Sound of Zippers

Truly I am not one to jump into the political arena of Florida hoopla. But this time I just cannot resist after having caught these headlines this morning in Broward's Sun Sentinel about a sex sting in the Sears' (yes Sears) men's room in Daytona Beach. See highlights below or click on Sears for the direct link if you think I'm making this up. ************************************************************************************

Operation set in the men's room at Sears By Ludmilla Lelis The Orlando Sentinel

November 3, 2007

DAYTONA BEACH - A high school teacher, one of nine men including a former Daytona Beach commissioner caught in a bathroom sex sting operation, resigned Friday, officials said. David Behringer, 28, who worked at Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, resigned "for personal reasons," said a spokeswoman for the Volusia County school district. Behringer, former City Commissioner Mike Shallow, and seven other men were arrested Thursday during a daylong operation targeting the reported sexually explicit behavior at the men's bathroom at the Sears department store in the Volusia Mall. Store security told police last week, police organized the sting........Police Chief Mike Chitwood explained, "There's a whole subculture trolling at these bathrooms, ....entirely nonverbal communication....if you understand the culture, you know what the signals are."

About six to eight officers spent most of Thursday visiting the bathroom stalls, looking for such signals — which include toe tapping, excessive zipper noises, certain hand gestures and eye contact, according to the reports. The chief said he wanted to combat the sexual misconduct in the public bathrooms, especially as holiday season approaches and the mall will be packed with families shopping.
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You can get arrested for engaging in excessive zipper noise? After laughing hysterically, I picked myself up off the floor to seriously wonder if this was even possible. In an era in which O.J. Simpson walks around freely just down the road in Dade county, a few counties up the road in Volusia county there are men being arrested for unzipping too loudly, or too frequently, or perhaps too suspiciously. At Sears no less.

Imagine ten cops staking out a bathroom, presumably on a witch hunt for gay guys in a store bathroom... and at a store with the ugliest ass jeans on the planet. Not likely gay guys would so much as buy their jockeys there; certainly I would not.

But then I remembered something that happened in Ft. Lauderdale just this summer, when the mayor, Jim Naugle proposed the city spend $250,000 on a specialized timed men's Robo John which would automatically open after a specified time. All this to rid Ft. Lauderdale Beach of its many "gay men cruising for sex in public bathrooms, scaring away tourists" (Naugle's words, not mine). Even though the police pointed out that there were less than five bathroom beach arrests in the last few years, and some included women, Naugle stubbornly insisted the numbers were wrong. Eventually Naugle was removed from the Broward Tourism Development Council after inflammatory comments that included blaming gays for the rising number of AIDs cases in the county. But he is still mayor, and he has his supporters. Certainly not I.

In a state where crime is through the roof, and just last month alone a record number of murders and rapes occurred in South Florida, how paranoia can be raised to the point of insanity by elected or appointed officials is frightening. The voiced concerns have far less to do with the dangers lurking in men's bathrooms and more to do with intolerance for the gay lifestyle, infused into a hatred that blames them for any perversion. That could be my father, your son, brother or boyfriend in those bathrooms....and that could be their lives being torn apart all because they tapped the foot of the man next to them or played with a zipper, demonstrating a total lack of male bathroom etiquette.

If I were a gay guy I think I would head for the women's bathroom because you probably stand less chance of being arrested in there.

Speaking of gay people, check out the Florida Gay Men's Chorus which sounds pretty good. Their holiday performance is almost sold out. Sounds amazing doesn't it... considering they spend all that time cruising in the men's room at Sears...or down at Ft. Lauderdale Beach trying to corrupt tourists.