Gay bars in picayune ms

Beneath the halos of streetlamps, the four women leaned on their car hoods and flirted. The officers threw the women against the cars, frisked their bodies, slapped cuffs on their wrists, and placed them under arrest. Their crime? Obstruction of free passage, legalese for blocking a sidewalk. The officers arrested them for the same sidewalk crime.

In a time without employment protections for sexual orientation, they would all almost assuredly be fired if the location of their arrests became publicized. Alert to the emergency, Charlene Schneider leapt over her bar and ran outside to intervene. Neither butch nor femme, she transcended gay archetypes and rejected bigotry wholesale.

Trying to understand the charges, Charlene brought out a tape measure to calculate her sidewalk square footage. Charlene knew what it meant to be outed and arrested as a lesbian. Born on August 13,in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, she moved with her family in early childhood to a house on Magazine Street in New Orleans, and she attended L.

Rabouin Vocational High School downtown. Expelled from school, Charlene ran away from home. Her mother had to personally take her back to Rabouin to get reinstated. When she walked into the place inshe counted seven gay women at the jukebox. Due to the sensitive nature of her codework, Charlene applied for, and received, a federal security clearance.

For several years, she balanced the discrete halves of her life—by day, a coder and decoder at a facility building stages of the Saturn V rocket; by night, a connoisseur of Quarter lesbian bars like Gay Village Inn. Then those worlds collided. A lesbian friend, whose dad was a cop, tipped Charlene off that The Village Inn was about to be raided.

It all happened faster than Charlene could react: bars, screaming, pushing, handcuffs. Charlene intentionally went back into The Village Inn so she could be apprehended and put in the same paddy wagon as her sister. To limit blowback from the arrest, Charlene gave the false name Charmania Cochran at the police station.

Within minutes, Charlene was handcuffed picayune and charged with the felony of making a false statement to police. When Charlene arrived at work the following day, her boss told her that debriefing agents were flying in from Patterson Air Force Base.

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Those three federal agents interrogated her for two hours. They threatened her with what would happen if she revealed a single detail of her codework. The explanation disgusted them. She refused to leave her apartment.