Listening to Brad Chapin describe being silenced and dismissed as he tried to tell the truth about his sexual assault allegations against Manny Yekutiel, I was pulled back to my own sexual assault by a tech executive.
I know firsthand that coming forward offers no guarantee of anything but pain. “You wanted it” or “Men can’t be sexually assaulted,” is what people meant to protect me told me, and Brad received his own cocktail of criticism. The systems and the individuals responsible for brokering justice often just deal out disappointment after disappointment, instead of offering understanding and accountability.
Men can be sexually assaulted. And the rules of consent still apply between gay men.
Saying that out loud shouldn’t be radical, but it still is. A lot of people still believe gay men are always available, that desire is our default way of being and that any encounter between two men must have been wanted by both. It’s a dangerous stereotype, and it gives cover to people who take what was never theirs. It’s the same belief that let people look me in the eye and tell me I must have wanted it. Infuriating.
Part of what keeps those lines blurry, though, is that in our spaces, being there is taken as saying yes when it really shouldn’t. Go home with someone, show up to the after-party, or merely step into the sauna, and the assumption is that you’ve already agreed to whatever comes next. Or having sex with someone once somehow means the consent conversation never needs to be revisited. Saying no at any point after can feel like breaking an unwritten rule.
I carry a quieter fear: that objecting makes me prudish, uptight, boring, or sometimes not gay enough. When I really examine this, I can acknowledge that it’s not true, only a toxic gay culture eating away at me. That’s because sexual liberation was never supposed to mean surrendering the right to change your mind.
Being in the room isn’t consent. Being in the bed isn’t consent. Consent is a yes to this person, this act, this moment, and it can be taken back.
If saying no in the moment is hard, saying something afterward is harder. And it gets worse when the person accused has power. A politician, a founder, an executive, someone with a guest list and a following. Suddenly the questions point at the person who was brave enough to tell the truth. Why did you go there? Why didn’t you leave? What do you want? Community rallies around the person who can open doors, and the person who was harmed becomes the inconvenience.
Manny’s exactly the kind of person primed to be “inconvenienced” by a sexual assault allegation. After all, Manny’s been building a resume to run for office ever since he rolled into San Francisco in 2012, fresh off the Obama campaign. He placed his own name over a Valencia Street storefront and invited every Democrat in America to stop by, building power handshake by handshake.
An activist myself in queer, climate, and anti-racist spaces, I’ve spent many days at Manny’s in the Mission celebrating social justice and progressive book launches, raising funds for get-out-the-vote initiatives, and building intentional community for Black and queer folks. With each encounter, I knew that I was shaking the hands of someone who’d eventually run for office. Everyone knew.
The dam broke for Manny when more accusers came forward.
Ryan Clark says that when Manny grabbed him, on a different occasion, he gestured to his partner and told him they weren’t open, meaning they weren’t available to anyone new. But Manny continued his hold until he had to be pushed away. Clark said it was Mayor Lurie’s endorsement that pushed him to go public.
Within a day, Mayor Lurie had pulled his support, and Manny dropped out of the race.
It seems like the outcome is that there were political consequences for accusations of sexual assault. That seems like a win. But, in my body, it hadn’t quite registered as a victory. What’s behind the victory is the same old message: you won’t be believed alone.
Consider the sequencing.
A single accuser, aligned with the other political camp, was largely bypassed. More accusers flipped the outcome in about a day. The lesson victims take from that isn’t “come forward.” It’s “wait until there are enough of you.”
We can do better than that. The burden shouldn’t fall on survivors to arrive in numbers large enough to be believed. It should fall on the rest of us, the endorsers, the voters, the friends who say “I know him,” to take the first person seriously. Brad Chapin shouldn’t have needed company. He should have needed only to be heard.
Charles Orgbon III (he/him) is an environmental sustainability consultant by day, and freelance writer by night. When it comes to writing, Charles has done a variety of creative projects, from personal essays to news journalism to even comics and songwriting. In 2020, for example, he released his first EP, "A Survivor's Reward." He loves writing about identity, culture, and sexuality.