November 25, 1997: a case for same--sex harassment on the job. (From the Advocate Archives).

A major step forward in gay and lesbian workers' struggle for equal employment rights came in late 1997 from an unlikely source. As writer Chris Bull explained in an Advocate special report, Joseph Oncale, a straight oil-rig worker, became an unexpected advocate for gay employees when he filed a same-sex harassment suit in 1994 against his employer. Lower courts had dismissed the case, holding that federal law did not apply to same-sex sexual harassment.

But in late 1997, gay advocates hailed the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to hear the case as a critical breakthrough: "Too many harassers have been allowed to argue that they can get away with harassing people of the same sex because they are not attracted to them--that it is simply horseplay," said Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund legal director Beatrice Dohrn.

On March 4, 1998, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Oncale's favor, saying that "behavior so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the victim's employment" constituted harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, no matter what the sex of the harasser.