In today’s Bay Area Reporter, there is a breaking story about Videogate. Zak Symanski, the reporter, asked the president of the Police Officer’s Association whether any LGBT police officers were involved in the making of the video.
His answer:

“Yes, there were gay officers in that video, but I’m obviously not going to say who they are,” Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco POA, told the Bay Area Reporter. “They were willing participants. In fact, as I’m looking at this … almost half the officers involved in the video were either black, female, or gay.”

I got quoted in the article essentially saying that this only shows that affirmative action isn’t enough to eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. But the more interesting quote is from a psychologist:

“It sounds like the people involved don’t identify themselves as being racist or sexist but there’s this underlying tension there between being powerful male, mostly white enforcers cruising around a neighborhood where much of their contact is with people suspected of crimes and yet at the same time there’s an expectation that to do their jobs they have to be a part of that community,” said Karasic, who described the “morale building” function of the videos as coming in part from indulging in behaviors that officers knew could get them in trouble.

“I’m sure they’ve all had their sensitivity trainings. They know that videos like this are not meant for the public. That adds a certain illicit quality to it, doing something they know is forbidden and yet that our homophobic and racist and sexist society also permits,” said Karasic. “There is at once some permission to have those feelings and yet at the same time not permission to express them. In these kinds of events they can perhaps have license to vent some of these feelings or thoughts they know they cannot ordinarily express, and the ‘morale building’ is the sharing of that joke. They might disavow this behavior by the light of day, but by all being in on it it’s something that brings them together because they’ve all been a part of that hazing and are now all a part of that club.”

Seperate from the guest editorial, the Bay Area Reporter also did an editorial that referenced the fact that LGBT officers were involved. As the paper said:

That gay officers were apparently involved, as San Francisco Police Officers Association President Gary Delagnes told us this week, is even worse.

To read the editorial, click here.

To read the whole article, click here.