By MARYCLAIRE DALE
The Associated Press
11/6/01 1:22 AM
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- In 1997, an 18-year-old high school football player in
Minersville and a 17-year-old friend were stopped by police after leaving a
party.
Police charged the boys with underage drinking and, after finding the
younger one with two condoms, took them to the station, where they were
lectured on the Bible and homosexuality.
The arresting officer, F. Scott Willinsky, allegedly asked if they were
"queer" and threatened to tell their families they were gay. Marcus Wayman,
the football player, told his friend he was going to kill himself.
A few hours later, he did just that.
On Monday, a lawsuit filed by Wayman's mother over her son's death went to
trial in federal court in Allentown. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified
damages, charges that the town and three of its police officers violated
Wayman's right to privacy.
"This is the first case that we know of that, after a tragic result like
this, a family comes back and tries to hold a public entity accountable for
trying to out them," said Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay
Rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents
Wayman's mother.
In an important pretrial decision, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia
ruled last year that a person's constitutional right to privacy includes
protection of his or her sexual orientation.
"It is difficult to imagine a more private matter than one's sexuality and a
less likely probability that the government would have a legitimate interest
in (its) disclosure," the court wrote in its 2-1 ruling.
The court also said that threatening to disclose the information was
tantamount to doing so, "because the security of one's privacy has been
compromised by the threat."
Police approached Wayman's car at about midnight, as the teens sat in a lot
next to a beer distributorship.
Willinsky, the son of then-Police Chief Joseph Willinsky, and Officer Thomas
Hoban took them to the station on underage drinking charges. The 17-year-old
had been drinking at the party.
Scott Willinsky later testified that both boys conceded, under questioning,
that they had stopped to have sex. The 17-year-old disputes making the
statement. Willinsky told Wayman that if he didn't tell his grandfather he
was gay, Willinsky would do so, according to the lawsuit.
Later that morning, police dropped Wayman off at the home he shared with his
grandfather.
"At his home, Marcus Wayman, depressed and disconsolate over the threats and
accusations, and feeling that the defendant police officers would carry
through on their threats and thereby stigmatize him, ruin his reputation,
and anger the main authority figure in his family, secured a firearm in the
house and, sometime before 6 a.m., committed suicide," the lawsuit states.
The three officers named in the lawsuit, Joseph Willinsky, Scott Willinsky
and Thomas Hoban, do not have listed numbers and could not be reached for
comment before the start of the trial. Their lawyer, Robert Hanna Jr., did
not immediately return a call Monday.
According to Ferrero, many school officials, social workers and others feel
they have a duty to share the information with parents when they learn that
a teen-ager may be gay.
Willinsky made a similar argument in court.
"Willinsky offers that, as a small town police officer, his role has
parental overtones, thus, reducing the citizen's expectation of privacy. ...
We mention this only to note our disagreement with the concept that the
breadth of one's constitutional rights can somehow be diminished by
demographics," Circuit Judge Carol Los Mansmann wrote in the opinion.
Minersville, population 4,900, is in a rural area about 100 miles northwest
of Philadelphia.
For a gay teen, the disclosure of his or her sexual orientation can be
traumatic -- and even dangerous, Ferrero said.
"Coming out is one of the single most significant moments of their lives,
especially when they're still in high school and they are forcibly outed,"
Ferrero said. "It can be extraordinarily traumatic, especially if maybe the
family is not supportive."
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