Lies With Man. Michael Nava
Ellen replied, “if she doesn’t agree, we want to know why you asked for a dismissal.”
Manasque-Brown said, “Counsel, talk to me, not each other.” She scowled. “Mr. Unger, Mr. Robinson, I don’t know what you’re up to but this is no way to proceed. If you wanted to dismiss this case, you should have filed the appropriate motion.”
“Your Honor,” Unger said. “This is a matter of the utmost sensitivity.”
After a tense moment of silence, she said, “Approach.”
Unger and Robinson stepped to the bench, and for the next five minutes they and the judge conducted a conversation in fierce whispers. At the end of it, she said, “Step back.”
Ellen said, “Your Honor, the defense—”
“Objects, I know,” she said. “Your objection is noted, but it’s also irrelevant because I’m granting the People’s motion and dismissing all charges against all defendants. With prejudice.”
“Why?” I blurted out.
“Ask Mr. Unger,” she said. “We’re adjourned.”
••••
I caught up with Marc in the parking lot.
“Hey,” I said. “What was that all about?”
He blasted me with his smile. “You been working out, Henry? Because you are looking good. You know, if I weren’t already taken—”
“Answer my question.”
He shrugged. “Your guy got off. Take the win.”
I thought for a moment. “You represent the police department. We were asking for personnel records. There was something in them you didn’t want us to see. Something worse than excessive force complaints. Something so bad you forced Robinson to drop the charges to keep those records private.”
“You’re wasted in the defense bar. You really should come and work for me.”
“But what,” I asked, “could be more damaging to a cop’s reputation than excessive force complaints?”
He responded with a Cheshire cat grin.
“Come on, Marc, the case is over. Who am I going to tell?”
“You promise to keep this between us?”
“I swear on my gay card.”
He smirked. “Fine. The department had an undercover cop in the anti-apartheid group the defendants belonged to. When the defense filed the Pitchess motion, some idiot police clerk included his name and records with the response. The DA had no idea who he was and called the department and they called me. We couldn’t have the judge turn his name over to you guys and blow his cover. We need to protect our people.”
“Even if it means dismissing the case?”
“What case? Misdemeanor trespass for a bunch of kids protesting apartheid? Hell, I agree with them.”
“Is the undercover cop still in the group?”
“Nah, he’s been reassigned.”
“Why did the department plant an undercover cop there in the first place?”
“Objection. Beyond the scope of cross-examination. I’ve got to run, Henry. Call me for lunch sometime.”
He got into his Beemer— the higher-ups in the city attorney’s office were notoriously well paid— and drove off, leaving my question unanswered.
But I didn’t have time to worry about it. I had a full day of court appearances ahead of me and a meeting at the end of it with a group of gay activists fighting Proposition 54, a ballot initiative to quarantine people infected with the HIV virus.
••••
Proposition 54 was spawned by an alliance between a right-wing Congressman named Schultz and an evangelical preacher named Shelby who led an outfit he called the Alliance for Traditional Family Values. Both had long and ignominious records as gay-bashers. Even their fellow bigots— the politer ones anyway— found their views too extreme, but then AIDS emerged, and Schultz and Shelby were no longer voices crying in the wilderness. The theoretical threat posed by men having sex with each other had now, in the mind of many straights, become the actual threat of a lethal disease, no matter how often they were told the virus could not be casually transmitted. People still believed AIDS could be contracted through casual touch or even breathing the same air as an infected person. Schultz and Shelby, riding these waves of ignorance and fear, had put together Proposition 54 for the November ballot. If passed, it would allow county health officials to identify and round up people who were HIV positive and force them into quarantine camps. At the moment, seven months before the election, the polls showed Proposition 54 winning by twelve points.
••••
I turned off Highland into the parking lot of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center and nosed my car into a narrow space. I always suspected, from its long L-shape, that in a previous life the center had been a hot sheet motel. Painted industrial gray, it was an unimposing building that, nonetheless, was constantly being vandalized with graffiti like the phrase I saw now in red spray-paint: “AIDS = Anally Inserted Death Serum.” It looked pretty fresh, so I guessed the center’s employees hadn’t yet had a chance to paint over it. A couple of dozen people were milling around the entrance, smoking, laughing and, as usual wherever there are more than two gay men together, discreetly cruising. Though mostly a male and white crowd, there was also a sprinkling of women and of Black and brown faces. There wasn’t much mixing among the groups, though, and that was a problem. Defeating Proposition 54 would require the community to unite but the community consisted of people whose difficult, private struggles to come out had left them mistrustful of all authority and strongly averse to being told what to do.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to herd the cats. My job was to talk to would-be demonstrators about their legal rights and how to respond to the cops. I made my way into the community room, pausing in front of racks of pamphlets and brochures from the city’s various AIDS organizations pushing safe sex and offering counseling and medical and social services. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly gay men and lesbians, aided by straight friends, had shaken off their terror of AIDS and organized themselves to take care of their own. The despair I had witnessed in San Francisco in 1984 had only two years later ripened into resistance.
In the main community room, a pudgy, white-haired man in black-rimmed glasses and a herringbone sports coat banged a gavel on the table at the front where he and a half-dozen other men and women were sitting. All the folding chairs that had been set out in the big space were occupied, and dozens of other people were standing against the walls or sitting on the floor. It was a pretty young crowd: there were a lot of black leather jackets, wallet chains, and hemmed jean shorts— the activists’ wardrobe. T-shirts were emblazoned with the names of AIDS activist groups or slogans like, “How dare you presume I’m straight!” A dozen or so of the crowd, men and women, wore black T-shirts with a single word written across their chests: QUEER. I knew one of them— Laura Acosta. She taught a gay studies course at Los Angeles Community College. At her invitation I had spoken to a couple of her classes about the developments in the law regarding gay rights. Not much to report there.
Laura was a self-described butch dyke, her stockiness a product of power weight lifting, her hair cut and gelled into a flat-top, invariably dressed in men’s khakis and a guayabera shirt. She was brash and loud and formidably smart. An anthropologist by training, with a PhD from the University of Arizona, she was overqualified to be teaching at a community college, but her efforts to find a tenure-track job at a four-year institution had been unsuccessful because, as she once told me, “I go in with three strikes against me. Woman, Chicana, dyke.” I told her if she ever wanted to sue, I’d find her the best gay rights lawyer I could but, as it turned out, she liked teaching at LACC where her students were like herself, brown and Black kids who were the first in their families to go to any kind of college