Joseph Oncale was assaulted and threatened with rape by his straight oil rig co-workers. Now he’s suing for sexual harassment. DOROTHY ATCHESON meets the heterosexual man whose thorny legal battle hits the Supreme Court in December.

OUT in the Gulf of Mexico, on an oil rig due south of New Orleans, a crew is relaxing in its quarters after a backbreaking 12-hour shift. As night descends and the ocean surges against the bottom of the platform, a roustabout steps into the shower to wash off the day’s grime. Suddenly, a co-worker grabs him from behind by the back of the knees and bends him up off the floor, while another threatens to rape him. Terrified the roustabout kicks and struggles, finally breaking loose and running away.

A scene cut from Deliverance? A pas­sage from a Genet novel? No, the above sequence comes from actual court documents in Joseph Oncale vs. Sundowner Offshore Ser­vices, Inc., a case that will be argued in December before the U.S. Supreme Court, the first hearing granted to the issue of same-sex sexual harassment. Joseph Oncale, 27, a hetero­sexual, married Louisiana oil rig worker,

alleges in his court case that he was ver­bally demeaned, touched sexually, and finally assaulted in the shower by his heterosexual supervisors, while his com­pany, Sundowner, did nothing to stop or punish them. The defendants deny the bulk of the charges. Though the incidents took place between August and November 1991, Oncale has yet to see justice. He was first stymied by the bureaucratic Equal Employment Oppor­tunity Commission, where his case was

held up for nearly three years without a response, and then by both the Louisiana District Court and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which dismissed his claim in 1996 on the grounds that the law does not recognize same-sex sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment, and the tangle of terminology that attempts to define it, just might be the most murky and controversial subject ever to hit the Amer­ican legal system. Brought to the pub­lic’s attention most prominently less than a decade ago, in October 1991—when Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas were duking it out before the Senate Jud­iciary Committee on Thomas’ suitabil­ity for the U.S. Supreme Court (an event that coincided with the Tailhook scan­dal)—sexual harassment complaints have since exploded across the Amer­ican landscape, surfacing in every type of environment, from the armed ser­vices to corporate offices to universities (and elementary schools) and even to the White House.

Although a complex set of guide­lines exists to help the courts decide opposite-gender cases, same-sex cases don’t fit easily into the rubric, and circuit courts around the country have been divided, delivering a variety of answers to same-sex cases, from dismissing them outright to making decisions in some cases only when it can be shown that the harasser is homosexual. The Supreme Court’s eagerly anticipated decision on Oncale will not just affect whether or not Oncale himself can finally go to trial but will hopefully provide some guidelines for deciding his case, as well as the hundreds of other same-sex sexu­al harassment cases—many involving gay men and lesbians—that have clogged the U.S. court system since 1994. When one considers that merely making offensive comments or quoting an off-color Seinfeld joke to another employee has been grounds for legal action in certain opposite-gender sexual harassment cases, the fact that Oncale has gone six years without even a hearing is unconscionable.

“Jody” Oncale grew up in tiny Mt. Hermon, Louisiana—in the rural north of the state, near the Mississippi bor­der—and still lives there today with his

wife, Tracy, 24, and two young sons, Joshua, two, and Zach, six months. In the couple’s comfortable brick house, abutted by a peach orchard, evidence of the children is everywhere, from the walls adorned with professional baby photos to the Winnie the Pooh blanket draped over the sofa and the multicolored plastic jungle gym on the lawn outside.

The town, if you can call it that, consists of an elementary school, a Baptist church, and a small cluster of houses on a remote country highway that weaves through forests and fields of grazing dairy cows, past the occa­sional dead armadillo. The Sunflower supermarket is a good 20-minute drive away in Franklinton, where Oncale went to junior high and high school, and where the run-down three-block retail thoroughfare has definitely seen better days.

A die-hard Ozzy Osborne fan, On­cale is an easygoing guy with a G.E.D. and a certified welding degree earned at a local technical college. He is also notice­ably small for a man—five-foot-four, 140 pounds—and though muscular, he’s lean and wiry. Oncale married his first wife, Rachel, when he was just 19. The two were members of the local Pentecostal church, and were close to Rachel’s fam­ily, who also lived in the area.

It was August 1991 when Oncale, then 21, took a $7-per-hour entry level position as a roustabout with Sun-downer Offshore Services, a Houston-based company contracting to and pro­viding crew members for a Chevron oil rig off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. “I was looking to start with a good company and go to the top,” he explains now.

The work is hard, to be sure. Far out to sea on an iron island of constantly moving machinery, the environment is loud, rough, windy, and stressful. A drilling platform runs 24 hours a day, maintained by two separate crews of about eight men each. Each crew works a 12-hour shift, then rests for 12 hours on a separate residential platform while the other crew takes over. The schedule is seven days on, seven days off, at which time the guys are replaced by a new set of workers and return by helicopter to tiny mainland outposts along the outer reaches of bayou country. There oil refineries and facilities dot the swampland, white herons wade lumi­nously against a backdrop of bright green algae and marsh grass, and the winding roads are dominated by the sturdy four-by-four pickups of rugged men—mostly riggers and recreational fishermen—whose nylon-mesh base­ball caps sport the logos of industrial supply companies.

Almost immediately upon being hired, Oncale says that he was verbally abused by his supervisor, John Lyons, who regularly cursed at him and the other two roustabouts on his crew, call­ing them SOBs and more. Though cussing is a commonplace offshore, On­cale says Lyons was especially virulent toward him, and soon the cussing took on sexual overtones. “You know, you got a cute little ass, boy,” Lyons would alleg­edly jeer threateningly, sometimes reach­ing out to grab Oncale on the butt.

According to Oncale, one day in late October, Lyons and another super­visor on the rig, a driller named Danny Pippin, attacked Oncale on a boat ride from the drilling platform to the resi­dential one. At the back of the boat, in sight of several other crew members, Pippin grabbed Oncale and held him so he couldn’t get away, bending him over double while Lyons pulled his penis out and poked it in the back of Oncale’s head. “[Lyons] said that he was going to ‘fuck me in my behind,’” Oncale claimed. “I kept struggling and finally got loose and asked him to please quit, don’t do that shit.” Lyons and Pippin just laughed.

When Oncale reported the inci­dent to his safety compliance clerk, Valent Hohen Jr., one of the top supervisors on the rig, Hohen counseled him not to “feel bad,” because he too was taunted by Lyons and the others, who would call him “Valene, Valene the Rig Queen.” The next day, after the 12-hour work shift was over and a crane was transporting Oncale in a personnel basket from the boat onto the residential platform, a six-foot, 245-pound roughneck named Bran-don Johnson allegedly pulled Oncale out of the basket and restrained him against the platform while Lyons placed his penis on Oncale’s arm. It was later that night, in the residential platform’s tiny living quarters—which consisted of two bunk rooms separated in the middle by a com­munal bathroom containing one sink, one small shower, and one stall-less toilet— that Pippin and Lyons attacked Oncale in the shower. Lyons rubbed a bar of soap between Oncale’s buttocks and growled, “Yeah, we know you talked to Daddy about it, but we’re going to fuck you any­way.” Terrified that they were genuinely about to rape him, Oncale kicked and resisted, finally pushing Pippin out of the shower until he got away. “What’s wrong?” they teased. “You don’t want us taking a shower with you?”

At least three members of the crew apparently witnessed the shower inci­dent from the adjoining bunk rooms. Beyond discreetly approaching Oncale afterward and saying, “Damn, man,” no one intervened. “That night I got very little sleep,” says Oncale. “I got up and got the hell away from them, went downstairs. I just stayed away from them. They scared me.”

Before departing for his shore leave, Oncale complained more desper­ately to Butch Edwards, the toolpusher, the person with the most authority on an offshore drilling rig, who could have reprimanded or even fired Lyons and Pippin, if necessary. But when Oncale returned from shore leave for his next work shift, Lyons’ hostility had, if any­thing, increased. Oncale says that Lyons continued to curse and threaten him: “So you told your Daddy, huh? Well, it ain’t going to do you no good. I’m going to fuck you anyway.”

With his supervisors’ having done nothing to punish Lyons and the others, Oncale’s last hitch on the rig was unbearable. When Lyons lit into Oncale one day for smoking without asking his permission and then for not under­standing his instructions about the work at hand, Oncale angrily shot baclc “Why do you have to talk to me like that?” Lyons responded with more cursing. “I told him that if he couldn’t talk to me like I was a human being, that I wouldn’t do anything for him,” Oncale says. “He then said that he would ‘run my ass’ off.”

So he went back to the toolpusher and demanded a pink termination slip that state exactly the reasons for his quitting. Edwards consented, and told Oncale to get it from Hoden, the safety clerk, who duly recorded on the slip: ”voluntary leaving due to sexual harassment and verbal abuse.”

It may be the most important piece of evidence Oncale has retained from his ordeal. By the time Oncale had reached the residential platform, Edwards was already on the phone asking for the pink slip back, saying that is was no good because he hadn’t signed it. Oncale refused. The next morning, Hohen called Oncale at home at 7:45a.m. Recalls Oncale indignantly, “he said, ‘Jody, if we don’t get that pink slip back, a lot of people’s gonna get fired, and we’re gonna lose our contract with Chevron.’ I told him, “Well, I’m sorry; you know, you give me a statement saying the same thing signed by Butch Edwards, I’ll give you this one back.’ Man, He slammed the phone down and hung up.”

Amazingly, Sundowner has avoided any trouble from the incidents, although Oncale reports the company was concerned enough at one point to offer a $5,000 settlement if Oncale returned the pink slip. (Oncale again refused.) Meanwhile, Oncale’s harassers (Lyons, Pippin, and Johnson) have also gone unpunished. Though most of the original crew now works elsewhere, none of the men was impacted on this job, and Pippin was even promoted, so that by 1995 he had become a toolpusher, making $48,000 a year. Attempts to reach the defendants were unsuccessful, and repeated calls to Sundowner’s lawyers and executive representatives were first unreturned and then answered with a definitive “No comment.”

Oncale’s defenders can’t say for sure why he was targeted by his tormentors. No one knows for sure. “They didn’t like him,” says Oncale’s attorney matter-of­factly. Tracy Oncale agrees. “From day one, Jody was just the one that John Lyons dealt crap to,” she says. “And it just got out of hand.” The implication, though, just as in a rape trial, is that the victim somehow invited his harassment. It is this, perhaps more than anything else, that rankles Oncale, the unspoken suggestion that there might be some­thing queer about him.

Certainly his small size is some­thing Oncale has been defending all his life. “Even in school,” says Tracy, “he just had to go that extra little step so that everybody knew they couldn’t push him around just because he was little. He fought a lot when he was in school, from ‘what his parents tell me.”

Not surprisingly, Oncale takes umbrage at the suggestion that his size had anything to do with his harassment. “I’m no different from any other guy,” he asserts, emphasizing, “I’m five-four! I’m not as tall as André , but I’m still a man.” Though he was reluctant at first to talk to OUT, Oncale agreed when it was made clear he would not be misrepre­sented. And when asked specifically how he wants to be understood, he responds: “Well, the first thing is, I’m far from gay. And I’m not a gay basher, you under­stand? If you’re gay, that’s fine. But don’t try to force the issue on me. I’m happily married; I have two wonderful kids. A wonderful wife. A lot of support from my family. I’m just an everyday, hard­working man.”

It wasn’t always such an equable pic­ture. After quitting Sundowner, Oncale nearly ran aground. As he waited, with very little response, for the EEOC to do something, he worked a series of jobs on the mainland, none of which paid as well as offshore, and secretly battled with his shame and humiliation. He began to drink daily, very heavily, which prompted a divorce from his first wife Rachel in 1993, and he started to pick fights with anyone who so much as looked at him funny. “Jody felt like what they did to him Out there took his manhood away, his pride,” says Tracy, who married Oncale in 1994. “And he fought real hard after that just to prove he was a man.”

In 1993 Oncale began to experience medical problems, a hyperactive heart­beat and numbness in his hands. Each time it would happen he would rush to the emergency room, but the doctors were stumped, eventually diagnosing mitral valve prolapse in error and pre­scribing heart medication that made him feel “like a zombie.”

With his troubles mounting and his complaint with the EEOC going no­where, Oncale’s mother hooked him up with André LaPlace, an attorney who had represented her in a slip-and-fall personal injury claim. LaPlace is a sole practitioner in Baton Rouge who has handled civil, criminal, and family court matters for 18 years. At 43, he resembles a young Bill Clinton crossed with Michael Landon and is as brash and irreverent an attorney as you could ever hope to meet. Over lunch at the formal Baton Rouge City Club—where an all-male, all-black wait staff in maroon tailcoats serves mostly white businessmen and politi­cos—LaPlace calls one of Oncale’s harassers “a dick-wagging piece of shit, as far as I’m concerned”; conjectures about a Washington, D.C., lawyer who tried to intervene in the case, “He thought we were rubes and boobs from the backwaters that have a hot case”; and even lapses into song at one point, say­ing, “It’s the Supremes now, man,” throwing his hands up and singing, ‘Stop, in the name of love.’”

His bright lavender button-down shirt is paired with a matching tie fea­turing a Picasso-esque nude covering her breasts, a theme that is continued back at his office, where the artwork-covered walls display several nudes. The dominant feature of one wall in the cof­fee area is an enormous photograph of LaPlace with a giant cutout index finger poking up his nose.

Nicholas Canaday III, 39, LaPlace’s colleague in the case, is the studied, mature side of the duo, more subdued in both his attire and his verbal presenta­tion. Not without a sense of humor, he nevertheless presents a very controlled and subtle image, and ponders questions fully before answering them. It is Canaday who wrote the legal brief for the Supreme Court and who will present the oral arguments. And nobody, includ­ing LaPlace, denies this is as it should be. “Nick has a great work ethic, and he’s very focused. I’m more of the mouth­piece,” says LaPlace, laughing. “Mv forte is trial litigation, trial work, discovery. Nick will be better for the oral argu­ments because, for one, he speaks slower than I do, and he’s probably not as reac­tionary as I am. I’ll say, ‘You’re a fuckin’ liar, man!”

In 1994, LaPlace connected On­cale with a clinical psychologist in Baton Rouge who diagnosed his symp­toms as panic attacks resulting from post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on, in large part, Tracy believes, because of Oncale’s inability to express his feelings and his keeping the details of his ordeal bottled up inside him. Though Oncale’s drinking problems continued into his sec­ond marriage, Tracy gave him an ultima­tum when she became pregnant with their first son, Josh: “I told him, ‘You can choose that can of beer or you can choose us,’ because I just couldn’t handle it anymore.”

After one or two initial slips, Oncale rarely drinks nowadays. Thanks to the sessions with his counselor, he has, also started to express his feelings better and practices calmness exercises to assuage the panic attacks. Life has returned more or less to normal in the Oncale house­hold. When not at work, he tinkers with his rusty pickup, mows the lawn, takes his son Josh fishing sometimes, and entertains friends at cookouts.

Although it took him a while to get up the nerve, Oncale started working offshore again in 1994. “He was a ner­vous wreck the first time,” says Tracy, “just bouncing off the walls.” The envi­ronment on his current rig is “real, real friendly,” he says, and “a good working atmosphere,” nothing like Sundowner.

Unfortunately for Oncale, by the time he got to LaPlace, his statute of lim­itations for a state trial had elapsed, and with that, any opportunity to try the case as a simple assault and battery, for example. “If he’d gotten to me timely,” says LaPlace, “we could have tried his case in front of a rural jury, and we would have killed [the defendants].” Instead, LaPlace and Canaday took the case to federal court under Title VII after obtaining a release from the EEOC, and that’s when they ran into the 5th Circuit’s prior rulings on same-sex sexual harassment. Although the Supreme Court had just previously turned down four other cases of same-sex sexual harassment, perhaps because the facts of Oncale’s case were so egregious, it first elicited the Clinton administration’s attention and then, receiving its support, decided to hold oral arguments on the case in December.

Oncale is uncomfortable with the situation his case has put him in. He has had to tolerate not just a gauntlet of sexual abuse but also endure increased public scrutiny as his case has moved gradually up through the courts and into the media. “It puts me under the spotlight, which I never really wanted,” he says. “It’s kind of hard to talk about what happened to you when it’s going to be in front of millions of people.”

He is also uneasy about being the poster boy for a variety of special interests he has no particular knowledge of or interest in—from the gay and lesbian community to the ACLU to doctrinaire antipornography activists like Catharine MacKinnon—who are hopping on the Oncalebandwagon. “I know it’s not just me,” Oncale says, a begrudging acknowledgment that his case will set a precedent for many others. “But mainly, I want to see justice done in my situation. I don’t want to sound crude or nothing, but I want these guys that did this to me, I want them to be penalized. I want them to feel like I felt. I know it’s horrible to say, but it’s the truth.”

With widespread public attention to the issue of same-sex sexual harassment, and to Oncale’s case in particular, LaPlace and Cariaday are hopeful that they can convince the Supreme Court that Oncale deserves a trial. But if Oncale is awarded his day in court back in Louisiana, what will their odds be then? When the media dissipates and the special interests move on to the new cause célèbre, not only will the limelight have faded, but so will the memories of those who would have to testify’ about what happened on that rig in fall of 1991. “We’re still looking at an uphill climb,” says Canaday. “I think we’re going to win the battle, but I wonder about the war.”