Sexual McCarthyism strikes Brockton:
Jay Dembling is embarassed, but unapologetic.
By all accounts, he was doing nothing illegal by throwing men-only sex parties once or twice a month in his Brockton home. But when the Boston Herald got wind that Brockton police officers had shown up at Dembling’s residence during a party on the afternoon of Aug. 30, detaining panicked party-goers as they tried to leave, he found himself at the center of controversy.
Many of the media reports focused on the proximity of Dembling’s tidy ranch to a middle school, and the fact that he is a community activist who has headed the local Crime Watch group.
With local TV news outlets camped outside his house or broadcasting interviews with angry neighbors, New York and Seattle radio stations calling on the phone, the Brockton Enterprise providing front-page details for several days running, and the city’s mayor calling for him to leave town, Dembling kept a low profile in the days after the news spread….
According to an officer in the criminal investigations unit at the Brockton P.D., Dembling and his parties are not currently the subject of a criminal investigation - and that’s what has Dembling so upset. He believes his privacy was needlessly invaded because of his community involvement and because he is a gay man. He is more resentful of the ruckus the media made about the fact that he lives in a school zone, and the insinuation that he, and men who came to his home, were pedophiles
Bay Windows isn’t exaggerating. The Herald story really was shameful. Its lede immediately associated the sex parties with the junior high even though the party was a private, indoor gathering and had no visiblity whatsoever to students. It tried to make the parties seem more unseemly by stating that poppers are a pill form of speed (possibly ignorance, but do they really not know what poppers are?). It pulled the story for sensationalistic front-page treatment, thereby insuring this man would be a pariah in his community.
Brockton mayor Yountis weighed in that “Whether or not it’s criminal, I don’t know, but given the location of his home, near a prominent school in our district, makes it even more appalling.'’ Before running the guy out of town on a rail, maybe the mayor and city council could sit down and suggest which sex acts between consenting adults are permissible in which parts of the city.
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