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Why bother putting lesbian and gay judges on the bench if one ends up with such specimens as Michael Sonberg?

From his judicial perch in The Bronx, one of New York City's grittier boroughs, openly gay Judge Sonberg dramatically broadened the scope of the Empire State's sex laws in July when he convicted two women of "prostitution," and the manager of the bar where they worked of its promotion. The women's crime? Lap-dancing for an undercover vice cop.

Leave aside what business has any judge, let alone a practicing sodomite, punishing people for working as whores. How does lap dancing, an erotic art celebrated openly in many civilized cities, equate with prostitution? Answer: with some precious legal ingenuity.

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Belinda Hinzmann and Ashanti Thompson agreed to allow what was an undercover vice cop to touch their unclothed breasts and buttocks. Then they offered a lap dance. "This 'lap dancing,'" Judge Sonberg writes, "consisted of sitting on and moving around on the officer's lap." Prostitution is defined by the New York law that prohibits it as engaging in "sexual conduct with another person in return for a fee." So is a lap-dance "sexual conduct"?

No New York court has ever said it was. The prevailing legal threshhold for "sexual conduct," established 20 years ago in People v. Costello, is that enjoyable trio "sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse, or masturbation." But 20 years is an awfully long time not to excessively broaden some government rationale for intruding into people's lives. Judge Sonberg set himself to the task.

"Cultural and sexual practices have changed greatly over the past 20 years, impelled by the advent of HIV and AIDS in the early 80s," Judge Sonberg begins promisingly. Just to show that he's no ignorant prude under his black robe, Sonberg goes on to list some of the changes-- from on-line chat rooms, to widely available porn videos, to even "the widespread acceptance of erotic dance as mainstream."

So is our gay judge on the road to ruling that lap-dancing, which involves no exchange of bodily fluids, also deserves strong legal protection? Au contraire. Sonberg's seemingly broad-minded social analysis is simply in service to the sex police. None of these now-accepted practices-- chat-room cruising, porn video watching, etc. "involve touching of naked body parts (conventionally clothed) for a fee." So it's the very loosening of sexual mores over the past 20 years, the gay judge concludes, that makes lap-dancing stand out in a new and criminal light. To make it, indeed, the equivalent of prostitution.

"This is a really expanded reading of the prostitution statute," says Bill Dobbs, an attorney and activist with New York's Sex Panic. "It exposes a lot of working women to criminal liability." The ruling also gives the city another weapon against erotically open clubs: with enough convictions at a particular venue, the city can declare the business a "public nuisance" and then padlock it.

How is it that openly gay people have gained access to the bar, let alone the bench? "It's because judges stopped enforcing solitication and other kinds of laws against us," Dobbs notes. "It's alarming that an openly gay judge has forgotten his roots."