Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 4, 1993 TAG: 9304040052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
COLUMN NO WALK IN THE PARK D4 D1 SHAMY SHAMY
Two weeks from today marks four years since my ugly face and mean-spirited ideas started disgracing this page. Together we've strolled the gardens of racial discord and gun control, religious fanatacism and government corruption, goats and rhinos, crime, drug abuse, AIDS and homelessness.Of the 1,447 days since my first ink dried, the past 11 have been by far the most eye-opening.
I breached some unspoken boundary on March 24 when I wrote how unsettling and infuriating it was to be sexually propositioned while reading a newspaper in my car at Wasena Park.
I picked the wrong time in history, and the wrong place in the world to prick that gaseous bag of hatred and passion. I'd broken from some collectively imagined herd, abruptly cutting south when all the other wildebeests wanted to jog north.
I've been tagged with more labels than a stack of junk mail. Gay-basher. Homophobe. Woman-hater. Fascist. Paranoid. Sexually confused.
Most of these charges in letters and phone calls, in quintessential Virginia fashion, arrived anonymously.
Equally typical: Many readers have suggested that if I don't like what goes on in Wasena Park I ought to stay away. But that's an invertebrate's reaction - a spineless offer to adapt to the edicts of yet another conqueror. You cede and live with yourself. Me? I'll take a stand. I already avoid a long list of streets and businesses at various hours for my personal safety and peace of mind.
A public park? At 8:30 in the morning? You adapt to that without me, thanks.
Lost in the frenzied din are a few valid points.
A man wants to sit in his car and read a newspaper at the park. Other men drive by slowly and look. One stops and offers oral sex. Rebuffed, he asks if he might get some oral sex. On another day, it happens again.
Have I been drawn to this park, as one caller accuses me, because in some recess of my brain, I enjoy this sexual attention from other men? Am I paranoid, as one accuses, or am I keen enough to differentiate between a dreamy, people-watching park gaze and a checking-you-out leer?
Lots of topics spring from these brief park experiences. I could write about how pathetic it is that someone is reduced to trawling for sex partners in a park.
I could devote a column - or a book - to empathizing with women, who endure these indignities everywhere they go, every day they live, at the hands of sex-crazed men. Because I didn't write that, I've been branded a man oblivious to women's struggles, even a woman-hater.
I could have explored in writing how I might have reacted if the sex offer had come from a woman.
I chose to personalize what I wrote. I didn't write how being propositioned by a man is a blow to my masculinity and to my sense of self.
While women and blacks, short people and cripples are being told to stand proud and know themselves, men - and especially white men - are being told to be ashamed not so much for what they do but for what they are. We're a fractured society of loosely knit victims' groups. My whining about being a victim of an unwanted sexual advance was perceived as my feeble attempt to sneak into one of the groups.
What I wrote I intended as a comment on Roanoke's solicitation law, which is being steadily eroded in the courts.
As it stands now, the men who approached me are within their rights to offer, or ask for, oral sex. Many readers rushed to defend the men's right to offer, trampling on their way my right not to be asked. But "just say no," is not good enough for me, just as "just ask them to stop" is no longer the only protection offered non-smokers.
In short, what is legal is not necessarily decent. What is abnormal - forgive me my Neanderthal thinking, but offering oral sex to a complete stranger in a public park is not normal - is not necessarily illegal.
Two years ago, Roanoke chased out a vendor who was trying to sell Sno-Cones at Mill Mountain Park. Today, it'd be legal to stand where he tried to sell his ices, and offer sex to a passing stranger.
I don't pretend to have a solution; I'm not even sure there is one. The more you think about it, the larger it grows from a personal discomfort to an issue that encompasses the First Amendment and individual rights and - gasp! - individual responsibilities.
Most of all, I think, my biggest perceived gaffe was my failure to mention that not all gay men cruise the park offering oral sex. So absurdly obvious is that point that I didn't even think to make it. Did you notice I also forgot to mention that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West?
A trite, patronizing line about how some of my best friends are gay might have successfully bought off a posse of shallow thinkers. You want to read that pandering crud, there are plenty of publications around town to leaf through. Not here.
Here I try to be honest with you, cloaking complex issues that face us in words and stories that are easy, even enjoyable, to read.
To do that, I run with no herd.