We like this!
Geared for Life at Pistons Bar in Long Beach - hosted by Marcus Hopkins, Mr. Pistons Leather 2010 with emcee Jeff Wacha, Mr. Detour Leather 2000, Mr. LA Leather 2000.
Gear up for: Paddle Patio Paddle-a-Thon - Gear from Rough Trade and Syren - Art by Tom of Finland - Kinky Fantasy Photo Session - Bootblacking by Chewy, Mr. Ashram West Leather 2010 - Paddle & Gear Raffle. $5 Event Entry and ALL Proceeds donated to the AIDS Life Emergency Fund.
Mr SF Leather 2010
Leatherati was live this last weekend at the Mr SF Leather 2010 contest which also included the SF Bay Area Leather Alliance awards show and dinner.
Mr Powerhouse Leather Lance Holman was selected as the new Mr SF Leather and will go on to compete at IML in May 2010. Congrats to Brandon Clark for a fantastic year representing SF!
Full story and pics on Leatherati Live!
And more info on the Atlanta Eagle raid
As reported on TheSundayPaper.com
A City Council subcommittee voted today to issue subpoenas for 18 Atlanta Police officers involved in the raid of the Atlanta Eagle, a gay leather bar in Midtown, last September. The move sets the stage to potentially expand the power of a citizen’s board meant to address concerns over how police go about policing.
But there are more problems in the offing, and this may have made it worse. Read the full story after the jump.
The only problem with the subpoenas in the Eagle case is that police officers who abuse their authority, ostensibly in the name of city government, are largely subject only to civil lawsuits and toothless citizen review boards. A job where you're allowed to carry guns and commit non-consensual acts of violence upon American citizens -- as they did in the Eagle raid -- should carry with it added oversight and serious criminal penalties for abuses of power, not an impenetrable blue wall of cover-ups and immunity from investigation or prosecution combined with automatic leniency from judges and juries, which is what we too often have now. "It's hard out there for a cop" might be valid as a defense in a shootout case, but not for the rape of a suspect with a plunger handle, nor for a baseless and fruitless raid of a gay bar which -- let's not kid ourselves -- was to send the message that if you go out to a gay bar in Atlanta, you may be pinned to the ground for an hour and investigated (or outed, if you're the closeted type) for no other reason than having gone there.
So the problem is not that the cops' Fifth Amendment rights might be infringed. The problem is that the citizens' review board is going to get the testimony, shake their fists a little, maybe if they're lucky get a few of the less clever bigots fired, and meanwhile all 18 cops will learn what not to say when they face a real judge.
Finally, does anyone really think that these police officers are being chewed out by their superiors for infringing gay people's civil rights? No, if they're being chewed out at all, it's for creating bad press and possibly costing the city some money. We may think the pre-Stonewall us-and-them days are over, but aside from maybe NY and SF at best, they never have been.
Posted by: raindog469 | 03/09/2010 at 06:42 AM