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.

This is a little gem I remember from my childhood of watching Sesame Street:

All this time I thought the goat was saying “Everybody get maa-a-a-a-ad!” but it turns out it’s “It ain’t bad to get maa-a-a-a-ad!” It’s also a hilariously retro clip – would we show someone lighting a firecracker beneath a goat these days? It lacks any kind of distinction between just getting mad and actually expressing it in an appropriate way, but it’s nice and affirming anyway as far as setting boundaries goes. Which is kind of the point.

I just got home from work and on the way, I passed a guy a few blocks from my house with two young kids. As I sat at a red light, I heard him yell at the kids to stop fighting across him (he was on a cell phone, which I’m sure made it even more annoying) and turned just in time to see him slap one of them across the head. The kid fell over and lay on the sidewalk, crying.

I full-on leaned on my horn. They turned to look at me and I yelled, “No!! It is NOT OKAY TO HIT KIDS!!”
*sings* I got mad, I got mad, I got mad; it ain’t bad to get maa-a-a-ad.

I always used to be afraid of confronting parents – or other adults – who I see abusing kids in public. I was afraid that they’d turn on me, or that it would embarrass the kids and add to their pain (instead of making them see that not everyone condones or ignores what’s happening to them?!), or that I would turn out somehow to be wrong about what they were doing not being okay. And then I’d start fantasizing about what I wished I had said or done. And as my own recovery progressed, I’d start fantasizing about it sooner and sooner after the moment passed. And then while it was still happening, while I still had time to debate about whether or not to act on it. And now I find that it just comes right out.

The guy hurriedly picked up the kid and brushed him off and tried to comfort him. I heard him saying, at one point, not to cry. Now I kind of wish I had honked again and yelled, “It’s okay to cry!!” That amuses me. The other kid, incidentally, was staring at me just flabbergasted throughout. What really pisses me off is that a few blocks later I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw that there was a police car behind me. That car had better have come along well after that incident, because that is some terrible, negligent policing otherwise – not that that’s anything new.

The funny thing is I think this was the same exact intersection I was at the last time I confronted someone by honking. That time, a few years ago, I was at that stop light again when the passenger in the car in front of me casually threw the garbage from an entire fast-food meal out the window. In several loads. All over the road. I honked long and loud in protest and the guy got out of the car and tried to menace me. I was like, seriously? I am in a car. I could probably smush you between our cars. I just honked louder and his friend in the driver’s seat, visibly freaking out, managed to talk him into getting back into the car and drove off very hastily.

I swear I don’t normally antagonize others; in fact, I almost never even use my horn. But sometimes it’s a convenient way to object loudly to what other people are doing. I just try to keep that on the “don’t abuse your child” side of things instead of the “drive faster darn it” side of things.

Which reminds me that I was going to post about another example of people confronting abusers. Apparently there’s a woman named Wendy Williams, who has her own radio show on WBLS in New York where she and her husband abuse people. Including Williams herself. The wonderful thing is that finally one of their staff members, talent booker Nicole Spence, is doing the right thing: speaking out and filing a lawsuit. Spence says:

“Mr. Hunter repeatedly sexually propositioned me at work in the most crude and vulgar ways, telling me over and over that he wanted to ‘fuck’ me. I also feared Mr. Hunter because he repeatedly physically assaulted Ms. Williams at or near the WBLS studio. In one instance, Mr. Hunter stormed into the studio, demanded that other employees leave and openly physically abused Ms. Williams, pinning her against the wall with his hand around her neck, choking her while repeatedly pounding his fist into the wall directly by her head.“

Spence filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and – as often happens when one person breaks the silence around abuse – many more staff members have now come forward with their own experiences of workplace violence. According to the New York Daily News,

“Others have come forward since we filed the complaint to support Nicole’s claims,” said Karen Webber, a partner in the prestigious law firm Thompson, Wigdor & Gilly, which is preparing a federal lawsuit on Spence’s behalf. “They say he often called women bitches and used alcohol, and they describe his violent outbursts against Ms. Williams.”

Amazingly, Spence has continued to show up and try to do her job at the station, despite so far having been thrown out of the station on the air, moved out of her office, and had her duties taken away. Williams’ way of dealing with her husband’s abuse of her and of her staff, besides attacking staff members and listeners herself, has been to tell the media, “Her allegations are totally false. This bitch is out of her mind.” Convincing words, no? SOHH claims to have inside information that Williams will be suspended when the station finishes its investigations.

There’s a rising roar against abuse… I think I’ll have to organize a blog carnival where people share about ways they have confronted abusers in their own lives.

Faked or real animal sacrifice… electric shock… abusive religious and political systems… medical experimentation… forced prostitution… attempted brainwashing… forcing victims to consume urine and feces… programming… burying victims alive… drugging… destroying or perverting family bonds… forcing children to abuse others…. These are some of the hallmarks of ritual abuse.

Ritual Abuse

“Ritual abuse” is defined and used in many different ways. It first rose into the public awareness as satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s. Even now people often associate all ritual abuse with Satanism, even though any system of belief can be (and has been) perverted to justify and create abuse.

“I used to refer to this as “Systematic Repetitive Abuse” in SRA contexts, just to hammer home the point that it wasn’t all due to some bizarre conspiracy…. It’s a human thing to make rituals, we do it all the time. Abusive people make abusive rituals.” – Bob King

Ritual abuse should be distinguished from ritualized abuse. Ritualized abuse does not require a “systematic” component and is merely abuse that takes place in a repeated, formalized manner. It is the difference between the religious rituals associated with Easter, and the mundane ritual of brushing one’s teeth and going to bed. As well as including a political or religious justification, ritual abuse is generally characterized by extreme physical and sexual abuse, and often by taking place within a group of adults, whether it’s a family or a social organization of some kind.

Ritual abuse can be tricky; it often contains the seeds of its own invisibility. That is, a lot of ritual abuse seems designed to make sure the survivors will not be believed. An abuser may don a Mickey Mouse or alien mask because if their young victim ever tries to tell someone that Mickey abused them, they will sound delusional. There has been speculation that at least some of the alien abduction stories out there, especially with the bright lights and the probing, are connected to experiences of ritual abuse. As the Dominion Conquest puts it,

The purpose of ritual elements of the abuse seems threefold: 1.) rituals in some groups are part of a shared belief or worship system. 2.) rituals are used to intimidate victims into silence. 3.) ritual elements (devil worship, animal or human sacrifice) seem so unbelievable to those unfamiliar with these crimes that these elements detract from the credibility of the victims and make prosecution of the crimes very difficult.”⁶

Definitions of Ritual Abuse

It might be more apropos to call this section “Descriptions of Ritual Abuse,” because this kind of abuse consists of a group of characteristics which might not all be present in any given ritually abusive situation. For example:

• “Absolute control over the child
• Mind games
• Abuse of power
• Twisted words that say one thing yet mean another
• Insistence that there are certain right ways to do things
• Absolute thinking about worship
• Cruel savagery against children performed in the name of love.”⁵

According to Safeline, “One definition of ritual abuse is when one or more children are abused in a highly organized way, by a group of people who have come together and subscribe to a belief system which, for them, justifies their actions towards that child. This usually extends into family involvement and may have been practiced as a religion or a way of life for years.” ¹

The Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission For Women (1989 report) takes a more extreme view, saying that “Ritual abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members…most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation.”²

By contrast, a similar project taken on in 1995 by The Canberra Women’s Health Centre focused on the purpose of the abuse as well as some political aspects: “Ritual abuse is organized abuse carried out by a group for the purpose of achieving power or making money. The abuse aims to break a person’s spirit and to gain the ultimate in power – absolute control over another human being. Religious or pseudo-religious beliefs are used as part of controlling others. It encompasses deliberate human and biological experimentation, technological mind control conditioning and criminal activity (eg prostitution, drug trafficking, arms dealing).”³

Healing Roads looks at the elements involved in cases of ritual abuse and compares them to similar situations on a larger scale: “In a broad sense, many of our overtly or covertly socially sanctioned actions can be seen as ritual abuse, such as army boot military basic training, hazing, racism, spanking children, and partner-battering…. The term ritual abuse is generally used to mean prolonged, extreme, sadistic abuse, especially of children, within a group setting. The group’s ideology is used to justify the abuse, and abuse is used to teach the group’s ideology. The activities are kept secret from society at large, as they violate norms and laws.”⁴

And Sanctuary Unlimited helpfully isolates some of the basic emotional elements of ritual abuse affecting children:

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