Several were moved to write letters to the editors of local newspapers, including, I am told, the Valley Advocate and one printed in Springfield Union from Amherst resident Paul Shepard. The press coverage of the arrests provoked a response from Valley gay men and their allies. Does anyone know where the paper records are stored? Holyoke District Court records are not digitized for this time. It would be interesting to know the results of further hearings or trials but I could find no later newspaper coverage. Their court dates were scattered over the coming month.
#Gay men cruising rest stops trial#
All the others pled innocent and were given trial dates, or were given hearing dates to enter a plea. Only one of the sixteen arrested, the man from Somerville, submitted to the facts of the case in the Holyoke District Court on Oct. The men were charged with “lascivious behavior,” “open and gross lewdness,” and/or, if there was any physical contact, “assault and battery.” In a follow-up article in the Springfield Union, the Captain of the local State Police said that the alleged homosexual activity was continuing in the rest area adjacent to Mount Tom in spite of the arrests, and that the state police undercover work there would continue until the situation cleared up. 21-22, plainclothes police made themselves available for proposition at the rest area and then arrested anyone who approached them.
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Rather than trying to solve the crime however, police focused on shutting down the sexual activity, which they characterized to the press as “homosexual attacks.” For two weekend evenings, Oct. Such victimization of men who cruised for anonymous sex (and who were unlikely to report crime to authorities), was so common that it was referred to in the gay subculture as “being rolled.” Police justified the entrapment because seven weeks previously a man reported that he had been raped and robbed there by another man. While the age of the sixteen men charged ranged from twenty to sixty-two, most were in late thirties and early forties. Northampton’s Daily Hampshire Gazette printed the names and addresses of the five from Amherst, Florence, Hadley and Northampton, including two who lived together. One was from Vermont, another from Eastern Massachusetts. A fourth of those arrested lived in Connecticut. It attracted men from up and down the highway, as well as locals.
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The rest area was not the one listed in GCN’s 1976 New England Gay Guide. The names and addresses of those arrested-along with the “morals” charges made against them –were widely reported in area newspapers, including the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the UMass Daily Collegian.ĭaily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton MA and UMass/Amherst Massachusetts Daily Collegian coverage Oct. He and other men were galvanized into protest by October 23-24, 1978 newspaper accounts of a sting operation at an Interstate 91 rest area in Holyoke in which sixteen men were arrested for soliciting casual sex. Steve lived in Northampton in the late seventies. “It was scary,” Steve Trudel recalls, “but the police action and media reports were so outrageous that even though I wasn’t into cruising rest stops myself, I was moved to do something about it.”