OAG vacates 126 anti-gay enforcement actions from mid-20th century – NJBIZ

Between 1933 and 1967, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control systematically suspended or revoked the licenses of 126 gay bars for serving LGBTQ+ patrons.

On June 29, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal apologized for the historical practices and issued a directive ordering ABC to vacate these enforcement actions.

This marks the first time the OAG or ABC has formally apologized for its role in the actions that occurred prior to 1967 when the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that ABC could not suspend a liquor license just because the licensee allowed LGBTQ+ individuals to congregate.

Additionally, Grewal and ABC Director James Graziano announced that ABC would both expand its current anti-bias training to root out any implicit bias or discriminatory enforcement efforts and undertake a broader review of the agency’s historical practices to determine whether any other communities were subject to discriminatory enforcement actions.

“The Attorney General’s Office is charged with furthering justice in New Jersey, and yet for more than three decades, our office fell far short,” said Grewal in a prepared statement. “The time has come to acknowledge this failing, to apologize for what happened, and to make sure it never occurs again. We are committed to righting this historical wrong and strengthening our relationship with New Jersey’s LGBTQ+ community.”

“To be clear, today’s ABC is committed to according respect, dignity, fairness and appropriate due process to all parties and persons before it and will not discriminate—or by extension allow licensees or permittees to discriminate—against protected classes or the public,” Graziano said. “We join Attorney General Grewal in acknowledging and condemning the harm our agency caused to members of the LGBTQ+ community and offer our sincere apologies to the generations of individuals impacted by it.”

On June 29 in Asbury Park, Grewal and representatives of ABC will gather with Garden State Equality and other community leaders to install a memorial at the former site of Paddock Bar, which was subject to three different enforcement actions by ABC between 1957 and 1960.

Like other actions targeting gay bars, those at Paddock Bar were based on two ABC regulations issued following the end of Prohibition: Rule 4, which prohibited licensed liquor establishments from allowing “female impersonators” (among others) on their premises; and Rule 5, which prohibited licensees from operating their business “in such a manner as to become a nuisance”—a term that, until 1967, included allowing the “congregation of apparent homosexuals” at the establishment.

In 1967, the New Jersey Supreme Court held in One Eleven Wines & Liquors, Inc. v. Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control that ABC could not use its enforcement authority to target gay bars simply because they served LGBTQ+ patrons.

Despite the ruling, no AG or ABC director has ever apologized for its enforcement actions.

To address this, Grewal ordered the ABC to issue a Special Ruling formally vacating the 126 ABC enforcement actions issued prior to 1967 that relied on Rule 4 or Rule 5 to suspend or revoke a liquor license. The ABC must also post on its website records of the 126 vacated actions to ensure that the historical record is available to the public; expand its anti-bias and cultural diversity training for ABC investigators and attorneys, with a focus on interactions with the LGBTQ+ community; and conduct a full review of the agency’s historical records to determine if its enforcement authority was used to target other marginalized communities. A report on the review is due to Grewal no later than Oct. 15.

“This unprecedented action by Attorney General Grewal represents a profound and meaningful acknowledgment of the unfair discriminatory treatment visited upon the LGBTQ community in the past by state law enforcement officials,” said Thomas Prol, a founding and current executive committee member of Garden State Equality and the past president of the New Jersey Bar Association in a prepared statement.

“The very people who were supposed to protect my community were actually the ones who led the charge in persecuting us – often viciously so – and they lost their jobs, homes, friends and families by those devastating actions,” Prol said. “Attorney General Grewal and his senior staff should be commended for taking this deep dive to explore these terrible law enforcement practices, expose the truth, and reconcile with members of the LGBTQ community.”

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