Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis personal injury attorneys who infamously pointed guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters outside their mansion last month, once allegedly fought to exclude gays from their ritzy neighborhood, Portland Place.
The McCloskeys sued Portland Place’s trustees, demanding that they enforce neighborhood rules known as the Trust Agreement, including one that prohibited unmarried people from living together. The couple unsuccessfully appealed the case all the way to the state Supreme Court.
“Several neighbors said it was because the McCloskeys didn’t want gay couples living on the block,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Friday evening in an exposé about the couple’s disturbing history.
“The trustees voted to impeach Patricia McCloskey as a trustee in 1992 when she fought an effort to change the trust indenture, accusing her of being anti-gay,” the Post-Dispatch reported. “Mark McCloskey clarified in a deposition much later that the trust agreement barred unmarried people living together, regardless of their sexuality. ‘Certain people on Portland Place, for political reasons, wanted to make it a gay issue,’ he said.”
Mark McCloskey made the statement in a deposition after the Portland Place trustees sued the couple in 2002 to foreclose on their house, because they weren’t paying their neighborhood dues. He said in the deposition that the couple had declined to pay the dues because the trustees “weren’t doing something, which was their obligation under the Trust Agreement.”
The lawyer questioning McCloskey asked, “Was it possible the issue was the trustees were allowing a gay couple to live there?”
Mark McCloskey responded that he didn’t know.
“I know there has been an ongoing issue about the definition of single family in Missouri law, and that the (agreement) calling for exclusively single family residences wouldn’t allow, technically, unmarried heterosexual people to live on Portland Place,” he said.
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