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"Let me get this straight - am I the opposite sex or is she?" a boy once asked during a grade school health class. On an Indian summer, Seattle morning not many years ago, I began to ponder the innocent query in a more sober light.
My attorney and I strode quickly toward the King County Courthouse and into one of America's first reverse sexual harassment trials. The frenzy over the coinciding Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings spilled over, fueling an unwelcome media onslaught my way, too.
For the hundredth time, I tried to weigh the impact of the Hill-Thomas fallout on my own quandary. And, for the hundredth time, I came up with little more than an aching gut. I did know that from this moment forward, I would never be viewed quite the same.
Other than a brush with jury service, Perry Mason re-runs, and a modest repertoire of lawyer jokes, this was the closest I'd come to the law, and it gnarled old notions. A peeping throng lined the Courthouse steps on the way to Judge Pechman's eighth floor justice parlor. Some of the reporters and cameramen we pushed past, I had worked with during my fourteen years of developing the City of Seattle media program. Some were clearly baffled.
"How the hell did it get this far?" one of them yelled.
I didn't answer, but I wondered, too.
It began with little things
From the time she arrived, I sensed little warning signs - odd things like being asked to travel to Oklahoma as her reunion date. Initially, I shrugged them off. But over the months, the signs grew more threatening - never a physical threat, like women describe, but a threat, nonetheless, that can cut a man to the core - the threat to career. Her strange, intrusive, and raunchy behavior progressively poisoned my workplace and beyond. With mounting frustration, I tolerated her phallic playthings, her flashing, and her endless and boundless assaults on my privacy for years, unsure of how City Hall might react to its disclosure. By the time my wife spotted the middle-aged, public relations manager hunting for real estate in the shadow of our remote, island home, I knew the moment had come to find out.
"Sexual harassment!" the Personnel Officer insisted, an opinion soon shared by the official city arbiter of such things - the Office for Women's Rights.
I shrank from the diagnosis. Christ! A women's issue! As I grappled with the nuances of this risky predicament, I shuddered over the role reversal sideshow I envisioned. On the list of serious guy things - sex, heart attacks, draft notices, prostate exams and sporting events designated by Roman numerals - charging your boss with harassment definitely missed the cut. I had buddies who reminded me of their own lifelong ambitions to be harassed sexually.
"Just a few more loose women on the planet is all I ask," one pal would pine.
More than macho pride
Guys confront. We go to war, but sexual harassment was far from the usual battle cry. Department morale, however, had already begun a free fall in reaction to a new management team widely perceived as terminally sophomoric. After much reflection, I decided my job meant more to me than macho pride. Ironically, blowing the whistle was the gutsiest thing I had ever done, but I doubted many would see it that way. In a culture where the model of manhood hardly extended beyond the image of the priapic mouth-breather, who fantasized endlessly about the more prominent virtues of Pamela Anderson, there was little room to stretch.
But, this was Seattle - a progressive, civil, and sensible community, with a mostly female, sexual harassment-savvy, municipal workforce. I asked for little - a discreet investigation, and an apology - no lawyers, no lawsuits, no publicity. With a long, Emmy-winning, public service career, and a wife newly honored as a State Teacher of the Year, surely I could expect that much I reasoned. City lawyers reasoned otherwise.
"How can a male object to female attention?" chided the Emerald City's legal staff, as they readied for a non-negotiable, seven-year brawl through the courts. Suddenly, City Hall's mantra of tolerance and inclusion, of "sexual harassment isn't about sex, but abuse of power," faded. With dizzying speed, I had gone from insider to infidel clearly because of sex - being the opposite sex to be exact.
"You're a guy," replied the keen-eyed Deputy Mayor to how the city had allowed a minor personnel issue to spin so out of control. He seemed unfazed by the cynical hypocrisy of those words even as they spelled the loss of the city's popular flagship department, its media program, and its most forward image.
I hastily hired an attorney - a touted labor whiz. He called the case "a slam dunk." That City Hall would ignore its own investigative report, the mediators, a court injunction and the potential publicity, amused him. Equality under the law, he insisted, meant exactly what it meant. I wondered.
Law, or pop feminist politics?
Some say when you don't have the facts you argue the law, and when you don't have the law, you pound the table. I braced for City Hall's table pounding, and just hours before trial, the racket began. After years of stony silence, city officials now preemptively leaked their spin to the media. In fine flailing fashion, they trivialized and polarized the conflict, fanning the gender war for cover. The press bit, and the courtly tones of Civil Rights Act and personnel code violations, of whistleblower retaliation and cover-ups, had been reduced to talk of resentful men and assertive women, of dirty toys and dirty tales, and harmless "funnin'".
"It's about time we got a man!" one lady crowed during a radio talk show.
"Women have no power to harass," some blindly rationalized.
Others snickered.
Entering this legal no-man's-land, I kept hoping that justice was more than a pendulum thing - more than someone else's turn to try out civil rights. Still, fighting for my career under a principal quaintly called the reasonable woman standard, didn't inspire much confidence. I could imagine the reaction if a gay or a minority were obliged to adjudicate his or her rights under a similarly ridiculous reasonable straight person or reasonable Caucasian standard.
The court years provided me a harsh view of a system I'd always taken for granted. I never imagined key evidence, like the one and only investigative report, could be banished from a trial so capriciously - or that a judge could see fit to dissolve injunctive protection after a jury found the defense had continued to retaliate - or that legal opinions could be rendered as unpublished as a way to sweep bad precedents under the rug. Slowly, I realized maybe the law wasn't what it seemed - maybe the Anita Hill-ClarenceThomas matter wasn't either.
The jury returned a split verdict - insufficient evidence of sexual harassment, but more than enough on retaliation. I knew Judge Marsha Pechman's burial of the investigative report was pivotal - a belief the jury would confirm. If only they'd been privy to that official inquiry, jurors told interviewers, they, too, would have found what other neutral observers had - a City Hall liable for sexual harassment.
And so, after falsely claiming to the court and the press that the defendants had been fired, after axing an entire department in a ruse to sidestep a work protection order - a ruse that simply transferred all orphaned staff elsewhere, but for the whistleblower, City Hall moved on. In the wake of the destruction, this same city crew jumped to the fore to champion other civil rights causes all over the West, preaching the lessons of Anita Hill and better workplaces, everywhere.
"I guess you and I are just out-of-favor folks" an Andy Griffith-esque United States attorney suggested to me as I left the Courthouse one evening.
He said little more, but the revelation that after two hundred years the grand principle of equality under the law might be more a question of fashion, a question of pop culture and politics, pierced like a dagger.
Soon after trial, a best selling writer began a book about a Seattle man sexually harassed by his boss. As groundbreaking as it was, it was still another superficial Hollywood caricature of a serious problem. When Warner Brothers contacted me to help promote the ensuing film, Disclosure, I passed, still raw from the carnival stage I'd been on.
The spotlight often felt searingly lonely, especially the more I realized how few would have chosen the path I took - to blow the whistle on a popular City Hall, over an issue few understood, while remaining in the workplace as an easy target. But, I wasn't alone. Congressmen, Church Councils, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and family stood with me. The Giraffe Project, a world betterment organization, even added my name to its honor roll for "sticking [my] neck out for the public good," ironically, joining the likes of Anita Hill. Ultimately, however, no appeal was enough to end this municipal disgrace.
"It's only one case," a senior editor for a women's magazine alibied afterward.
"City Hall got too far downstream to do the right thing," one of my adversaries confided in a moment of candor.
Meanwhile, "Men just don't get it" headlined a local editorial on the sexual harassment epidemic. How we missed a chance to bring this full circle! Yes, I got stiffed just like other out-of-favor folks before me. But, I gained an understanding, too, about the principle that counts most - the one about being true to yourself. I hope to pass this on to my own young son, along with the idea that civil rights should never be taken for granted. The more we treat justice as a perk of politics and pop culture, the more our inalienable rights become a little less inalienable for those out-of-favor - those one might consider the wrong race, the other creed or the opposite sex. On my day in court, no one argued the law did not apply - but then, no one had to.
What do you think? Talk about it on the Equalitarian Discussion Board.
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