Speak Up!

John, United Kingdom

     I am a gay man and want to share my story.
     I was a PhD student and everyone said I could be a great professor or something like that. But everything changed when I went to a small European country to conduct fieldwork. (I was an anthropology major, so I had to do some research outside UK.) I needed to work with a particular professor there and he’s gay, but I didn’t think that would affect any aspects of my research or work with him.
     One day he invited me into his house to discuss my research. I went there and he was waiting for me, naked. He started talking about his sex life, and how much he likes to have sex with his students.  He told me how good looking and “cute” I was…Then he asked me to have a dinner at a restaurant with him. I was not comfortable at all but I felt I had to say yes in order to build a professional relation for my research. However, instead, he took me a gay bar, grabbed my hand and forced me to dance with him. I said “No” but he kept touching all over my body and I was completely disgusted.  A couple of days later, he again told me to come to his place to disuss my research. This time, he tried to rape me and I ran away. Later, he showed up at my home and forced me to have sex with him.
    Then he began to retaliate.  He has huge political power in his country and used it to prevent my research everywhere. He had promised me that I could teach at his university, but no. But the worst thing was that I needed his letter to obtain a visa, and he never wrote it. Also, everyone started talking about me, like “He’s your sugar daddy, isn’t he? I am sure you are so good at it and you can do anything in this country.”
     I really wanted to take legal action but never could because in that country almost all sexual harassment cases were dismissed, and there’s no such thing as gay rights there.
     So I reported what he did to my advisers at school and they told me to come back to the UK as my situation was “an extreme emergency.” I came back and talked with them. They gave me a new project to complete my PhD. I needed some rest so I went back to my mother’s house. I read papers and books and wrote a new proposal. But they never responded–there’s a strong connection between my advisers, my school, and this professor.  Instead of helping me, they buried the case.  I called everyone in the department but nothing came out of it. In the end I dropped out of the program.
    I got a very serious depression after the sexual harassment but it got worse after I left the school as it had been my dream to have a PhD and teach. Also since then I can’t form long-term relationships with guys as I am now afraid of men in some way. I also suffered from panic disorder for a while. And I am still traumatized–I can’t read any academic books, meet anyone from the school, I can go on and on regarding the effects this has had on me.
    This sexual harassment happened 2 years ago but I’m still struggling. I hope people will take sexual harassment at school and gay sexual harassment more seriously.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Harassment by teachers, Harassment of Men, Retaliation, Backlash, and Victim-blaming, Same-sex harassment, Sexual Harassment in Education, The Absolute Worst: Our Hall of Shame. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.