A gay elected official is sounding the alarm that a string of arrests at a New York City cruising site revives “the dark days” of queer entrapment.
Last week, The City broke the news that the Amtrak Police Department — a federal police force that operates outside New York City’s sanctuary city laws — had targeted a Penn Station bathroom in arrests for public lewdness. The bathroom was listed as a “hotspot” on Sniffies, a map-based digital platform for queer hookups.
These enforcement efforts have led to over 200 arrests since June 1, an Amtrak representative confirmed to Out. And The Gothamist reports that at least 20 men have been taken into ICE custody as a result of the crackdown.
New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal tells Out that these arrests “harken back to the dark days of trapping gay men and other members of the community in public spaces like restrooms. … Add to that toxic mix, ICE, and the Trump administration’s efforts to round up undocumented New Yorkers. It was a rather frightening callback to a period that we thought had long passed in queer American history.” In modern U.S. history, police entrapment at cruising sites peaked during the McCarthy era, when the federal government considered queer men national security threats and actively targeted them.
Senator Hoylman and his colleagues, U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler, State Senator Liz Krueger, and Assembly Member Tony Simone, co-authored a letter Friday to Roger Harris, the president of Amtrak, demanding that the sting operations cease and that he meet with the elected officials to discuss a plan moving forward. Hoylman, a gay elected official living in NYC and the Democratic nominee in the race for Manhattan’s borough president, confirmed to Out that Harris agreed to meet, and they are in the process of setting up that meeting.
Out New York City council members Erik Bottcher and Tiffany Cabán wrote a letter Thursday to Harris sharing their concerns about the reports of “deeply alarming violations of civil rights, due process, and protections against discriminatory policing.” In the letter, they write that they request a “written explanation of how these arrests have been conducted, how many people have been affected, and what safeguards Amtrak will put in place to prevent further violations of civil rights.”
One of the arrested, David (who prefers to not have his name included in this story), tells Out about his harrowing experience being handcuffed and arrested while trying to use the Penn Station restroom in June. He says he stopped into the bathroom after returning from visiting a friend in New Jersey. David recalls being watched by a man when he went up to the urinal; two other men were looking over the dividers at one another, but Davis says he didn’t engage. “Next thing you know, he pulls out his badge and says ‘All three of you are under arrest.’”
David says he didn’t resist arrest. And as he was being escorted out of the bathroom in handcuffs, he says he told the officer that the cuffs were tight and asked for them to be loosened a bit. In response, the officer tightened them even more. David was booked and charged with public lewdness. The charge was later dropped after he participated in Project Reset, a diversion program, which required him to take an online course.
David wonders how Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor, feels about the arrests, as the politician was vocal about LGBTQ+ issues during his campaign. Out reached out to Mamdani’s team but did not immediately hear back.
Jared Trujillo, a lawyer and law professor at CUNY School of Law, warned social media users about this issue in a TikTok video he posted earlier this month. During a following conversation with Out, he underlined that this is an attack on the entire LGBTQ+ community. “We are living in a period of retrenchment, and it happens with every civil rights movement,” Trujillo says.
Out reached out to Sniffies but did not immediately hear back in a request for comment.
This article originally appeared on Out: Over 200 arrested at NYC gay cruising site
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