Gay Book Reviews

Order Peter Cashorali's Gay Fairy Tales: More Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men Today!

This is one of the best books written for gay men that I have read in a long time. The stories are at once familiar and relevant to the life of today's gay men. A friend used one of the stories to help his family learn about his HIV status.

Order Peter Cashorali's Gay Fairy Tales: Traditional Tales Retold for Gay Men Today!

The author takes familiar fairy tales and recasts them with gays in the starring roles: finally, a world where it's the gay man who finds love or fulfills his dream or solves the problem. The stories work well when read aloud, too. The sources of the tales are given, so that you can trace them. I believe that every gay man will benefit from reading these stories. This book and the one reviewed above would make a fine addition to any gay man's library.

Gay and Lesbian Issues

SUMMARY: The U.S. Supreme Court was able to affirm that sexual harassment is not dependent on gender or orientation -- and did so without concern about establishing a "general civility code" (Heaven forbid!).

"We see no justification...for a categorical rule excluding same-sex harassment claims," reads the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States issued this morning, affirming for the first time that sexual harassment in the work place by one person against another of the same gender violates Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The seven-page opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia (a conservative with perhaps the finest legal mind on the panel) makes no mention whatever of sexual orientation, which the Congress has never made a protected category -- and to the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Human Rights Campaign, the absence of orientation from the ruling appears to be a good thing.

Remarkably, if briefly, Justice Clarence Thomas -- who has extensive experience regarding sexual harassment .both professional and, famously, personal -- added a few words in the form of a concurring opinion, despite his stoney silence during December arguments. The court's decision allows non-gay Joseph "Jody" Oncale to proceed with his lawsuit against Sundowner Offshore Services, where he charges he was extensively sexually harassed, threatened and intimidated by his supervisor in the all-male environment of an offshore oil rig, charges that Sundowner and Oncale's ex-co-workers flatly deny.

The case had held both a threat and a promise for gays and lesbians -- a threat of witch-hunting investigations had the Supreme Court decided (as some lower courts had) that actions against a person of the same-gender could be considered sexual harassment only where one or both of the parties were lesbian or gay; and a promise of some modicum of protection from work place discrimination based on sexual orientation, which is entirely legal in 40 of the 50 states and under federal law (although it is in violation of the employment policies of federal agencies under the Clinton administration). The court chose something of a middle road between, on the one hand, outlawing all work place harassment of a sexual nature -- the outcome sought by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- and, on the other hand, emphasizing the "sex" in sex discrimination to the point of requiring the perpetrator's sexual orientation to indicate an actual attraction to the abused.

Ultimately, it was the "discrimination" in sexual discrimination the court insisted upon, saying that regardless of the genders involved (and not even to mention the sexual orientations involved), Title VII applies only when there is differential treatment based on gender -- and seriously abusive treatment, at that. As Justice David Souter noted during oral arguments in "Oncale," when Oncale's case is tried, his burden will be "to prove that individual defendants would not have treated women the same way as men and [that] the employer would not have condoned it with women in the way it was condoned with men."

Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Beatrice Dohrn expressed relief at the inclusive nature of the ruling, saying, "Had the court carved out an exception for same-sex claims, that would have had a great negative implication for gay rights." The Human Rights Campaign's Kim Mills enthused, "This is a victory for all American workers. We're pleased that the court understands that sex harassment is about power and that sex orientations of the people involved are irrelevant."

While absolutely opening the door to same-gender sexual harassment claims, the Scalia opinion is largely occupied with setting limits on what might constitute the basis for an appropriate claim under Title VII, regardless of the genders of those involved. There had already been great concern both within and outside the high court about the proliferation of sexual harassment complaints, and Scalia emphasized that complaints under Title VII had to reflect gender-based discrimination, not just actions "merely tinged with offensive sexual connotations." Scalia wrote that Title VII "does not reach genuine but innocuous differences in the ways men and women routinely interact with members of the same sex and of the opposite sex. The prohibition of harassment on the basis of sex...forbids only behavior so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the victim's employment. Conduct that is not severe or pervasive enough to create an objectively hostile or abusive work environment - an environment that a reasonable person would find hostile or abusive - is beyond Title VII's purview."

Seemingly responding directly to concerns raised by the Equal Employment Advisory Council, an employers group which had feared that opening Title VII to same-gender complaints would make the civil rights law "an unmanageably broad code of working behavior," Scalia rejected the notion that the clause would become what he called "a general civility code for the American work place." "That risk is no greater for same-sex than for opposite-sex harassment," he said, "and is adequately met by careful attention to the requirements of the statute. Title VII does not prohibit all verbal or physical harassment in the work place; it is directed only at discrimination because of sex. We have always regarded that requirement as crucial, and as sufficient to ensure that courts and juries do not mistake ordinary socializing in the work place - such as male-on-male horseplay or intersexual flirtation - for discriminatory conditions of employment."

Justice Thomas once chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency bearing the most responsibility for dealing with illegal work place discrimination (and an agency which was represented on Oncale's side of the current case), although his record there more reflected the Republican administrations' deregulation aims. It was allegations of misconduct during his tenure there, brought against him by Professor Anita Hill in the course of the confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court, which gave most U.S. citizens their basic education about the concept of sexual harassment. His concurring opinion said in a single paragraph that he joined the high court's unanimous decision "because the court stresses that in every sexual harassment case, the plaintiff must plead and ultimately prove Title VII's statutory requirement that there be discrimination because of sex."

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