Dangerous Families

Queer Writing on Surviving

Edited by Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein-Sycamore

[an imprint of the Haworth Press|Harrington Park Press], [2004]

Dangerous Families is a ground-breaking book: an anthology of writings by queer survivors of childhood abuse.

People have only been speaking out publicly in great numbers about abuse for a few decades, and been allowed mainstream visibility to talk about this for even less time, perhaps twenty years.

For much of that time, the discussion was moderated by therapists analyzing people’s experiences, as in The Flock or The Minds of Billy Milligan, or as currently happens on talk shows like the loathsome Sally Jessy Raphael. In fact, old-timers in our local Survivors of Incest Anonymous meetings talk about an era when meetings fell apart partly because therapists would come just to goggle at the survivors who were, inexplicably, getting healing without their help. (“You… talk to other abuse survivors? But… everyone knows that’s bad for you! You’re just going to get re-traumatized! There should be a therapist guiding the discussion at least!”)

Queerness is usually erased from the discussion, too, except for the unfortunate and now-rare occasions in which a mental health professional of some kind is attempting to “blame” queerness on abuse. Because, you see, they’re both so rare. And sexual. (Never, oddly, because they’re both so common.) And as a result of this, for some people it became forbidden to talk about being queer and being raped, for fear of reinforcing that farcical link and helping reduce a community to some Freudian wet dream.

Furthermore, most if not all writing about abuse is partitioned off: it is just about child sexual abuse, or specifically about domestic violence, or focusing on spanking. There is a sense that we must deal with our problems one at a time, a societal tendency to “divide and conquer” – a tactic which never serves anyone but the abusers, regardless of the milieu in which it is being used.

And maybe most importantly, the little speaking and writing about abuse allowed is usually limited to white women – or really, to straight, able-bodied, affluent white women. The effects of abuse and the silence around it pose two more barriers to communities which already have many hurdles between them and writing and publishing and the visual media. On top of that, there is a perception that abuse is already weird enough – we don’t need to alienate people more by talking about male survivors, survivors of color, queer survivors, Deaf survivors, working-class transgendered Latina ritual abuse survivors… mainstream culture, in the United States at least, reduces these different communities to the punch lines of anti-P.C. jokes.

Dangerous Families breaks all of those unspoken rules.

And a good thing, too. It is difficult to effectively break the rule of silence surrounding all abuse while sticking to all the other rules that keep us in line.

Dangerous Families is an amazing collection of essays for more reasons than those. Those are all the political reasons to read it; the personal are just as compelling.

It is a book full of stories in which the authors tell nothing but the truth, bold and clear and direct, the truth as it is right this minute. Some of the authors’ stories have arced up and down all the way into safety and healing; others are caught in the middle of figuring it all out, in chaos, or on some other bump or valley in the journey. In that way it offers both recognition and hope to its readers.

So whenever that magic moment came when I needed to slide over on the couch or run my hand down her ass, I felt like I was becoming her perp. It shocked the shit out of me when I started having friends who touched one another casually. It shocked me when I popped my cherry a second time, casually sleeping with a not-friend. “Fuck, this is weird,” I remember thinking, “he’s not leaving his body.” And neither was I.

– leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, “gonna get my girl body back”

In the introduction, the editor observes all that is left out of writing on childhood abuse and talks about how it we need “literature that focuses on something more than the time line of events, the feelings involved, and the process of recovery.”

There is another book, called The Memory Bird, which collects personal writings about abuse. It focuses specifically on sexual abuse, but it is similar to this in many ways, as a collection solely of people’s thoughts and experiences instead of a prescription for life. I remember, when I first read it, how intensely struck I was by seeing my experiences and opinions echoed in the words of a few other survivors halfway around the world. It was amazing.

Dangerous Families serves a similar purpose with a wider scope. It can be difficult to read, particularly with its wider range of abuses: the more abuse is involved, the more readers are likely to see themselves reflected therein. There will be people who never thought of what happened to them as abuse before, and people who thought they had “dealt with it,” who find that something in them is opened up by reading this book. For those who are willing to see that part of themselves, this anthology can bring amazing fellowship and revelations about life.

The editor goes on to comment that,

“I always conceived of Dangerous Families as an anthology of non-fiction stories that goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation…. These stories… go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back. As survivors, we become hyperaware; our vigilance enables us to dissect everything.”

This anthology has definitely achieved its goal. Each piece packs in powerful layers of experience and imagery, asking for multiple readings. As a whole, the layers of pieces and experiences and identities add up to something densely packed, multi-dimensional, world-changing, and amazing.

Eli Clare’s work, always lush and powerful in this way, goes even farther in this anthology, and serves as a good example of how much is contained within:

What I have to tell makes language a club, a bludgeon, sticks and stones wielded against advancing tanks and trucks. Yes, a weapon. Not even a tool, much less the snow tracings of the last wet storm before spring, bending the boxwood, elderberry, scrubby pine almost double. A story, yet another story.

Last night at the theater Jeffrey Dahmer’s voice came alive in one brilliant monologue – that black gay performance artist, cross-gendered and beautiful, leading us from hair salon to drum to Jeffrey’s seductive murder of black boys. I fled the building, bolting from the memory of blood. Dahmer the lone crazy man taking his full.

Let me tell you, my father was Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey lived in my hometown over and over again. Too many people to count. We drank blood, decorated our bodies with blood, shaped symbols in blood. Human blood, animal blood. Sometimes I wake up in the deep of night, that taste still on my lips.

This book is incredible and important: important for survivors to read to see they are not alone, important for survivors of any kind of abuse to see the commonalities between abuse of all kinds, important for (those extremely few) people who have never been abused in any way to read to understand their friends and loved ones and the world in which we live. Read it piece by piece, slowly, read it in giant gulping banquets, read it alone, read it with support, but definitely, as soon as you can. Read it.

Warning: this review gives away the ending.

Me and Will (1999)
Directed and written by Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
Starring Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
A Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose joint.

This is not a good movie.

It is a long movie. An unintentionally funny movie. An erratically dramatic movie. A very, very badly edited movie. But it is not a good movie.

Gory Losers? Groinal Lodgings?

Why, if it was so bad, did we watch the whole thing?

I’ll tell you why. Because the cable movie ratings warned us about how it had AC and GL and so forth, and my roommate was convinced that GL stood for Gay and Lesbian.

To be fair, we had plenty of reasons to think that they might, as I think my roommate put it, “realize that they really loved each other all along and then do it.” First of all, it was on Showtime, home of the cornier American version of Queer as Folk and of The L Word.

Secondly, it’s a buddy movie about two hot tough femme women riding motorcycles across the country, which is usually Hollywood code for lesbian. They even code one of them as “butch,” making her “the tough one” and naming her Will, of all things. Why Will? Because she’s butch, I guess. We didn’t really get any other explanation. The other one is named Jane, which at first I thought was just a pseudonym she was giving out. Nope. Her name’s actually Jane.

Thirdly, the only actual city we see on their road trip is San Francisco, in which they spend a ludicrous amount of time considering that they’re going from Los Angeles to Montana. They rave about how they’re going to move there. All right, they’re saying it because hot men are passing them – and there’s a reason they’re passing you, ladies – but then they go into a diner with a ridiculously flirty waitress (played by Traci Lords). We are just getting so many mixed messages here.

The Good, the Bad, the Plot, and the Editing

The plot. The plot? The plot….

Well, there was a plot. I remember it; we drove by it several times. Occasionally we even slowed down enough to see what was supposed to be going on.

See, they’re in rehab. And they hate rehab. And they like motorcycles. And one of them knows where the motorcycle from Easy Rider is, because her dad’s friend owns it.

So of course they break out of rehab, get ahold of some motorcycles of their own, and drive up to Montana to get it. I mean, wouldn’t you?

The rehab angle actually provides much of the movie’s unintentional humor. I watched it with my roommate, who had two years in Alcoholics Anonymous at the time, and a friend of ours who had a year, along with my own year and a half in various other twelve step programs. As my roommate remarked, it seemed like it was written by someone who had a month sober and said, “Oh wow! I should make a movie about this!”

This inspiration, you see, provided the subplot, which is that… well, it’s that Will has a drug problem, basically.

The subplot is supposed to be that Will and Jane make a passionate commitment to each other to stay sober until they find the famous chopper – and then get totally wasted. The movie has a very difficult time sticking to a plot, so this subplot basically turns into “Hey! Addictions sure are tough to shake, huh?” But we do get a lot of accidentally funny moments where one of them, out of nowhere, starts spouting twelve-step slogans, or yelping about “the committee in my head!” or reciting the Serenity Prayer – and then they go right back to their standard “bad girl” personas.

Pacing and Plot Problems

This would be a pretty good plot if it made any sense. I mean, yes, break out of rehab. But how? What are the dangers? Where are the wacky or dramatic chase scenes? How the hell did they get those motorcycles? We don’t know; I mean, we’re only the viewers. We only planted our butts in those seats for two entire commercial-free hours for this movie. Why should we know what’s going on?

I’m not bitter at all.

That’s one example of the terrible editing. We repeatedly go from Dramatic Disclosure to Sudden Resolution without much thought. The editing is problematic on another level as well. For example, when they go to San Francisco – inexplicable as that already is – we are treated to at least two separate montages in which they appear to cross the Golden Gate Bridge repeatedly. It’s not that they like to ride their bikes across the bridge and pay that stiff $5 toll over and over – it’s simple overuse of “Hey! Look! They’re in San Francisco! You know ’cause you can see that bridge!”

And that’s not even the bridge they would take if they were coming from L.A.

Then there’s the amount of time they spend in San Francisco. See? Why would they do this if they weren’t setting us up for that all-important lesbian subplot? Damnit. This movie – like the bad hustler movie we saw afterward, and the really terrible softcore porn after that – has a little difficulty with pacing. There are long pauses, slowly delivered dialogue, and a lot of scenes that just show people walking, or sitting, or putting their clothes on.

Possibly the most egregious examples of the movie’s rocky pacing are in their relationships with their parents. Quite a way into the movie, with no warning and no previous voiceovers, we are suddenly assaulted by the sound of Jane’s voice reading what appear to be cheesy song lyrics. But no: it turns out that she is telling us that Will was sexually abused by her father, and that Will suddenly realizes at this point that she needs to confront him. No sooner do we learn this than Will goes to a pay phone. She calls him, freaks out, hangs up, goes into a bar, does shots, vomits up blood, and they never, ever speak of it again.

The same time and effort are put into the five or ten minute scene with Jane’s mother. Her mom is clearly supposed to have obsessive-compulsive disorder; they play it subtle by not telling us this outright, but they are thwarted by the incredibly over-the-top OCD stereotypes. She twitches, she mutters numbers and counts fish sticks under her breath, she washes her hands every five seconds… they’re not taking any chances that we might not get it. She’s also quite abusive: she screams at her daughter at the drop of a hat, hits Jane’s hand when she puts a drink down without a coaster, and manipulates her shamelessly. Jane apologizes meekly and wipes off the coaster (not the counter) with the hem of her shirt. Yet after five or ten minutes of this cavalcade of scenery-chewing, Jane takes her mother’s hand and has a Meaningful Moment where All is Made Right Between Them.

Man… those two days of rehab must have been good.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

This movie did keep us guessing. It never took the easy solution to a crisis: although the famous chopper was ridiculously easy to get, none of the other plot points were resolved. Will does not confront or reconcile with her father, who we never see. She does not resolve her drug and alcohol abuse problems; in fact, she overdoses at the end and dies. When her boyfriend turns out to have been following her throughout the road trip and she gets back in his car, she doesn’t go back with him; he just comes along for the ride. When they stop to fix one of the bikes and a cop hits his wife with a flashlight, throws her out of the truck, and then Will and Jane try to rescue her and he comes back and assaults Will, they just let her get back in his truck. Nobody gets easy answers, least of all the audience.

The movie also gets some credit because it was written by the two leads, Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose. One review raved about them; apparently they’ve been unjustly relegated to roles in “exploitation (movies) and cheap TV shows,” and wrote and produced this movie on their own. That’s pretty impressive, and this movie has great potential. Someday, perhaps, someone will remake it — or just edit the version that’s already out there.

Oh yeah: and that was the Mother’s Day episode of the comic, too. I know they don’t mention it, but I like to think that that is why Elly got to take a bubble bath after her day of a million errands. It’s Mother’s Day – let’s allow her to be “lazy” for once! Maybe in the very last panel!

After I went to bed I remembered another angle on “lazy”: the way it’s used in racism. I’m no ethnic studies major, but what I’ve got here so far is that first the white mainstream abducted and enslaved people from West Africa, and decided to label them “lazy,” clearly applying no logic to anything around them whatsoever.

(And again, there’s a connection to self-care as well:
“When the Europeans colonized Africa, they looked contemptuously upon native work habits. When they saw African farmers hanging around their huts in the middle of the day and drinking beer, the Europeans called them lazy. They said this was a reason Africans didn’t ‘prosper,’ and by extension a sign of racial inferiority. From the African’s point of view, you’d have to be crazy to go out and work in the 100 degree tropical heat. You stored up your energy during the day, and did chores at sundown when temperatures cooled off. From there a phrase was born, ‘mad dogs and Englishmen go out into the midday sun.’” I won’t vouch for the historical accuracy of any of those details, but you get the drift.)

Latinos, especially Mexicans, got similar treatment, in this case being driven into intense poverty and extremely low-paying jobs with terrible conditions, and again getting labeled lazy. (Supposedly for coming from a culture of taking siestas in the afternoon heat – for extra credit, you may write a paper about the north/south divide in specific countries, continents, and around the world, with special attention to cold versus hot climates. No longer than five pages, due in my office by ten!)

Of course, racism is a form of abuse. And this is a variation on the same game that we saw before, that leads people to workaholism: impose impossible pressure or impossible standards on people and deprive them of their needs for not meeting those standards, or just as a side dish to the pressure. On an individual scale, it’s the parents who make their kids work (way above their age level) in the family business, or keep up the house and raise the kids while their parents work, always trying to do tasks that even the adults in their lives aren’t doing well, always trying to do it well enough to earn the attention and approval that are one of their most basic developmental needs. Mainly, I suppose, when paired with the overt emotional abuse of lecturing, yelling at, or shaming them when they inevitably do something wrong. On the bigger scale, it’s the society or government that creates unlivable conditions for people and holds out the imaginary carrot of “We’ll stop abusing you when you do a good enough job to prove that we’re wrong.”

Play with it; I’m sure there are corners I’m missing here.

I really enjoyed breaking down some of the tools that people use in emotional abuse; trouble is, I kept coming up with more so they’re kind of scattered around this site! I am finally collating them into one handy document; I’ll update it as and when I think of others. You are invited to suggest your own in the comments!

These are abusive acts, and many of us do them once in a while, or do them without intending to harm anyone, or do them thinking that everyone involved is okay with it so it doesn’t harm anyone. I would say that doing them and taking responsibility for it and making amends and changing one’s behavior is, well, an effect of abuse and also just plain human. Doing them regularly (not necessarily in every conversation, but when triggered/angry/upset/scared, for example) and refusing to acknowledge it or change… that’s when people cross my mental line into “abuser.” There’s always time to cross back. Hopefully this list will help people recognize problematic behaviors of their own as well as problematic relationships they are or have been in with others.

* The Bait and Switch: Changing a decision or agreement that has been made with others without consulting them; see also unilateral decision-making.

* Boundary Rejecting: Refusing to accept or respect people’s boundaries – what they say is okay with them, what they say they can do, what they say works for them, et cetera; arguing with them extensively and/or insisting that their boundaries are unreasonable or meaningless.

* Changing the Rules/Changing the Story: Rewriting history in order to cover up a mistake or to get one’s way (e.g. “I/you never said that!”); making up a story about what the other person’s motivations are and projecting it onto them (see also projecting).

* Insults/Name-Calling: Enough said?

* Making Crazy Stakes/Raising the Stakes: It’s a ridiculous imaginary zero-sum power game. “If you’re not willing to do this small thing, then you get NOTHING. If you’re not willing to do everything that I say, down to this small level, then you lose EVERYTHING.” It’s taking it very quickly from the smallest detail to the biggest possible level to totally bewilder people and throw them off guard. If you can convince them, even briefly, to go with you into this insane world where that is at all a reasonable way to look at it, then of course they have to choose to do what you say.

* Passing the Buck: Consistently refusing to see or take responsibility for one’s part in a situation; insisting that everything is someone else’s fault. Also related to projecting, because it can involve dumping all one’s responsibility in a situation on the other person – projecting every mistake or fault onto them in order to avoid “getting in trouble” or having to admit imperfection.

* Projecting: Casting someone in an old role and dumping all the baggage from that relationship on them. Especially when refusing to allow them to be anyone else (like themselves). Like by pairing it with the filibuster!

* The Repeating Rant: Repeating one’s problem with someone, or one’s argument or point, over and over and over. Especially when paired with:

* Stonewalling: Shutting someone down completely when they try to talk. When paired with the Repeating Rant, you could call this The Filibuster. Making up names for things is fun!

* Time Debting: Not the rare unavoidable lateness, but consistently being late to hang out with friends, to work, to pick up kids, and/or other commitments. Or not showing up at all, without contacting them.

* Unilateral decision-making: Fine by yourself, a problem when it affects others who are supposed to have some say in what is going to happen – whether in a group of friends, a partnership, or a department at work.

* Yelling: Enough said!