In 2017, when 26-year-old Gemmel Moore’s body was found in the West Hollywood apartment of small-time Democratic donor Ed Buck, his death was dismissed as an accidental drug overdose. Two years later, when 55-year-old Timothy Dean died by overdose in the same apartment, the police ignored the coincidence. Although by then a coalition of activists and civil rights organizations were demanding an investigation, it was not until 39-year-old Dane Brown escaped the apartment at 1234 Laurel Avenue in search of emergency medical care that the police arrested Buck.
In keeping with his extensive pattern of targeting what the New York Times calls “vulnerable men,” Buck—a wealthy white man with political connections—paid Moore, Dean, and Brown—black men with little money and less clout—to return to his apartment where he “administered large doses of narcotics to manipulate his victims to participate in sex acts.” As a result of what the media has referred to as Buck’s “fetish” for “pay to play,” two men’s lives were stolen. It’s some kind of miracle that Brown, who reported that he overdosed not once but twice while he was in Buck’s apartment, is still alive.
At the time of this writing, Buck is awaiting sentencing. But in March, his attorneys filed to have his convictions overturned, arguing that the government “kink-shamed” him by “pointing the jury toward his sexual fetishes in an effort to obscure the lack of proof supporting the charges.” Buck’s conviction, his team’s argument goes, was based on “prejudicial and irrelevant character evidence…by presenting graphic images and videos of his sexual fetishes.”
The governmental power—and prerogative—to punish those who engage in deviant sex is undeniable. Buck’s lawyers need look no further than their client’s own victims to witness that same systemic prejudice against queer, drug-using, and kinky people; indeed, it took a literal grassroots movement to force the justice system to treat the lives of Moore, Dean, and Brown as if they mattered. But there were other biases that Buck’s team failed to name. Why didn’t they also invoke the anti-blackness, classism, and whorephobia that almost disappeared the tragic deaths of at least two people and the traumatization of many more?
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel, out on June 28.
I’m excited to share that we now have a cover for the UK edition, available 10/28 from Cipher Press. I’ll be in London in late October—see you then!
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David Davis 39, part 1