After that came a Law and Order: Organized Crime story that for once was tight-knit, complete in a single episode, and nicely balanced between the series’ overall grimness and flashes of hope. It was called “Tag: GEN” and dealt with a gang of well-orchestrated robberies of Gay men,each attracted to their predators via a dating app. The crooks meet their victims in a bar and proceed to spike their drinks with the date-rape drug GHB (gammahydrobuterol), and while the victim is out cold from this drug the bad guys steal all his cash and jewelry, then hack his phone and electronically extract all the money from his various bank accounts. The Organized Crime Control Bureau finds out about this from a closeted Gay cop, Eric Geary (Adrian Anchondo), who’s in a bar the night of a drug raid. Though Eric has no money to speak of, he’s slipped the proverbial “mickey” to make sure he’ll stay out of the way of the gang’s activities. The head of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), is an open Lesbian and she tries to convince Eric that he’s exaggerating his fears of being “ont” on the NYPD, but Eric says it’s very different for males – which seems believable to me. It reminded me of the comment openly Lesbian 1930’s film director Dorthy ARzner made to Marjorie Rosen when Rosen interviewed Arzner for her book Popcorn Venus, in which Arzner said that as a Lesbian she was actually better accepted by male directors than a straight woman would have been – “Hey, she likes girls, and we like girls! She‘s one of us!”
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a similar dynamic operates in police work; the late San Diego Queer activist Albert Bell used to argue, “Hompphobia is misplaced sexism,” and his point was that Lesbians and Gay men are hated differently. Lesbians are considered to be women who have usurped the male role, while Gay men have voluntarily accepted demotion to the female role. None of this makes sense, of course, but it serves as a convenient rationalization for both anti-woman and anti-Queer prejudice. It explains why so manh homohaters are obsessed with anal-receptive sex protesters outside thehome of openy Gay Governor Jared Solis of Colorado routinely carry placards of people engaged in anal sex and denounce the fact that such things are going on in the governor’s mansion (I have no idea what Governor Solis and his husband do in the bedroom, and quite frankly I don’t care), and when Lwrence O’Donnell was covering the indictment of former President Donald Trump one of the protesters supporting Trump accused him of having a vagina. In vain O’Donnell tried to explain to the guy that, as a male, he doesn’t. (Remember also that when former vice-president Mike Pence refused to steal the election for Dunad Trump, Trump called him a “pussy.”)
The plot turns out to bew the work of Alex Petrillo (Max Sheldon), son of low-level mobster Frank Petrillo (Marc Kudisch), who bought Alex a string of five Gay clubs intending that he run them legally, only Alex thought his dad owed a large sum of money to high-level mobster Frank Moretti (Ray Abruzzo), and started the scheme to rob his bars’ customers to raise the money to pay Moretti off. The ending is the revelation that Frank Petrillo actually had a large amount of money saved up himself from rather dubious enterprises, and so Alex didn’t need to turn bad to pay Moretti off. The climax occurs at a circuit party held at one of the Petrillo venues,during which Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has to pose as a Gay sugar daddy to draw out the gang, and Eric coaches him on how to write his post on the dating app, including putting in the word “gen” – +short for “generous” – and arose emoji to send a message that he’d be willingt o give lavish gifts to anyone who had sex with him. Alas, Eric nearly blowss the case when he sees the man who drugged him and goes off after the guy. I hope that Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners keep Eric as a character – not only because Adrian Anchondo is the hotte3st man in the cast of aly of the Law and Order shows since the young Christopher Meloni on SVU, but also because he’s a fascinatingly conflicted character and I’d like to see more of him!
