COLUMN ONE : Gay Police Leave the Shadows : Homosexual officers in Los Angeles are heartened by a lawsuit and progress in departments elsewhere. They seek a more open existence on the force.

He is 24 years old, the son of a cop from the Midwest, and enrolled as a recruit at the Los Angeles Police Academy. And because he also happens to be homosexual, he lives a double life, masquerading in a hat and dark glasses when off duty in the gay community, fearful that his fellow recruits or supervisors will stumble upon his true identity.

“I know these people play rough here,” he said, afraid to divulge his name. “Something could happen to me. There are people, some hard-core people, who would stop at no lengths to get rid of me.

“I mean, it’s one thing to handle the court system and street crime, but something else to have your own brother officers against you.”

She is a six-year veteran officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. And because she is a lesbian, she too lives a shadow existence, avoiding the annual police picnic and the Christmas party because she can’t bring her lover.

“The walls have ears,” she said, also shielding her name. “Nothing happens that your sergeant and your lieutenant and your captain don’t know about.”

But while gay Los Angeles police officers fear being discovered, many of their counterparts in other major law enforcement agencies in California are open about their homosexuality. They are shedding their hidden identities in response to decisions by police administrators to recruit gay and lesbian officers and to discipline officers who discriminate against their homosexual brethren and sisters.

A new survey by a key California police accreditation agency identifies gays and lesbians as an untapped group of potential police recruits.

Furthermore, the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, a professional organization of police administrators, last fall rescinded its decades-old policy of opposing the hiring of homosexual police officers. “That policy,” said Phil Lynn, manager of the association’s National Law Enforcement Center, “was one that no longer reflected the views of our organization.”

The exact number of gay and lesbian officers in the Los Angeles Police Department is unknown; of 8,400 officers, not one single man or woman is openly homosexual, according to police administrators. Local gay activists suggest that the number mirrors the city’s percentage of homosexual citizens--perhaps as high as 10%--but police administrators say they know of only a few “suspected” gay and lesbian officers.

But regardless of their numbers, and after years of working incognito inside the department, closeted gay and lesbian officers are growing hopeful because of a lawsuit filed by a gay sergeant who contends he was threatened and harassed off the force by fellow officers.

Gays and lesbians are hoping his suit will change the policies at Parker Center to conform with those of other major police agencies in the nation, put an end to alleged discrimination by heterosexual officers of their homosexual counterparts and, perhaps most important, launch new police recruitment drives aimed at the city’s gay and lesbian community.

Gay activists believe that if the police hire more people from within their community, relations with police could improve and, likewise, make many heterosexual officers sensitive to problems in the gay community.

Homosexual officers are hoping that they need no longer work publicly in a dark-blue police uniform while living private lives in a cloak of secrecy.

“It’s going to happen,” vowed Mitchell Grobeson, the former Los Angeles police sergeant who brought the suit. “It has to happen. Otherwise, the number of lawsuits will be so exorbitant to the city of Los Angeles that it will be too costly for the department not to.”

In an environment that demands loyalty, gay officers see Police Chief Daryl F. Gates as their foe. And the chief made it clear in a recent interview that while he will not tolerate harassment among his troops, he also will not compromise on the issue of selectively recruiting gay and lesbian officers.

Under Gates, the department does not specifically exclude homosexuals from among its ranks. But the department also does not actively target gays and lesbians for recruitment, as it does other minorities.

“In the factors that go into being a police officer,” the chief said, “sexual preference is irrelevant. It should stay irrelevant. And it will stay irrelevant while I have anything to say about it. I guarantee that.”

Indeed, Sgt. Ed Mautz, a longtime recruitment officer, said the department only once in the last decade actually tried to attract homosexuals to the force, when it set up a recruitment booth at the Gay Pride parade.

“Not one person came up and asked us about our recruitment program,” he said. “Now, granted, this was seven years ago and attitudes may have changed by now. But we got no response at all from gays or lesbians.

“In fact, the only people who did come up to talk to us were punk rockers with spiked hair and steel boots, and they just came up to laugh at us.”

Despite the Los Angeles department’s refusal to recruit homosexuals, other large police departments in California and around the nation are actively seeking gay and lesbian officers to fill their police academies, and they are demonstrating to their local homosexual communities that the police are sensitive to their needs.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, for instance, advertises for recruits in gay publications and sets up recruitment booths during large public events in the gay community. Capt. Rachel Burgess of the sheriff’s West Hollywood station said her deputies are also well aware of an automatic three-day suspension for any officer making a derogatory statement about homosexuals.

“If they are gays or lesbians,” she said, “the doors are not going to be closed to them.”

In the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department, 20% of the sworn work force is gay or lesbian, a lesbian lieutenant supervises a 70-officer bailiff security office, several gay sergeants are watch commanders, and the department’s budget officer is a lesbian.

A few years ago, according to Ray Towbis, an aide to the sheriff, the president of the local Deputy Sheriffs Assn. was a sergeant who also happened to be gay. “He was voted in by everybody,” Towbis said.

In traditionally conservative San Diego, Police Chief Bob Burgreen has assigned an officer to work as a special liaison with the homosexual community in the city’s Hillcrest district, where the department earlier this year conducted a police job fair.

“People in our command are aware that we don’t play this bull of screening out gays or lesbians,” said Matt Weathersby, the San Diego liaison officer. “We are going to get more gay officers.”

Added one San Diego gay police officer, who is considering dashing his secret identity to become the first openly homosexual officer there: “The Police Department has taken on some new policies and training methods to help us. And the people are very supportive.”

A statewide study in June by the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training in Sacramento, which certifies police officers, identified the homosexual community as a key target area for future officers, if police agencies in the 1990s hope to bolster their sagging recruitment efforts.

The study said that gay officers are often more stable and less transient than heterosexual officers, and that a single man does not need the salary that a married man with children requires. The study also questioned the wisdom of perpetrating the macho image of the big-city officer.

“The stiff upper lip macho mentality characteristic of the average police officer collapses under too much stress,” the report said.

“In addition, the macho image carried by many police officers into their work tends to have a negative impact on the average citizen. This leads to distrust of police departments in general and, as in Los Angeles, into citizen reluctance to increase police department budgets when (the issue) appears on the ballot.”

A Golden State Peace Officers Assn., run for and by gay and lesbian officers, has been established, and emissaries like Richard Norton, a co-founder and San Francisco County sheriff’s deputy, travel the state teaching local departments the value of extending their ranks into the local gay community.

Likewise, the Gay Officers Action League was set up in New York City to foster the same camaraderie among homosexual police officers on the East Coast. Executive Director Sam Ciccone said the group helps sponsor recruitment drives in the gay community, and helped persuade the New York Police Department to print recruitment posters picturing gay and lesbian officers.

“We sent them throughout the city,” he said. “Why? Because police departments reflect the areas they serve, and I think that the people in New York want to have a police department that is really responsive to them.”

In Texas, a lesbian recruit named Mica England is suing the Dallas Police Department, alleging she was disqualified because of her sexual orientation. She hopes to overturn a state law that classifies sexual intercourse with a member of the same sex as deviant--the biggest stumbling block for homosexual police recruits in Texas.

“I was mad and angry,” said the 26-year-old England, describing how she was turned down as unfit to work for Dallas’ finest. “On my way out, I yanked down the equal-opportunity employment poster from their bulletin board.”

Sam Lindsay, head of the litigation division for Dallas, declined to discuss the city’s defense against the lawsuit, except to say: “There are legitimate reasons for not hiring people who are lesbians or gay for law enforcement postions.”

The Texas case is similar to what is happening in Los Angeles, where a bloc of City Council members wants to settle Grobeson’s lawsuit. But what the former police sergeant wants most of all is the creation of a special position in Los Angeles for an officer to work as a liaison with the gay and lesbian community, and for the department to actively recruit future officers from within that community.

Without those changes, Grobeson and others contend, the Police Department will continue to foster harassment and discrimination of gay and lesbian officers. They complain that the department looks the other way in condoning pranks, name-calling and threats against homosexual officers, and that some patrolmen even refuse to work with or provide backup to officers suspected of being gay.

One Los Angeles police officer, whose lesbianism was suspected by her peers, recalled an incident several years ago when she chased a burglary suspect alone on foot for 15 minutes, without backup from her partner. “It was like a slap in the face,” she said. “I was terrified.”

And Grobeson described how a fellow officer once told him how he would like to strand a suspected gay policeman inside a vacant building during a false-alarm call. Grobeson said the officer boasted: “I’m going to sneak up behind him and I’m going to blow off the back of his head. Then I’m going to claim it was dark and that I thought he was the suspect.”

The incident never occurred, but Grobeson said it was an example of the hostility some officers harbor toward gays in their ranks.

Homosexual officers said the discrimination begins as early as the background investigation into new recruits, when all applicants are asked pointed questions about their private lifestyles, their closest friends and their past and present romances.

In fact, many gay activists accuse the top police managers in Los Angeles of being prejudiced for refusing to recruit and welcome gays and lesbians into the rank and file.

“We’re going to have to drag him (Chief Gates) kicking and screaming to go along with change,” said Donna Wade, co-chair of the Los Angeles-based Gay and Lesbian Police Advisory Task Force, and herself a former police officer in St. Louis and Atlanta.

“Gates has a very homophobic attitude,” added Miki Jackson of the task force. “He has an attitude that is very dated. He is creating an atmosphere that is allowing job harassment in the job place.”

Gates today declines to discuss his personal views on homosexuality, but in a 1982 interview with The Times, he quipped: “Who’d want to work with one?”

In a recent interview, Gates would only go so far as to say: “We have homosexuals in the Police Department, and what my personal views are have nothing to do with it.”

He also emphasized that while federal law requires police departments to recruit racial minorities and women, the same does not hold true for gays and lesbians. “What you do in your bedroom, what your sexual preference is, is none of my business,” the chief said.

“That is so private, and I think it would be absolutely ridiculous and wrong to try and go out and recruit people based on their sexual preference.”

He also said he strongly discourages harassment within his police ranks.

“We may have some mavericks out there,” he said. “But I don’t allow anybody to harass a Los Angeles police officer. I don’t let them do that. I won’t allow that.

“We have women in this department. You think they haven’t been harassed? Well, we deal with that harassment.”

Several patrolmen interviewed at random said they would not object to working alongside a homosexual officer, as long as that officer is professional and conscientious.

“I don’t think the department is ready,” said one officer, a sergeant with about 20 years in the department. “No more than private industry would want to hire so many gays. What is the need to?”

But others disagree, particularly gay and lesbian peace officers with other law enforcement agencies who feel secure enough in their jobs that they have openly revealed their homosexuality.

Said James Simms, a five-year veteran of the California Department of Corrections who now works at the R.J. Donovan prison in San Diego County:

“I could hold my personnel file up to almost any heterosexual officer. I come to work on time, always properly dressed. I’m courteous and my file reflects that. I’ve got over five letters of commendation.

“And other gay officers can do the same. We’re just as good as anybody else.”