Yesterday's protest in front of Mayor Bloomberg's residence at Gracie Mansion seems to have drawn the attention that demonstrators were hoping for after weeks of growing anger from within the gay community over claims that the NYPD has been targeting gay men and the porn shops they patronize under trumped up charges of prostitution. Activists compared the situation with the Stonewall raid of 1969. Attorney Bill Dobbs said, “Forty years later, the NYPD is still targeting gay men and places we gather."
While Mayor Bloomberg has only addressed the issue indirectly, he did send senior staff members to a meeting this week at City Council offices where leading voices within the local gay community sat down with police officials and Speaker Christine Quinn among others. Andy Velez of the Coalition to Stop the Arrests tells Gay City that police at the meeting admitted to taking a pause from said arrests.
30 men were arrested by city vice cops in six porn shops in 2008. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne defends against charges that the Department is going after gay-themed video stores pointing out that only 3 of the 100 nuisance cases that involved prostitution last year were at such businesses.
One of those businesses is Blue Dog Video in the East Village, which settled a lawsuit filed by the city on the heels of several arrests coming from a sting operation at the store. Its owner spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity because he said he did not want his daughter to know that he worked at the store. He told them, “It is like any other video store...all these people who got accused — I cannot believe they are prostitutes.”
Many of the men who claim that they were lured into the prostitution charges despite never agreeing to anything more than consensual sex have pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Openly gay State Senator Thomas Duane told the Times, “There is a certain amount of discomfort that these men would be having consensual sex with someone that they just met."
