Badpuppy Gay Today |
Monday, 02 March 1998 |
Following the use of a hidden surveillance camera by San Diego's KGTV for a news broadcast showing adult males (their genitals blurred) engaged in sexual acts in the restroom of a local university (SDSU) furious citizens from many walks of life are now rising up in protest. (See GayToday, Events, February 26). Keith Griffith, "cruisemaster" at the web site from which tearoom cruising information was gathered by KGTV, says he is "mad as hell." In an e-mail to GayToday and to other publications he wrote: "And now it is our time. As many of you know, my website… has been used by the news media during February sweeps month to improve local ratings. This form of "journalism" has involved bringing hidden cameras into public toilets for the sake of a story. Lives of men have no doubt been ruined as the police respond with sting operations. "It is time for those of us who value free speech and are offended to see how journalism has been reduced to sleaze for the sake of ratings points respond. What better way than to turn to the new medium that allows for the "average Joe" to take back control of the flow of information. "Hopefully these 'journalists' will learn that those of us who value our rights to suck cock take this matter very seriously." Angry viewers expressed their dismay over the KGTV Station Manager's excuses (again, see GayToday, Events, February 26) for having aired the sensationalistic tearoom scenes. These too were forwarded to GayToday: "No 'child' of yours in college would be affected by the activity you targeted, unless he were participating in it (his right), peering under toilet stall walls (I guess that's his right, too), or just couldn't find a toilet with an empty stall (in a word, pitiful). In fact, your college-age "child" would probably already know about such activity and how to avoid it, if that were his wish. "The activity was consensual and required a snooping TV station's disguised camera to be publicized. It harmed no one, unlike lurid publicity. The fact that you find it distasteful is no justification for sensationalizing it. Sweeps are, of course--at least from the perspective of clueless, ethically challenged news directors. Another angry viewer addressed KGTV: "... about your hidden camera in the SDSU bathroom: "1. If you had to hide in order to catch men having sex, were they really having sex in public? "2. In fact, that kind of activity stops whenever the participants hear the noise of the restroom door opening; it's not like you or I or anyone else ever walks in and sees anything we don't want to see; you have to HIDE to see it (or you have to be there obviously wanting to participate in it to see it). "3. This kind of activity takes place at every university in the world, at every interstate highway rest stop, at every truck stop, etc. Any man who has ever used a public toilet and glanced at the grafitti knows this activity takes place. Why don't you do a whole expose on all 100+ San Diego male-male "public" sex spots? "4. And finally, a journalistic question. There are at least a couple of definitions of news. (A) That which just happened. (B) That which people don't know about yet (and would want to know about). I'm perplexed on how your SDSU toilet story met either of these definitions since bathroom sex is as old as public toilets themselves and since anyone who's ever used a public toilet knows about it. "In the end, I think you were sensationalistic, I think you were gay-bashing (when are you gonna hide your cameras at hetero make-out parking spots?), I think you were pretending something was news that isn't news at all, and I think you, perhaps, were and are totally naive. [name deleted] Don Wells, KGTV's News Director reportedly responded to the foregoing questions by e-mail: "Answers to your questions: "1) We were hardly hiding. The producer we sent in was not hidden from view and was approached by those in the newsroom. Only the camera was hidden. "2) The reason we pursued the story was because the activity did not stop when we initially went to check it out. It was obvious and active in the middle of the afternoon. That's why we went back with a camera. "3) What makes this story different than the hundreds of others is that a web site exists to direct people to these restrooms, that the restrooms are at universities where the activity occurs in the middle of the day (a far cry from a truck stop), and that the university is fully aware of the activity and chooses to ignore it. Just because it happens a lot doesn't make an activity appropriate or acceptable. If attacks on gays happen every day across the country it doesn't mean we stop reporting it. "4) Of course it's NOT common knowledge that this is occurring in our university restrooms on a daily basis and that a web site is directing people to go there. You only have to read my e-mail to know that. And the several people who told me that they plan to call the university to complain about there( sic) attitude tells me that it fits your definition of news. "Finally, the story had nothing to do with the participants being gay. If we had found a web site directing "heteros" in the same way, we would have made exactly the same decision." In an e-mail letter to the university's president, Steve Weber, another San Diego resident made the following points: "I am very concerned about the recent Channel 10 undercover project in campus bathroom. A graduate student in sociology, I could never get Camille and the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects to ever approve of my doing for scientific purposes what reporter Kyung Lah has done, apparently with official approval and for who knows what purpose. "I am very disturbed to see ordinary students, staff or faculty depicted in print and in video while engaging in harmless, consensual acts they had every right to think would remain private. But I'm more concerned because acts such as these, which occur all over the city and all over the world, are problematized beyond credibility and are used to reinforce a normative sexuality which the university, as a bastion of modernism, really has no place doing. Any tabooed practice or "silenced" difference, as Foucault has argued, is most likely always to be either illegal or the basis for commitment. And an intrusion of the privacy and well-being of a person simply because what he or she is doing is illegal might not be justifiable, especially for an academic, because to do so is nothing more than to declare the status quo the Truth, the standard of morality, that which no one ever has any right or need to defy. "I would point out that public sex is not an unstudied area. And I would remind you that it is not intrinsically evil. In fact, as you know, ancient philosophers have held it to be a virtue. If the embedded risk in the activity is not the morality or the well-being of those who engage in the acts but, rather, the risk to those who happen upon it unsuspectingly, I would respectfully suggest that the University set aside a location where the acts may be completed out of the range of the unsuspecting. "Huge issues about sexuality and 'proper' social order are in question here. While it would be much more politic to overlook these huge issues and to just snicker at the guys in the bathroom, a man of a larger perspective would do something much grander. I urge you to do that grander thing. Steve Weber, President of SDSU, responding to these comments, is reported to have said: "We are examining what actions, if any, we might be able to take. Clearly the rights of the people involved were violated—I suspect, however they are not about to exercise those rights in a court of law. We are examining whether we might be able to take action as a University." Don Romesburg, Publications Manager for GLAAD and author/editor of GLAADAlert, has announced that he would appreciate receiving reports or "heads up" when local readers or viewers hear about or participate in a media report on a public sex raid (or series of raids, or whatever). "As you may know," Romesburg writes, "GLAADAlert has recently featured coverage of a number of heinous 'Perverts in the Park' stories in places like San Antonio, Kansas City, Little Rock, Wilkes-Barre, PA, and now San Diego. That way a letter-writing campaign mobilizes hopefully hundreds of our over 70,000 readers to respond to these media outlets. "In the worst instances, such as Little Rock, where a man committed suicide, GLAAD also tries to meet directly with the leaders of a media outlet in hopes of at least bringing some sensitivity to the coverage. "While letting us know about stories is helpful," Romesburg continues, "the best way to ensure action on our part is to pass along copies of tapes of TV news reports, or fax or e-mail print reports to us. Ones sent our San Francisco Media Resource Center ( phone: (415) 861-2244 fax: (415) 861-4893 e-mail: romesburg@glaad.org ) will receive the fastest action. In 1998, I wish we could be past this kind of 1960s reportage, but for now all we can do is keep chipping away at it." |
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