Local
Md. sodomy law used in bookstore arrests of gay men still on books
Only one of two separate sodomy laws repealed in 2020
In a little-noticed development, the Maryland General Assembly agreed to requests by Republican lawmakers to delete one of the state’s two separate sodomy laws from a sodomy law repeal bill that it approved in March of 2020, leading most LGBTQ activists into incorrectly believing the full sodomy law had been repealed.
According to Maryland House of Delegates member David Moon (D-Montgomery County), who introduced the repeal bill in the state House, which approved the bill on Feb. 20, 2020, the Democratic-controlled Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee voted unanimously to pass an amendment that deleted from the bill a provision calling for the repeal of Maryland’s Criminal Code Section 3-322, which is known as the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act.
The act criminalizes oral sex in all possible circumstances, including between consenting adults.
It states, “A person may not: take the sexual organ of another or of an animal in the person’s mouth; place the person’s sexual organ in the mouth of another or of an animal; or commit another unnatural or perverted sexual practice with another or with an animal.”
The offense of violating the act is listed as a misdemeanor but includes a penalty of up to 10 years in prison or a fine not exceeding $1,000 or both upon conviction of the offense.
During its deliberations in March 2020, the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, while deleting the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act from the repeal bill, left in place the provision in the bill that called for repealing Maryland’s criminal Code Section 3-321, which criminalizes “sodomy” between consenting adults as a felony with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison upon conviction.
Supporters of the original repeal bill say the two statutes each criminalize same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults and the repeal of one of them and not the other leaves on the books a statute that stigmatizes LGBTQ people even if the law is not enforced.
Supporters of the original bill also pointed out that separate, existing Maryland laws strictly prohibit acts of cruelty to animals as well as any non-consensual sexual acts, including same-sex rape and sex between adults and juveniles. This meant that repealing the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act would not prevent anyone engaging in sexual assault, sex with minors, or abuse of animals from being arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Among those who supported that assessment in testimony before the committee was Lisae Jordan, executive director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
But despite these assurances, which were further confirmed at the Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing by Maryland’s Assistant Attorney General Carrie J. Williams, Republican members of the committee, including Sen. Michael Hough (R-Frederick & Carroll Counties) raised strong objections to repealing any existing statute that might be used to prosecute someone engaging in sexual assault or pedophilia.
Sources familiar with the committee have speculated that Hough’s strong hints that he would hold anyone who voted for the full repeal responsible for an inability to prosecute sexual assault and sex with minors as well as incidents of cruelty to animals may have “spooked” the Democrats on the committee to back the amendment.
Sen. William Smith (D-Montgomery County), who chairs the committee; Sen. Jeff Waldstreicher (D-Montgomery County), the committee’s vice chair; and committee members Sen. Shelly Hettleman (D-Baltimore County) and Sen. Susan Lee (D-Montgomery County) did not respond to requests by the Blade for comment on why they voted for the amendment to remove the Unnatural and Perverted Sexual Practice Act from the repeal bill.
Each of them has been supportive on LGBTQ rights on other legislation that has come before the Maryland General Assembly. Lee, for example, introduced a sodomy law repeal bill several years earlier that failed to pass.
The other members of the committee that voted to remove the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act from the repeal bill included Sens. Ronald Young (D-Frederick County), Charles Sydnor (D-Baltimore City & Baltimore County), Jill Carter (D-Baltimore City), Robert Cassilly (R-Harford County), Chris West (R-Baltimore County), Justin Ready (R-Carroll County), and Michael Hough (R-Frederick & Carroll Counties).
Moon said the full Maryland Senate quickly approved the committee’s amended bill that repealed the sodomy law but did not repeal the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act. He noted the committee’s approval by a unanimous vote came just as the Maryland General Assembly’s 2020 legislative session was coming to an end one month earlier than usual due to restrictions related to the COVID pandemic.
With just one day left before the legislative session was to adjourn for the year on March 18, 2020, Moon said the House of Delegates, which had passed the full repeal version of the bill by a vote of 133 to 5 on Feb. 20, 2020, had a choice of accepting the Senate version or letting the bill die. He said House members decided to approve the Senate bill, with the vote taking place March 18.
“Basically, that change was made in the last day of the pandemic legislative session,” Moon told the Blade. “And so, it was a take it or leave it situation. So, we went ahead and struck the sodomy part out, and here we are,” he said.
He noted that the truncated legislative session did not provide time for the Senate version of the bill to come before a House-Senate conference committee, where supporters of the original bill could have pushed for rejecting the Senate version and sought approval of the House version.
“The next year the Unnatural or Perverted Sex Practice law is being used exactly in the manner we were trying to stop it from being used,” he said, referring to the May 20 raid on Bush River Books & Video store, in which four of the arrested men were charged with Perverted Sexual Practice.
Moon said he plans to introduce another repeal bill at the start of the General Assembly’s legislative session in January 2022 calling for the full repeal of the Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice Act. Supporters of Moon’s original bill in 2020, including the Maryland LGBTQ advocacy group Free State Justice, say they will push hard for passage of Moon’s bill next year.
The 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which declared state sodomy laws unconstitutional, and other court rulings impacting Maryland made the two Maryland sodomy statutes theoretically unenforceable for consenting adults. But attorneys familiar with the two statutes have said police have made arrests and prosecutors sometimes have attempted to prosecute mostly men, including gay men, charged under the laws in the years following the court rulings.
The most recent known arrests took place on May 20 of this year, when Harford County, Md., Sheriff’s deputies arrested nine men during the raid on the adult Bush River Books & Video store in the town of Abingdon. Four of the men were charged with “Perverted Sexual Practice.” The store is located 25 miles north of Baltimore.
One of the men charged with Unnatural or Perverted Sexual Practice was also charged with indecent exposure. Another four were charged with indecent exposure and one of the men was charged with solicitation of prostitution.
A friend of one of the men charged with indecent exposure told the Blade his friend was with another adult male inside an enclosed video room with a locked door when Sheriff’s Office deputies opened the door with a key obtained from the store and placed the two men in handcuffs as they were arrested.
The friend and others familiar with the arrests said the arrested men spent the night in jail before they were released in the morning and appeared in court. Several of the cases are scheduled for trial on Aug. 2 in Harford County District Court.
Greg Nevins, an attorney who serves as senior counsel for the national LGBTQ litigation group Lambda Legal, said lower court rulings that apply to Maryland and other states, in addition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision overturning state sodomy laws, have left it largely up to individual trial court judges to interpret these rulings to determine whether consensual sexual activity under sodomy or indecent exposure laws took place in a “private” or “public” setting.
Most of the court rulings declaring sodomy laws unconstitutional have limited those rulings to consensual, non-commercial sexual activity conducted in a private setting.
But according to Nevin, at least one ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which includes Maryland, had the effect of making the Maryland Unnatural and Perverted Sexual Practice statute unenforceable for consenting adults regardless of whether alleged sexual activity takes place in a private or public place.
Nevin and other attorneys have said reports that some of the arrests at the Bush River Books & Video store in Harford County involving Sheriff’s Deputies opening locked private video rooms, where men allegedly were engaging in sexual activity, should be considered private spaces like a rented hotel room.
The owner or a representative of Bush River Books & Video store has not responded to requests by the Blade for comment.
District of Columbia
Ruby Corado sentenced to 33 months in prison
Former Casa Ruby director pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2024
A federal judge on Jan. 13 sentenced Ruby Corado, the founder and former executive director of the now closed D.C. LGBTQ community services organization Casa Ruby, to 33 months of incarceration for a charge of wire fraud to which she pleaded guilty in July 2024.
U.S. District Court Judge Trevor M. McFadden handed down the sentence that had been requested by prosecutors with the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia after Corado’s sentencing had been postponed six times for various reasons.
The judge also sentenced her to 24 months of supervised release upon her completion of incarceration.
In addition to the sentence of incarceration, McFadden agreed to a request by prosecutors to hold Corado responsible for “restitution” and “forfeiture” in the amount of $956,215 that prosecutors have said she illegally misappropriated from federal loans obtained by Casa Ruby.
The charge to which she pleaded guilty is based on allegations that she diverted at least $180,000 “in taxpayer backed emergency COVID relief funds to private offshore bank accounts,” according to court documents.
Court records show FBI agents arrested Corado on March 5, 2024, at a hotel in Laurel, Md., shortly after she returned to the U.S. from El Salvador, where authorities say she moved in 2022. Prosecutors have said in charging documents that she allegedly fled to El Salvador, where she was born, after “financial irregularities at Casa Ruby became public,” and the LGBTQ organization ceased operating.
Shortly after her arrest, another judge agreed to release Corado into the custody of her niece in Rockville, Md., under a home detention order. But at an Oct. 14, 2025, court hearing at which the sentencing was postponed after Corado’s court appointed attorney withdrew from the case, McFadden ordered Corado to be held in jail until the time of her once again rescheduled sentencing.
Her attorney at the time, Elizabeth Mullin, stated in a court motion that her reason for withdrawing from the case was an “irreconcilable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship.”
Corado’s newly retained attorney, Pleasant Brodnax, filed a 25-page defense Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing on Jan. 6, calling for the judge to sentence Corado only to the time she had already served in detention since October.
Among other things, Brodnax’s defense memorandum disputes the claim by prosecutors that Corado improperly diverted as much as $956,215 from federally backed loans to Casa Ruby, saying the total amount Corado diverted was $200,000. Her memo also states that Corado diverted the funds to a bank account in El Salvador for the purpose of opening a Casa Ruby facility there, not to be used for her personally.
“Ms. Corado has accepted responsibility for transferring a portion of the loan disbursements into another account she operated and ultimately transferring a portion of the loan disbursements to an account in El Salvador,” the memo continues.
“Her purpose in transferring funds to El Salvador was to fund Casa Ruby programs in El Salvador,” it says, adding, “Of course, she acknowledges that the terms of the loan agreement did not permit her to transfer the funds to El Salvador for any purpose.”
In his own 16-page sentencing recommendation memo, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Borchert, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Corado’s action amounted at the least to fraud.
“The defendant and Casa Ruby received no less than $1.2 million in taxpayer backed funds during the COVID-19 global health crisis,” he memo states. “But rather than use those funds to support Casa Ruby’s mission as the defendant promised, the defendant further contributed to its demise by unlawfully transferring no less than $180,000 of these federal emergency relief funds into her own private offshore bank accounts,” it says.
“Then, when media reports suggested the defendant would be prosecuted for squandering Casa Ruby’s government funding, she sold her home and fled the country,” the memo states. “Meanwhile, the people who she had promised to pay with taxpayer-backed funds – her employees, landlord, and vendors – were left behind flat broke.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office and Corado’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request from the Washington Blade for comment on the judge’s sentence.
“Ms. Corado accepts full responsibility for her actions in this case,” defense attorney Brodnax says in her sentencing memo. “She acknowledges the false statements made in the loan applications and that she used some of the money outside the United States,” it says.
“However, the money was still utilized for the same purpose and intention as the funds used in the United States, to assist the LGBTQ community,” it states. “Ms. Corado did not use the money to buy lavish goods or fund a lavish lifestyle.”
Brodnax also states in her memo that as a transgender woman, Corado could face abuse and danger in a correctional facility where she may be sent if sentenced to incarceration.
“Ruby Corado committed a crime, she is now paying the price,” said D.C. LGBTQ rights advocate Peter Rosenstein. “While it is sad in many ways, we must remember she hurt the transgender community with what she did, and in many ways they all paid for her crime.”
Virginia
Woman arrested for anti-gay assault at Alexandria supermarket
Victim recorded video of Christmas Day attack
Alexandria police announced on Jan. 12 that a Maryland woman has been arrested for allegedly assaulting a man while shouting anti-gay slurs at him at a Giant supermarket in Alexandria on Christmas Day.
The arrest came after a video of the assault that the victim captured with his phone and on which the woman can be heard shouting anti-gay slurs went viral on social media.
Police identified the woman as Shibritney Colbert, 34, of Landover, Md. Alexandria Police Chief Tarrick McGuire stated at a news conference that police responded to a 911 call placed by the victim and attempted to apprehend the woman, but she drove off in her car before police could apprehend her.
He said following an investigation, Colbert was apprehended and arrested in Prince Goerge’s County, Md., on Jan. 8. He said arrangements were being made for her to be brought to Alexandria where she was expected to face charges of assault and battery, destruction of property, felony eluding, and driving an unregistered vehicle.
The video of the incident shows Colbert pushing a shopping cart she was using in an aisle at the Giant store, located at 3131 Duke St., into the victim and another woman who was trying to help the victim. She can be seen throwing groceries at the victim while shouting anti-gay names. “Boy, get out of here with your gay ass,” was among the words she yelled at him that could be heard on the video.
The victim, who police identified only as a 24-year-old man, could be heard on the video saying he does not know the woman and urging her to “please back up.”
“Based on the victim’s statement, comments exchanged prior to the assault, and the totality of the circumstances, investigators believe the victim was targeted because of his sexual orientation,” police said in a statement.
Tarrick said Colbert’s arrest came at a time when Alexandria police were completing a strengthened hate crime policy calling for detectives to investigate crimes based on hate and for the department to prepare reports on hate crimes twice a year.
“Hate crimes are not just crimes against individuals, they are offenses that threaten the entire community and undermine the fundamental principles of dignity, equality, and safety,” Tarrick said.
Alexandria police didn’t immediately respond to a request from the Washington Blade for a copy of the official police report on the incident.
A link to the video posted on the social media site Reddit in which an unidentified man provides some details of the attack, can be accessed here:
Virginia
Mark Levine running in ‘firehouse’ Democratic primary to succeed Adam Ebbin
Outgoing gay Va. state senator has endorsed Elizabeth Bennett-Parker
Gay former Virginia House of Delegates member Mark Levine (D-Alexandria) is one of four candidates running in a hastily called “firehouse” Democratic primary to be held Tuesday, Jan. 13, to select a Democratic nominee to replace gay state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria)
Ebbin, whose 39th Senate District includes Alexandria and parts of Arlington and Fairfax Counties, announced on Jan. 7 that he was resigning effective Feb. 18, to take a job in the administration of Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger.
The Jan. 13 primary called by Democratic Party leaders in Alexandria and Arlington will take place less than a week after Ebbin announced his planned resignation.
According to the Community News of Alexandria publication, a public debate between the four candidates was scheduled to take place one day earlier on Monday, Jan. 12, from 7-9 p.m. at the Charles Houston Recreation Center in Alexandria.
The winner of the so-called firehouse primary will compete in a Feb. 10 special election in which registered voters in the 39th District of all political parties and independents will select Ebbin’s replacement in the state Senate.
The other candidates competing in the primary on Tuesday, in addition to Levine, include state Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, former Alexandria Vice Mayor Amy Jackson, and World Wildlife Fund executive Charles Sumpter.
Another Alexandria news publication, ALXnow, reports that Ebbin, Spanberger, and at least four other prominent Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly have endorsed Bennett-Parker, leading political observers to view her as the leading contender in the race.
“I have worked alongside Elizabeth and have seen her fight for the values of our community,” Ebbin said in a statement, ALXnow reports.
Arlington gay Democratic activist TJ Flavall said Parker-Bennett has attended LGBTQ community events and is known as an LGBTQ ally.
Ebbin’s endorsement of Bennett-Parker over fellow gay politician Levine in the Jan. 13 firehouse primary follows what observers have said is a longstanding rivalry between the two over disagreements around legislative issues.
In 2021, Ebbin endorsed Parker-Bennett when she challenged Levine in the Democratic primary for his House of Delegates seat in the then 45th House District in Alexandria.
Parker-Bennett defeated Levine in that race at a time when Levine, in an unusual move, also ran for the position of lieutenant governor. He also lost that race.
ALXnow reports that in his Facebook announcement of his candidacy for Ebbin’s state Senate seat Levine discounted the relevance of the large number of prominent endorsements that Parker-Bennet has received. In campaigns that last for just a few days rather than weeks or months, “it’s about turnout,” ALX now quoted him as saying.
Levine, an attorney, has a longstanding record as an LGBTQ rights advocate. He worked as a legislative counsel to gay former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) before becoming a radio talk show host and TV political commentator in Virginia prior to his election to the Virginia House of Delegates.
The firehouse primary on Jan. 13, which is open only to voters with identification showing they live in the 39th District, will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in these locations:
Alexandria: Charles E. Beatley, Jr. Public Library, 5005 Duke St.; and the Charles Houston Recreation Center, 901 Wythe St.
Arlington: Aurora Hills Library, 735 18th St. S.
Annandale: New John Calvin Presbyterian Church, 6531 Columbia Pike
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