News Slant	News Slant Archive

"Some gay people deserve pride. Others deserve prison." That could be the slogan of the Empire State Pride Agenda, which-- for those who don't get the name's discreet subtext-- is New York's largest lesbian and gay lobbying group. Keeping straight which queers are which kept the Pride Agenda busy this legislative season in Albany-- New York's state capital. By the time lawmakers went home at the end of June, the Pride Agenda had bragging rights to new laws that raise penalties for consensual teen sex, and enhance the ability of vigilantes to attack shameful gays, all the while securing extra punishment for those who attack gay people deserving of pride. In addition, Pride Agenda lobbyists-- ever alive to shame's sting-- helped exact a promise from legislators to change New York law so that victims of heterosexual assault need never again face the stigma of stating in court to that they were forced to submit to homosexual-sounding acts.

View our poll archive

It's not that New York sex statutes weren't pretty rotten before this year's "Sexual Assault Reform Act." Though the state's highest court in 1980 struck down the law forbidding same-sex relations among persons 17 years or older-- New York's age-of-consent-- "sodomy" still sits on the books, along with the less poetic "deviate sexual intercourse." Which term applies when depends on what organs and orifices criminally commingle. While illegal sex involving penetrating penises tends to get classed as "rape" in New York, the state's legal eagles deem fellatio "sodomy." New York cops and prosecutors sometimes threaten to lay a sodomy rap on same-sex couples caught in flagrante delicto in lovers' lanes, even though the charges would never stick in the end. And New York newspapers are filled with articles about men arrested for "sodomizing" teenagers. Gay people generally hold sodomy to be, like candy, dandy. But in the imaginations of John Q. and Mary C.. Public, such news reports conjure inflammatory images of buggered boys, when all that likely transpired was a blow job.

A distinctly lesser reason for ridding New York statute books of references sodomy is that some assault victims who endured, say, coerced cunnilingus, get described in court as having been "sodomized," a designation that could cause the homophobic ill-ease. Yet this was the rationale the Empire State Pride Agenda highlighted in its public statements.

"No sexual assault survivor will ever again be further humiliated by reading in the papers that she was 'sodomized' or re-victimized by having to take the stand and admit that she engaged in 'deviate sexual intercourse,'" declared executive director Matt Foreman, extolling the Sexual Assault Reform Act. Would the Pride Agenda be as solicitous about the angst felt by a racist white assault victim whose assailant happened to be black, and who would have to face what she felt was the stigma of miscegenation?

If New York's "Sexual Assault Reform Act" simply got rid of the term sodomy and "deviate intercourse," it would be a small accomplishment. But the law makes it easier to prosecute consensual sex among teenagers, and keeps sex criminals on probation for ten years, or even life.

"It's a classic bait and switch," says Chris Farrell of the Parolee Rights Project. "It's presented as an advancement of sexual freedom, when it's really only a way to give greater power to the police and the state."

The law makes it possible to prosecute 18-year-olds for sex with teenagers under 15, raises the age from 13 to 15 under which higher penalties kick in for consensual sex, allows life imprisonment for a second offenses involving a minor, and increases the time on which New York's gay sex criminals remain on probation after completing-- if they ever do-- their prison time.

New York City subway riders beware-- the law also establishes a new crime of "forcible touching," which includes "the squeezing, grabbing or pinching of such other person's sexual or other intimate parts... for the purpose of gratifying the actor's sexual desire."

Foreman told The Guide that the Empire State Pride Agenda takes a range of progressive positions on issues from sexual equality to racism. However the group took no position for or against the aspects of the "Sexual Assault Reform Act" that would subject the likes of William Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and André Gide-- all of whom had relationships with teenagers-- to years in Empire State prisons, and afterwards force them to register for life as "dangerous sexual predators."

But gays deserving of pride will benefit from another Pride Agenda accomplishment-- a new hate-crimes law that will increase the sentences of those who attack state-approved homosexuals.

Before he became executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, Foreman worked for the New York State Department of Corrections-- in whose facilties thousands more queers will rot thanks to the Pride Agenda's work. Got pride?