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.

Lance Mannion (how awesome is that? that can’t possibly be his real name, right?) wrote recently about the idea that college is a waste of time for people who are happier in non-white-collar jobs. And the recent article in the Atlantic that suggested that those folks are unfit for college, which I think are (as the Simpsons might put it) strong, bewildering words.

I never saw college as something that I needed to get into a particular career; I figured, even at the time, that if I wanted to go to school to get a particular career (at least one outside of academia), I would go to some professional school for whatever it was I was trying to do.

I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I knew I could write well enough and didn’t need a degree to do it, just motivation and time and work. I was going to college because it was expected of me, because I figured it would get me a higher-paying day job in the meantime, but mainly, because I needed to get the hell out of my family home and I couldn’t make it on my own yet.

I needed college as a kind of decompression chamber between childhood and life. And, both while I was an undergrad and later when I worked in the college’s admissions department, I saw a large number of students in the same position. Whether or not they were studying what they wanted to be doing in life, (whether or not, in fact, they even knew what that was), they needed a place to find their own footing.

It became clear to me pretty quickly that many of us were emerging from the depths of dysfunctional, abusive homes – no matter how loving and well-intentioned they might also have been – and that we needed these four or more years to learn about boundaries, and healthier relationships, and our own wants and needs. Often, we needed the time to become willing and able to acknowledge our own abuse. It’s like fish and water: it’s hard to see it when it’s the only thing you’ve ever known. And it’s hard to feel safe acknowledging it when it seems to be the only option.

Some of us seemed to self-destruct in college. I’m sure every college or university has its share of suicidal students, people who get out of the house and plunge straight into drugs/smoking/alcohol (or just farther into drugs/smoking/alcohol), and people whose serious mental health issues are just becoming apparent. It can be ugly – just plain hideous and terrifying to them and those around them – but it’s part of the healing process. Like pus. I hate to bring pus into an argument, but there you have it. Nasty, hot pus clearing out the infected wound. Of abuse.

Moving right along….

We surely had our share, so much so that we often joked about whether there was something in the dorm’s plumbing that was making people go crazy. Over time, though, it became obvious: there were just a lot of students who were, basically, getting the bends on the way back up to reality. Away from their home lives. Some got the help they needed, though generally not from our school’s incredibly weak counseling department. Some are still working through this process… well, really, we all are, just at different paces and with different tools.

Certainly it’s possible to go through the same process without college, but I am so glad I had it to shelter me. I was thrown in with a huge peer group, given a set of basic rules, and against that background I learned a tremendous amount about how my own childhood had affected me, what did and didn’t work for me, and how it was all different from and similar to others’ experiences. I got to see other people go through the process of facing and addressing abuse and its effects before me, and learn about what I liked and loved and needed in life, and try to learn everything that I wanted to before they decided I had enough credits and kicked me out into the workplace.

It was like a great big womb, basically. Not the safest or most nurturing one, because we were young adults and didn’t need the same kind of womb anymore. But a reasonably safe place where we could be suspended between the child and adult worlds for a little while. It gave me a grace period for figuring out my own shit. I had a lot of resentments about my academic career at the time, some regrets, and a tremendous amount of confusion – but to a large extent, that was because I was concerned with what I thought I needed and wasn’t getting instead of what I did need and was.

It still took me a while to hit bottom, to come face to face with my experiences of abuse and their effects on my adult life. Part of that was denial, part of it was a lack of information about those effects and the resources available to me. I didn’t know this stuff, the therapists I went to didn’t know this stuff, the doctors I saw didn’t know this stuff, my friends didn’t know this stuff – we have a lot of work to do in making it common knowledge so that people can start healing sooner. But college helped a lot in closing the gap between what I knew and what I needed to know, outside of the classroom.

Nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah! I can get married!

Not that I wasn’t going to anyway. But

I almost used the blink tag there, I’m so excited.

You know, I’m one of those survivors who basically never cries. Sometimes out of extreme frustration, but that’s about it except when I was little. The last time I can remember crying in front of my parents is when they (the senate or whoever, not my parents) passed the “Defense” of Marriage Act in 1996, letting states ban same-sex marriage at will and outlawing it nationally. And today I cried out of happiness, instead.
Also, the first picture I saw for the story on the SFGate site is of Shelly Bailes and Ellen Pontac, who I totally know. They started the gay pride picnic in Davis, where I grew up. They make ties, too, or at least they used to. I met them and found out about the first picnic at a Whole Earth Festival more than 10 years ago when I stopped to buy a tie with stars and planets all over it. Not only is that a huge shout-out, but I just went to the Whole Earth Festival again this last weekend! In fact, I want to blog about it later….

This is a huge deal, y’all. And it makes our coast look a lot better. I was afraid that it was going to be all Massachussetts and Vermont and everyone. The left coast started it, damnit! Hawaii was the first fighter on the marriage front!

It’s deeply relevant to this blog, too, because I can’t think of anything more stupidly codependent or bad-boundaries than telling people that they can’t get married because you (or vice versa) have decided it’s morally wrong. Or gross. Or whatever it may be. Because people feel threatened by it for their own very personal reasons.

My girlfriend’s sister gives us great examples of this. She likes to write these letters about how she (girlfriend, not sister) is going to hell for her “tendency” toward this “sin” of being with a chick. And how it makes EVERYONE ELSE really uncomfortable, and how she is alienating God (yeah, because THAT’S how that works. If you can alienate your higher power, are you sure you really have one?) and how she isn’t happy (projection) and how she needs to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Which is routinely hilarious, because I literally can’t think of anyone who has a closer or more personal relationship with their higher power, whatever name they may give it at any given time, than Annie. And because she, of course, is happier in recovery from the abuse they grew up with than she has ever been, grows happier and healthier and more deeply rooted and deeply herself every day. And then there’s her sister, who is still suffering from the effects of the abuse they grew up with, and the crazy and conflicted beliefs of the cult that they grew up in – and is acting that out by projecting onto her sister and the rest of her family, and trying to control how everyone lives and what they believe.

It’s a microcosm of the political battlefield on which this stuff gets played out. Handing out legal safety and economic safety and benefits to only certain people, and then drumming up crazy reasons to deny it to others, is… well, it’s nuts. It’s a form of abuse, obviously, (probably economic abuse among other things), and it’s fascinating to watch the kinds of projection and unreality that people spout out in trying to defend it. I’m just happy to be able to watch all that from the SAFE side now.

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.