The Lifestyle (45 page)

If there were any doubts in the minds of the hotel owners that the ABC meant to enforce its regulations in the private rooms of guests if the Lifestyles convention took place, they were put to rest when Espinoza gave his final word on the
subject to Murray. It is a truly wondrous document, and warrants quoting almost in full.

“The entire Palm Springs Convention Center complex is licensed for the sale, service and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The same holds true for the Wyndham Hotel property. The regulations apply at all times to both facilities regardless of whether or not alcoholic beverage service is being provided at a certain time or location within the licensed premises or whether
the activity is private or public in nature
. [Italics mine.] Any other interpretation would render the regulations meaningless and unenforceable…. The regulations are clear that licensees shall not permit ‘any person’ to engage in the prohibited activities on the licensed premises.”

The implication was clear: hotel owners had better play ball according to the ABC’s moral rules, or they wouldn’t play ball at all. There was a right way and a wrong way to have sex in a private room—and swinging sex was the wrong way.

Murray threw down the gauntlet in a return letter, alerting Espinoza to the “Constitutional significance” of his perceived mandate. He went on for five pages, making a clear case that the ABC was selectively going after LSO, and demanded that he enforce the regulations regarding sex in private rooms equally, everywhere, and immediately. “If in fact you have no intention of conducting such enforcement we would like a detailed explanation as to the distinction which you feel precludes these areas from enforcement…. Absent such a distinction we will have no alternative than to challenge Section 143.2 et seq. as unconstitutional as applied.” It was the first time any- one had ever threatened to stand up to the ABC in court on Constitutional grounds. In its forty-year history, the regulatory body had never had a restraining order placed on it.

The havoc that the ABC was wreaking on the Lifestyles Organization became clear when McGinley won the first of a series of court battles he would wage against Atlas Hotels. The
judge ruled that Atlas had failed to prove that LSO’s activities had necessitated the breaking of the contract and most significantly, that there was “no evidence to suggest that any activity complained of was committed by any individual whose conduct would make [LSO] liable thereof.”

For McGinley, though, the judgment was a Pyrrhic victory. “Until the ABC stepped in, we had the greatest relationship with the Town and Country,” he told me over the phone at the time. “The ABC got what they wanted in that battle. And that really burns me. They’re running around the state doing exactly the same thing to other people who are too poor or too scared of exposure to stand up to them. But I’ll tell you something. They have not won the war. I’m just putting my troops into the field.”

McGinley was not exaggerating when he said the ABC was “running around the state doing exactly the same thing to other people.” From the California government’s point of view, sexual tolerance had gone too far in society, period. The government was on a moral crusade and swingers, as McGinley had predicted, were now just one group among many who numbered among the infidels. When a government—any government—feels itself standing as a righteous bulwark against sexual immorality, the public becomes the enemy and the government usually turns loose on society what the Palm Springs
Desert Sun
would later inaccurately call a “renegade agency.” There was nothing “renegade” about the ABC. Invested with the power of economic life and death over every hotel, bar, nightclub, and restaurant in a state of thirty-two million people, the ABC had the specific mandate of keeping the public in moral line—which it did in massive shows of force shortly after the Lifestyles ’96 Convention. The ABC raided
bars, nightclubs, and dances where gays, lesbians, blacks, his-panics, poor people, and artists were all alleged to be getting out of hand. Willy-nilly, the ABC revoked the liquor licenses of these establishments and drove them out of business. Since the ABC had no power over organizations that didn’t hold a license to sell alcohol, such as LSO and other swing clubs, they effectively shut down the spots where their members liked to assemble. In its raids the ABC employed both its own agents and proxies in city vice squads, which the ABC directly funded. The ABC received those funds from the State of California, which in turn received them from the federal government in order for the state to initiate a fresh approach to crime prevention. Raiding the clubs of people perceived to be immoral was the fresh approach to crime prevention taken by the right-wing administration of Governor Pete Wilson.

“These raids were being conducted in the name of protecting the morals and the family standards of the people of the State of California,” the UCLA-affiliated lawyer Bob Burke told a meeting of swingers that I attended at the height of the harassment. Burke, who had taken up the cudgel for the California Bar and Tavern Guild, explained that we lived in a time when the government was not allowed to regulate private sexuality, and the raids were its way of surreptitiously doing the regulating. Instead of firing or jailing people who had sex unconventionally, as they’d once done with swingers and homosexuals, they were now removing the liquor licenses of the establishments where they recreated, sending a message to these and other subcultures that they should behave more conventionally. The crime-prevention theory behind the raids was that immoral sexual behavior led to the breakdown in family values and the breakdown in family values led to criminal behavior. Since immoral people were known to congregate in taverns, nightclubs, and at conventions, the ABC was the perfect enforcement arm. Its mandate entrusted it both with
safeguarding “public welfare and morals” and preventing “moral turpitude” in licensed premises.

“When I started looking into this, I found that these strike forces were moving selectively,” Burke told the swingers. “They would first start in areas where there were African-American bars and then about three or four weeks later they would drop all enforcement there and they would move over into areas of Latino bars and raid these groups, and then pull off from there. Then they’d go to gay and lesbian bars and dance clubs and they’d raid these. Then they’d go back to black bars.

“Most pointedly, of course, they never went into the more affluent, prestigious, or more comfortable areas of the city,” Burke related. “You never saw them going into West L. A. or Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades or any place else like that. They were not to be seen. You would never see them in any of the sports venues.”

In other words, the government took for granted that poor people and unconventional types were more of a criminal threat to society than were the wealthy. Afraid of exposure if they protested, or having no money with which to protest, the poor and unconventional were without power in society. And so the ABC treated them as governments always treat the powerless. A dozen agents at a time would pour through the doors of a bar in a poor neighborhood and force patrons to line up against a wall with their hands up, sometimes for two hours. One of these raids on a Latino bar was captured on the establishment’s video surveillance monitor. As with the Town and Country, in almost every instance of a raid some infraction was discovered and the liquor license was revoked or suspended. The charges did not have to be proved in court, since the ABC was the regulator. The only appeal a bar or dance hall had was to the ABC itself.

“It is so outrageous and such a violation of our First Amendment rights,” Burke said, “that we can’t sit back and say ‘It doesn’t concern me.’ If this kind of state Gestapoism
can happen here with an agency, it can very quickly move to other states.”

The ABC also took the regulations against public eroticism and applied them in the most suspect ways when it suited their purposes, which brings into question some of their allegations against anonymous couples at Lifestyles ’96. In effect, the ABC moved the goal posts so close together on the playing field that there was no room left for the people they didn’t want to play. “The ABC…busted into an unassuming gay bar in Hollywood,” David Gutcheon wrote in
Art Collector International
. “In the bar was a model of Michelangelo’s
David
, the sublime classical masterpiece…. The Department of Alcoholic

Beverage Control declared that this icon was a violation of Cal. Admin. Reg. 4-143,4, and they revoked the bar’s liquor license. That’s how high the stakes are. In California,
right now
, Michelangelo’s
David
constitutes obscenity, and displaying it can cost you your business. As Dr. McGinley put it, ‘If they can establish legal precedent, they could shut down our whole civilization.’”

Art Collector International
is perhaps the last journal you would expect to find Robert McGinley cited in as an authority on the government’s threat to “our whole civilization.” But Gutcheon had come to recognize what Bob McGinley knew in his gut back when the war on swingers had first begun: when the media spend years condemning one form of legal sexual expression on moral grounds, it sends a message to rulers that community standards allow for the oppression of all forms of expression, except those which the government approves. And that includes artistic expression.

Back in May of 1997, reflecting on the ABC’s oppression of his own organization, McGinley began to feel the same emotion that had narrowed his eyes to slits thirty years before. “You bastards. You have picked the wrong guy to do this to.”

A vital lesson of war taught by Sun Tzu states: “Maneuver in the highest heights.” As the troops on the Palm Springs battlefield began to move about and fire on one another, McGinley began to search for high ground on which to make a stand. For almost fifteen years the press had been on the side of law and order and morality, and against the lifestyle. Now, he believed, the media had to be shown what the effects of their support for the “moral authorities” had wrought: people who were doing no more than having
erotic fun
in public, but
explicit sexual fun
in private settings, were being persecuted. “This is a battle to the finish,” he told me. “Really—I’m serious. Losing it will mean the end of lifestyle conventions and dances, gay and lesbian dances, black and Latino dances—the works. Who’s going to hold an event if the ABC wins here? I have to convince the press of that. They have to know we’re on the same side. They have to know that when the ABC attacks us, they’re also attacking free expression—they’re attacking the media.”

On July 15, with the 1997 convention less than two weeks away, the ground for McGinley’s final battle was chosen for him by the enemy. In a meeting with Jim Dunn, general manager of the Palm Springs Convention Center, the ABC insisted that it was dead serious about enforcing its mandate: there was no room for negotiation on the artistic merits of any one event. Not only were the Trade Fair and the Car Wash “in conflict with the statutes of the ABC,” but, pointedly, so was the Erotic Arts show, and the convention center would lose its license if it went ahead and displayed the works (which, amazingly, the ABC had not even inspected for violations of its rules). Dunn wrote McGinley that day, saying that the art show would have to be either canceled or moved to “a tent located on a nearby vacant lot.” The cost of the tent, born by McGinley, would be almost fifty-four thousand dollars. There were more than a hundred paintings in the Erotic Arts show, and they would almost certainly suffer damage in the heat.

McGinley now knew he had his high ground, and he knew the press and public would rally around him. The ABC was now attacking a highly protected form of free speech in North America: art. The public might not give a hoot about swingers, gays, lesbians, and poor people, but they would realize that once the government moved on art illegally, it would eventually move on everybody.

In that last week before the convention, with the hotels and convention center forced to try to back out of their contracts with LSO (which would have meant losing most of their tourist income for the summer), the world joined McGinley on his redoubt. The American Civil Liberties Union took LSO’s case, putting its First Amendment specialists, Peter Eliasberg and Dan Takoji, in charge of the ABC file. The ACLU linked up with Paul Murray and Bob Burke and prepared to take the ABC to court to stop its harassment of LSO with a temporary restraining order. After that they hoped to win a permanent injunction that would defeat the ABC on its other fronts of attack against gays, lesbians, Latinos, and African Americans. The
Washington Post
assigned its veteran California correspondent, William Claiborne, to the story. The Palm Spring
Desert Sun
prepared a space on its front page for coverage of the showdown in court. The local affiliates of the major TV networks showed up at the convention with their vans—this was too juicy to miss. Art
Collector International
, distributed in first-class cabins on American Airlines, would leave absolutely no doubt about where the interests of the public stood on this issue: “The promise that shaved gorillas calling themselves peace officers
shall not
be empowered to implement their hit-it-with-a-stick social policy upon society at large is
the
promise of America.”