Jailer Learns Gay Culture to Foil Straight Inmates : Crime: Deputy protects homosexuals in special ward by keeping out gang members, skinheads and others who try to serve their time there.

Each weekday morning, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Ernest Cobarrubias sits at his desk at the Hall of Justice Jail, with a pocket guide to gay bars at his side.

One by one, inmates are led into the room, which doubles as the jail barbershop.

“When did you last have sex with a woman?” Cobarrubias asks, facing the inmate from across the desk.

“What gay bars and bathhouses do you go to?”

“How long have you been gay?”

The questions may sound impertinent and overly personal, but Cobarrubias isn’t just being nosy.

As the senior deputy in charge of classifying prisoners at the Hall of Justice Jail, part of Cobarrubias’ job is to protect the jail’s 350 or so homosexual inmates, who are segregated from the overall inmate population.

Neo-Nazis, gang members, skinheads, satanists and so-called “homophobes” have been known to feign homosexuality in an attempt to serve their time in the homosexual ward of the jail, atop Sheriff’s Department headquarters downtown, authorities said.

Some of the phonies seek to prey on the homosexual inmates while others are merely trying to escape the tension, violence and overcrowded conditions of the main County Jail on nearby Bauchet Street, Cobarrubias said.

It’s Cobarrubias’ job to spot the fakes and send them back to the main jail.

In eight years on the job, Cobarrubias has become an expert on gay culture. The 40-year-old married father of two can detail the names and locales of dozens of gay bars and knows which gay magazines feature intellectual commentary and which ones offer little more than nude pictures of men.

Three mornings a week, Cobarrubias is assisted by David Glascock, 50, a gay community activist who monitors the screening process and the jail’s treatment of homosexuals for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Armed with a list of loaded questions, Cobarrubias interviews a parade of inmates seeking admittance to the jail’s gay module.

“What size dress do you wear?” he will ask.

Most homosexual men don’t wear dresses. Those who do usually know their size. So when a muscular 6-foot-2, 210-pound man replies, “Size 6,” Cobarrubias knows he is probably an impostor.

“You can more or less tell when someone comes in who is real muscle-bound that they’re faking when they act effeminate,” Cobarrubias said. But, he added, “You can’t go just by looks. There are some gay men who look as masculine as anyone.”

Another tip-off can be tattooes: “Frankly, there are very few homosexual men I know who are running around with bare-breasted women tattooed on their chest,” Glascock added.

Some inmates pretending to be homosexual have talked to other inmates and are ready with the name of a gay bar or two. But the questioning gets tougher.

“What’s the cover charge? Where is it? How is it decorated?” Cobarrubias asks.

A homosexual inmate who does not go to gay bars may not necessarily know the answers, Cobarrubias said.

“Sometimes we have closet cases where a guy is ashamed to tell his family,” he said. “I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Although some of the interchanges with inmates are amusing, the purpose behind them is very serious.

Homosexual inmates are “very vulnerable to abuse within the jail setting,” Sheriff Sherman Block said.

Before the screening program was started eight years ago, gang members and other heterosexual inmates tried to get into the jail’s homosexual ward for the purpose of “abusing gays and getting them to submit to sexual activity,” Block said.

The program has substantially reduced the number of attacks reported by homosexual inmates, Block said.

Sometimes--maybe one case in 100, Cobarrubias estimates--a non-homosexual inmate slips through, usually after being coached. The mistake usually comes to light quickly because an inmate starts preying on other inmates or receives visits from a girlfriend or other inmates turn him in. Rarely--maybe five times in eight years, Cobarrubias said--has an inmate seriously beaten a homosexual inmate before being discovered.

Other jails have systems for segregating homosexual prisoners but Los Angeles’ efforts are probably the most thorough, said John Hagar, a former ACLU attorney who helped work out a settlement in a 1983 ACLU lawsuit accusing the Sheriff’s Department of unfairly denying homosexual inmates privileges available to other inmates.

Joseph Coddington, 34, who is serving a petty theft sentence in the jail’s homosexual unit, said he has served time in dozens of jails from Las Vegas to Long Beach and in his native Florida after convictions for prostitution and other crimes. He said he was gang-raped in a Florida jail at age 23. But he said he feels safe and well-treated in the Los Angeles jail.

“If someone said, ‘You’re going to jail, where would you like to go?’ I’d choose the Hall of Justice Jail,” Coddington said.

Glascock, 50, was brought in to the program to help teach Cobarrubias how to identify homosexual inmates. At first, he was a volunteer. Now his salary is paid by the county as part of the settlement of the ACLU suit.

Glascock has been concerned about the treatment of homosexuals by law enforcement officials since he was 19 years old and went to jail in Wisconsin for having sex with minors--two teen-age male prostitutes.

Cobarrubias had no particular past experience with homosexuals. A native of East Los Angeles, he spent five years as a social worker for the Department of Social Services before joining the Sheriff’s Department in 1974, working as a patrol officer and bailiff.

The duty of weeding out fake gays fell to him because he was in charge of deciding where to place incoming prisoners at the Hall of Justice Jail. Other inmates housed there include juveniles, informants and “softs,” prisoners who deputies believe would be in danger at the main jail.

Cross dressers--men who wear feminine clothes and makeup and even some who may have undergone sex change operations--are housed away from other gay inmates in a separate module to cut down on problems and disease, officials said.

Sometimes Cobarrubias will allow a non-homosexual inmate to stay at the jail if he believes the person has a genuine and well-founded fear of serving time in the main jail.

Conditions at the Hall of Justice Jail are better in many respects than in the main jail, Cobarrubias said. Televisions and telephones are on every row. The atmosphere is more relaxed and it is less crowded. The Hall of Justice Jail has 60 fewer prisoners than the 1,800 for which it was designed. The County Jail, designed for 5,276 inmates, has 6,482, Sheriff’s Deputy Patrick Hunter said.

Cobarrubias’ unusual assignment has prompted ribbing, some of it cruel, from fellow deputies who have called him the “homosexual deputy” or accused him of being bisexual.

“I’m sure they think I’m gay or it’s at least crossed their minds,” Cobarrubias said. “But once they sit down and talk to me, they know where I’m coming from. I’m just heterosexual, doing a job assigned me by the department.”