Brangelina

by Ian Halperin

  It appears as if the debate has continued in earnest all over the Internet. In an essay published on his blog, Anadder, for example, Michael Fridman outlines and demolishes most of the arguments against consensual sibling incest while still remaining queasy about the idea:

  1. It’s unnatural—The same old line’s been used to prove the immorality of homosexuality, interracial marriage, contraception etc. Sorry. The answer’s always “so what?” (being unnatural doesn’t make something bad) and “no it isn’t” (e.g., ten to fifteen percent of college students reported some childhood sexual contact with a brother or sister).

  2. It’s universally condemned—This was also used against interracial marriage etc. Again: so what? And again: no it isn’t. It’s universal to have some kind of incest taboo, but the limits vary a lot. In many cultures it’s common for first cousins to marry (with up to fifty percent of marriages being between first cousins).

  3. It causes birth defects—Finally a somewhat true statement (although apparently the best strategy is to actually marry your third cousin). But if that’s reason to outlaw incest we need to outlaw drinking/smoking during pregnancy (which we don’t and it would be a big deal to do this). We’d also need to prevent two carriers of a genetic disease from procreating. Finally despite what you hear on the news, we’re not living in the twelfth century. Sex ? babies. Two sisters having sex, or a heterosexual incestuous couple using contraception will demolish the argument.

  4. People who were brought up together shouldn’t be together— Umm, because … ? I’ve heard this one before. It’s priceless, the ultimate non-sequitur. This suggests that two childhood friends should avoid romantic relationships. This of course happens very often. I’m not aware of studies suggesting such couples are psychologically/emotionally worse off than the average couple. This argument is grasping at straws.

  5. It makes me personally uncomfortable—At last, the truth! Yes, it certainly does.

  But Voices in Action, a U.S. support group for victims of incest, argues strongly that there is no such thing as “consensual incest.” “These teens have been brainwashed into believing this behavior is natural; it is not,” states the group. “Sexual abuse is learned behavior.” On the other hand, Dr. Sean Gabb of the British think tank Libertarian Alliance argues that “consenting incestuous behavior is no business of the state. It is up to individuals to make their own decisions.” Brett Kahr, a senior lecturer in psychotherapy at Regent’s College, London, argues that there is no proper research into the field of consensual sibling incest, writing, “Who are we to say that Joe Bloggs and his sister Jane Bloggs aren’t having a perfectly good relationship and we’re all missing out?”

  If I was going to locate and meet with brothers and sisters who were having a sexual relationship, it appeared that the Internet was my best hope, but I was still in the dark about the logistics. Given the strict laws against incest, I wasn’t sure how I could convince anybody to talk to me without being suspected of trying to entrap them. Soon, however, I discovered a phenomenon that I never knew existed called Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA), which has given rise to a number of easily accessible online forums.

  GSA is defined as sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings or a parent and child, who first meet as adults. In other words, they have been separated at birth, for whatever reason, then later meet and date without knowing that they are related. Those who advocate for the rights of those who commit consensual incest argue that GSA is more prevalent than one might expect.

  The most famous example is a German couple, Patrick Stübing, and his sister, Susan, who grew up separately and only met as adults. Patrick was arrested and imprisoned for violating Germany’s incest law, which he and his sister have been fighting to overturn for years, arguing that it hearkens back to the racial-hygiene laws of the Third Reich. But the Stübings are perhaps not the best poster children for consensual sibling incest because they have had four children together, two of whom are disabled, apparently as a consequence of inbreeding. Rather, the couple is probably a better argument to keep the prohibition against incest intact, since study after study shows a radically increased chance of birth defects and disabilities—as high as fifty percent in some cases— among children of incestuous siblings.

  Despite the fact that a number of examples exist, I am not convinced that GSA is as widespread a phenomenon as its advocates claim. I suspect that it is a means for practitioners of sibling incest to claiming innocence of wrongdoing and potentially elicit sympathy from the public, which would otherwise be revolted by the idea of brothers and sisters having sex with each other (e.g., “We didn’t set out to commit incest; it happened by accident. It’s not our fault that we fell in love”).

  Nevertheless, I had no interest in locating incestuous couples who didn’t grow up together. I needed to find those in a roughly similar situation to Angelina Jolie and James Haven for an accurate comparison. I started on a number of chat rooms, posing as a forty-five-year-old man who had been having sex with his sister since he was nineteen and she was eighteen. I was looking for a “support group to help us come to terms with our situation and discover if there is anybody else out there in a similar situation.” I soon discovered that the majority of users on these sites were there to be titillated or expected pornography. Authentic incestuous siblings, it seemed, were not easy to find.

  In the end, it was a contact that I made on a GSA site that led me to my first meeting. It started when I received an invitation for my sister and myself to meet another couple to chat. I was given a time and place to meet at a deli in Brooklyn. First, I needed to find a sister to accompany me on my charade, one who was around my age. I offered $125 to Staci, a singer I knew who had done some acting and who I thought would be able to pull off the ruse convincingly. I hadn’t yet decided whether I would eventually identify myself as a journalist. My thinking was that if I let my subjects know about the book I was writing, it might get them to share their thoughts about Jolie and her brother.

  The couple we met that evening I’ll call Ruby and Jeremiah. When I introduced myself, I used my own name, Ian, but I introduced Staci as “Kendall.” Ruby and Jeremiah looked to be slightly younger than us and, at first glance, they didn’t look a lot alike, though we later learned they were brother and sister by blood. We introduced ourselves and made some small talk about the New York subways. At that first meeting, they didn’t encourage a lot of personal discussion about our relationship, maybe because we were in a relatively public venue. In our communication beforehand, in fact, they had encouraged me to be “discreet.” They appeared to be sizing us up, getting to know us, maybe figuring out whether we were on the up and up.

  This was no small issue. Researching the New York State penal law, I discovered that there could be serious consequences to their relationship. According to section 255.25 of the New York Criminal Code:

  A person is guilty of incest when he or she marries or engages in sexual intercourse or deviate sexual intercourse with a person whom he or she knows to be related to him or her, either legitimately or out of wedlock, as an ancestor, descendant, brother or sister of either the whole or the half blood, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece. Incest is a class E felony.

  Such a violation would apparently be punishable by up to four years in prison, so their caution was understandable.

  While we were all digging into strawberry shortcake at the end of our meal, Jeremiah suggested we might want to attend one of their monthly get-togethers.

  “A support group?” I asked.

  “We don’t call it that,” he replied, “but, yeah, that’s basically what it is I suppose. To us, it’s mostly a social thing.”

  A little more than two weeks later, he again contacted me and invited me to an address on Staten Island the following Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Checking on Staci’s availability, I confirmed our attendance and then had breakfast the next day with my “sister” to firm up our cover story.

  We decided on a f
ew basic parameters, some of which we had already agreed upon before our initial supper meeting, including what we both do for a living (I would be a technical writer, she a designer), where we come from (Tacoma, Washington), how long we’ve been together and whether we’ve ever been with anybody else since we started our relationship, etc. After that, I gave Staci the freedom to improvise as she saw fit. I agreed to pay her $400 for the evening and our “rehearsal time” and to pay for her taxi home afterwards.

  On the appointed day, we took the ferry and a taxi to what appeared to be a very respectable middle-class residential neighborhood on Staten Island, complete with manicured lawns and, ironically, more than one religious grotto with a Virgin Mary statue because, we later learned, the street was predominantly Italian and very Catholic.

  When we arrived, there were five other people there: the hosts, whom I’ll call “Allan and Adrian”; another couple, “Shawn and Leila”; and a single woman around fifty, “Kim.” We were offered white wine and an assortment of snacks was laid out in the spacious living room, which was covered with art posters. As I had assumed, the two couples were siblings. Kim, the single woman, she later explained, was in a relationship with her brother, but he worked near Chicago and lived in Skokie, Illinois, and she only saw him on occasion, which she said was “hard.”

  I learned that, as far as the neighbors were concerned, Allan and Adrian were married. “As long as you’re not Italian, they stay out of your business, they ignore us,” Adrian explained. “That’s why we like it here.”

  It wasn’t exactly like a twelve-step meeting, they were actually planning to watch a movie later on, The Philadelphia Story, starring Katherine Hepburn and James Stewart. But, like AA, they seemed to expect the new members to begin by telling their story. This was the part that made me most nervous, knowing that these people might be able to detect a phony couple a mile away. Staci let me do most of the talking, though she jumped in with a masterful improvisation at one point that yielded some fascinating insight.

  I explained that we came from Washington State, and that our parents had divorced when we were nine and seven-and-a-half, leaving our mom to raise us, though our father was a dentist so we were well taken care of. After high school, I planted trees for a year in British Columbia and planned to go to university, majoring in sociology or creative writing. After Kendall graduated, we both moved to New York and found an apartment in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side before eventually enrolling at the City University of New York. It was while living there that we ended up “accidentally” having sex one night. With the exception of a two-year hiatus, where we both saw other people, we had been together ever since, pretending to be married ever since our mother died of a blood infection eleven years ago.

  Upon hearing our story, Kim asked whether we had ever had any “close calls.” I think she wanted to know whether we had ever almost been caught. But Staci jumped in and said she got pregnant when she was twenty-eight and had to have an abortion. That, she explained, was when we broke up for awhile, “freaked out” about our flirtation with disaster. A little while later, after they had shared their own experiences, they all said they knew siblings who had also had abortions, though none of them admitted to an accidental pregnancy themselves. Allan and Adrian, however, said they knew a “friend of a friend” who had become pregnant with her brother’s child, and, for whatever reasons, decided to have the baby, presumably well aware of the risks. “The baby was normal,” explained Allan, “but it was still fucking stupid.”

  Maybe I was expecting some kind of Penthouse Forum scenario, but none of the people there that evening shared how exactly they had first ended up having sex with their sibling, though each said it had happened in their teens, apparently at a much younger age than what I had claimed for Kendall and myself. Like my friend in college, and like my own concocted tale, it just sort of happened, they implied.

  At one point I said, “I’m so relieved to see we’re not alone. We never met anybody else who was like us, and we thought that maybe we’re freaks, though we knew there were people out there from reading about it on the Internet.” They all nodded knowingly. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but I had to be careful not to come off like a journalist, and I found myself biting my tongue to avoid appearing too inquisitive.

  They didn’t tell us their own hometowns, but Kim said, “You’ll find that most people like us move as far away as they can from wherever they grew up. I have no idea what the statistics are, nobody does really, or where sibs mostly live. But I think a lot of them move to New York. It’s such a huge city that it’s just safer here. I’ll bet that more sibs live here than anywhere else in America.” Sibs is the term they use to describe people like themselves. I noticed that the word incest was hardly ever used.

  Each of the other five siblings said they felt alone for years until they found other people who were in a similar situation. “I’ve gone to therapy for some of my so-called neuroses,” says Shawn, “but I never once told her about Leila. I would have obviously liked to talk about it, and I’m sure it would have been OK, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t feel safe. It’s not that I thought she’d turn us in, but it’s that I know how people judge what we’re doing. She’d turn it into some psychological hang-up and start looking at everything through that filter. And, you know, I am neurotic, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with me and my sister. It’s sort of the opposite, if you know what I mean. It’s Leila who makes me feel grounded and sort of gets me through all my crap.” Leila herself barely said a word all evening when we talked about these things, but she did nod vigorously when Shawn said this.

  Hoping to inspire a conversation along these lines, I said, “Yeah, people think we’re deviants, but it seems totally normal to me. We’ve been together longer then most married couples I know, and we’re still happy. We fight sometimes, but that’s normal too, right?”

  “Exactly,” Adrian chimed in. “We consider ourselves married. I think this link we have makes our ‘marriage’ more successful. It’s not about blood but maybe some sort of special connection that we had from growing up together or something like that. You know, I know a lot of sibs who break up, or who actually get married to other people, so it’s not like it’s a guarantee. There’s all kinds of problems that come about from trying to hide it, and it gets stressful. You guys haven’t had any real close calls, but we have, believe me.”

  I asked what kinds of close calls they’ve had, but Shawn just said, “family stuff.” They are all passionate about the fact that all incest is seen as deviant or a form of child abuse. They convincingly argue that consensual sibling relationships are in a category by themselves, though at one point Adrian dismisses the concept of GSAs. “What are the odds?” he snorts contemptuously.

  “The thing that screws us up,” says Kim, “is that there are so many cases of incest involving rape or coercion or father-daughter stuff. That stuff’s sick. There’s also sick stuff going on in our world sometimes. I knew a girl who had started having sex or at least doing sexual stuff with her older brother when she was eleven and he was sixteen. She realized years later that this was the equivalent of rape, even though he didn’t technically force her. But they never had anything like what me and my brother have or what these guys [pointing at the others] have. This is the real McCoy. There’s nothing sick about it. This is about love.”

  By this point in the evening, I’d decided that I couldn’t reveal what I was actually doing there because I didn’t think they would appreciate the deception. But I really wanted them to talk about the subject at hand, so I took the plunge: “It totally sucks that we can’t talk like this to other people, that we know we’re going to get judged by society or arrested. How are we going to ever change people’s attitudes if we can’t talk about it? I remember watching the whole brouhaha over Angelina Jolie and her brother and thinking that she’s about to come out of the closet about consensual sibling incest, and we got so
excited. We thought people’s attitudes were going to change.”

  At the mention of Jolie and her brother, everybody seemed to brighten up. “They’re totally sibs,” Allen said. “It’s so obvious. I wish she’d have the balls to admit it.” Only Adrian was skeptical. “Maybe,” she said.

  I asked whether they thought the backlash against the Oscar kiss would be different today, now that Jolie is known as “Saint Angelina.” “Back then she was already considered a freak,” I said. “There was the blood and the knives and the lesbian thing. She wasn’t exactly the right poster child for consensual sibling incest.”

  “I didn’t know any other sibs at that time,” said Kim. “But I remember that Lars [her brother] and I thought she was getting ready to out herself, that she was testing the waters or whatever. We always want to do that. I always want to blurt it out to somebody, thinking that they’ll understand that it’s normal, [that] they’ll see me and know I’m not a freak, that we love each other like anybody else.”

  Kim suggested we go to the computer in the den and check out the kiss on Youtube. We all gathered around Allen’s laptop, and he wondered what search term to use. “Put in ‘Jolie Oscar brother kiss 2001,’” Kim said.

  “2000,” I corrected her.

  A couple of dud videos came up before he finally found the right one. At the conclusive moment, however, it was impossible to even see the lips make contact.

  Allen googled it and found the photo in question, the one showing the smooch.

  “They’re totally tonguing,” Kim yells out, excited. Adrian pointed out that there was no tongue visible. Leila seemed amused by the debate but remained silent.

  Some other photos came up, including one of the siblings with their hands all over each other either before or after the Oscar ceremony and another from the Golden Globe press room of Jolie leaning back into her brother’s arms and appearing to kiss him passionately, like a lover.