THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501150122
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Readers can get uncomfortable when newspapers tackle tough topics, especially when the subject is sex.
As a culture and a community, we do not know how to talk directly and frankly about human sexuality. Instead, from playgrounds to pay-TV, we talk dirty. Or we don't talk at all.
We mystify and glamorize and demonize a powerful part of our natures.
And we pay a huge price, as individuals and as a society.
In 1992, 17,245 teenage Virginians got pregnant; 518 were younger than 15. A recent national survey reports that at least four out of five teenagers have had sexual intercourse.
About 6,000 Virginians have AIDS; 3,474 have died from AIDS. Nearly 6,600 have the HIV virus that causes AIDS.
In 1993, 2,084 women reported being raped in Virginia. More than a third of those rapes took place in the five cities of South Hampton Roads.
In the workplace, companies must invest in sexual harassment training because men and women don't share the same set of rules.
It's time we talked.
Today through Tuesday, The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star will examine these issues in the series ``The Subject is Sex.''
Much of this series is built around four community conversations - one each among teenagers, heterosexual men, heterosexual women and homosexuals of both sexes.
Thirteen of these participants gathered again for a conversation that will be broadcast at 1 p.m. Wednesday on WHRV, 89.5-FM. That broadcast accompanies a seven-day series beginning today on National Public Radio's news programs.
We collaborated with WHRV to reach more people in different ways and to use these conversations to stimulate a larger dialogue throughout Hampton Roads.
``The sex series seemed to be a challenge worth taking up,'' said Tom Warhover, the Pilot's public life editor, who supervised our project.
``We could do what national radio could not: describe how people here understand sexuality and how it influences public life in Hampton Roads.''
NPR zeroed in on sexuality as ``a good example of something we had kind of danced around,'' said John Dinges, executive director for the series.
``The idea behind all these series is to find cutting-edge social issues that people at the community level have to grapple with and make decisions about, as opposed to, say, foreign affairs,'' Dinges said.
We asked readers to volunteer to join these conversations. Finding homosexuals willing to speak about sex - with their names and photographs in the newspaper - was hard. Many feared repercussions.
Kimberly Burns, the chair of the Hampton Roads Lesbian and Gay Pride Coalition, asked 30 to 40 people to participate. Most declined. The nine who accepted our invitation still worried about backlash.
``Even as I sit here, I'm wondering, `Who is going to have my address?' '' said Hope Damon, a psychotherapist. ``I don't want my house firebombed. . . . These are realities to us.''
Geneva Overholser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The Des Moines Register, believes that when newspapers fail to write directly and frankly about sex, it feeds ``our national hypocrisy about sex-related matters. . . .
``It is precisely this sort of sensitivity that keeps us in the dark as a society, prevents our changing and precludes our addressing our problems adequately.''
It's time we talked. by CNB