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In an L.A. Times piece on John Stoll's review hearing, reporter John Johnson wrote, "If the term 'elephant in the room' applies to something unacknowledged that looms over everything, then there is an entire herd in Judge John Kelly's courtroom."

On September 14, 2002, Stephen Tauzer, 58, who in 1984 had been chief prosecutor at Stoll's criminal trial, was murdered in his own garage by a former police investigator, Chris Hillis, who believed that Tauzer had been having sex with his late son Lance.

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Tauzer had met the young man when Lance was 18 and beginning a string of drug arrests. During the next four years, Lance Hillis spent a lot of time at Tauzer's house, which for a time was his legal address. By the time Lance was 22, he was a methamphetamine addict on probation; his latest arrest appeared to guarantee a prison term. But Tauzer intervened on his behalf, not for the first time. Despite the Hillises' wish that their son be taught a lesson through incarceration, Tauzer arranged to have Lance sent to a rehabilitation center.

Escaping from rehab, Lance Hillis sped away in a stolen car and collided head-on with a truck. Chris Hillis blamed Tauzer. A few weeks after the funeral, Hillis went to Tauzer's home to retrieve his dead son's dog, and stayed to bludgeon the Deputy DA senseless and stab him 16 times in the head.

Tauzer, a respected figure whose accolades included the Boy Scouts of America's "One Brick at a Time" award, was never openly gay, but his sexual orientation was an open secret. Despite the brutality of Tauzer's murder, public sympathies favored Lance's father. It was rumored that Tauzer, after all, was one of the "Lords of Bakersfield," a shadowy gay-old-boy network of closeted public officials, business leaders, and other ostensibly model citizens believed to subject young men to coercive sex.

"He was a homosexual," said Hillis of the late Deputy DA in a January 2003 Bakersfield Californian interview. "Everybody who worked for Tauzer knew.... I always tried to protect my son. I knew he would come back from drug use, and I didn't want him to have the stigma of being a homosexual."

"You just don't come out in Kern County," attorney Michael Snedeker observes. "There's a Victorian dichotomy that says you can be gay as long as you stay closeted; the closets there are very deep." If you are a successful gay man in Bakersfield, coming out means being demonized for having led a double life by those who set you up to lead one.

No closet is too deep for the Bakersfield Californian, which thrives on sex-crime news and titillation. While doing its best to stoke the '80s sex-ring panic, the Kern County paper of record darkly intimated that the sex rings were "the tip of the iceberg." Editorially drawn to conspiracy theory, the Californian has recently been helping to perpetuate the Lords of Bakersfield legend, using Tauzer's murder to justify the coverage. Beginning in January 2003, the newspaper published a string of sensational articles by Robert Price recapitulating local lore about "a loose-knit, secretive network" whose membership included "homosexuals who preyed upon young men and boys, then used their positions of power and influence to protect one another from possible ramifications."

The legend seems have evolved from rumors about a "White Orchid Society" said to exist in the '50s, whose members were supposed to be prominent, secretive queers who lusted after local youths. Incidents between young hustlers and older men were cited as evidence. Mimeographed copies of a gay-conspiracy exposé were circulated hand to hand around Kern County in the 1980s and perhaps earlier. The Californian series suggests that five murders in seven years-- the first of which occurred in January 1978-- may have had links to the surreptitious group. (Ironically, one of the reputed Lords was the Californian's former editor and co-owner, Ted Fritts.)

For the Right, the Lords mythos is a rich source of propaganda. The website of the "International Organization of Heterosexual Rights" prominently links the Californian series, complete with its original subheadlines. ("Powerful gay men. Vulnerable teenaged boys. Murder.") Reactionary activist Richard Palmquist has even produced a document, supposedly written by DA Edward Jagels's former wife, claiming Jagels is gay. It's worth noting that The Gay Agenda, a widely circulated hate video in the'90s, was produced at the fundamentalist Springs of Life Ministry in nearby Lancaster, just over the LA County line. The Gay Agenda claimed to reveal the dark intentions of a vast network of family-hating deviates.

Nevertheless, the Kern County gay community has been nudging closet doors ajar. In 1999, the state Labor Commission ruled that the administration of a Bakersfield public school could not accede to demands that pupils be removed from classes taught by teacher James Merrick simply because he was thought to be gay. At parents' insistence, 15 of Merrick's 100 students had been excused from his eighth-grade science classes and reassigned to study hall. The parents had assumed correctly that Merrick was gay when he rebuked Pastor Douglas Hearn, a County Human Relations Commissioner, for saying publicly that homosexuals were "sick" and that students risked rape from gay teachers. Merrick had previously been circumspect about his sexual preference.

There is currently a visible chapter of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Educators' Network, GLSEN, in Kern County. Meanwhile, Steve Tauzer's killer, Chris Hillis, has begun to serve a 16-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter. Rumors persist about gay officials obtaining lighter sentences for friends charged with criminal acts. But Kern County justice, famed for severity, tends in reality to be most lenient when the victim, not the perpetrator, happens to be gay.