New York City – from www.gaycitynews.com -Perhaps assuring that the broader gay community will never learn the full scope of the prostitution arrests of gay men in Manhattan porn shops, five men who brought four civil rights lawsuits against New York City after they were arrested for prostitution in two porn shops and a spa have signed an agreement that allows the city to designate as confidential any document it produces during that litigation.

“Confidential Materials shall mean New York City Police Department (NYPD) personnel and disciplinary related records, and records of investigations regarding the conduct of Members of the Service of the NYPD conducted by the NYPD, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, or other agency, and other documents that may, during the pendency of this litigation, be designated Confidential Material by defendants,” read the protective order which was filed in federal court on August 9.

The order allows Michael L. Spiegel and James I. Meyerson, the lawyers handling the four cases, and the five plaintiffs, including Robert Pinter, the gay man who in 2008 blew the whistle on the arrests, to show confidential material only to staff at their firms, experts they may hire, and the plaintiffs.

Spiegel and Meyerson declined to comment.

Such orders are common in litigation, and should the city overuse the confidential material label the plaintiffs could contest that. But outside of federal court, the Bloomberg administration has refused to disclose records that might reveal more about the arrests.

The police department ignored a 2008 request made under the state Freedom of Information Law by Gay City News for information on the arrests in some of the porn shops. Gay City News filed an appeal in 2009 and that drew no response.

Every record sought by Gay City News in a July 2009, Freedom of Information request that asked for all records related to the arrests dating to January 1, 2007, was withheld by the Bloomberg administration on December 22. City Hall has not responded to a December 30, 2009, appeal.

Asked at an August 11 press conference this year why he did not fully disclose what the police and other city agencies had done, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “We try and put out all the information. Of course, it has to do with procedures to provide security for the city. That’s been our policy and we’ll continue to do it, and I think every community in this city, no matter what their interest or orientation are, knows that this city treats everybody equally and we try to enforce the law. Some laws are difficult to enforce, some are not. There’s always interpretation issues, but we want to make sure everybody has their rights in the city and will continue to do so.”

At a July 7 hearing on the four civil rights lawsuits, Tonya Jenerette, a senior counsel in the city’s Law Department, said that, in 2007, 2008, and 2009, the police department and the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement brought ten nuisance abatement lawsuits that cited prostitution arrests of men. The lawsuits were meant to close the businesses.

Gay City News asked for the city’s list of the ten lawsuits, but at press time it had not been produced. Previously, the newspaper found such lawsuits against four porn shops and two spas in 2008 and one each against a porn shop in 2007 and 2009. Altogether, police arrested just over 50 men in the porn shops. Eleven men and one woman were arrested in the spas. The arrests were made largely by the same group of police officers in the Manhattan South Vice Enforcement Squad.

In the lawsuits, the plaintiffs charge that the city made the arrests, which are seen as false arrests in the gay community, only so it could cite them in nuisance abatement lawsuits. Jenerette called that “nonsense” at the hearing and said that just ten of the 99 lawsuits citing prostitution arrests brought in that three-year period cited arrests of men while the rest cited arrests of women.

There are some indications that the targeting of gay men for arrest in porn shops has gone on longer and is more widespread than the city is admitting.

The arrests in the 2007 lawsuit began in 2004 and continued into 2007. Undercover vice officers made one male prostitution arrest in 2004 and another in 2005 in Blue Store on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. The city sued that business in 2005. One man was arrested in 2008 for prostitution in another Chelsea porn shop, but that business was never sued. It is likely that there are other shops where arrests were made that were never sued.

Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, has refused to release all records, except for three pages, in response to a Freedom of Information request made by Gay City News that sought dozens of documents related to the arrests. His predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, also refused to release records. The district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, an out lesbian who represents Chelsea, took more than a year to respond to a July 2009 request seeking records on the arrests held by her office. She did not respond to a request for comment about that delay.