MEMOIR- A COLLEGE SEX SCANDAL
How I researched and wrote my first newspaper front page story: Part 3
I was ridiculed for my news tip suggestion. I carried on anyway.
With this information I went back to the First-Year writing room and began typing out my story. I would submit it to the Second-Year students and the newpaper publisher and wait for their reviews. So far, the Second-Year students had not been kind.
I finished my travel budget story but it took a couple of story meetings with the second-years before I got up the nerve to submit it.
Although we first years hadn’t started invading the Endeavor yet, the classroom converted into a working newspaper office, we were starting to get published.
Once my hard-hitting SA story was submitted, it was accepted. Without comment. It was not returned with scrawled red pen with snarky comments. My story was published. For the first time I made page one, the page I would own for most of my second year.
More on that in a minute.
For that February 4 issue, I shared the front page with another first year, Deidre MacD, who’d written a Canadian Federation of Students story.
Deidre owned that issue. She had a second story that was much more explosive than the scandal I’d uncovered.
Deidre’s story resulted in a much-talked about page two story on a video game called Gal’s Panic. It became a college sex scandal.
I took the photographs.
Deidre came into the classroom- where I was working late and on my own- and asked if I had a camera. I did. Obviously this was in the days before cell phones. I kept a camera in my locker, which I was not supposed to do, it was flouting the rules. The college supplied classic-style 35 millimetre film Yashikas, which had to be signed out and turned back in at the end of the day. There were only so many cameras to go around and they were always in demand.
Deidre wanted me to take pictures for her. I said sure, if I could have photo credit. We each had a quota of photo credits to reach. Deidre agreed, told me the subject was a “pornographic video game,” in a video games room in the Cave. I fetched the camera and we walked down to the Cave.
The “Cave” was the massive room set aside for student recreation. A lot of tables, a kisok to buy sandwiches, drinks or snacks, and what I didn’t know- a video games room in a small room in the back.
I hadn’t known we had an arcade. It was in the far corner of the Cave, in a small darkened room behind a glass door. There were about a half dozen video game machines inside, like pinball machines. We looked for the one Deidre was interested in. It had the name, ‘Gal’s Panic,’ written on it. It had a recorded female voice calling out on occasion, “Come on, touch my body.”
Deidre explained: if the game was won, an electronic version of a cloth draping a picture of a female nude was removed and at each level the picture became more explicit. The player maneuvered a joystick controller that cut away pieces of a pesky digital cloth preventing a peek at the nude.
We discovered neither of us were much good at video games. When another student came in I asked him if he could play it. He said yes, we gave him our quarters, and he won a couple of games easily. There was a skill of sorts to it. The digital “saw” cutting away the digital “cloth” had to avoid gremlins. He cut away bits of cloth quickly, forcefully jamming the joystick hard to turn sharp corners, moving out of the way of these teeny little gremlins who could stop all efforts to get a peek at the female nude. Rude gremlins.
When he won, I took photographs of the resulting nude. The machine’s nude looked more like a painting of a female nude than a photograph of one.
When the newly printed papers came in with the story, I was on my way into the college when I passed Deidre walking with a friend.
“Sorry, Lawrence,” she called out. She explained she’d just seen the story and the photo credit read, “Photo by Deidre MacDonald,” instead of my name. She assured me she’d gone to Richard B, the instructor/publisher and told him to give me credit for my quota as I didn’t get photo credit for publication.
The video game apparently had been in the college for a year, with no complaints, but when Deidre’s article was published the whole matter became quite an issue, dealt with also in our editorial, asking the question, “Is our college making money off of pornography?”
Deidre and I didn’t hang out together. We had talked a few times. I recall sitting with her and Sandy M- our bearded McGill graduate and former tire salesman- once in the Cave. Deirdre was talking about being at a party and describing someone falling on a glass coffee table and breaking it.
I also recall her and I sitting alone once in the Cave, talking. I recall it as a fun chat. She described a date in Edmonton a relative had set her up with. He was a dentist or some other professional. She said he had the money and the style. He took her out to a fine restaurant and he ordered champagne or something similar, but she chose to drink beer out of the bottle. There was a few other touches to this story I can’t recall, but all carried the gist he was upper-crust filet mignon and she was down-home hot dog. She said he never asked her out again.
I recall one of her contributions in class on selling. She was working as a waitress and talked about how to serve wine and bump the customer up to more expensive wines. She worked at the Lodge, one of the main hotel-restaurants in town.
Once in the Endeavor, a number of us were working late, and she was talking about a women’s walk, Take Back the Night, a protest of violence against women. More than 100 walkers were expected, many to be carrying candles and signs. Men weren’t allowed to walk. I questioned that, wondering aloud if it were a protest against men or a protest against violence. Deidre also said men should be able to walk.
That was about it. She was a classmate. We’d talked, but we weren’t close.
It was in our second semester we began attending a once-per week critique classes each publication day, our first class with a mix of first and second year students analyzing the good and bad of the latest Endeavor edition. It was during this critique class we first got to know who some of the second-years were. We crowded in with the second-years in our first-year classroom with our four rows of 40 or 48 Mac Classic computers with the newspaper’s publisher, Richard B, a veteran instructor who led these critique discussions, everyone holding a freshly printed newspaper in our hands as we went through the pages, one by one.
I had no idea what the second-years were talking about at first as they critiqued each page. A typical critique might be, ‘We should have come up two picas on that column.’ So we first-years sat in silence listening. It took a while before I knew what they were talking about.
Anyway. We were critiquing the front page first- and my story was on page one.
My travel expenses story had been published on the front page and there were no comments from the second-years who had ridiculed my story suggestion. Here we were with a genuine explosive scandal.
If you want to be crass, there are two types of scandals that sell newspapers. Sex and money. In this issue we had both.
Richard B pointed out the positive aspects of my story during the critique: “He didn’t slam anyone or point fingers. He just gave the facts as researched.”
But whatever our publisher thought, I learned some Student Association members did feel slammed. Some former and sitting Student Association members became very angry, genuinely pissed, over my first news story. My first front page news story.
When student elections came up a couple of months later, one student in our department, a black woman in her mid to late twenties, Joy N, decided to run for SA president. Her main campaign theme was to reduce student spending on travel.
Well.
Historically at our college only about 10 per cent of students bothered to vote, but during that spring election Joy N became the focus of a storm of anger from some students. She was defended by others just as passionately.
That unusually emotive tone for our usually placid student body set the temper for our second year in college. By the time the lit fuse was spent, Joy N, a successful student with an impressively superior grade point average, would be removed from the SA presidency in disgrace. Her grades would tailspin. She would quit college just before graduation.
I wasn’t the only one to question how Joy would be removed and why- it was extremely damaging to her and her reputation- but it was a comment of Richard B’s that first zeroed in on a core issue, a secret hidden from us at that time, and from himself, too, I’m sure.
It was a secret I was to work on uncovering during my second year in college. That scandal- it was another sex scandal- would end up in provincial court where the college would fight a student tooth and nail.
But at this moment we knew nothing about a secret the college was hiding. We were just first-year peon journalism college students trying to figure things out. We were just happy our first news stories were published.
“People are asking why the college administration is bothering Joy,” Richard B would tell me in a hallway.
That’s what it looked like. Joy, only one of two black students in our Com Arts division, was under some serious flack. She had nearly been removed from the race for SA president. She was taking on unususal- it might even be called- hatred.
That view would also become part of a later class discussion I recorded when Joy later stumbled on something. A college secret. A big secret.
The college secret was hidden. Joy would trip over it without knowing what it was. It was huge. Like national news huge. And hidden.
And our college was confident no student would ever discover it.
