Sexually Explicit Material in Firehouses: Trying to Douse a Blazing Issue

It was a terrible scene.

Two Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics had answered a call one spring evening last year to open wetlands near Los Angeles International Airport where the ant-bitten, partially clad body of a young woman had been discovered. She had been murdered. And they suspected she had been raped.

“It was really sad and gruesome,” said a woman paramedic, who asked not to be named. “My partner and I drove around afterward. He has a teen-age daughter, and I have a sister in her early 20s. We both were upset.”

Back at the station, she went into the recreation room.

“They were watching pornography,” she said. “All I remember is going in there, realizing that pornography was on and walking out. It was a simulated rape scene. I had just seen a young girl who had been killed, and they were in there making comments.

“I didn’t sleep the entire night.”

In her years as a paramedic working out of about 30 firehouses, she said, she could not remember a single station without sexually explicit material: videos, magazines or cable programs. And some firemen do not seem to mind who is present when they watch, she said.

“They see you coming in, and they just continue watching,” she said. “If they’re not going to stop when I’m in the room, what’s going to stop them?”

The question of what to do about sexually explicit material in station houses has challenged fire officials throughout the country for several years, particularly since the integration of women as firefighters and paramedics.

The issue was raised anew in Los Angeles early last year when a women paramedic complained that firemen at a Westchester firehouse had been watching sexually explicit material on the station’s TV. When investigators looked into the allegation, they turned up reports that a veteran fireman had sexually harassed a probationary woman firefighter at the station.

The fireman was subsequently charged with misconduct and, after a lengthy Board of Rights hearing, was suspended for five months. Among the charges on which he was found guilty was an allegation that he had once tried to tug the woman firefighter into the TV room to watch the Playboy Channel.

In the aftermath of the highly publicized hearing, Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald O. Manning presented to the Fire Commission a draft directive, reiterating the Fire Department’s policy against sexually explicit material. The city attorney’s office is reviewing the draft regulation.

Harold J. Kwalwasser, president of the Los Angeles Fire Commission, declared in a discussion of the issue that there is no place in the city’s firehouses for sexually explicit material because they are public workplaces supported by taxpayers.

But Manning, Kwalwasser or anyone else could not say how often some members of the city’s 3,000-member firefighting force may have watched sexually explicit films or videos or thumbed magazines featuring female nudity while on duty.

And efforts to talk about the problem with firefighters at several stations were rebuffed.

“We are not allowed to comment,” a captain at Fire Station 10 said.

“I’ll have to refer you to administrative headquarters,” said another fire captain at Station 26. “I can’t change department policy. Any comment I would make on it would be out of line.”

Ralph Travis, secretary of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, said he believes that instances of watching pornography in city fire stations are rare.

“I believe 99.9% of firefighters have no interest in viewing that type of material in the engine houses,” said Travis, a 26-year veteran. “I spent about 11 years in the field, and I probably saw maybe one or two instances in that time.”

At the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Battalion Chief Gordon Pearson said the 2,500-member force, including five women, has had “no complaints.”

“I’m not saying that there aren’t films in stations,” Pearson said. “But if there are, they are being very discreet.”

To get some idea of the problem that sexually explicit material poses in the Los Angeles Fire Department, Manning ordered surveys of printed material and television programs available to members of the department.

Television Survey

According to the television survey released Wednesday, 46 of the department’s 104 work locations have “the capability of receiving sexually explicit material, either through their cable TV subscription or by use of a dish antenna.”

The report made no attempt to explore viewing habits or to determine if city firemen have been watching sexually explicit material on the Playboy Channel or the “Late Night Special” broadcast by Select TV.

As to printed matter, Manning told fire commissioners that a telephone survey disclosed that 16 stations had reported having material fitting the department’s definition of sexually explicit. Nearly all of it is locked in cabinets or lockers, he said.

“So we have some work yet to do,” the chief said, “but I would be willing to bet right now that since the survey there are less of them (stations) that have it.”

Others are a lot less confident that the department’s survey tells all.

“I have the feeling that the material has been put away in the stations where the women are, but in the stations where the women aren’t, watching sexually explicit material still goes on,” said Rebecca Hegwer, one of 60 women paramedics and firefighters in the city Fire Department.

“It was widespread until all this stuff started hitting the paper.”

Hegwer, second vice president of the United Paramedics of Los Angeles and a paramedic for seven years, said she once found firemen watching hard-core pornography on a rented videocassette recorder at 8 a.m. When people object to the practice, the watchers resent it, she said.

“They complain that their First Amendment rights have been violated. They resent being told they can’t read or look at what they want,” Hegwer said. “And their anger is directed at women, as if it’s the fault of women that they can’t look at the stuff.

“At the same time, there is a significant number of male members of the department who support the idea of banning sexually explicit material. It’s equally offensive to many men. But they have been reluctant to make an issue out of it for fear of not fitting in. They believe, as the women do, that there is no place in a workplace for this type of material.”

Tradition Altered

Several fire officials of larger departments interviewed by The Times agreed that integration has altered a decades-old tradition of the firehouse as an exclusive male bastion for a brotherhood of firefighters.

“It’s not a club,” New York City Deputy Fire Commissioner Gary Dellaverson said. “It’s a place where public services are delivered. And what follows from that is that women are entitled to be harassment free.”

When women first joined New York’s 13,000-member department a few years ago, Dellaverson said, the fire chief banned “objectionable material,” including anything that might be sexually offensive, from public and shared areas of fire stations--but not from personal property in lockers. Dellaverson said he could recall “stuff up in the bunk room” when women were first assigned to fire stations. “I told them to take it down,” he said. “They complained about it, but they took it down.

Fire Chief Warren E. Isman, president of the International Assn. of Fire Chiefs, said he issued a general order to his 1,000-member Fairfax County, Va., Fire Department, including 22 women firefighters, after twice walking in on firefighters watching sexually explicit movies on station TV sets. In effect, it said, “Thou shalt not do it,” Isman said.

“We had an internal challenge through the grievance process. I denied the grievance, and my order was not challenged beyond that,” he said.

“The firehouse has long been considered a male bastion, and with females in the fire service it can no longer be considered that. It is an arm of local government that is very close to the community. It’s their facility.

“My concern was that people would find sexually explicit magazines, as well as videos, offensive. Females could be easily intimidated and would not want to say anything about it.”

Fullerton Fire Chief Ron Coleman, who will succeed Isman as president of the association in August, said firefighting is a “different profession” than it was 20 to 25 years ago when there were little ethnic mix and few females in the ranks.

“It was once referred to as the largest white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant professional fraternity in the world,” Isman said. “Today, it is more reflective of the demographics of our community.

‘Where to Draw the Line’

“A fire station is a public place. It is not appropriate for those kinds of magazines to be lying out in public in fire stations. The difficulty is where to draw the line. Playboy magazine is found in doctor’s offices.”

In Los Angeles, where female and male firefighters share sleeping and bathroom areas as well as kitchen facilities when assigned together on their usual 24-hour shifts, Manning has encountered a similar problem with definitions.

Like his counterparts in New York City and Virginia, Manning tried to ban sexually explicit material from fire stations by simply issuing a directive drafted in January, which stated:

“All Fire Department work locations are places of business and are open to the public. It is the department’s policy to create a work environment that is neither intimidating, hostile, offensive, or non-productive; therefore, effective immediately, the display of any sexually explicit material is prohibited on all Fire Department property.”

It went on to define sexually explicit material as:

“Any book, magazine, newspaper, video or other publication, or any other matter containing photographs or pictorial representatives of sexual organs or sexual acts.”

When the draft directive went before the Fire Commission for consideration, however, it produced a lively discussion about whether the commissioners had the power to define and control sexually explicit material that is protected by the First Amendment

“There’s no question in my mind that what we’re talking about is entirely protected speech in some context: the Playboy Channel, the Playboy magazine. None of them are pornographic,” Commission President Kwalwasser said. “If the city attorney tells us, because it is protected material, we can’t control it, then we should just pack all this (discussion) up and go home.”

At Manning’s urging, the fire commissioners asked the city attorney’s office for an advisory letter on what it can legally do about restricting sexually explicit material. It is expected to take several weeks to get the answer.

In the meantime, Manning thinks his message to members of the Fire Department about sexually explicit material is clear. ‘We don’t want it,” he declared.

And, he said, if someone wants to read Playboy magazine while on duty, he can, “if he sits inside his locker and shuts the door.”