Cruisers Beware: Entrapment Is Back

Wake Up Sissy, Entrapment Is Back!

They are dusting off ALL the conservative greatest hits. Since June, nearly two hundred people have been arrested in a sting at New York’s Penn Station, where Amtrak Police placed undercover officers inside a busy public restroom flagged on cruising apps like Sniffies. Officers reportedly hid in stalls or pretended to use urinals to watch for sexual activity.

An attorney representing one of the arrestees describe the charges as “flawed,” noting that at least one person was detained simply for wearing a Pride wristband while using the restroom. Among those arrested was David, a 31-year-old health care worker told The City that he was taken to a cell inside the station and handcuffed to a wall, at which point he heard one officer tell others “we got three more fag pervs.” An off-duty NYPD sergeant was also taken into custody at the Penn Station bathroom and issued a summons for public exposure earlier this month Because Amtrak is a federal agency, it can bypass New York’s sanctuary protections and hand detainees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement—something city and state police are barred from doing. At least twenty people were reportedly turned over to ICE without formal charges.

Body-camera footage captures officers arresting two men groping each other at a urinal, but other accounts point to stunts and tactics. CUNY law professor Jared Trujillo reports that officers sometimes initiate contact, explaining that an officer might touch himself or simply peer at a person, and if that person—there to pee—responds in any way, he can be arrested or charged with lewdness. That is the very definition of entrapment.

@profjaredtrujillo

Be safe!! Amtrak officers are using Sniffies and otherwise approaching people in the men’s Amtrak bathroom at Penn Statuon and charging them with lewdness #sniffies #NYC #civilrightawyer #amtrak #pennstation

♬ original sound – Prof. Jared Trujillo

Cruising, the art of meeting in public spaces for consensual sex has long been part of queer culture, itself a by-product of sexual repression. So has its criminalization.  For generations, vague “public lewdness” statutes have given law enforcement cover to surveil, shame, and arrest gay men simply for existing in public.

In 1953, during the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare era, civil-rights strategist and speech writer Bayard Rustin was arrested for “lewd vagrancy” after consensual sex with two men in a parked car, convicted of a misdemeanor, sentenced to sixty days in jail, and forced to register as a sex offender, a scandal that pushed him into a quieter, behind-the-scenes role in the movement. Decades later, in 1998, pop star George Michael was followed into a Los Angeles public restroom by a plainclothes officer and arrested for a “lewd act,” leading to his public outing as a gay man.

Appearing on The Late Show, George recounted how he was “coaxed fairly directly,” adding, “It’s called entrapment. It’s illegal.” In 2004, the Triangle Foundation and six individual plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department over its notorious “BAG-A-FAG” sting. The case ended in a settlement that awarded $170,000 to the plaintiffs, and ensured the expungement of all related arrest records. As recently as 2022, the Port Authority settled a class-action lawsuit over similar bathroom patrols and pledged to end plainclothes policing, yet here we are again.

The Penn Station sting again illustrates how easily bathrooms can be weaponized, with “public decency” as the pretext, to sweep LGBTQ+ people into the criminal system and, in some cases, the immigration pipeline.

Queer life has always found ways to survive surveillance, but munchers and tuggers beware!