The day after the raid on the Rainbow Lounge the chief of police in Fort Worth accused patron Chad Gibson of groping one of his officers and insisted that Gibson was to blame for the violent raid:

"You're touched and advanced in certain ways by people inside the bar, that's offensive," he said. "I'm happy with the restraint used when they were contacted like that."

Gibson, hospitalized with a life-threatening brain injury when FWPD chief Jeff Halstead attempted to use the "gay panic defense" to justify the attack that put Gibson in the ICU, wasn't able to speak up in his own defense. But Gibson is speaking up now:

Gibson said he wants the officers involved in the raid prosecuted. He also called the response by the city of Fort Worth a cover-up. Although the city has asked the U.S. Attorney General to review the investigation, Gibson said he has lost all confidence in law enforcement.... "They have blamed it on me, that I was drunk [and] that I hit my head," he said. "I groped the officer. I did this. I did that. You know what, no ... Accept responsibility."

And Gibson isn't buying the FWPD's latest excuse: that it wasn't their officers who assaulted Gibson, but officers from the state's liquor agency, the TABC.

"Even if the Fort Worth Police didn't touch me, they watched it," he said. "They watched other people do that to me."

The raid on the Rainbow Lounge seemed like an anachronism, a return to a time when the police could harass and brutalize gay men and women with impunity. Back in the bad old days the police knew that the gay men and women they roughed up—and often shook down—couldn't defend themselves. Back when gay men and women could be fired or thrown out of their apartments or imprisoned for being gay, back when the vast majority of gay men and women were forced to live their entire lives in the closet, the police knew that someone like Chad Gibson wouldn't—couldn't—show his face on TV and tell his side of the story and demand the prosecution of the officers who assaulted him.

And that's perhaps the most mystifying aspect of the raid on the Rainbow Lounge. The police burst into that bar as if it were 1968, the year before the NYPD's raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if all the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without being assaulted too. The police didn't expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth's city hall. The police didn't even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It's as if the police in Fort Worth didn't know what decade they were conducting this raid in.

And not only is Chad Gibson speaking up for himself, and not only did the other gay men who witnessed the assault on Chad Gibson speak up, but Chad Gibson's mother and sister came to Gibson's defense in the days immediately after the raid. And that may be the best indication of just how inoperative the old rules are. Back in the bad old days—back before Stonewall—the police knew that the men in a bar like the Rainbow Lounge had either been rejected by their families for being gay or lived in terror of their families finding out they were gay. Under the old rules gay men swept up in bar raids couldn't come forward to protest police brutality because their families would see their names in the paper or hear them on the news. Back then our families—our mothers and fathers and siblings—were our enemies. Today they're our allies.

Until a week ago Saturday the police in Fort Worth believed the old rules were still in force. Gay men and women tore that rule book up forty years ago. Now they know.

UPDATE: A couple of folks in comments wonder why Gibson doesn't specifically deny groping an officer. This interview clarifies that point:

26-year-old Chad Gibson is left to nurse a head injury and his face is still healing from an incident he can't recall. "I was at the bar buying drinks for my friends and I. The next thing I remember is waking up in the ICU," Gibson said. "I'm just appalled that they took it to the level that they did."

Eyewitnesses—men who can remember the incident because they didn't suffer a traumatic brain injury during it—say that Gibson didn't grope anyone.