Comment on this story Seven Days Wednesday, May 26 •Officials at the Y-12 weapons manufacturing compound in Oak Ridge say they will use stacked boxes of nuclear waste as “security barriers” against terrorist attack. If the practice of leaving containers of potentially toxic substances sitting around in piles is now considered a security tactic, then the Metro Pulse office refrigerator has been the safest place in town for more than 10 years. Thursday, May 27 •Local business and political leaders meet and discuss ways to cope with the economic sanctions imposed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency because of poor air quality in Knoxville. Somebody suggests bottling air and selling it to Y-12 as a “security measure.” Friday, May 28 •Though they have jacked up tuition 60 percent since 1998, University of Tennessee administrators refuse to implement a proposed $8-per-student fee hike to be used for Green energy projects, even though UT students themselves requested it. University officials reason that only mature, experienced professionals are qualified to decide how to gouge students for more money. Saturday, May 29 • In an instructive News Sentinel story, Tennessee Valley Authority police report that the most important boating safety measures for Memorial Day revelers include wearing life preservers, not driving too fast, and not running over fellow swimmers and boaters. We suspect the TVA police have way too much time on their hands. Sunday, May 30 • A News Sentinel story says that Pigeon Forge officials are confident that skyrocketing gas prices will not hurt the city’s summer tourism. Apparently, higher fuel costs are being offset by fortuitous drops in the rates charged by goony golf moguls, funnel cake manufacturers, and has-been country music singers. Monday, May 31 • The Associated Press reports that an understaffed regional forensic lab at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City has a backlog of 275 autopsies dating back to 2001. That’s good to know. Given the stance on gay rights recently taken by public officials in Dayton, we thought all the moldy old stiffs were in Rhea County. Tuesday, June 1 • Having already announced their intent to use boxes of waste as security barriers, officials at Y-12 say they will redouble efforts to keep the compound safe from attack. New security measures will include the hiring of more guards and the discontinuance of all trash disposal. Knoxville Found What is this? Every week in “Knoxville Found,” we’ll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you’re the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you’ll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn’t cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send ’em to “Knoxville Found” c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902. Last Week’s Photo: No one is better equipped to identify last week’s curiosity in Sequoyah Hills Park than the artist. “The ‘Knoxville Found’ this week is a sculpture in marble made by me, Moema Furtado with the assistance of Bayle Cook. The sign with our names and explanation disappeared, so [here’s] a statement about the work: ‘Settling Ground,’ Marble Sculpture, 2003. Marble detritus and discarded construction materials were used to create small narrative clusters. The collaborative nature of this piece hints at the struggle between a sense of place and the archaeology of memory—like small upheavals and reconfigurings caught in the dynamics of the internal/external spaces of ‘home.’ This work is part of the ONE TON SHOW – ‘The Home Show.’" Congratulations, Moema, Metro Pulse is thrilled to endow you with a promotional copy of Erin McKeown’s swell recent release, Grand. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend JAMES WHITE PARKWAY / CHAPMAN HIGHWAY TASK FORCE Thursday, June 3 • 6 p.m. • South Doyle Middle School • Library • 3900 Decatur Rd. CITY COUNCIL MEETING Tuesday, June 8 • 7 p.m. • City County Building • Large Assembly Room • 400 Main St. Regular Meeting.

Domestic Violence

Abuse is the same in gay and straight couples, but gay victims have fewer resources

During the 10 years Doug was beaten and abused by his lover, he never even considered getting help. As a gay man, he just didn’t believe it would be offered to him. And his lover frequently reiterated that fact.

“It was really a weird experience going through it in Knoxville, because if there’s one thing I knew about Knoxville it was the cops were never going to help,” he says. “I’m from Boston, and this is a small southern town. He always made the point of where we were, and cops were never going to help.

“I’ll tell you what, when those cops walked in the door, they did,” says Doug, which is not his real name. He was the first man in a gay relationship to obtain an order of protection against his abusive lover in Knox County.

Although the Knox County Sheriff’s deputies and the court system did help Doug, East Tennessee lacks many basic services for gay men and lesbians in abusive relationships. Many police and medical personnel are insensitive or dismissive of the problem. There’s little in the way of support or counseling services, and there’s no apparatus to help people get out of legal and financial arrangements, the way there is for straight couples caught in abusive relationships. Lesbians can use many of the same safe houses straight women do, although the treatment might be less sensitive. Gay men have no place to go.

A task force established by Legal Aid of East Tennessee is trying to change that.

On Tuesday, June 8, a Gay and Lesbian Legal and Domestic Issues seminar will be held at the City County Building. The event is for police, counselors, providers, attorneys, and the general public.

“Domestic violence occurs at the same rate in these communities as it does in straight communities,” says Annette Beebe of Legal Aid.

Beebe says that there are many misperceptions about gay relationships and domestic violence.

“When police respond they dismiss it really easily—it’s a cat fight or guys being guys or fags beating up on fags,” Beebe says. “People don’t even understand that [domestic violence] happens in that society. Most heterosexuals think [homosexuality] is about sex, and it’s deviant. They don’t realize it’s the same dynamics.”

Doug agrees that abuse in gay relationships is no different than in straight relationships. He says he has a knack for spotting others in abusive relationships. “I can show you a woman in Knoxville who is living in a $300,000 house in West Knoxville getting the shit kicked out of her. I can pick them out in Krogers just by the way a husband will tell her to get something off the shelf,” he says.

Doug met his former lover in the late ’80s, not long after he’d moved to Knoxville. It was his first relationship. The abuse started just weeks after they’d been dating. At first it was just emotional. “I took it kind of as a warped sense of humor,” he says. They were a quiet professional couple who ran a successful business in Knoxville.

Doug is 6-foot-3 and his partner is 5-foot-6, so many people had trouble imagining the dynamics. And Doug would fight back. “But then there are those moments when your guard is down, and you’re not ready,” he says.

Often Doug was attacked when he was asleep at night. “When he was home, he was a terror. He was manipulative. He knew how to play every one of my fears,” he says. “He worked at keeping me in agony. To meet him and look at him, you never would have known it.

“I never thought about getting help. I’d still be with him if the cops hadn’t come through the door. It didn’t matter if I was gay or straight, my first relationship was going to last. I was not going to walk away from it, I was going to make it work,” he says.

The abuse left Doug with a permanent disability. He never contacted the police, but they found out through other means and intervened. The court system protected him, but there was little else in the way of help. There were no shelters to go to or support groups. Financially, he lost everything. Getting his name off a utility bill or out of a lease was extremely difficult. Things are getting a little better, he says.

The task force is starting pilot programs. They’re looking at launching a survivors’ support group along with a batterers’ prevention group. Straight batterers are often sentenced to counseling groups that work on getting them to confront their problems. Doug’s partner, who came from a family where there was a history of domestic abuse, was the only gay man in a straight-only group. The task force would like to create one specifically for gays. They would also like to create safehouses, especially those for gay men. For more information about Tuesday’s seminar, call Legal Aid at 637-0484.

—Joe Tarr

Closing the Gateway
Visitors Center moves to Gay Street; Beck to open downtown museum

This week, if all goes well, Knoxville Tourism and Sports Corporation’s Visitors Center is reopening in a somewhat downscaled but more focused fashion in the freshly renovated building at the corner of Gay Street and Summit Hill Drive. The new building will host the center’s cheerful and comprehensively regional gift shop, previously located in their Gateway Center on Volunteer Landing, plus a new addition, a circular coffee bar. In an adjacent studio, visible from the coffeehouse, will be the live broadcasts of public-radio station WDVX, the bluegrass-and-Americana station moving downtown after several years in rural Anderson County.

A stage is set up in the cafe for the station’s occasional live performances, permitting a small crowd; there’s even talk of modestly reviving an old downtown institution, the lunchtime music show known as the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, absent from Gay Street for these 50 years.

Hastened by a new Knox County project for their old space, the Visitors Center is leaving behind its unusual former building, completed on Volunteer Landing in 1999. It looked like something built for a World’s Fair, a three-story glass-and-brick silo with a spiral ramp. Knox County intends to refashion it as a museum annex to the Beck Cultural Center on Dandridge Avenue in East Knoxville. For years ensconced in an old house, Beck possesses a reportedly impressive collection of photos and artifacts concerning African-American culture in the Knoxville area, but it has never had an ideal display space. Reuse of the Gateway Center is part of County Mayor Mike Ragsdale’s promise to enhance the Beck Center’s presence in Knoxville (The original Beck Center will remain as a library and research facility.)

Until last week, the Gateway Regional Visitors Center’s cool, dark silo with its ambient sounds of water and birds chirping made it perhaps the most relaxing, contemplative spot downtown. It drew an advertised 40-45,000 a year. But there were always awkward problems.

Unlike most attractions downtown, Gateway always had free parking, but the fact that nearby Riverside Tavern claimed the spaces closest to the center caused inevitable resentment. Another problem was questionable siting that left the center deep below the Hill Avenue Viaduct, at a sort of amputated northeastern end of Volunteer Landing. Getting there was awkward by car, much moreso by foot. Though a sidewalk along the serpentine drive up to Hill Avenue was eventually added, making it at least possible to walk up toward the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, the Gateway center was never on the way to anywhere in any practical sense.

It’s unclear whether Beck’s uses of the site will overcome these perceived problems. Cohen says there are many details to work out but doubts parking will be a major issue. “I’d love to have enough visitors for parking to be a problem,” he says.

It also has to be admitted that the Gateway Center’s mission was blurry. It was a fine place to find a quick gift for nearly anybody, but it was never clear exactly what the center was welcoming us to. Originally funded by a federal Economic Development Agency grant, the Department of Energy, and Lockheed-Martin—and administered by the National Park Service—it emphasized Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Big South Fork; a creative round theater showed films about Oak Ridge. The city of Knoxville chipped in half a million of the project’s $5 million total, but most of what the center touted was 30 miles or more away. Its message seemed to be What are you doing here? You ought to be in the mountains. That emphasis may have suited the park service fine, but it was especially awkward after the federal agency pulled out of management of the center about three years ago, and the city tourism folks took it over.

The new center seems, if not quite as serene, less geographically blurry in its new digs on Gay Street. The gift shop will emphasize the products of Knoxville proper, along the lines of the Tourism and Sports Corp.’s Uniquely Knoxville project: books, soap, candles, pottery, all of it from Knox County. The coffee at the coffee shop will be from Goodson Bros. Members of the family that founded JFG, they’ve been brewing coffee under contract for years but have never opened a cafe. The baked goods will come from Mag-Pies and Hogan’s. Even the soda pops of choice will be Pepsi products, largely due to the fact that the heritage of one member of the Pepsi family, Mountain Dew, traces its roots to 1940s East Knoxville.

The Tourism and Sports Corp.’s Robin Hamilton expects the new center will attract at least 30 percent more traffic, due to the more central and visible location. The exterior may be further enhanced with message boards; there’s talk of making it something akin to a Knoxville version of Times Square.

—Jack Neely

June 3, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 23 © 2004 Metro Pulse