tangents

news & views

by dal mcintire

Public restrooms aren't very savory places for sex. Most homophiles take pains to avoid such places, or at least to cut short any necessary visits. Yet a small percentage of homosexuals, driven to such resorts by social pressures, and allowed no better outlet, are tempted by sudden offerings and often find themselves in the clutches of the law.

In order to protect "he-men" who are sometimes propositioned in the johns (they can say "no"-can't they? And some of the same men don't think it at all offensive if they proposition a woman in public) cops are planted in many public toilets, maybe in plainclothes, posing as "available" or even making advances, or maybe hiding behind partitions in pipe-corridors, watching from a "peeping closet" to see what happens at the urinals or in booths. This whole dirty business of luring, trapping and toilet-peeping has been resoundingly condemned by journalists, jurists, psychiatrists.

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and clergymen. The cop whose job is to prevent legal infractions finds himself too often deliberately luring men into them. Time and again, corruptable cops find this a fertile field for graft.

It has been suggested that an officer who crouches for hours in an uncomfortable "peeping closet," closely watching what ought to be of utmost privacy, may get impatient to grab the first "likely looking" party that comes along--and invent the "evidence" later. Such cases are usually broken in the courts, even tho cops are well trained and experienced at playing out their testimony-IF defendents are not too frightened to defend themselves properly, and don't fall for the cops' promise to let-them-off-easy if they plead guilty to the lighter charge. (Cops know they can almost never prove the heavier charge.)

Out of dozens of these cases nightly in large cities, few are publicized. Most men, whether or not they did what the cop charges, are

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