Ties That Bind

by Sarah Schulman

  I am so impressed and intrigued by this construction. That to shun and scapegoat with assaultive and dehumanizing actions are rights and private while to intervene to stop this cruelty is somehow itself the violation.

  Of course, we’ve seen this twisted construction many times in history. Segregationists positioned themselves as a culture being trampled, violated, and invaded by federal laws forcing integration and its implied miscegenation. Suffragists looking for full responsibility and participation were depicted as libertines—irresponsible and socially parasitic, violating the “moral” family fiber with a kind of sexual threat. Supporters of abortion rights are depicted as child murderers. Gay rights means that homosexuals will have sex with your children and should be kept away from their own children, or must have children to matter. Over and over the person actively seeking equality, accountability, and full communication between equal parties is constructed as some kind of violator, destroying “privacy” rights, and often with an implied sexual threat. It’s as though the information that the other person has feelings, ideas, is equally fully human, would violate the chastity, the unknowing state of the shunner’s life if the victim was allowed to participate and negotiate, speak. This information is positioned as inherently sexually threatening. And the shunner is self-righteously passionate about defending their purity, their right to exclude.

  Atina Grossman’s fascinating, complex book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton University Press) gives a crystal-clear example of perpetrators re-inventing themselves as victims. She confronts and analyzes in depth how quickly German civilians began complaining to U. S. occupying forces about their suffering and mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis that they themselves had democratically elected. Grossman documents how quickly the United States and Russia capitulated to this idea, the United States abandoning any real effort at de-Nazification almost immediately. In the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Stalin quickly absolved Germans of any real responsibility so that he could win their easy loyalty. As Stalin said, “The Hitlers come and go. The German Volk remains.” This strategy of laying no responsibility created a class of victims who never experienced justice. They never experienced public acknowledgments of cruelty, fascism, and injustice. In my own experience, the lingering lack of accountability by perpetrators severely harms victims in the long term. It alienates them from themselves and their core values.

  When the family is excluding and persecuting a gay person who is asking for intervention, people who know and come into contact with that family have a moral imperative to tell them that what they are doing is wrong. Especially other straight people, work colleagues, neighbors. Perpetrators scapegoat the gay person because they believe that no one cares. They interpret the silence of others as a reward of approval. Only if they are made to feel a negative consequence for their actions will their actions change. It is the responsibility of others to create that consequence.

  The shunning of the gay person within a family is morally wrong. Whether it is expressed through actual exclusion, diminishment, or pathologization, the process of humiliating someone who has not done anything wrong is never justified. Families have responsibilities to their members, the responsibility of longevity. When a person is not driven out by cruelty or kept from family events or from children, that person has the opportunity to re-experience family members over and over again at events and—if they are not excluded—through different group decision-making experiences. If they are given information about family crises and achievements, joys and pains, and if their crises and achievements, joys and pains are acknowledged as those of someone equally human, then processes occur by which different problems are eclipsed and different tendernesses are won. When people are excluded from these processes, the relationship cannot transform precisely because of the refusal of interactive problem solving, i.e., shunning.

  In an appropriate family structure, different members are called on at different moments because of their different skills. In a shunning family, the gay person’s true skills and abilities are pretended away so that the heterosexual family members can create the delusion of supremacy and importance for themselves. If gay family members are included, they are sometimes expected to make family needs primary because their lives are not perceived as important. They may not be consulted in a way that allows them to fully contribute but instead are simply told what to do. Whether through over-expectation or shunning, the gay person is often not allowed to be fully human.

  When gay people have the rare experience of being fully humanized within their family, they often choose to prioritize that family over friends or other relationships that may not themselves have familial support. Having a family is not considered to be the privilege that it is; instead it is theorized as neutral. So other people’s lack is theorized as their fault in the way that poverty and illness are also theorized as the fault of the poor and the ill. This way of thinking enables people with a humanizing family to falsely see it as a natural outgrowth of their own goodness and deserving nature. Sometimes members of good families rely so completely on the ever-present support structure of their family that they don’t bother to face and deal with problems with friends, because they know that no matter how they treat others, they will have unconditional familial support. The loving family keeps them from taking responsibility for how they treat others. A truly humanizing family will demand that their gay family member treat their lovers honorably. A special risk for a moderately accepting family is that they may not view their gay family member’s relationships as requiring moral responsibility and may resent their partners.

  In this way, the “cadre” of friends that Kate Kendell described as the foundation of immoral behavior can in fact be the gay person’s family, holding no expectation standard for how they treat another homosexual. In a healthy, non-homophobic family, a gay family member’s closest friends and lovers also have support from that family, are treated like family, can go to the family for intervention and protection. If the gay family member abandons or projects onto a lover, the family must intervene and support that person by confronting their family member with her capacity and duty to be responsible and accountable. Loving gay family members means believing that they can treat other gay people with full personhood.

  When a gay person does not have a healthy family, and a lover extends the cruelty of the family, society, and culture through shunning or abandonment, it is the moral imperative of the people who know them to intervene and advocate for negotiation, acknowledgment, and responsibility.

  Unfortunately, this rarely occurs. First, there is a psychology of powerlessness. The gay friends do not see themselves as fully responsible citizens. They do not see their shunned friend as someone deserving of due process. Often the friends privilege the withholder in deference to the fantasy that there is a “private sphere.” This is based on the fantasy of a heterosexual family in which that scapegoated person’s pain will be heard and tended to by “someone”—a sphere that is someone else’s responsibility. But for many gay people, if the gay friends do not intervene, there is no private sphere and that “someone” does not exist.

  In fact, people evoke the word “privacy” as justification for refusing to negotiate. They don’t have to negotiate; it’s their right to privacy. The “private” family doesn’t have to account for their treatment of gay people; the “private” citizen doesn’t have to account for her treatment of gay people—even those who have shared love with her. Industries like book publishing, theater, film and television production, religion, and education are all private endeavors that have no public accountability to gay people. Even the Saint Patrick’s Day parade is legally a private event and is permitted to shun Irish gays and lesbians annually.

  The word “privacy” is a justification for maintaining the scapegoating of people who have no private sphere. It’s like Carla Harryman’s observation that homeless people are not allowed to live in public space
because their socially engineered condition is pretended away as their “private” problem. The only right to “privacy” I believe in is when Mastercard wants your social security number. No one has the “private” right to scapegoat another human being no matter how badly they want to. Refusing to treat someone the way that they deserve to be treated by you is not a right. That is a misuse of that concept. In fact, I would argue the opposite. Interactive resolution and communication is a social responsibility. To refuse it is anti-social. People who live in a shared community of colleagues and friends have an overriding social responsibility to promote communication and resolution. And bystanders have the moral responsibility to do everything they can to encourage communication and to discourage shunning.

  This distorted thinking comes, of course, from many different streams. One contributor among many is protectionism, and how it has been historically applied to people without rights.

  The so-called Progressive Era–discourse of protectionism has been revitalized in many guises. This is the idea that certain experiences and certain knowledge are inherently dangerous for some people, usually those infantilized by lack of rights. In the industrial age, the debate was about women in the workplace. Protectionists once argued that it was in women’s best interest to be excluded from the experiences of dangerous or alienating labor. Their opponents argued for women’s free agency in the paid labor force as an essential part of economic and psychological autonomy. Some felt that the institution of paid labor was an unfit context for women and chose to preemptively ensure that no woman would have the information (be it enlightening or diminishing) of that experience. Others felt that women and work would dialectically act on and transform each other.

  The reproductive rights movement of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s engaged a similar discourse, but its counter-points were religious right-wing organizations. Feminists argued that choices and full information about abortion, birth control, and sexuality improved women’s lives. Antifeminists argued that restricting the experience of what they saw to be destructive or immoral choices and information were in women’s best interest. If abortion or lesbianism are inherently wrong, keeping women from having this information or these experiences was in their best interest, they said.

  In the 1980s this debate resurfaced as internal to feminism. It was recast from the arena of women in the industrial workplace and refocused on the role of women as workers and consumers in the realm of sexual commodification. Some argued that pre-emptive restrictions on women’s participation in the production of and access to sexually explicit materials were in women’s best interests. Others argued that full availability of information and choices served women’s interests. This is a long-standing tension about the pre-emptive restriction of information and experience. In these highly politicized public realms—labor, abortion, pornography—the motives for restricting information seem fairly clear.

  At the root of this obstruction is the powerful fact that information allows people to create choices, explore consequences, and act with awareness. But also that knowledge creates responsibilities. Lack of information allows impulsive acting out, without full articulation of possible hopes or outcomes. People who want to pretend that they do not have responsibility to others try to refuse the information that would make them conscious of this responsibility. Active engagement changes the perpetrators (i.e., mitigates or stops or creates consequences for their cruelty). Doing nothing changes the victims (abandons them to being abused). “But you can’t change other people!” you may cry. Not so! Ask anyone whose life has been destroyed by someone else’s cruelty. Victims are changed. It’s perpetrators whom we are told, we cannot transform. As my college professor Audre Lorde used to say, “That you can’t change City Hall is a rumor being spread by City Hall.”

  I would argue that this discourse about the pros and cons of protectionism is just as relevant in the emotional realm. Access to ideas, opinions, and feelings of others allows an individual to create choices, which may lead to change. Restricting the intake of information makes change harder to articulate or imagine. If you will not let someone tell you how your actions are affecting them, then you have no responsibility to acknowledge or rethink your actions. People who are isolated tend to have less information about how others live. They don’t hear how other people face and deal with problems, and so they have less information about how to move forward constructively in their own lives, and consequently are more likely to cause harm to others. They hear fewer bad ideas and fewer good ones. Because change is not inherently good, but can be good, not hearing other people’s ideas, opinions, and feelings can make it easier to resist negative change. But, by preemptively restricting one’s exposure to other people’s ideas, experiences, and feelings, one ensures that both negative and positive change will be harder to come by.

  Many frightened people organize their lives around the refusal of information: withholding from and avoiding interactivity, screening and not returning phone calls, refusing to have conversations, hiding behind e-mail. They can be privileged people who are frightened by the thought of threats to their privilege. They can be traumatized people who are frightened by accepting the power of their actions. The debate is still one of protectionism, although it is now cast as part of the so-called “private sphere.” Hearing about the consequences of your actions on others is falsely described as a violation. People who hide, insist that they have a “right” not to know how their actions affect other people. Their fear of information is so intense that they can describe this information as some kind of violation. They may even use the language of sexual assault to describe how badly they feel when they hear about the consequences of their actions on others. Censors may call authentic gay representation “pornography” or rate it NC-17, as though it is dangerous. Individuals may say that they feel “unsafe” or “assaulted” if someone without rights wants to tell them how their actions make them feel.

  Within the family, the legal system, and the arts and entertainment–industrial complex, homosexuals and our accurate expressions are seen as inherently sexually predatory. It is implied and no longer needs to be explained that this is why we should not be included in certain human experiences and representations. Within this construction, the desire to be fully humanized, given due process, be heard, is experienced as sexually violating—the imposition of sex. Only human beings have responsibilities and feelings; vampires and other predatory shadows simply don’t have the right. And shunned, victimized, scapegoated homosexuals excluded from their families and from cultural representation do not deserve to be heard. Even by each other.

  The sexualized hysteria within familial homophobia and its consequence on lesbian/gay culture itself and representational constrictions converge with this misuse of the feminist “NO.” The origin within feminism of the idea of refusal as a “right” comes from early discourse about sex. Women were expected to comply with male demands for sex. We were not considered to possess the right to refuse. By insisting on a woman’s right to say “no,” feminists transformed paradigms about rape, motherhood, birth control, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse. “No” became a statement that implied a kind of resistance to an inappropriate form of sexual action, There were slogans like “What part of NO don’t you understand?” and other political strategies emphasizing refusal as a right.

  For reasons that I do not understand, oppression discourse has often been twisted by sexual hysteria into advocating for obstruction over resolution, which is ultimately not in women’s best interests. Over time, and in different ways, linking a position to sexual abuse has made that position’s righteousness ironclad. Right and wrong have at different times in feminist discourse been defined by perception of sexual threat, whether or not it is accurate. Refusal has become the symbol of self. Self-esteem becomes falsely defined by the right to say “no.” The refusal to negotiate, or to treat the other disenfranchised person as a full human being, has taken on a meaning, rooted in fear of sexual v
iolation, that now surpasses sexual violation. Describing a gay family member as a sexual threat to a child, or a pathologized lover as a “stalker,” saying that the withholder “feels raped,” or that gay people trying to march in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade are “violating” the other marchers, and other inflammatory words implying sexual threat are used as metaphors to justify exclusion and refusal to negotiate. As though simply using that vocabulary justifies any action.

  Should “no” mean no? Just because someone says “no,” does that mean that they are truthful, appropriate, justified? That they should be listened to? And is refusing to obey them really a sexual violation? When a family just does not want their gay relative among them, the industry just does not want the gay character, the landlord just does not want the gay tenant, the lover just does not want her dearest to know their child, does that make it okay? If the victim is powerless, apparently it does. Only when you can force, through third-party intervention, the right to personhood (that is, to due process, to be heard), does that arbitrary, convenient “no” become overridden. Just because someone says “no” doesn’t mean that we have to listen.