Really happy to have you here. Hope you had a great holiday. So in the 1950s, police in Washington, D.C.,

assigned a whole squad of police officers, a surprisingly large part of the overall police force,

and made it their job to police bathrooms and public parks and other places where they thought men might secretly be meeting up to have sex.

They had officers who were trained to come on to people, to make passes at them basically, and lead them on,

to see if they could get the other guy to initiate some kind of a sexual encounter.

And then they would slap the cuffs on them and arrest them.

Hall them downtown.

They called this the perversion elimination program.

You will not be shocked to learn that what they called perversion was not eliminated by this police program.

But this program in the 1950s, it did arrest a lot of people. It did ruin a lot of people's lives.

That said, they didn't throw the book at everyone. If they picked up somebody in one of these

staying operations, who was a first-time offender,

no other trouble with the law, not employed in some sensitive position in which the person

could conceivably be blackmailed, right?

They tended in those instances to give a warning.

I mean, yeah, maybe they would make the poor guy spend a night in jail to scare the bejesis out of him, right? But in those kinds of circumstances, generally, they would let the guy go. And that is what happened when a young seminary student was arrested in Washington, D.C. in Lafayette Park in 1953.

He was a very bright young man.

He had a seemingly very bright future ahead of him.

He was a seminary student, after all.

He had no other offenses on his record,

no involvement with the law whatsoever.

But he was picked up in one of these sting operations.

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