Maple Leaf (Gardens) forever: Sex, Canadian historians, and national history, The

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 2001 by Steven Maynard

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Journalists' ability not only to describe but to determine contexts for sex scandals draws attention to the pivotal role of the media. As Vincent Doyle has demonstrated with reference to another Ontario panic over intergenerational sex - the "kiddie-porn ring" in London, Ontario, from 1993 to 1995 - the media play a key role in constructing the categories, such as "pedophile" and "child victim," through which we understand sex scandals. This is much in evidence in the journalistic coverage of the Gardens scandal. Newspaper reports described the scandal as a story of "notorious pedophiles" who "lured young boys" into the Gardens (Foss A25). While most media were content to talk about "pedophiles" and "victims," others were more explicit in linking hockey's sex scandals with gay men and child abuse. In its coverage of the Sheldon Kennedy case, the Alberta Report declared, in an article titled "Hockey pays the price for gay tolerance," that "the ugly truth about predatory homosexual coaches finally comes out," this despite the fact that Graham James (Kennedy's former coach), Stuckless and Roby never publicly claimed a gay or homosexual identity. Media representations transform men who break the law ("sexual offenders") into men with distinct types of sexual identities ("predatory homosexuals" and "pedophiles"). But that is not the extent of their cultural effects.

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Reading the The Globe and Mail coverage of the Gardens scandal, one is struck by how sexual acts are laid out in close to pornographic detail. The "at least 20" sexual encounters of one boy involved with Roby over the span of a year were described in the Globe this way: "Mr. Roby performed oral sex on him ... Mr. Roby would fondle him with one hand while he masturbated with the other and then ejaculated on his own stomach" (Downey, "Posed Naked for Roby" A12). Dozens of newspaper reports on the scandal were comprised of little more than blow-byblow accounts of sexual activity, with particular attention paid to whether those involved "ejaculated," one of the most frequently used words in the reports (another is "masturbate"). Articles ostensibly written as court reports were given headlines, such as "Encounters at Gardens described" (A17), that served less to warn about sexual danger and more to sell newspapers. An article in the Globe's coverage is a striking example of the clever mechanism by which our culture brings a putatively despised aspect of sexuality into view under the pretense of marking it out for disapprobation, all the while keeping it at hand and giving it increased, indeed national circulation. James Kincaid, in his sustained deconstruction of the historical and contemporary eroticization of the child, questions what lurks behind a culture that endlessly professes its desire to "protect the children" yet demands that newspapers and countless other cultural forms continue to offer up children's sexualized bodies and supply us with the details of sex with them:

In the very strength of our denial, the need we have to tell the story so strenuously and so often, always in the same terms exactly, lies perhaps a surer clue to our involvement in the sexualizing of the child. Such frenzied denunciations of the villains, such easy expressions of outrage, such simple-minded analyses of the problem of child-molesting as we love to repeat serve not simply to flatter us but to bring before us once again the same story of desire that is itself desirable, allowing us to construct, watch, enjoy the erotic child without taking any responsibility for our actions. This, one might say, is the sort of pornography that really ought to be banned (1992, 375).

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Maple Leaf (Gardens) forever: Sex, Canadian historians, and national history, The

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 2001 by Steven Maynard

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