Ties That Bind
Page 1
TIES THAT BIND
Familial Homophobia and
Its Consequences
ALSO BY SARAH SCHULMAN
NOVELS
The Mere Future (2009)
The Child (2007)
Shimmer (1998)
Rat Bohemia (1995)
Empathy (1992)
People In Trouble (1990)
After Delores (1988)
Girls, Visions and Everything (1986)
The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984)
Collected Early Novels of Sarah Schulman (1998)
NONFICTION
Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998)
My American History:
Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years (1994)
PLAYS
Enemies, A Love Story (adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer) (2007)
Manic Flight Reaction (2005)
Carson McCullers (2002) (published by Playscripts Inc., 2006)
TIES THAT BIND
Familial Homophobia and
Its Consequences
Sarah Schulman
NEW YORK
LONDON
© 2009 by Sarah Schulman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2009 Distributed by Perseus Distribution
CIP data available
ISBN 978-1-59558-480-9 (hc)
The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.
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Dedicated to those who keep their promises.
“We must understand and confront the unprecedented.”
—Larry Kramer
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Familial Homophobia, an Experience in Search of Recognition
“The Oppressed Will Always Believe the Worst About Themselves”
Cultural Crisis, NOT Personal Problem
Homophobia as a Pleasure System
The Failure of Therapeutic Solutions
Doing to Lovers as Other Have Done to Us/Her
Third Party Intervention: The Human Obligation
Withholding Creates Tension, Acknowledgment Creates Relief (And This Is Why We Are Talking About Gay Marriage)
To Be Real
Conclusion: Facing Challenging Ideas
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and Phil Wilkie. Thanks to the many readers. Deep appreciation to Alex Juhasz, my cousins Marcia Cohen-Zakai and Alon Zakai, Alix Dobkin, Dudley Saunders and Claudia Rankine.
TIES THAT BIND
Familial Homophobia and
Its Consequences
INTRODUCTION
Familial Homophobia: An Experience in Search of Recognition
Despite the emphasis on gay marriage and parenthood that has overwhelmed our current discourse, how gays and lesbians are treated IN families is far more influential on the quality of individual lives and the larger social order than how we are treated AS families. Yet, as is often the case, central and uncomfortable truths take a backseat to more facile and familiar conversations. In this book, I try to articulate how and why systems of familial homophobia operate, and, more importantly, how they can be changed.
There are two experiences that most homosexuals share. One is “coming out,” a process of self-interrogation in opposition to social expectation that has no parallel in heterosexual life. The second common experience is that we have each, at some time in our lives, been treated shoddily by our families simply, but specifically, because of our homosexuality. This experience is, in turn, mirrored by the legal system and the dominant social structures within which gay people must live, as well as in the arts and entertainment industries, which select and control our representations. As a consequence, familial exclusion and diminishment is often extended by the behavior of gay people toward each other. It is a house of mirrors of enforcement.
Imagine if a family responded to the coming out of one of its members like this:
They discuss as a family their special responsibility to protect their daughter/sister/mother/niece/aunt/cousin from pressures and cruelties that they themselves will never face. They promise not to exploit or enjoy privileges that she is denied, and to commit their family’s resources to accessing those privileges for her and other gay people. They extend this commitment to others in her community who don’t have conscious, moral families. They treat those people like full human beings and support their gay family member in doing the same thing. In their larger family, friendships, workplaces, in their consumption or production of culture, in how they vote, and what laws they both support and access. They intervene when gay people are being scapegoated by directly addressing the perpetrators.
This is not an impossible scenario. Yet, today, families are more likely to “tolerate” homosexuals, that is, to keep them in a position of lesser value than to learn from them and be elevated by their knowledge. It is far more common to see a politician with an openly gay child actively opposing gay rights than to see him publicly praising that child for having the self-awareness and integrity to come out.
Because of the twisted nature of dominant behavior, gay people are being punished within the family structure even though we have not done anything wrong. This punishment has dramatic consequences on both our social experiences, and our most trusting, loving sexual relationships.
The specifics and dimensions of familial homophobia are broad and vast. They can range from short-sighted slights to varying degrees of exclusion to brutal attacks that distort the gay person’s life to direct and indirect cruelties that literally end that person’s existence. The impact of this will vary, of course, based on what other kinds of support systems the victim has been able to accrue, how committed the family is to enforcing the homophobia, and what kind of interventions are performed by third parties. If the family’s prejudices are flexible, if the victim has consistent and reliable active support from others, and if other individuals in the family or community actively intervene to denounce, and therefore mitigate the impact of the cruelty, familial homophobia can be an unnecessary but overcomeable obstacle.
Without compassionate intervention, however, familial homophobia can become an overwhelmingly wrenching determinate on the gay person’s life. Worse, it can be the model for the ways that gay people treat each other. History shows that recipients of undeserved cruelty—scapegoats—are dependent on the intervention of third parties to support their own acts of resistance. The weak need help. This often starts with a few individuals putting themselves between perpetrators and victims, and results ultimately in new kinds of social standards and sometimes legislation.
Strangely, the issues of this book are both obvious and denied. After all, it is being written in a moment when most people will tell you that “things are getting better” without being able to define, beyond banal cliché, what that actually means. The AIDS crisis forced America to start the process of acknowledging that gay people exist. Thus, even though there are many institutions today that still pretend that we do not exist, there are ot
her institutions that acknowledge, in some form, that we do exist. This is a significant change, but not progress. In many states, cities, and counties, gay people can be fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes, refused service in restaurants or hotels, denied membership in organizations and communities, and experience other victimizing humiliations. In five states (as of May 2009), gay and lesbian couples can be legally married. It’s a bizarre set of daily contradictions that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people must balance and internalize. Some television shows have central characters who are homosexual; other television shows convey entire worlds in which homosexuality is never acknowledged. You never know what you’re going to find around each corner.
However, the acknowledgment, when it does occur, is often problematic. Does the fact that openly gay people are allowed to have apartments in some places mean that “things are getting better?” Or does the fact that so many other places still protect discriminators reflect a more extreme cruelty today than it did forty years ago when gay nondiscrimination laws were unheard of?
I feel that the same negative action has a more intense negative meaning today than it did in the past, when there were fewer options for change. To oppose gay rights sixty years ago, when there was no visible movement, was a very different action than opposing us today. Knowing gay people, seeing our wish for justice, and saying “No” is a lot meaner than refusing something vague and theoretical. Although we are often told that “attitudes are changing for the better,” I think we can all accept that when so many people in our country do not have legal rights and are not culturally represented, that is itself a condition of oppression. And that it reflects attitudes.
This twist, calling a constant state of injustice “progress,” gets played out in a number of distorting ways. Most Americans now know that homosexuals exist. Simply representing us is falsely coded as “progress.” Having a gay character in a book, play, film, or television show falsely codes that work as progressive. Often it even results in the work winning an award from a gay organization. But, if the actual meaning and content of the specific representation is examined, many of these representations are retrograde. They often portray the gay person as pathological, lesser than, a side-kick in the Tonto role, or there to provide an emotional catharsis to make the straight protagonist or viewer a “better” person. What current cultural representations rarely present are complex human beings with authority and sexuality, who are affected by homophobia in addition to their other human experiences, human beings who are protagonists. That type of depth and primacy would force audiences to universalize gay people, which is part of the equality process. It would also force an acknowledgment of heterosexual cruelty as a constant and daily part of American life.
These oppressive conventions and structures are kept in place by some concrete strategies. One crucial strategy is the use of false accusations to maintain gay people’s subordinate status. False accusations are inaccurate and misleading statements about gay and lesbian people and about homosexuality that force us to live with the burden of a stigma that we don’t deserve, and to then pay the emotional and social price of having to prove innocence that should not have to be proven.
The most typically vulgar false accusation homosexuals face is that homosexuality is somehow wrong, and/or inferior to heterosexuality. This is a typical “smoke screen” kind of argument, an argument so ridiculous, and in fact insane, with no basis for justification, that to have to refute it is itself dehumanizing. We know the pattern: perpetrator falsely accuses victim in order to create a “smoke screen” that obscures the perpetrator’s own agency. I say it is a “smoke screen” because, in addition to placing an unwarranted burden of proof on the gay person, it also obscures the real issue at hand, namely the perpetrator’s homophobia.
Another typically vulgar false accusation is the charge that gay people should be kept away from children. Sadly, gay people have wasted a lot of energy and self-esteem in trying to prove how child-friendly we are. Even to the point of feeling that we have to have children to be fully human, or to be treated as fully human by our family or government. Today, in an act of diminishment, gay people use having children as proof that we deserve rights, respect, and representation. This of course reveals that our lack of children is a sign that something is wrong with us, that we are dangerous and deserve to be outside of power. This false accusation is another smoke screen, obscuring the real issue: that depriving children of relationships with gay people is itself child abuse. Especially for those children who are themselves gay and trapped within a family that practices or exploits homophobia.
These of course, are the most obvious and bottom-of-the-barrel false accusations, but there are also many more sophisticated false accusations that are just as damaging.
For example:
•Homosexuals are a special interest group while heterosexuals are objective and neutral.
•Homosexuals’ feelings are not as important as heterosexuals’ feelings. (Extend this to artwork and social ideas.)
•Homosexuals have to prove that they are deserving of privileges that heterosexuals take for granted.
•Homosexuals should universalize to heterosexuals in order to enjoy representation, but heterosexuals should not have to show any interest outside of their own experience.
•Acquisition of rights and social change for gay people is their responsibility alone.
And my favorite and the most devolved:
•Gay and lesbian people, despite having no rights and no representation, somehow only achieve what we do because we are given unfair advantages: “Even though you have published ten books, you only got the job because they needed a lesbian.”
I cannot tell you how many times straight people assume that I have professional advantages because I am a lesbian, when in fact it is the opposite. I have profound professional disadvantages because I am out in my work, and they have profound advantages because they are straight. This is the twist of course: to position advantages as neutral and any accomplishment as a benevolent gift from tolerant superiors.
And even more sophisticated:
•When any gay person, no matter how supremely achieved and deserving, receives some acknowledgment, this means that gay people have achieved equality. Or as a white woman once said to me, “What do you mean black people have no rights? Jesse Jackson has more power than my husband!”
Ironically, if gay people were treated equitably, the perpetrator would have the burden of proof. If they were made to account for their false accusations, it would be a lot harder to pull them off. Unfortunately, the system is twisted so that the cruelty looks normative and regular, and the desire to address and overturn it looks strange.
As Bertolt Brecht said, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible.”
Resistance gets falsely pegged as the inappropriate behavior because it results in discomfort for the perpetrator. Ironically, it is often not the fact that a gay person is being scapegoated that makes people angry but the assertion that the perpetrator should have to be accountable that infuriates them. It’s not the awful truth that upsets people, but the telling of the truth that gets construed as the problem.
While false accusation is a strategy of homophobia, shunning is its tool of enforcement. Shunning is when people are cut out, excluded from participating in conversations, communities, social structures; are not allowed to have any say about how they are treated; and cannot speak or speak back. Shunning is a form of mental cruelty that is designed to pretend that the victim does not exist and has never existed. It is practiced by religious groups like the Amish and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it is also practiced by the arts and entertainment industries, the legal system, family structures, economic systems, and social conventions that pathologize and isolate gay people by not acknowledging or representing our experiences. And, by extension, by irresponsible individuals who don’t want to be accountable for the undeserved pain they are inflicting on others who don’t h
ave the power to create consequences. In short, shunning is an active form of harassment.
Because gay people are ritually shunned in all aspects of social life, dehumanizing us through shunning appears normative and regular. Even by other homosexuals. It’s imitative. Shunning is the most common form of homophobia and the easiest to carry out. While shunning seems passive and can be practiced daily without effort, its effects are dramatically active. In fact, being on the receiving end of shunning is to be aggressively assaulted on a daily basis. This can range from not acknowledging a gay family member’s experiences and achievements as equal to those of other family members, to excluding authentic lesbian characters from the American stage. It’s an exclusion system that can be manifested by making a gay family member uncomfortable while welcoming a straight family member, deciding that only one lesbian teacher can be hired in a department at a time or that no novels with lesbian protagonists can be published by a particular publishing house, by a lover deciding she has no accountability to her partner because no one else cares if she does or not. It is a removal of living, breathing people from recognition and representation in daily life. It is a refusal to engage, recognize, negotiate, communicate. It is an exclusion from the conversation.
Shunning is multiplicative. For example, in one week I can be excluded from a family event, be ignored by a publisher who has never published a lesbian novel, be disrespected by a theater that has never produced a lesbian play, and be denied job and housing protection in many states of the union. And let me add, many of my weeks look like this. If any of these parties felt that I had social currency or power, or that someone would care about how I was treated, their behavior would be different because they would fear the consequences. But, because all of these arenas agree that I don’t matter, they can replicate and extend each other’s habit of shunning and make it look normal and uneventful.