The growth of police concern this month was marked first by an alarming announcement in the San Diego Union Tribune (August 6) about police plans to register entrapped gay men--possibly outdoor cruisers-- as sex offenders.

San Diego, in the wake of the spotlight that the Cunanan case put on that city, has been the scene of numerous outdoor arrests ever since the scandalous publicity began to dim. The San Diego locale hit hardest by police-under-bushes behavior (upwards of 60 entrapment arrests) has been Marian Bear Memorial Nature Park, so seldom used for family recreation by suburbanites nearby that police are pleading to neighbors, asking that they take leave of favorite TV programs and go outdoors to crowd the surrounding nature trails. Police seem to be saying that if only others, besides the cruising gay males, would utilize nature, then men out for a cruisey walk would be properly intimidated and feel forced to leave the park.

Unless invited, many agree, even closeted gay men are highly unlikely to approach or to become intimate with strangers in any untoward manner. By explicitly making themselves sexually available, therefore, police deliberately encourage the very behavior for which they thereafter arrest same-sex cruisers. In Sunday's San Diego Union-Tribune, notice was made of stepped up police patrols at Black's Beach. Particular attention is being paid to the "north end" of the "swimsuit optional" part of the Beach. Police excuse the arrests by saying that sex is taking place "out in the open." Other more seasoned observers deny this claim.

One San Diego resident told GayToday, "I'm really getting tired of the media and the police lies on this topic of 'public sex.' Nobody stands in the middle of the beach or the middle of a path at Marian Bear and has sex. People always hide in dense vegetation where the only people who would find them would be people specifically looking for them. And even then, the sex stops before anyone can see it because those approaching make noise....Its a waste of police officers, to put it mildly."

During the last three decades, major cities like Washington, D.C. and New York had seen authorities reportedly eliminating the unworthy police practice properly known as enticement-entrapment. Ever since Republican New York Mayor Guiliani's controversial police policies have allowed, however, public recreational areas such as the rambles in Central Park, a locale thought to be especially dangerous at night, reports of arrests are once again rising.

Hearing of these matters, one lone figure cruising a Florida beach retorted, "Nature abhors a vacuum and if gay men don't stroll through the beautiful city parks, who will? Nobody."

Along Florida's Space Coast, there stands a park on Route 1 where plainclothes police regularly enjoy long leisurely evenings flirting with gays on the edge of the Indian River, their shadowed faces bathed only in the moonlight, frittering away tax moneys in the company of sometimes admiring but nervous suburban closet-cases who are often married men out for a walk. When these suburbanites react with enthusiasm to the shapely police-flirts, they are ignobly arrested.

Nearby arrests on the Atlantic Ocean, at Canova Beach, have long provided Florida taxpayers with the knowledge that while serious crimes rise in number, vice officers, often with sensitive egos, are playing with or waving their genitals at passers-by, using them, it might be said, as fishermen use worms hoping to catch passing quarries. It is generally only naive, closeted and inexperienced men who are caught in the web of such entrapment. Often the results for these men are tragic.

GayToday editor, Jack Nichols, a former chair of a county ACLU Committee on Sexual Rights, was quoted in Gannett's Florida Today, saying of small town outdoor cruising busts that "most of them (on the arrest list) are not openly gay people. Most of them are married and are so influenced by society that they do not feel comfortable being in bars and other places where they could be labeled as gays."

The editor was interviewed on entrapment by James Hooper, a former National ACLU Board member, and he broke, to the ACLU official's surprise, into poetic rhyme. His poem described police entrapment:

www.cruisingforsex.com states that:

In the Atlanta, Georgia suburbs, Decatur's Belvedere Theatre has been a target of police stings, while in Arlington, Virginia, at the LBJ Park, U.S. Park Service Police continue to harass cruising males, using attractive plainclothesmen to entice "solicitations."

In the Newark, New Jersey area, a local newspaper says that entrapment reinforcements are being increased, especially at Northern New Jersey parks.

Miami University campus rest room entrapments August 10 (Oxford, Ohio) found four arrests being made, including faculty members and visitors.

Palmdale, California police are said to be lurking in Vista Point. In Gainesville, Virginia stepped up police patrols and license tag notations ( in Conway Robinson State Forest) are in force, according to a Manassas newspaper.

Similar reports are being made from North Andover, Massachusetts (Harold Parker State Forest), Salt Lake City (Memory Grove Park), Dayton, Ohio (Hills & Dales Park), Covington, Kentucky (Duvue Park) and West Palm Beach, Florida (woods behind Heartbreakers Dance Club).

"The cruisey park you're talking about would be less cruisey if authorities would only change its neon name," GayToday's editor joked with a mainstream reporter about police entrapment at a notable hang-out. The south-of-Rockledge, Florida locale is called Hoo Hoo Park.