Wow, this is horrifying -- all of it, but especially the preposterous connections the newscasters are making to pedophilia -- thanks for posting, and for your work exposing entrapment cases.

Sean,

I have long admired the work that you and Triangle Foundation do/does, Thank you so much for keeping up the fight on an issue that lots of LGBT activists would simply ignore.

Thanks for reporting on this Sean. Media coverage and police activity like this always steams me. Notice how the story is juxtaposed with images of children playing and swing sets- as if the two are related! Every time something like this goes down it's the gay community that get our names dragged through the dirt. The majority of men usually caught in these stings don't even identify as gay and here we are portrayed as creepy men, salivating through fangs waiting to sexually pounce on the all American white family man. Wake up people, those committing these crime ARE the all American white family man, not gay men who choose to live openly and honestly!

Add a big "Amen!" to the previous 3 comments! Keep up the good work, Sean!

Guess this is no surprise, considering the widespread attention--and approbation--the Craig arrest received.

I've come a long way on the issue of public sex since I first came out (as a lesbian, then!) in 1982. At that time I thought, "Eeeew, if men are going to risk public sex with strangers in bathrooms and parks, they're going to have to take their hard knocks if caught." Then gay male friends began to educate me. I was shocked to discover some of my friends actually cruised parks. I was even more shocked when, as I came to accept myself, my own repressed sex drive resurfaced.

While I never cruised for anonymous sex, I did engage in some sexual activities with lovers--in parked cars, on a picnic blanket in a state park, and in an outdoor hot tub, for example--that definitely qualified as "public sex". As a transitioning bisexual FtM, I was hyper-aware that police would apply very different standards based on my gender at the time and that of my partners.

I also became aware over time through reading and talking to people of the underhanded tactics employed by police forces. The fact that police officers lie about what occurs in stings. The fact that undercover operations are not designed to stop cruising activities but rather to humiliate and oppress teh queers. That closeted gay men with a lot to loose, facing the prospect of being outed in the pages of their local paper, will sometimes go so far as to kill themselves first.

Your posts on this issue, Sean, have been excellent and an island of sanity in a sea of online misinformation and condemnations. Thank you so much for that.

Posts about sex? On a queer blog? Really?

But seriously, thanks for posting this. That coverage was outrageous. Contact the families of the kids he worked with - as if cruising and pedophilia are related???

I also love how the POLICE officer there admitted that the stings don't work, and said that the solution is just to do some more of them. Yeppers.

Could you post more some time on the legal problems that surround this case? I mean, I'm guessing that you can't about this specific case, but maybe the general ones that you find in Pontiac?