Mike Alvear's Urge & Merge

Atlanta’s gay community woke up with a shock last week when they learned that dozens of cops stormed into a tranquil gay bar, forced 62 patrons to lay on the grubby floors face down for an hour, ransacked through their pockets, rounded up their ID’s, threatened jail time to anybody who asked why they were being held against their will, and then threw them out–without letting them have access to their cell phones, wallets and other personal belongings.

All so they could arrest eight men for dancing in their underwear.

That’s the only charge police could come up with. They traumatized 62 men, violated their constitutional rights against illegal search and seizure, threatened them with arrest if they didn’t comply, trashed an iconic neighborhood bar so they could do what?  Arrest a few guys doing the Macarena in their Calvin Klein underwear?

Of course, that’s not what the police were looking for. They were looking for something that posed an intolerable danger to the city; something that menaced the public safety; something worse than home invasions or armed robbery:  Sex.

Or rather, the possibility of it.

The police had raided the bar because anonymous tips–and their own undercover work–showed that in a few instances, a few men were kinda, sorta, MAYBE doing the deed at the back of the bar.

The operative word being maybe.

This of course, sent law enforcement officers into an orgy of panic. If there was ever a reason to divert police resources from armed assaults plaguing the city, this was it!

Welcome to a southern-style sex panic. The only thing missing from the police action was the captain waving goodbye to the tyrannized and saying, “Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?”

Here’s how a sex panic works in the south:  First, you convince yourself that two guys looking at each other like Elvis looked at a pork chop poses more of a threat to public safety than two guys who look at your property as if it were their own.

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