The Lawyer Who Helped Make Fire Island Safe for Gay People
Benedict P. Vuturo (1921-1991)
By Virun Rampersad, November 2025
Many people believe that Stonewall was the turning point that transformed the Pines and Cherry Grove into places where gay people could finally live openly and without fear. While the 1969 riots and the societal changes they sparked were indeed pivotal, an event one year earlier—led by the Mattachine Society and a Long Island lawyer named Benedict (“Benny”) Vuturo—made an equally significant and more immediate impact.
In the 1960s the Town of Brookhaven’s police department had a shameful practice of raiding Fire Island’s gay communities and arresting men on vague “public indecency” charges, then publishing their names in local newspapers. At a time of rampant homophobia and virtually no gay rights, this cruel act had the effect of destroying people’s reputations and often getting them fired from their jobs and being disowned by their families.
Newsday Article 1965
As part of a plan to fight back against this harassment, the Mattachine Society retained Vuturo to represent men who had been arrested in these raids. Although he wasn’t gay himself, Vuturo believed deeply in fairness and civil liberty and accepted the engagement saying: “Civil liberties are civil liberties.”
Vuturo’s first opportunity came when 27 men were arrested in late August 1968. His defense strategy of demanding jury trials for every defendant proved highly effective. With his fierce and pointed cross-examination - “Please tell me precisely where you shone your flashlight and why?” — he embarrassed the police, making it clear their actions were nothing more than bigotry carried out at the expense of the safety of the communities they were supposed to be serving. He won every case and the raids quickly stopped. His victories were some of the earliest cracks in the wall of state-sanctioned persecution of queer people in America and helped make Fire Island a place where gay men and women could live freely.
Karl Grossman, who in 1968 was a reporter for the Long Island Press, covered the events. In 2018, 50 years after the trials, he wrote an excellent retrospective detailing the Mattachine Society’s strategy and how Vuturo went about defending the victims of police raids. You can read that engrossing account of LGBTQ+ history here: The Fire Island Raids: 50 Years Later
Karl Grossman. Photo courtesy 27west.com