Much of Bell and Lanni's time is spent screening incoming inmates who claim to be gay. In other penal systems, the last thing a straight inmate would want to be thought of is as gay, because homosexuals are such easy prey.
But in Men's Central, many straights try to pass as gay. They want to be in the gay-only dorms, Bell said, because they regard them as places where sex is readily available and they'll be safe from violence or, in some cases, where they can gain access to SMART programs.
Accordingly, the deputies check the backgrounds of new inmates, and question them on matters likely to be familiar to active participants in local gay culture. To keep abreast of trends, Bell and Lanni regularly consult with owners of gay bars and read gay publications.
The deputies are reluctant to reveal their current tricks, but in the past, for example, they questioned applicants about the former practice of gay men exhibiting different colored handkerchiefs from pants pockets to signal specific sexual desires.
"We'd ask a guy, 'If you wore the color red in your right pocket, what would that mean?' " Lanni said. "And if he didn't know, we'd say, 'OK, what would blue mean?' What happens is, they can't sustain the lie."
As a result of such care, the population of the so-called K-11 dorms (K-11 is the official jail classification for a gay inmate) is now about half of what it was 15 years ago, when controls were minimal.
"I'm sure we still get fooled, but we're pretty successful," Bell said. "You could count on one hand the ones that get past us."
Many of the K-11s represent what Bell sometimes calls "the dregs of the gay community," largely invisible even to other gays. The offenses for which they're incarcerated differ little from those of the general jail population, Bell said, although homelessness and, especially, methamphetamine use tend to be more common among gay inmates.
West Hollywood Mayor Jeffery Prang, an early SMART backer who attended the program's recent graduation, said reducing the incidence of drug use and lawlessness among gay inmates has to do with more than righting individual lives that are out of kilter. It's also vital to checking the spread of HIV among all gays.
"Drugs are extremely pervasive in the male gay community," he said, "and most everybody here is involved in drugs and prostitution. In the world of drugs and HIV, this is ground zero."
