A total of 48 males have been arrested between May 16, in a police sting that employs plainclothes decoys who say they are discovering "illegal sexual activity both inside and outside the building."

Twenty-eight of the arrests occurred between July 23 and August 8 at 20/20 Video located at 2020 West Street in Parole, near Annaopolis.

Rawley Grau, the Alternative's editor, described a police department spokesperson who brissled when asked why police devoted so much energy to what is essentially a minor, victimless misdemeanor, and who then insisted that area businesses had first summoned police help.

Pioneering gay activist Frank Kameny, known as the early originator of gay activism's militant strategies, made what the Baltimore Alternative's September issue called "An Immodest Proposal."

Kameny told Alternative readers that activism's response to undercover police entrapments must be " a fun and games thing," After all, he notes, sodomy is fun.

"The whole purpose should be to bring into public ridicule both the officials at all levels who are perpetrating these arrests, and the laws themselves behind the arrests, to make laughing stocks of them and to force their hand, with the immediate goal of of stopping the arrests, and the ultimate aim of ridding Maryland of its anti-sodomy laws."

There's no use, says the long-time activist, doing nothing more than cursing police misbehavior. He recommends to Marylanders that activists write solicitations for sodomy to public officials in their official capacity, that is to officials who are functioning officially at the time.

"This is not the place for anonymity or closetry," writes Kameny in the Alternative," telling how, in 1972, he behaved in this manner toward three top Washington, D.C. law enforcement officials: the chief of police, the United States attorney for Washington and the D.C. Corporation counsel.

Kameny's letters to officials said: "I hereby invite, solicit, urge, and entreat you to engage with me in an act or acts of sodomy of your choice, as defined by Section 22-3502 (sodomy) of the D.C. Code, in some indisputedably private place in the District of Columbia at a time of our mutual convenience:,"

Kameny reasoned that if he was prosecuted, that he would utilize the case "as a launching pad for an effort in the courts, to overturn the D.C. sodomy law." Kameny also explained he'd solicit both judges and prosecutors for sodomy, thereby involving them as "victims", and requiring that they recuse or disqualify themselves on conflict of interest grounds.

The noted activist also said he'd have solicited the "entire D.C. Superior Court bench, and, if necessary our Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court," leaving them immobilized, with no one able to conduct a case against him as a solicitor in any court. In the meantime, he would subject them to a "torrent" of perpetual ridicule, he said.

He recommends inviting close media scrutiny for this deliberate strategy.

If the officials fail to prosecute, Kameny notes, they'd be establishing a major precedent, since, without fear of their reprisals, Kameny or others would be able to solicit the highest officials, leaving others citywide to solicit at will.

Arrests of gay men ceased shortly after his solicitation campaign, says Kameny, and long before the District of Columbia abolished its sodomy law.

He recomends, should activists take such a bold path, that none should plead guilty if there are arrests. "Go to trial," he writes, "and, if convicted, appeal all the way."

Solicitation laws, says Kameny, upon which arrests are justified, find plainclothes police "soliciting solicitations" in order to make arrests "for the very solicitations that they had solicited."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland is planning a challenge to Maryland's criminalizing of oral sex between two persons of the same gender, but which does not penalize non-commercial heterosexual oral sex.