Gay 101 : Police: Classes put recruits in touch with what it’s like to be gay, and try to counter any prejudices.

M. Corrine Mackey, a fortysomething black lesbian free-lance journalist, surveyed the sea of predominantly white San Diego police recruits for the first time two years ago and blurted her secret to the roomful of strangers.

“Being here is my worst nightmare,” she told the academy class. “I grew up on the south side of Chicago. I learned from an early age that Officer Bob was not my friend. I’m not even sure what I’m doing here.”

Mackey is one of six speakers who regularly teach a course that has come to be known as “Gay 101,” a two-hour San Diego Police Academy class that tries to counter the prejudices that law officers can sometimes harbor against the gay and lesbian community. The course started in 1986.

While other police agencies throughout California have similar programs to acquaint officers with the nuances of dealing with gays, San Diego police have gone a step farther by blending classroom training with mandatory visits by some recruits to a gay and lesbian social center.

The classroom setting, which each new officer must attend, starts with Mackey and others briefly recapping their first reactions to knowing they were gay and detailing how life has unfolded since then.

To Scott Fulkerson, one of the instructors and a member of a citizens police review committee, the classes always begin the same. Recruits sit with arms folded, slunk way down in their seats, their body English belying their attempts to be attentive.

“The students are somewhat defensive at first,” Fulkerson said. “They sit there and don’t say anything and their body language can be pretty severe. We go in completely vulnerable and present ourselves as human beings.”

Before the class stands a deputy district attorney, a female insurance broker, a writer, a county health director and the administrative director of the Lesbian & Gay Men’s Community Center in San Diego. Fulkerson is executive director of the center.

One by one, they spin their life stories and accept questions.

Fulkerson, 46, describes his fear of accepting his homosexuality because he believed he could never have any sort of relationship with a woman and literally would have to start wearing a dress.

David Rubin, 33, a deputy district attorney, tells how it felt in 1986 coming to San Diego and being the first openly gay law enforcement official. Today, he is proud to say, about 70 gays and lesbians are part of SOLO, the Society of Law Officers, in San Diego County.

And then there is Mackey, who admits to carrying her own biases against the officers into the classroom and calls much of what goes on between herself and the recruits as “an exchange of bigotry.”

Despite her reservations about police, Mackey keeps coming back to the class.

“One of the things in it for me is to get beyond my own prejudices,” she said. “I get the sense that a lot of people in the class are homophobic even if they consciously don’t display it. They see the problems I have with cops and can learn from that too.”

After the small talk, the questions begin:

Were you born that way or did you choose to be gay? What did your family think? Do you miss having kids?

It’s OK that you’re gay, but why come out and make a big deal about it? When we deal with a domestic disturbance involving two gay men or two lesbians, who is the man and who is the woman in the relationship?

The inquiry about male and female roles in same-sex relationships is almost always asked and never clearly understood, instructors say.

“We tell them there are no hard and fast roles here,” Fulkerson said. “The idea of an openly gay or lesbian relationship is two equals coming together. It doesn’t matter who mows the lawn or cooks the food.”

Classroom instruction for officers in San Diego on sexual orientation began in 1986 under then-Chief Bill Kolender, who sought to strengthen ties with the gay community.

Fred Scholl, the first class instructor, said that while Kolender looked upon homosexuality with some disdain, he respected political power and urged the gay community to mobilize if they wanted to be recognized.

Once it did, he was more than receptive to having Scholl teach the course, which started as three hours long and was cut back to two hours.

In the five years Scholl taught, he saw a number of different responses, ranging from the enlightened to the truly bigoted.

“Sometimes, we’d be quoted from the Bible and asked how we could justify our lifestyles,” he said. “We’d be told that we chose our lifestyle and we caused AIDS and we were going to be damned by God. But we gave as good as we got.”

In the past year, current chief Bob Burgreen has expanded the program for officers to visit a number of community organizations, including homeless shelters, an agency for the mentally disabled and a center for the deaf.

“We have to deal with these people and it’s easy to put them at a distance,” said Matt Weathersby, community relations assistant to Burgreen.

“But when six members of the gay community come in here, the officers need to see them as human beings,” he said. “They are not there to convert anyone. They are there because officers have to deal with people who are gay and lesbians and it will help them with their job.”

The state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, POST, mandates only that law enforcement agencies touch on issues in the academy such as how to deal with ethnic and racial minorities as well as the elderly, handicapped, women, gays and other groups.

But it is up to various agencies to determine exactly how that should be applied.

In San Francisco, for example, where more than 10% of the officers are gay or lesbian, recruits are run through an 8-hour “sensitivity training” class that begins with the instructor asking rookies to shout aloud every derogatory term for gays they’ve ever heard.

They are eventually asked whether the terms adequately describe the gay community or if referring to gays in these terms is appropriate, said Lea Militello, a San Francisco lesbian police officer who teaches the course.

The recruits respond with silence, she said.

Militello, the liaison to the chief of police for the gay and lesbian community, said everyone in the class is then required to complete a number of written statements, such as “If someone of the same sex made a pass at me, I’d ....”

The answers are exchanged with other recruits, ranging from those militantly anti-gay to those openly homosexual.

“You get two very different polarized set of answers, ranging from ‘I’d feel flattered’ to ‘I’d kick his ass,”’ Militello said. “It’s a very effective thing to do.”

Part of the class includes showing the film, “The Life and Times of Harvey Milk,” the story of the gay San Francisco County Supervisor who was murdered along with Mayor George Moscone by former supervisor Dan White in 1978.

And before the eight hours is over, a panel of gay cops, clergy, transvestites, politicians and others answer all types of questions, from the arcane to the graphic.

Militello said the class has been revamped since she took over 2 1/2 years ago, but some sort of police orientation to the gay community has existed for about 15 years.

“The training used to consist of a brief history of the gay community and then a visit to the gay bars in town,” said Militello, an officer for 11 years. “A lot of us don’t even go to gay bars.”

The Los Angeles Police Department also includes gay officers in its training program, a form of which has existed for eight years. Seven gay civilians and five gay officers teach the 90-minute classes, which is similar to San Diego’s program in that instructors discuss their personal histories of gay awareness.

But unlike San Diego, Los Angeles police academy instructors have extended the training to supervisors and other officers already working in the department.

Topics of discussion include gay bashing, civil disobedience involving gays and concerns over the AIDS virus, according to Art Mattox, training coordinator with the department’s gay and lesbian police advisory task force.

POST has no record of which law enforcement agencies do or do not have training programs for sensitivity toward gays and lesbians.

But the commission is drawing up guidelines that will allow any department to train existing officers using a standard model similar to the program used in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Depending on the availability of state funds, officers can be reimbursed part of their salaries for the time they are in classrooms.

Increased awareness and training “is a recognition that our communities in California are changing,” said Dave Spisak, a senior POST law enforcement consultant. “There’s an ongoing realization that in order to serve the community, we have to mirror the community. We value diversity for the strength it brings to the community.”

Changes are coming due in the San Diego police training program, based in part on objections from Scholl, the original course instructor.

Scholl stopped teaching the program eight months ago when the department refused to allow openly gay officers to speak before the class. He said he noticed a “subtle homophobia” at the academy.

“I told (academy supervisors) that it’s OK to be gay and lesbian but not to be gay and lesbian and be a cop,” he said. “The reason I left was essentially a political statement. There has to be a change and I think there will be a change. There has to be.”