SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
Fifty years ago what had been an outrageous annual Suffolk County tradition—the police raid on gay communities of Fire Island—came to an end.
It took gay men taking their chances with juries of Suffolk residents—as proposed by a prominent, feisty, rough-and-tumble Suffolk attorney, Benedict P. Vuturo.
The juries, one after another in the fall of 1968, found the gay men rounded up in the raid on Fire Island in the summer of 1968, innocent.
And that did it—the Suffolk Police Department finally stopped the raid.
There have been enormous societal changes in the last several decades in regard to gay men—as well lesbian women and others as others with a non-traditional sex identity. Indeed, there is a big movement acronymed LGBTQ—for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. And but three years ago, in 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right in all 50 states.
What happened for many years to gays on Fire Island seems like a nightmare of another time—and it was.
These raids on Fire Island every summer were a tradition began by the Brookhaven Town Police Department, as half of Fire Island is in Brookhaven. With the absorption of that department and nearly all others in western Suffolk into the Suffolk County Police Department in 1960, the perverse tradition was continued by the new county police force.
I first became aware of the raids when hired in 1964 by the daily Long Island Press as a police-and-courts reporter covering Suffolk. It was like pulling teeth sometimes to get information from the Suffolk cops. But after their annual raid on Fire Island, the cops wanted the media to know all about it—pitching to us not only the names and addresses of those arrested but their occupations and where they worked. The police effort was clearly meant to damage those arrested, to perhaps get them fired for being gay and being arrested in a raid on Fire Island.
The two communities hit on Fire Island were Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines, both in Brookhaven Town. The raids were made by boatloads of cops storming the beach. Prisoners were dragged off in handcuffs and brought to the mainland.
Year after year, the 25 to 40 or so defendants, most of them from New York City and frightened about casting their lot with Suffolk locals, would plead guilty to various “morals” charges. Then one judge began sentencing some arrestees to jail, getting himself plenty of publicity. The Fire Island gay community had had it.
The colorful Mr. Vuturo, former president of the Suffolk Criminal Bar Association, was retained by the Mattachine Society of New York to represent the arrestees in the next raid. That raid happened on August 24, 1968.
The Mattachine Society prepared the Fire Island gay communities for the legal fights ahead by distributing a pamphlet in 1967 advising against “shortsighted” pleas of guilty and declaring: “Intolerable police state tactics continue because of our cooperation.” The pamphlet further said if one was arrested not to provide any more than name and address. “Never carry identification that contains the name of your employer,” it counseled. bb
Mr. Vuturo demanded jury trials for each of the 27 arrested in the 1968 raid. He told me he believed a jury of adults would never convict. He was correct. He won every trial.
I covered the situation. When the defendants of that summer were arraigned in Suffolk County District Court, then located in Commack, Mr. Vuturo declared: “Outrageous…These men will be cleared of these notorious allegations.’” He said the men didn’t represent a public nuisance, weren’t annoying anyone. “The police actually sought these men out.”
The trials were some scenes. Mr. Vuturo toughly cross-examined arresting officers demanding they tell in detail what they saw and did. The cops were embarrassed. And in his summations at the trials, he spoke dramatically about murders and other major crimes occurring in Suffolk and how, he declared, the Suffolk Police Department was wasting its resources storming Fire Island to round up gays.
“To be on Fire Island—in Cherry Grove or Fire Island Pines—when the cops are there for a raid is to put your life in your hands,” he intoned. “The cops go and beat the bush. They grab you and handcuff you to whoever…Was a breach of the peace committed? Who saw it but the cops who went looking?” Mr. Vuturo said the men didn’t represent a public nuisance, weren’t annoying anyone and police had to search through beach scrub to find them. ‘The police actually sought these men out.’”
For Mr. Vuturo it was a matter of “civil liberties are civil liberties.”
He hoped to lose one case so he could get to the New York State Court of Appeals or U.S. Supreme Court to try to have the laws under which the arrests were made ruled unconstitutional. But he never lost one of the “Fire Island trials” as they were referred to in court corridors during fall 1968.
He said the victories proved “People—given all the facts are fair. People aren’t stupid. That’s what the jury system is all about.”
Dick Leitsch, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, told me that the gay rights group had first considered hiring New York City lawyers, specialists in civil liberties work, to defend the arrestees in the next police raid on Fire Island. “But we figured the courts out there might view them as outside agitators,” he explained. So the society, he said, spoke to some members of the Suffolk County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the flamboyant Central Islip-based attorney Vuturo was recommended.
Mr. Vuturo, a father of five, who went on to himself become a Suffolk District Court judge and died in 1991, was key to ending a travesty. And so were the Suffolk jurors who showed that the jury system works. And deserving huge credit are those gay men of Fire Island who stood up to prejudice and hate in a dark time.
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.