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.

With Take a Thief, Mercedes Lackey has delighted fans and self-abusers alike with another steaming pile of horrific crap.

Think I liked it? Well, I didn’t.

Take a Thief is….

Dear god.

The Plot

Let’s take this first. This is the main reason people read her books, I believe.

There is one thing that Mercedes Lackey does well, and that is escapism. Specifically, it is the boilerplate plot from which all her books are spawned.

There is always someone who had, or is having, a terrible, terrible childhood. There is always some waif who gets rescued by the Throbbingly Beautiful And Incidentally Psychic White Horse and becomes a Herald. Or a Herald who has repressed all the pain and torment of their childhood and is only now resolving it, in the middle of winter, trapped in a cabin with the one other Herald with whom they are destined to Do It, in a howling snowstorm which is the worst blizzard Valdemar has seen since the Most Recent Dramatic Historical Event Which Everyone In This Book Is Referencing.

The symbolism! The electricity! The DRAMA!

People read Mercedes Lackey for the emotional release, just like a good (or in this case, an asstacularly horrible) Greek play. The more tormented the teen, the more they will enjoy Mercedes Lackey. In fact, readers of all ages can dive into any one of her over-italicized creations and thrill to the vindication of the mistreated character du jour.

Most of the biographical blurbs about her specifically note the fact that she had a “normal childhood,” and I’ve heard that she refuses to talk about her normal childhood in interviews. Other than to insist that it was perfectly normal. Yet many of her books involve the recurring theme of some mistreated youth overcoming tremendous odds to become a beloved hero and then graciously forgiving their family.

I’m just saying.

And it is addictive stuff; there is something exciting about the dramatic build-up and release of all these experiences, no matter how badly written. In fact, the worse the better – we don’t want our dramatic orgasm to be all cluttered up with silly things like a cohesive plot!

The Setting

I’m not being entirely fair. There is one other reason I can see to read her books.

She spends a tremendous amount of time in each book simply explaining exactly how every single teeny-tiny aspect of this particular place in her imaginary world works.

This may not sound like a good thing. And it isn’t. But there is something pleasantly hypnotic about it at times. She is the perfect author for any gamer who has ever spent more time fantasizing about creating a perfectly, infinitely detailed society and history than actually setting up a game.

Normally, this habit of hers drives me crazy. She desperately needs a decent editor, for this and other reasons. With proper editing, Take a Thief could have been a really snazzy short story instead of a mediocre novel. Of course, with proper editing, she would have far fewer books out, so it’s not really in her financial interest to sacrifice quantity for quality.

But in Take a Thief, she got away with it a lot of the time. This is one of the few novels of hers in which some of the ridiculous exposition made sense; for example, having seven pages of endless natter about exactly why and how Skif committed each crime did actually add something to the book.

If she could only have omitted every other ten-page stretch of expository obsessive musings and faux-humorous asides….

The latter is one of my main problems with “Misty” Lackey’s writing.

The Writing Style

Have you ever been invited to sit in on a game of Vampire: The Masquerade, or whatever the kids are playing nowadays? And you’re surrounded by people you don’t know that well, or at all, and they keep shouting out things that are clearly in-jokes, which don’t make any sense to you, as if the in-joke itself is inherently funny?

“Look! A frog!”
(uproarious, hysterical laughter all around)

Kind of like the advertising for Napoleon Dynamite, which offered a free watch that said “Iiiidiot!” out loud. I’m sure that’s hysterical to the fans, but I’m left wondering why I want a watch that insults me.

Well, “Misty’s” books are like that. She loads ‘em up with italics, dashes, and exclamation marks and proceeds to make jokes that — well — aren’t exactly funny! Like this:

This was not the sort of atmosphere he’d expect a priest to seek out!

To make matters worse, she elbows us in the ribs like that all the damn time. It’s not just for jokes: any time she wants to make a point, or show someone’s reaction to something, she breaks out the italics and the leftover bags of cut-rate punctuation.

Alberich examined the subject, asked his questions, made his statements, came to his decisions, and left it alone.

If he trusted the person in question.

And he trusted Skif.

That was a very, very strange realization.

And when all else fails, when she’s hammered her points in so hard that the hammer broke, she starts veering out of the universal narrator voice and breaking the fourth wall:

So Bazie had built this thing in the first place?

Best of all is when she does all of them at once:

Even if this one hadn’t actually murdered poor folks, he probably wouldn’t care that his friend had. And my Lord Rovenar was oh, so conveniently away on his family estate in the country.

But wait, there’s more.

The Characters

God help her, they speak in dialect.

Now, in real life, there are many reasons to write in dialect. But to invent her own accents and slang and differences in linguistic structure and then make everyone speak that way is… impressive, and also, astonishingly annoying.

People, in real life, had to fight for the ability to write in their own dialects, the way they spoke, the rhythms they grew up with, and still be published, and not get raked over the critics’ coals. Like Zora Neale Hurston. And this is what Misty does with that:

“Nah, I’ll be doin’ that t’ all uv them, then into th’ bleach they goes, an’ no sign where they come from!” Bazie rubbed his hands together with glee. “An’ that’ll mean a full five siller fer the lot from a feller what’s got a business in these things, an’ all fer a liddle bit uv easy work for ye an me! Nah, what sez ye t’ that, young’un?”

Skif could only shake his head in admiration. “That — I’m mortal glad I grabbed fer Deek’s ankle yesterday!”

And Bazie roared with laughter. “So’m we, boy!” he chuckled. “So’m we!”

It’s a little-known fact that Daw Books had to create a special area of their budget just for replacing Misty’s worn-out apostrophe key over and over.

The Screams Of Her Victims Before At Last Sweet Death Claims Them

I think my favorite thing about this whole wonderful fantastic book is the way she addresses child sexual abuse.

The plot, eventually, centers around what the FBI calls “child sex rings”. Additionally, Skif grows up working in his uncle’s tavern alongside a young woman who is forced into prostitution as well as taken into the proprietor’s bed. This is how Misty deals with them finding out that the young woman has just barely turned fifteen:

“Fifteen!” Skif’s eyes bulged. “I’da swore she was eighteen, sure! Sixteen, anyroad!”

Then again – he’d simply assumed she was. There wasn’t much of her, and she wasn’t exactly talkative. She had breasts, and she was of middling height, but some girls developed early. Wasn’t there a saying that those who were a bit behind in the brains department were generally ahead on the physical side?

And she says it again later:

In the years since running off, Skif had learned a lot about his uncle, and he’d learned that when it came to women, Londer had to pay for what he got. Since he’d already paid for Maisie, it followed that he’d probably seen no reason why he shouldn’t have her first. Not that he’d shown any interest in anything too young to have breasts, but half-wits often matured early, and Londer probably wouldn’t even think twice about her real age if he’d taken her.

See? It’s okay, because he didn’t rape her out of a desire to fuck little kids – he did it because he paid for her! And plus she already had breasts! And anyway, the real issue is that she looked eighteen!

Regardless of what it is that she meant to achieve with this subplot, all it does is detract from her later claim that child sexual abuse is “worse than death.” If Skif really thinks it’s worse than death, he should probably have a worthier reaction than “Oh well! Half-wits got some big boobs!”

That’s quality writing, right there. And, while she keeps sort of obliquely referring to people sexually abusing much younger children, she never lets the characters actually think about it or reference it openly – the entire thing is kept pretty much peripheral to the plot, even when it becomes the denouement of the novel.

Actually, I take it back. My favorite thing about the book is the way that she addresses horsefucking.

Now, she doesn’t talk openly about that either. But consider the following interactions between Skif and his magical pure white throbbingly beautiful psychic blue-eyed horse who “Chose” him:

She paced close to him, and once again he was caught — though not nearly so deeply — in those sparkling sapphire eyes….

He gazed into that abyss, and thought back at Cymry as hard as he could — :Is that the only reason you Chose me?:

Because if it was –

— if it was, and all of the love and belonging that had filled his heart and soul when he first looked into her eyes was a lie, a ruse to catch someone with his particular “set of skills”–

:Are you out of your mind?: she snapped indignantly, shaken right out of her solemnity by the question. :Can’t you feel why I Chose you?:

That answer, unrehearsed, unfeigned, reassured him as no speech could have. And something in him shifted, straining against a barrier he hadn’t realized was there until that moment….

:Skif — do you really, really want me to leave you?: The voice in his mind was no more than a whisper, but it was a whisper that woke the echoes of that unforgettable moment when he felt an empty place inside him fill with something he had wanted for so long, so very, very long –

He rushed to greet her, and as he touched her, he felt enveloped in that same wonderful feeling that had been creeping in all afternoon, past doubts, past fears, past every obstacle. He pulled her head down to his chest and ran his hand along her cheeks, while she breathed into his tunic and made little contented sounds. He could have stayed that way for the rest of the afternoon….

Isn’t that sweet? The pure, soft-core love between a boy and his psychic horse. It reads like the romance novels in the supermarket, the ones that used to inspire my friends to dramatic readings, the ones where people would gasp out things like “So bonny! So very, very bonny!”

Mercedes Lackey’s writing bears every resemblance to a quasi-historical romance novel with a geek twist. She pumps it out at great velocity, with little variation in the basic characters, setting, or plot elements; she uses wildly purple prose at times, and lacks any subtlety in her language; she coyly skirts the edges of any really difficult issues, or treats them with very broad strokes, as if they were dressing for the main characters’ emotional roller-coasters; and she puts most of her literary effort into trying to show off the sheer detail of her fictional setting, impoverishing the characters and robbing the novel of any emotional depth.

However, it must be said that this is not her worst book. Her stand-alone novels tend to suck less than the stories which she tries to stretch into trilogies. So if you must read a Mercedes Lackey novel, this might as well be it.

I love How I Met Your Mother. Recently, they showed an episode that I just thought was so perfect for us here: The Bracket.

Barney (played by Doogie Howser, I mean Neil Patrick Harris) discovers that one of the women he slept with has started following him around, telling any woman he talks to that he is just saying whatever it takes to get in their pants and that sleeping with him was the biggest mistake of her life. Inspired by March Madness, they create an elaborate “bracket” to narrow down which of the 64 biggest disasters he perpetrated could have motivated a woman to do this. And then his friend Lily (my favorite Buffy actress, Alyson Hannigan) insists that he go to each of the top four and apologize to them. 

What more could you ask for? (A), his character is a glorious fountain of the signs of addiction, which are also the effects of abuse. The grandiosity and arrogance that overlie a searing pit of low self-esteem… the rigid (and ironic) fear of displaying emotions like (especially) fear… the web of lies that he weaves to get his way and stay in denial…. 

And of course, (B), he’s a total sex addict – in his case, obsessing about, using, and pursuing sex compulsively to fill the same pit of self-esteem that he tries so hard to hide from everyone. Which, almost inevitably, is a result of either overt or covert sexual abuse. (Overt means out in the open, comparatively: blatant, physical sexual abuse of any kind. Covert means it’s murky, and ironically because of that can literally be out in the open: things like talking explicitly and inappropriately about sex in front of children, exposing them to inappropriate sexual experiences, or in any way treating them like a partner instead of a child.) 

And then, (C) the greatest thing is that, just like in My Name is Earl, Barney in this one episode is (albeit accidentally, unwillingly, and out of order) engaging in recovery. He’s going around to women he screwed over and (sort of) trying to make things right, and sometimes finding out that things are already okay. Just like when people in 12-step programs make amends! He’s seeing a little bit of what effect his acting out has had on people. (Hey, that must be why we call it acting out – because we’re always acting out the pain and chaos of our abuse on some level until we become able to turn it over.) 

Also, (D), it’s freaking hilarious. Especially the end. Enjoy….