Wondering how butt enemas and female ejaculation came to be the subject of the first obscenity case to hit D.C. in decades? Credit Los Angeles Police Department Det. Michael Ozaki, who testified yesterday as a witness for the government—and may be responsible for bringing the works of John "Buttman" Stagliano to the attention of the FBI.

Ozaki works with the LAPD on obscenity-related matters, helping to regulate everything from child pornography to topless bars to video arcades. Ozaki has been following Stagliano's work since July 22, 2007, when he first spied Stagliano's Evil Angel booth at the Erotica LA trade show. Ozaki testified that LAPD was on-site at the adult convention to ensure that the venue—the L.A. Convention Center—was in compliance. While on duty, Ozaki also observed Stagliano standing behind the Evil Angel booth, "speaking to a male" to whom he later "sold a DVD."

Ozaki next spied Stagliano on a police field trip to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, which Ozaki says he attends yearly to keep tabs on the "new line of products" hitting the industry. On Jan. 11, 2008, Ozaki saw Stagliano engaging in similar activity—selling DVDs, magazines, even T-shirts—from behind a convention booth.

Later that month, Ozaki paid a visit to the Evil Angel offices in Van Nuys, California, where he snapped some aerial photos of the facility and secured photographic evidence of Stagliano's wife, Karen, entering the building. Also visible in that photograph? A sign reading "Beware of the evil pussy." DVD sales? Pussy jokes? The evidence may seem tame, but the government is attempting to prove not only that Stagliano disseminated obscene matter to D.C., but also that he's is in the regular business of "pandering" obscene materials "for commercial purposes."

After Ozaki brought Buttman to the attention of the feds, the feds set to work bringing Buttman to D.C. As it turns out, before 14 jurors were forced to view Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice in court this week, there is no evidence that either film has ever been screened inside the District of Columbia by anyone else—not even by the FBI.

Though FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley arranged to have the DVDs sent to a District P.O. Box in 2007, Bradley actually watched the movies in a cubicle in his office in Manassas, Va. Since Bradley is not a resident of D.C., didn't order the DVDs from D.C., and didn't watch them in D.C., defense attorney Paul Cambria questioned what, exactly, this case has to do with the District at all. "Did you conduct any surveys to determine the level of acceptance of adult materials?" he asked Bradley. "Have you visited any adult bookstores in D.C.?" he asked. "Have either of those two movies been declared obscene by any jury or any court?" he asked. Government prosecutors objected to Cambria's line of questioning—and the mystery of why milk enemas and vaginal discharge became D.C. issue remains unanswered.

Photo via big-ashb, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

A report by Washington City Paper intern and "Buttman" trial correspondent Juliana Brint:

The story of how 14 D.C. jurors came to spend 50 minutes viewing a parade of hardcore erotic milk enemas from the jury box begins with the pornographic discretion of FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley.

In December 2007, Bradley—using a fictitious name, credit card number, and address–ordered copies of Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice from the website EvilAngel.com to a location inside the District of Columbia. John "Buttman" Stagliano, accused of filling Bradley's order, now stands trial for obscenity charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

So how did Bradley decide which of EvilAngel.com's hundreds of porn titles to purchase? "Looking at the covers [on the website], it appeared that those movies emphasized the excretory function and squirting, so that's why I ordered them," Bradley testified yesterday.

Deciding the DVDs—along with an online trailer for Belladonna: Fetish Fanatic 5—were crude enough to justify obscenity charges, the government indicted Stagliano for "transportation of obscene matters for sale or distribution" and "engaging in the business of selling or transferring obscene matter" in 2008.

Two years later, District Court Judge Richard Leon was left with deciding just how many milk enemas the jury should be made to watch during the trial. Stagliano's lawyers motioned to make the jury watch the entire five-and-a-half-hours of prosecuted material during the proceedings. Leon ruled against them, arguing that as long as the whole works were admitted as evidence and available in the jury room, there was no need to show all of them in the courtroom.

"A work need not be viewed in its entirety to be judged on the whole," Leon ruled.

Leon then went on to dictate how exactly the evidence would be presented during the trial—to both the jury and the audience of about 50 who came along for the viewing yesterday.

Before starting the porn, court officials examined the IDs of everyone in attendance to verify that they were over the age of 18. Prosecutors briefly fumbled with the DVD system—the jury caught an extra scene of two women making out in cat costumes—before arriving at the main event. Milk Nymphos was screened on two large televisions, one on each side of the jury box. While it was certainly possible to catch the on-screen action from many angles in the public viewing area, it was clear that the material was intended for inspection by the jury, not the audience. This point was reinforced by Leon's decision to play audio through Court-issued headsets, which members of the public were not provided. (Leon made a slight exception for the press, issuing two headsets to be shared among the several reporters present).

Without headsets, the public missed one of the most interesting aspects of the scene that the prosecution decided to show—the repeated use of racial slurs.

The 50-minute-long Milk Nymphos scene involves two white female performers, one black male performer, and a whole lot of milk entering and exiting various orifices. One of the female performers repeatedly refers to her male co-star as a "nigger," declaring, for example, "Come on you nigger, fuck me in the ass," and imploring the other female performer to "look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock."

Rarely has dialog been so central to the reception of a hardcore pornographic film. But are the epithets enough to convince jurors that the film's anal milk fountains "cross the line" into obscenity? If the prosecution was hoping the slurs would get a rise out of the jurors—11 of 14 of whom are black—it was unclear whether they succeeded. Although some of the jurors seemed to flinch at the epithets and a few removed their headsets well before the end of the film, there were few signals of outright disgust. After 50 minutes of milk play, the group generally looked more tired than scandalized.

Let's hope they got some rest: When the trial reconvenes today at 10 a.m., the prosecution promises to show significant excerpts from Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice.

Photo via Gravityx9, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Recently, I began re-watching The X-Files, a 90's television program about a fringe department in the FBI devoted to investigating "unexplained phenomenon"—paranormal activity, extraterrestrial life, government conspiracy, alien fetus contraband, and the like. Heading up the X-Files is Fox Mulder, a brilliant psychological profiler who has been marginalized in the FBI for his strong belief in all things paranormal; his partner, Dana Scully, is a medically-trained skeptic who acts as Mulder's foil (sexual tension abounds).

But in the middle of Season 2, Mulder comes across one unexplained phenomenon that he just can't bring himself to believe in: Rape.

. . . Okay, so it's specifically a rape committed by the invisible spirit of a septuagenarian Alzheimer's patient living in a retirement home ["Excelsis Dei," 1994]. Michelle Charters, an orderly at an assisted-living facility, contacts the FBI claiming that she was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by a resident while on duty. According to Charters' medical report and a self-shot video she provided to the FBI, "the abrasions and contusions here would be consistent with her claims," Scully notes, and the examination revealed "injury and tearing associated with sexual trauma."

Hmm . . . looks like someone made up a story to get out of work today.

But what's not explained by the medical report? Charters "claims to have been raped by an invisible entity," specifically the projected spirit of a long-time resident who had repeatedly groped and made sexual comments toward Charters in the past. Sure, the whole spirit-rapist thing sounds pretty unlikely, but this is just the kind of paranormal twist that, in nearly every other episode of the X-Files, Mulder would immediately believe, back up with evidence from several previous X-Files cases, and then aggressively investigate. This time, Mulder cites a couple of other X-Files documenting "entity rapes," notes that none have ever been substantiated, and is basically like, "well, fuck it."

Over the past season and-a-half, Mulder has instantly accepted the following explanations for otherwise "unexplained" crimes:

- a slain police officer with a penchant for origami animals is reincarnated as a 9-year-old suburban girl in order to exact revenge against his former partners (and complete his widow's origami animal collection);

- the spirit of a dying bank robber, shot by Scully in a botched robbery, assumes the body of another FBI agent in order to exact revenge upon her (and hook up with his ex-girlfriend);

- an extraterrestrial parasitic organism living deep under the Alaskan ice invades the bodies of Arctic scientists, leading them to all murder each other;

- the members of an Amish-ish community known as "the Kindred," who somehow have the ability to instantly switch from male to female, murder people with their superior powers of seduction (and bury dying members in the sticky residue of some sort of restorative cave);

- a criminal who Mulder helped capture in his first FBI case, presumed dead, is actually alive, killing people again, somehow growing younger, and now has a salamander hand;

- a centuries-old man who can stretch his body to inhuman lengths commits a series of murders in order to provide sustenance before returning to hibernate in a nest;

- a former alien abductee, with the help of a government conspiracy bent on dismantling the X-Files, kidnaps Scully and offers her up to the alien beings, who perform tests on her for an unspecified period of time before returning her to Earth in an unexplained coma;

- vampirism;

- a Vietnam veteran who, through a strange war experiment, was left without the ability to ever sleep, murders the surviving members in the company by projecting his violent dreams into reality.

But when a woman contacts Mulder and Scully and informs them that she was raped by an invisible spirit, Mulder's all like, "What, that's impossible!"

Pppphhhhhffffbbbbtttttt!!!

But Mulder agrees to go to the retirement home anyway, where he tells Charters that he can't go forward with her case without some kind of physical evidence, as if that has ever been necessary to Mulder's investigations before, ever. Then they go on a nice tour of the facility with Charters' boss, who tells Mulder and Scully that Charters is just a big whiner, and also the weirdest thing is happening at the facility where all the patients who used to have Alzheimer's magically don't have Alzheimer's anymore. Meanwhile Mulder is just farting his way through the whole process, telling Scully things like, "I think this is going to turn out to be a huge waste of time, just like all the other X-Files on entity rape," as she attempts to figure out WTF is going on in this facility, where all the Alzheimer's went, and how invisible people are raping (and now killing) all of the facility's orderlies.

. . . but what if she wasn't lying about being brutally beaten and raped?

Then Mulder tells Scully that they're leaving, checking out of their hotel, and heading back to Washington "with a big goose egg," and she's like, but, but:

Scully: What if there's a connection?

Mulder: Between the rape case and the Alzhemiers? You mean, when they're not drawing childlike pictures they're violent sex offenders? . . .  You think Michelle Charters was raped by a 74-year-old schizophrenic?

Scully: It's possible.

Mulder: . . . an invisible 74-year-old schizophrenic?

Scully: Well maybe it's not the medication. Maybe it's the place itself.

Mulder: Are you saying the building is haunted? Because if you are, I think you've been working with me too long.

Scully: I'm saying there might be an environmental reason for what's happening there . . .

Mulder: I think you're looking too hard, Scully, for something that's not there. I think that Michelle Charters concocted this story to get out of a job she hates.

Scully: Her lip required 13 stitches. The blood to her head resulted in a subdural hematoma. That's quite a concoction.

So Mulder is finally like fiiiiine, and they return to the retirement home, where additional shit goes down:

Spirit murder

Spirit flooding

. . . and so Mulder finally puts his Oxford-trained brain to work, immediately determines that a guy he refers to as "The Asian Orderly" has been growing illicit mushrooms in the old folks' home basement as some sort of medicinal treatment from "his home country," and the mushrooms were making the Alzheimer's go away and also helping the spirits of dead residents seek revenge against their former orderlies by . . . well, that part's not really explained, actually! But whatever, case closed—Mulder never needs any real evidence, anyway, as long as the case doesn't have anything to do with rape.

Turns out YMCAs were tagged as a cruiser's paradise long before the costumed boy band lampooned the health clubs' rep in the 1978 hit single.

The dirty secret was out at least as early as October 1964, when Walter Jenkins, a 46-year-old married advisor to and longtime buddy of President Lyndon Johnson, got caught in a sting operation blowing an older dude in a stall in the men's room of a Y just a couple minutes walk from the White House. (The actual club where Jenkins did his business has been rebuilt since he got stung.)

News of the sex bust didn't break for several days — turns out Jenkins on the day of his bust went straight back to work at the White House after his release from the police station, and worked past midnight as usual.

But, when the story broke, just weeks before election day, it broke big. One biographer said Jenkins became overnight "the most famous homosexual in America."

He resigned from the administration immediately.

Abe Fortas, a pal of Jenkins who talked him out of suicide after the arrest, reportedly told FBI investigators that, "It was common knowledge among Washington attorneys that the YMCA was the home of homos."

There was no political second act around here for Jenkins, who died in Austin, Texas, in 1985.

Some history-revising conspiracy buffs have said that Jenkins was actually busted at the Hay-Adams, and that FBI head honcho J. Edgar Hoover changed the official scene of the tryst to the YMCA to protect the hotel.

If so, I say: Good for Hoover. There's no way a tune called "Hay-Adams" would have played as well in the discos.

I just can't stop! I've got the madness! Let's sew up this bracket right now! FBI, CIA: Show me your men!

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION: My, how the tables have turned. Look who's on the other end of the interrogation table now, FBI! Do you have women working inside your workplace? We have ways of making you talk. Cue the Rage Against the Machine! Fire up the waterboard!—What's that you say? You publicly post your org chart on the Internet? My bad:

Director Robert S. Mueller, III (Male, 10 points)
Deputy Director John S. Pistole (Male, 9 points)
Associate Deputy Director Timothy P. Murphy (Male, 8 points)
Chief of Staff Lisa Monaco (Female, ZERO)
Senior Counsel to the Director W. Lee Rawls (Male, 6 points)
Special Counsel to the Director John Carlin (Male, 5 points)
National Security Branch EAD Arthur M. Cummings II (Male, 4 points)
Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services EAD J. Stephen Tidwell (Male, 3 points)
Human Resources Branch EAD Donald E. Packham (Male, 2 points)
Science and Technology Branch EAD Louis E. Grever (Male, 1 points)

Cleared of all charges! With 48 points of a possible 55, the FBI soars above mere manishness to achieve near manfection. Token female Lisa Monaco notwithstanding, the FBI proves it's got the gravitas to be a real contender in this race.

—

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: I spy, with my little eye, something feminine . . .

Director Michael V. Hayden (Male, 10 points)
Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes (Male, 9 points)
Associate Deputy Director Scott White (Male, 8 points)
Director of Intelligence Michael J. Morell (Male, 7 points)
Nat'l Clandestine Service Dir. Michael Sulick (Male, 6 points)
Science & Tech Dir. Stephanie L. O'Sullivan (Female, ZERO)
Director of Support "Under Cover" (Unknown, ZERO)
Center for Study of Intelligence Dir. Carmen A. Medina (Female, ZERO)
General Counsel John A. Rizzo (Male, 2 points)
Public Affairs Dir. Mark Mansfield (Male, 1 points)

Oh, "Under Cover," if only you made your gender public, perhaps you could have lifted your agency above its lowly station of simple "manliness" to true "very manliness." With just 43 out of 55 points on the manly index, a 78 percent manliness is hardly enough to register an international incident.

Photo by Matti Matilla.

So are anti-gay crimes on the rise? Or are they just being tracked and recorded better?