In a plot twist nobody saw coming – really, nobody did – the gun-toting St Louis couple are reportedly homophobic
Mark and Patricia McCloskey once waggled guns outside their sprawling mansion as peaceful people protests racial inequality and police brutality. (Screen capture via Twitter)
A white couple who stood outside the Missouri, US, mansion and waggled guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, surprise surprise, once allegedly fought to exclude gay folk from moving into their manicured neighbourhood.
Shocked. Truly shocked.
In the inflammatory footage, a barefoot white man dressed in a pastel pink polo and blocky khakis rolled out of a marble mansion, clutching an AR-15. A barefoot woman joins him – wearing blocky black capris and a Breton top – as she grips onto a silver handgun.
The pair of personal injury attorneys, later identified as Mark and Patricia McCloskey, weathered intense criticism for their brutal, waspish threats towards peaceful protesters that seemed like it was a deleted scene from a Quentin Tarantino film.
They snaked around their estate, lined with hedges and chandeliers glistening in the windows behind them.
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St Louis couple clashed with neighbourhood trustees, who claimed they were anti-gay.
Based in Portland Palace, a palatial neighbourhood of upper tax brackets, the McCloskeys, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, often clashed with their fellow locals and evicted two tenants from a module home on their cavernous property in just two years.
They once sued the area’s trustees to demand they enforce neighbourhood regulations.One of the rules, listed in a document called the Trust Agreement, prohibited unmarried people from living together. Neighbours said it was because McCloskeys “didn’t want gay couples living on the block.”
Security personnel stand on the balcony the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey as protesters demonstrate against racism and police brutality outside their neighborhood on July 3, 2020 in St Louis, Missouri. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
As the McCloskeys unsuccessfully appealed the case all the way to the state Supreme Court, trustees voted to impeach Patricia, accusing her of being anti-gay in 1992.
Although, Mark sought to rebut claims. “Certain people on Portland Place, for political reasons, wanted to make it a gay issue,” he said during a deposition in 2002. Portland Place trustees sued the couple in 2002 to foreclose their house as they weren’t paying their neighbourhood dues.
Mark argued they weren’t paying the dues because trustees “weren’t doing something, which was their obligation under the Trust Agreement.”
Lawyers questioning McCloskey asked: “Was it possible the issue was the trustees were allowing a gay couple to live there?”
Mark said he didn’t know, before adding: “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.”
