Denver to cast the tie-breaking vote.

The Assembly passed the bill in March, 45 to 26, but its fate was always in doubt in the more conservative Senate, which did not approve it May 1 before limiting its effect slightly retaining laws against same-sex acts between prison inmates, for example, and stiffening the penalties for adults who seduce children under 14.

By this time, the newspaper headlines were large and bold. Heavy, organized opposition arose from evangelical and fundamentalist church groups, whose members flooded Gov. Brown and the Legislature with letters, telegrams and phone calls of protest. "You would not believe some of the filth of the people who profess to be Christians," one staff aide said.

By the time the Assembly reconsidered the bill May 8, to take up the Senate's amendment, 37 church-goers from Napa were parading on the Capitol steps.

A dozen children, flanked by their mothers, played violins and sang "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," and other patriotic hymms. But the second Assembly vote was 45 to 26, just as in March.

Gov. Brown's press office reported him receiving 14 letters in favor of the bill, and 2,591 demanding that he veto it. He had 14 telephone calls for it and 470 against it, as of May 2.

As signed, the law raises to three years, from one, the minimum prison sentence for forced oral or anal sex, and acts performed with someone under 14 who is also › 10 years younger than the defendant.

The age of consent is 18. Sex with someone under 18

D.C. Abolishes Vice Squad

By Joe Stewart

WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

WASHINGTON Mayor Walter Washington vetoed the City Council's budget decision to abolish the capital city's police vice squad May 15. But he said he was doing so only to protect a chief executive's right to make staffing decisions himself.

The vice-squad abolition was one of several dozen such "executive" decisions made in the City Council budget adopted April 29, all of which Mayor Washington vetoed.

They all went back to the City Council, where gay activists who have been lobbying against the vice squad's $386,000 appropriation are confident they have the votes to override the mayor's veto. It takes two-thirds of the 13 Council members to override.

Officially called the Prostitution, Perversion and Obscenity squad, the unit.contains 17 plainclothes officers who have arrested over 200 cruising gay men for solicitation since 1972, GAA/D.C. and the Mattachine Society of Washington said in a detailed, four-page letter to the mayor in January. The squad also targets in on street prostitutes and transvestites.

The GAA and Mattachine activists argued before the Council, at budget hearings on March 29, that the city is not only violating free-speech and other civil liberties in the arrests, but wastes scarce tax dollars on victimless crimes at a time when the Washington Post reported that violent crimes in the city were up 19 per cent in 1974. In response, the Council's Public Safety Committee reported:

"The PPO Branch is no longer a useful tool in the reduction of crime... It is our opinion that this Branch has in the past demonstrated itself in a manner which infringes upon the constitutional rights of various segments of the population. In view of this, and in an effort to increase the crime-fighting force of the city, this committee abolishes the PPO Branch."

On April 29 the Council approved the report and that's the point to which Mayor Washington took exception. The Council should give him the police budget to spend, and it's his decision how to deploy police officers, Washington contended at a press conference May 16 to explain his vetoes.

Mattachine President Franklin Kameny and GAA leaders buttonholed the mayor after the press conference to argue the PPO veto, and it was understood that Washington wouldn't object to abolition of the squad by

GAY PRIDE

Special

NOW and ACLU support Rights

NEW YORK The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union have agreed to work actively for gay-rights legislation in Congress.

Both will send letters to every member of the House and the Senate urging adoption of the Abzug-Fraser gay-rights bill (H.R. 5452), for which Senate sponsors are now being recruited, according to Bruce Voeller, executive director of the National Gay Task Force.

The ACLU decision is significant, for the group concentrates only on three or four issues during every session of Congress, according to Marilyn Haft, director of the ACLU's Sexual Privacy Project.

She revealed the gay-priority decision to CONTACT in an interview May 6, and it was announced publicly by Voeller the following week.

Voeller called it "an about-face." He noted that while the ACLU has provided free legal defense for many gay-related cases in the past child custody for gay parents, sexual solicitation and sodomy-law challenges, campus gay-club harassments among them the ACLU has never taken a role in lobbying for gay-rights legislation until now, he said.

Voeller met twice with Aryeh Neier, executive director of the ACLU, to persuade the organization to make the gay legislation commitment.

Karen DeCrow, president of NOW, said her organization will seek to rally its chapters in grassroots support for gay rights across the country.

The two groups' interest was signalled when both Haft and DeCrow attended the March 25 press conference in Washington to announce 18 new House sponsors for the Abzug-Fraser bill.

About 80 to 85 per cent of the cases being supported in the Sexual Privacy Project are gay-related, Haft said. On April 13 the ACLU board of directors adopted a new official statement on gay concerns that goes beyond its previous stand.

"Homosexuals are entitled to the same rights, liberties, lack of harassment and protections as are other citizens," the new declaration says.

It deletes a sentence from the earlier ACLU position, approved in 1966, that says, "The union's policy stand supports only the private behavior of consenting adults."

It adds the ACLU's new concern for discrimination against gays in immigration, the rights of gay parents, campus clubs and political groups. The 1975 position also calls specifically for "legislation to eliminate government and private discrimination against homosexuals."

It includes 1966 language denouncing police entrapment and discriminatory arrest policies, bias in government hiring, and laws which seek to dictate private sexual behavior.

Haft said that Avon Press will publish a.200-page ACLU paperback in July, "The Rights of Homosexuals," as part of the Sexual Privacy Project.

She said the book, to retail for about $1.25, will discuss not only legislation and court decisions regarding sexuality and job rights, but gay marriage, tax advantages and parents' rights as well.

Haft said no special distribution has been arranged, but that Avon will distribute the lavender-covered book to the supermarket, airport, college and other bookstores it regularly supplies with the military-rights, race-relations and other books in the ACLU rights series.

GOV. EDMUND G. BROWN Jr.

is punishable as either a felony or misdemeanor, at the judge's option. The maximum felony sentence is 15 years. Prison sex carries a similar option, with the maximum being five years.

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