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.

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.

At its most basic, economic abuse is any form of abuse involving money. The classic example is in domestic violence situations, where one partner may make a point of controlling the family’s money so that nobody can leave. Besides neglect, economic abuse may be the least visible form of abuse. There are no public service announcements about it. There are no helpful pamphlets detailing signs that economic abuse is taking place. So let’s start out by naming a few here, in the context of an adult relationship.

If one partner is….

• not “allowed” to get a job or go back to school, or not allowed to choose their own job or area of study;
• kept in the dark about how much income their partner has;
• denied access to information like account numbers and payment arrangements;
• given no part in decisions about how the family’s money is spent;
• consistently dependent on their partner for their financial needs;
• loaning their partner money and never seeing it again;
• entirely responsible for their partner’s financial needs;
• unable to get credit because their partner has defaulted on household loans or expenses;
• losing or never seeing income or personal belongings that their partner is stealing from them, whether silently, openly, or through binge-spending;
• disturbed at work by calls or visits against their will from their partner;
• at risk of losing their job because their partner threatens to share inappropriate information or lies about them with their employer;
• required to ask for any money they need;
• required account to their partner for everything they spend even though their partner does not do the same;

…then they are being economically abused.

Like most forms of abuse, economic abuse is often but not always paired with emotional abuse. It is easy to say, “I would never let someone tell me I couldn’t take whatever job I wanted or keep me out of financial decisions!”, but rarely is the setup that blatant. It may even seem kind to begin with. Perhaps you don’t have as much income, and your partner generously handles all the bills. Maybe you naturally defer to them on big purchases because after all, it is their money. Maybe you start out on even footing but slide into this position of unequal power as one partner stays home to take care of children, becomes disabled, goes back to school, or is laid off. Perhaps you are the one who makes more, and extend your hospitality to your partner, covering their rent or their utilities or even food – “just for a while.” Or it may seem minor, even natural, next to the other abuse which has become an intrinsic part of the relationship.

The first step in ending abuse is to recognize it, and the effects it has. We will be examining the effects of abuse later on, but there is one which is important here: anger, which can manifest as defensiveness and even denial. If you feel angry and defensive when reading these lists, grumbling to yourself that I don’t know you or your partner, or that there were special circumstances that made everything on that list perfectly reasonable, or that you can’t call this abuse, you may want to be aware that that is not the reaction of someone who has never been abused.

Economic abuse can occur in adult/child relationships as well. Some simple examples of economic child abuse include:

• having to pay for your own food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs;
• missing school in order to work;
• being required to work either in a family business or to earn outside income for the family;
• being unpaid or underpaid for such work;
• losing money as a result of broken agreements around chores, allowance, and other financial matters;
• being asked to loan money to your parents or other adults;
• never seeing that money again;
• not having your physical needs for food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs met at all;
• losing money as a result of your parents or other adults stealing it;
• being forced into sex work to earn money for the family.

Many of us will look at that list and protest that sometimes parents simply can’t help not being able to meet their children’s needs. It is certainly true that sometimes parents feel trapped in low-income situations. Sometimes adults make a series of bad decisions, or find themselves thrust into bad situations as a result of natural disasters and other emergencies. Sometimes a government’s way of handling these situations seems to trap the victims or make things worse. However, placing the burden of these situations on children is always abuse and always wrong.

Handling traumatic situations is very much like writing a sonnet. In sonnets and other formally structured poems, the limits that we place on the situation paradoxically give us tremendous freedom. As we accept a few specific rules, we become able to see all the options that we are not restricted from using. At the opposite extreme, when writing free verse, poets often end up using the same few tricks and making the same sets of mistakes over and over; their apparent complete freedom can bewilder them. Having principles of our own choosing guides us toward experimentation, while having no set rules leaves us wandering in confusion and giving ourselves rules that don’t work.

It is the same with trauma. We always have a very large number of options available to us, but all too often we are sure that we are stuck in the situation at hand. We may even put tremendous amounts of energy into finding reasons that no other option will work. However, if we are determined to do anything to prevent our children from being adversely affected, we begin to be able to see that the choices we had rejected before might actually work. When we are willing to put our energy into preventing any harm to them, we start looking more closely at our options, gathering information on resources we never knew existed, pressing points that we had formerly given up on, and trying things we had never before been willing to consider.

If we have children, we must also be willing to put our energy into refusing abuse to ourselves. Abusive acts never happen in a vacuum. If we are abusing ourselves by not making sure our needs are met, whether physically, emotionally, or otherwise, then we are not fully available to support, nurture, and love our children. If we are staying in an abusive relationship at home, work, or elsewhere in our lives, we are not just teaching our children that it is reasonable to expect and accept abuse; we are also exposing them to abusive people and depleting the emotional resources that we have to offer them. In that spirit, let’s take a moment to look at another kind of economic abuse: abuse which occurs at work.

Abuse in the workplace may look like simple emotional abuse, but it carries one of the clearest hallmarks of economic abuse: the abuser has economic power over the victim such that they may seem to be unable to meet their needs if they leave the abusive relationship. Often it does not look so clear. Workplace abuse can come from co-workers at any level, from subordinates to CEOs, and might involve:

• performance pressure, in which the expectations for an employee’s performance rise as far as they can, without recognition or reward, until the employee is punished for not being able to exceed the final set of expectations;
• shaming or punishing employees who make mistakes;
• sexual harassment;
• discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, sexuality, physical or mental abilities, et cetera;
• refusal to pay for work performed, including overtime;
• threats of violence, whether joking or serious;
• threats of any kind, such as using the threat of layoffs to demand that employees work harder or longer, especially without a commensurate increase in pay;
• pay that is below a living wage for its area;
• pay that is considerably below the standard for the work performed;
• refusal to communicate clearly about expectations;
• denial of benefits for any reason, including forcing employees to work fewer hours than they are able to in order to avoid paying them benefits;
• requiring employees to lie on behalf of the company or their supervisors or other co-workers;
• yelling or insults;
• outsourcing departments.

None of the items on these lists are options. If we are to truly face abuse, we have to accept that as our most basic premise. There is no situation which can justify any of the above acts. As adults, we have a double responsibility: we have to refuse to abuse others, and we have to refuse to condone abuse against ourselves.

It has only been perhaps twenty-five years since people began talking openly about any kind of abuse and sharing what they did to recover from it. We do not have a very large pool of information from which to draw. But one of the lessons that people have discovered over and over in that time has been that no matter how limited our options seem, no matter how little we know about what else can happen for us, it is not until we refuse to get involved with even potentially harmful acts that the cycle of abuse ends. It is only then that we are truly free to heal; it is only then that we can end abuse completely.