Women and Children First, Guys

He said, he said: George Takei and Scott Brunton

My general feeling about all of these allegations of sexual harassment/assault is that if someone says they felt victimized, then they were victimized. (False accusations notwithstanding, obviously.)

I guess where I'm getting a little thrown off lies with some of the accounts where the accuser seems to have been talked into feeling victimized.

When I lived in L.A. a bar friend of mine (John) offered to help me look for a new apartment in West Hollywood. After driving around all day, we went back to his place on Doheny to call a few more listings. (This was 1991.) While I was on the phone with one of the landlords, I turned around to find John with his pants down, stroking his erect penis. I was not interested in John that way, so I proceeded to turn the other way to finish the call and pretended like it never happened. And that was that. Is there something wrong with me because I'm not traumatized by this? I had never given John any indication whatsoever that I was interested in him sexually, yet he exposed himself to me out of nowhere. Shouldn't I have had PTSD for six months afterward like the guy Kevin Spacey groped in a bar in L.A.? I didn't. I just brushed it off and went about my apartment hunt. The way I saw it, we were both single grown men and he gave it a shot and failed. (And who could blame him? :-) I have literally a dozen other similar stories -- letting a friend I wasn't into crash after a night of drinking and having him sniff around my crotch in the middle of the night, etc. -- and I'm guessing all of you do, too. But none of them made me feel like a victim.

I always thought queer people who were against marriage equality because it made us too "mainstream" were shortsighted (and kinda dumb). But I do worry that adopting heteronormative views on sex is a road we don't want to go down. For me, the best part of being a gay man -- and what helped offset the downside of homophobia and a shitty school experience -- is that we play by our own rules when it comes to sex. And let's be honest: if straight people knew the full truth about most gay men's sexual pasts --- the number of partners, the bathhouses, the backrooms, the bookstores, the sex clubs, the apps, etc. -- most would be mortified (and many of the men would be jealous!).

But if you read Harry Dreyfuss's account of what happened with Kevin Spacey, he admits it never really bothered him, and that he spent the past however-many years using it as a fun party story. But after the Harvey Weinstein revelations -- and maybe the revelations about his own dad(!) -- he realized he was a victim and should be upset. Is this a good thing?

The sister of someone very close to me attempted suicide years ago when she recovered memories of having been molested by her stepfather. She called my loved one (her younger sister) to tell her what was going on and asked if she too had been molested. My loved one said that she has vague memories of some odd things as a child, but that she doesn't remember being molested and that even if she had been, it would have happened several years ago, wasn't happening now and that it wasn't an issue for her. Her sister actually seemed annoyed that she had this take, almost disappointed that she wasn't eager to jump on the victim train with her. Is this a good thing?

All of this is to say that while I do not condone any forms of abuse, I hope we as gay men can keep things in perspective. I hope we are able separate what women go through -- the risk of rape, pregnancy and physical assault (and too often death) -- with the shenanigans of garden-variety gay men, which almost never rise to the same level of threat. As heinous as they can sometimes be -- if George Takei did what he's alleged to have it's obviously wrong -- to me they're kind of like the price of doing business in this special club we call the gay brotherhood.

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