The case before the Court involves a Louisiana man who claims that he was sexually assaulted by his male colleagues while working on an offshore oil rig. The American Civil Liberties Union, which joined Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in a friend-of-the-court brief, argued that same- sex sexual harassment is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits sexual discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

"Title VII prohibits harassment on the basis of sex," said Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU's national legal director. "The sexual orientation of the people involved, or their gender, is not the issue. The issue is harassment.

"The focus of sexual harassment cases should be on the offensive conduct," Shapiro added, "and not on the gender or sexual orientation of either the victim or harasser."

The brief was also joined by NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Women's Law Center, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and People for the American Way.

The case was brought by Joseph Oncale, a roustabout who was assigned to an offshore oil rig operated by Sundowner Offshore Services in the Gulf of Mexico. Oncale alleges that while stationed there in 1991, he was sexually assaulted, battered, and threatened with rape by two male supervisors and a male coworker.

Specifically, Oncale charges that two of his supervisors, John Lyons and Danny Pippen, repeatedly taunted him about sex, and on one occasion held him down while they assaulted him in the showers with a bar of soap. He quit his job shortly after the shower incident, and filed a federal lawsuit alleging both quid pro quo and hostile work environment sexual harassment.

Oncale's lawsuit was dismissed on summary judgment by a federal district court in Louisiana. In May 1996, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling, becoming the only federal appeals circuit to announce a blanket rule that same-sex sexual harassment is never actionable under Title VII.

The case presents novel questions for the Supreme Court in an area of the law that only dates back to 1986, when the Court issued its first ruling that sexual harassment is actionable under Title VII. In that decision, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the Court ruled that injecting sexual conduct into the workplace can create a hostile working environment that amounts to discrimination "because of sex" in violation of the federal statute.

The question for the Justices is whether discrimination "because of sex" -- a standard the Court adopted when the case involved a male harasser and female victim -- applies to sexual harassment between two men or two women.

Every other federal appeals court that has addressed this issue has said that same-sex harassment is prohibited by Title VII in at least some circumstances. For example, the Seventh Circuit recently ruled that "We have difficulty imagining when harassment of this kind would not be, in some measure, 'because of' the harassee's sex.

"[W]hen one's genitals are grabbed, when one is denigrated in gender-specific language, and when one is threatened with sexual assault, it would seem impossible to de-link the harassment from the gender of the individual harassed," the Seventh Circuit said.

The brief signed by the ACLU echoes the Seventh Circuit's reasoning, arguing that "it is the inherently gender-based nature of sexual harassment that brings the conduct under the purview of Title VII, no matter the respective sexes or sexual orientations of the harasser or the harassed employee, and no matter whether the harasser's intention are amorous or hostile."

"If the Court were to carve a Title VII exception for same-sex harassment cases, either because of gender or sexual orientation, many forms of workplace harassment would become immune from the law," said Shapiro. "The Court should rule that Title VII applies equally to all workers, regardless of gender or sexual orientation."

The case is Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, No. 95- 568.