On the night of Thursday, 10 September 2009, Atlanta police—vice squad plus the Red Dog Unit, the department’s SWAT-like drug team—hit the Atlanta Eagle after anonymous tips about drugs and sex on the premises. The bar, open since the mid-1980s in Midtown’s historic district, was the only leather bar for roughly 1,200 miles between Washington, D.C. and Wilton Manors, Florida, and a public room where the LGBTQ community actually met. Around 11:30 p.m., officers—later counts ranged from a citizen review board’s 24 for the initial raid to a lawsuit’s 48 that night—walked in and blocked the parking-lot exit. Sixty-two patrons were inside. No drugs were found. Nobody was caught in the act. Eight employees were arrested for “providing adult entertainment without a city permit”; arresting officers said four of them had been dancing in underwear. No patron was charged. Seven of the eight employees were later cleared; the eighth missed court and drew a bench warrant.
Inside the bar, officers used anti-gay slurs, threats, and actual violence. Patrons said the room was ordered to the floor, faces down, and that people were searched at least once, many twice. Anyone who asked a question was told to “shut the fuck up” and threatened with a beating. Multiple accounts heard “faggots” and “queers.” Witnesses heard an officer say, “Raiding a gay bar is fun, we should do it every week.” Patrons said they were kicked and shoved and cut on broken glass. In a 2010 investigation, officers said they searched patrons because they suspected some might be armed: undercovers had walked into the bar with concealed guns and had not been checked, so they decided other people might be carrying too. A leather bar’s lack of a metal detector became the excuse to put sixty-two men on the floor. The day after the raid, The Stranger reported a tip to Mayor Shirley Franklin’s office alleging illicit drug use. Queerty argued the real predicate was public sex. A later report settled on two anonymous complaints alleging illegal drugs and sex on the premises.
Community pushback was immediate. On 13 September several hundred people packed the bar’s parking lot. On 15 September State Senator Kasim Reed, then running for mayor, and City Council President Lisa Borders called for an investigation. A lawyer for the bar put the constitutional problem in one breath: police had come in for the least serious ordinance violation imaginable—dancing in underwear—then searched every customer and detained the room. On 19 September about a hundred people protested outside City Hall. In 2017 an Advocate list of notorious gay-bar raids put the Eagle next to the 1969 Stonewall Inn raid and the Black Cat Tavern raid.
On 24 November 2009 lead attorney Dan Grossman, with Lambda Legal and the Southern Center for Human Rights, filed Calhoun v. Pennington for 19 patrons, naming Chief Richard Pennington and 48 officers. It alleged constitutional violations, excessive force, and a raid without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Pennington resigned the same day; George N. Turner replaced him. On 10 June 2010 a citizen review board voted to recommend punishment for two officers who had arrested off-duty assistant manager David Shepherd in his upstairs apartment. On 9 September the board found that 24 officers had falsely imprisoned people and that abusive language was highly likely. It also flagged lead investigator Bennie Evett Bridges: 32 complaints since he joined APD in 1991. Eagle lawyers said police had withheld discovery—erased phone photos and video, and thousands of relevant pages. On 6 December 2010 the Atlanta City Council voted 14–0 to approve a $1.025 million payout into an escrow account held by Lambda Legal. APD had 180 days to investigate the raid and change procedure around how officers behave during raids and how they detain people.
In February 2011 Reed announced that the Red Dog Unit would be disbanded and replaced by APEX, with new supervisors and new LGBT training. On 28 June 2011 APD and the city’s outside counsel published their investigations. Internal affairs sustained dozens of procedure violations; six officers were fired; others took suspensions or written reprimands. Both reports said officers had violated patrons’ constitutional rights and that anti-gay prejudice had played a role. More suits followed: Burkes v. Reed for ten more patrons, an October 2011 $120,000 settlement with eight employees, and a March 2012 $330,000 settlement with those ten plaintiffs. Combined with the original $1.025 million, the city paid well over a million dollars for one Thursday night.
The paperwork did not hold. On 17 March 2015 Grossman filed a contempt motion: in 2013 APD had rewritten procedures and stripped out language the 2011 orders had required. On 5 May the city’s lawyer admitted APD had not fully complied. Judge Timothy Batten gave the department 90 days to retrain all 2,000 officers. On 19 May he found the city in contempt and let Grossman oversee compliance. APD produced a one-hour training video every officer had to watch and a quiz they had to pass. In 2020 the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation put the Eagle and Kodak buildings on its Places in Peril list, and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms started landmark designation that would have made the Eagle the first protected LGBTQ landmark in the Deep South. Stonewall is the raid everyone knows. The Atlanta Eagle is the raid leather Atlanta still lives with.
