When I was a Boy a Man Wanted Me to Touch His Penis

— OR—

“All Bathrooms Are Risky for Kids”

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“Matchitehew” is the label an Algonquin tribe would give to pedophiles and sexual deviants. It means “one with an evil heart.” And if you were a matchitehew you would be driven from the tribe, escorted into the callous wild where God’s eyes do not abide.

The Algonquin and the Apache share ancestry. The only reason I mention this is that, when I was a small, small boy (maybe second grade) my mother brought me to Apache Plaza in New Brighton, Minnesota — a poorly lit mall that somehow made our money sad. I doubt mom bought anything.

Before leaving, my mother brought me to a men’s room to use the urinal.

“I’ll wait right here,” she said, and watched me disappear around the privacy walls of the men’s room entrance. Inside, along the right wall, were two urinals followed by two toilet stalls (each stall enclosed by elevated walls). Along the left, on the opposite wall, were sinks and a long mirror.

I unzipped and stood in front of the lowered porcelain receptacle, wielding my urinating penis like a Jedi Master, swinging the stream to the left, then to the right, and attacking the urinal deodorant cube as boys do.

As my light saber was losing power, my mind began transitioning from the dimension of my imagination — the easy and powerful realm of play — back to the mundane reality of the mens room. What pulled me back was a voice. An urgent voice that echoed softly in the concrete chamber.

I think the voice said: “Hey!”

With my pants zipped up I went to the sink, like a good boy, to wash my hands. Again, the voice:

“Pssst!”

It was strange because I had assumed I was alone. In the mirror I could see the entire bathroom and there was only emptiness. But I heard it again:

“Pssst!”

It was only when I physically turned around, and could look down, below where the mirror could see, that I saw him. He was in the second stall. The stall door was closed, but he was kneeling on the floor in the opening beneath the stall door. With one hand he was inviting me to him with his finger. With his other hand he held his pants so that he could reveal his penis to me. And I remember it vividly still to this day. I remember its semi-erectness, its color, and how it hung between his legs as if it were a god he was kneeling in worship to.

He was a predator in waiting, and I was his long awaited prey. He was a spider, the men’s room was his web, and I was a naive young fly. But I didn’t understand any of that at the time. I was younger than sexual desire, and younger still than understanding perverted sexual desire. To me he was simply a strange, disturbing person, and my instinct, like that fly who first senses the presence of webbing, was to flee.

So I ran to my mother and told her things I didn’t even understand, and explained to her what a child can’t explain. But she understood. At first she considered going in after the man, but elected to bring me to a security officer instead.

This was the early 1980s. If this event were to happen today, there’d probably be helicopters and SWAT teams, and maybe news crews to heap shame upon the poor man. But in the 1980s, like the Apache, a security guard simply went in and escorted the man out of the mall and back into the wild.

Of course, in our modern life, there is no real wild. There is only tribe attached to tribe. So, the man was simply nudged out of the building into the sunlight to find a new place for his sad little web.

It does bother me a little that nothing was done to him, that he faced no real consequences. But, at the same time, society tends to overreact to these things nowadays. We make far too big of a deal about it. This is not to diminish the trauma of sexual abuse. To the contrary, sexual abuse is very traumatic. I mean, in my case, the guy never even touched me and I never touched him. Yet even now, some 30 years later, I feel a compulsion to look under the toilet stall walls before using the urinal. And sometimes, if the wrong characters are around, it can be a challenge to actually urinate. I just stand there like an idiot, frozen in my lame, pseudo-PTSD. How stupid!

So I gush with compassion for those boys and girls who were not able to escape; who were pulled in to the dumb erotic moments and silly sins of gross adults; adults tormented in the desperate fog of their compounded moral failures. I mean, I simply saw a man exposing himself, and I still get all weird sometimes. The internal distress and toil of kids more seriously violated is exponentially greater.

But, for the sake of victims, I think we should resist the temptation to catastrophize sexual abuse. Sometimes, with intent to discourage and shame sexual predators, we paint far too grim a picture of how much sexual abuse will destroy a victim’s life. The problem is, the more we puff up the consequences of sexual abuse, the more powerless we make victims feel in the face of their own symptoms. Good gawd, watch the movie “Mystic River” and you will walk away believing that, if you are sexually abused, your life is over! You will never be normal again! But your life is not over. The reality is, kids who are sexually abused get over it. They adapt and even thrive. The human spirit is too resilient for something like sexual abuse to defeat.

Sexual abuse is unacceptable. I am not saying we should trivialize the immorality of the abuse. Nobody should have to be violated the way sexual abuse victims are. But neither should anyone be made to feel powerless when they are not.

What made me remember this incident was the debate about which bathroom transgendered people should use. Conservatives make the case that having a transgendered person in the wrong bathroom is a danger to children. Why? Because transgendered people are seen as perverts, or people who are ill. As a child who has experienced inappropriate sexual advances from an adult, my opinion is this: all bathrooms are risky for kids. Having shared bathrooms (as they have right now in Paris) does not change this reality.

But does allowing transgendered people into bathrooms increase the risks? Is transgendered behavior symptomatic of an illness? Is it a type of sexual perversion? I don’t know. Maybe it is all of that. I don’t think so, but maybe. Here’s the thing, though: if it is a perversion, or an illness, it doesn’t trouble me. Why? Because it is so self-oriented — it’s primarily about the transgendered person’s own identity. It’s in no way inherently predatory.

If it should turn out that transgendered-ness is an illness or perversion, it seems to be primarily about, at worst, attention seeking. So, even assuming transgendered behavior is depraved or sick, just as you shouldn’t worry about a narcissist committing suicide, you also shouldn’t worry about a transgendered person sharing a bathroom with your child. That is, exercise equal caution and worry as you would exercise for a non-transgendered person if they should be in the bathroom with your child.