Here’s how a bunch of macho oil workers brought about legal protections from same-sex harassment
The 1998 Supreme Court case was a win for the LGBTQ community
Joseph Oncale signed up to work on a remote oil rig hundreds of miles offshore, in the Gulf of Mexico. Besides seven other male crew members, he would work a week straight before seeing another soul. It was difficult, isolating work. What he didn’t sign up for was sexual harassment. In fact, before Oncale’s case, the idea of sexual harassment among a group of men was not a legal concept that existed.
In October of 1991, his supervisor and another coworker began grabbing his genital area and buttocks, Oncale said. They called him “baby” and “termite.” After a while, the behavior worsened. As his coworker held Oncale down, their supervisor pulled out his penis and laid it on Oncale’s head. At various times, according to Oncale, the men would say, “Here boy, you know you can fuck this” or “You’re going to give it to me.” The next time, the supervisor put his penis on Oncale’s arm. They verbally threatened to rape him.
Oncale’s job was as roustabout, a position in charge of cleaning and general maintenance aboard the rig. “That’s about the lowest you can get on the totem pole,” Oncale later told ABC News. When asked why the men subjected him to physical harassment, he responded, “Because it’s dangerous, and you do want to know whether people will stand the heat, whatever it is. So you really want to test people.”
The next “test” came when the two men entered the stall where Oncale was showering. They pinned him and forced a bar of soap between his buttocks cheeks, near his anus. They threatened to sodomize him. “You know, but that’s not the terms they used,” Oncale remembered later.
Oncale managed to get away, and he reported the matter to their supervisor. A week later, he returned to the boat. Both assaulters were still there. Oncale still reported to the man who threatened to rape him.
Oncale eventually quit, and later stated it was due to his fear of being sexually assaulted. In 1994, he filed a formal complaint against his employer, Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., claiming that sexual harassment against him constituted “discrimination because of sex,” as termed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana held that “Mr. Oncale, a male, has no cause of action under Title VII for harassment by male co-workers.” The court never claimed that Oncale wasn’t harassed, but ruled that because it was men harassing men, it didn’t count. The plaintiff had no case.
Traditionally, a person’s sex was considered an important component in harassment cases, especially when the conduct in question involved proposals of sexual activity, wrote Sonya Smallets for the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. But gender was only a means of proving that sexual desire was present, and even then, only for persons of heterosexual orientations. In other words, the law implied that same-sex harassment effectively didn’t exist, or at least, wasn’t plausible. According to “the Court’s reasoning, such harassment presumably would not occur if the harasser and victim were of the same sex,” wrote Smallets. Though Oncale appealed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the circuit court’s decision.
Then in June of 1997, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Oncale’s arguments, after granting a writ of certiorari, a petition for a higher court to review a lower court’s decision. But early on in the proceedings, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist became “unusually blunt,” wrote The New York Times: “I don’t see how we can possibly sustain the holding,” said Rehnquist. “There is not the slightest evidence that Congress intended to federalize relationships between men and men,’’ countered Harry M. Reasoner, the defendants’ lawyer.
But on March 4, 1998, the justices unanimously reversed the lower courts’ decisions, ruling that same-sex sexual harassment is actionable under the law. Justice Antonin Scalia — not well known for gay rights advocacy — delivered the opinion. Just as nothing in the Civil Rights Act prevented a member of one race from claiming racial discrimination by a member of the same race, nothing in Title VII prevented a plaintiff from claiming discrimination by a member of the same sex. The law protected “any individual” from harassment “because of…the person’s sex.” It would follow that sexual harassment, or anything proven to contribute to workplace discrimination, followed the same rules.
In fact, sexual orientation should be deemed irrelevant, argued the Supreme Court, as harassment “need not be motivated by sexual desire.” As such, the Court did not require Oncale to prove that his harassers were homosexual. The fact that Oncale and his harassers were heterosexual was beside the point.
Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services delivered a surprising victory for LGBTQ rights, especially in regards to workplace equality. “Gays are probably the big winners in this decision, [which] opens the door to a flood of litigation that could convert existing sexual harassment doctrine into the rough equivalent of a gay civil rights law,” columnist John Leo wrote in U.S. News and World Report. The National Center for Lesbian Rights stated, “This decision means that workers who are harassed on the basis of their gender because they are (or are perceived to be) lesbian or gay are no longer automatically barred from legal protection under Title VII.”
In the end, however, the Supreme Court emphasized its ruling wasn’t to impose “a general civility code.” Appropriate, everyday socializing was not the issue. The intention was to forbid only behavior “so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment.” The court’s mission was to ensure people like Oncale merely had a right to present their case in the first place, then let a jury decide. His case was reinstated, but the parties settled under confidential terms in October of 1998.
After the Supreme Court ruling, critics argued that behavior like that on Oncale’s oil rig was just fraternal horseplay, harmless locker room antics that allowed men to assert their masculinity and dominance. It was natural, they said. “[I]f he’s getting picked on, it’s probably — he’s probably not worth the hair on either one of our backsides,” one offshore oil worker in Louisiana told ABC News. “And that’s — I mean, I got this guy pegged. I don’t know who he is. I don’t want to know who he is. But if them guys offshore are picking on him, it’s probably because he’s not meant to be out there in the first place.”
Others claimed that, whereas real men respected this code instinctively, women these days were too sensitive. No one could expect to pinch their rear end and get away with it anymore. One oil worker told ABC News, “I think most of the guys know better than to be jerking around with the women like that because the word is out. You treat members of the opposite sex unfairly or disrespectfully, we will get rid of you.”
In reality, the ruling officially opened an opportunity for men to prove they had been targeted by other men, based on their sex. In 1998, one teenage plaintiff argued that male coworkers had targeted him for wearing an earring, a perceived lapse of masculinity. Another laborer named Phil Quick in Des Moines, Iowa, alleged male coworkers constantly “bagged” his genitals at work. The term generally meant slapping the genital area, but in one case, Quick was pinned from behind while another man “reached into my groin and crushed my testicle between his thumb and fingers,” he claimed.
Indeed, just as women were beginning to feel empowered to speak up against sexual harassment in the workplace, men were too. And finally, sexual orientation in these matters was deemed irrelevant.
