Antigone and the Chicken Hawk

Years ago, before I even knew what a Congressional Page was, I learned about chicken hawks from one of my Classical Rhetoric professors. Aside from hitting up on a number of his male students, this silver-haired professor asked my best friend if he could hide in the closet and watch while my best friend and his girlfriend had sex.

Office hours with Professor G were a challenge. He had the fastest hands of any man near retirement-age on the planet. He would reach out to shake your hand, then intentionally overshoot it and grab your waist and start to tickle you. As he reeled you in closer, he would suddenly violate the sanctity of your rear end by goosing it with a force that pretty much launched you into the air. All of this as he positioned himself between you and the door.

We would now call this sexual harassment. But then we just called it office hours with Professor G.

Since I had seen women play the game with horny male TAs and professors, I thought, what the heck. So I sometimes wore jeans with holes in them when I had to give a presentation in Professor G's class. And once, when I hadn't prepared for a reading, I stuffed a pair of gym socks in the front of my pants.

And that's when I discovered the danger in trying to con a con. I was way out of my league when Professor G called me into his office to discuss my final paper, which was on the Greek tragedy of the Antigone.

When I entered Professor G's den of debauchery, I was immediately taken off guard. Rather than being poised to spring on the ribs and rear end of the young and restless, he was sitting calmly behind his desk. My paper, which was on his desk, hadn't been read.

Professor G smiled and said, "You know, some of the athletes come up to my home and dive for coins that I toss into the pool. It's all good fun, and I was thinking maybe you'd like to join them."

He didn't need to mention that those athletes were diving as naked as they did in the day when Sophocles was writing the Antigone. (Since I lived in a jock dorm, I'd heard that a couple of the track guys were regulars in G's pool.)

Professor G then looked down at my unread paper and said, "So, what grade do you think you should get for this class?" Getting an A was a seriously big deal for a student like myself who was trying to get into medical school. But living with myself was an even bigger deal.

I looked down at the unread paper, and then at Professor G. I said, "Sorry Professor G, but I don't swim," and I walked out of his office. I would have sooner dived into a pool of hot lava than into G's pond of penile perdition. While I'm pretty sure it was an A paper, I got a B in the class.

Sex educators often avoid questions of morality as long as the words "consensual sex" and "it wasn't against the law" can be applied. So I thank Professor G and his spiritual brethren like former Congressman Foley and President Clinton for helping me understand more about morality.

We have had to endure nearly a decade of the self-righteous telling us that our young need to be sexually abstinent until marriage, as if this helps define morality. And they've told us that sex between two males or two females is immoral, as well. Oh really?

If I've learned anything in life, it is that morality has nothing to do with whether two unmarried people have sex, or if two gay people have sex. But I am certain that it is violated when teachers, politicians and priests touch instead of look, and ejaculate instead of admire.

The young need to be able to trust in the old. They need to be able to push against the boundaries and learn that the boundaries are safe.

Maybe its time we all reread some of the great tragedies like the Antigone, where questions about morality drive the drama, as opposed to our dramas of today, where getting caught is all we seem to care about.