All of this contrasts sharply with the way narratives of abused straight (and, usually, white) women play out. When the Framingham Eight—a group of women in prison for killing their abusive partners—came into the public eye in 1992, people were similarly uncertain about what to do with Debra Reid, a black woman and the only lesbian among them. When a panel was convened to hear the women’s stories to consider commuting their sentences, Debra’s lawyers did their best to leverage the committee’s inherent assumptions and prejudices by painting her as “the woman” in the relationship: she cooked, she cleaned, she cared for the children. The attorneys believed, rightly, that Debra needed to fit the traditional domestic abuse narrative that people understood: the abused needed to be a “feminine” figure—meek, straight, white—and the abuser a masculine one.36 That Debra was black didn’t help her case; it worked against the stereotype. (In another early lesbian abuse case, in which a woman gave her girlfriend a pair of shiny black eyes, the prosecutor acknowledged that while she was grateful for and surprised by the abuser’s conviction, she believed that the fact that the defendant was butch and black almost certainly played into the jury’s willingness to convict her.)
The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another. And when that happens, the results are frustratingly predictable. Most of the Framingham Eight had their sentences commuted or were otherwise released, but not Debra. (The board said that she and her girlfriend had “participated in a mutual battering relationship”—a common misconception about queer domestic violence—even though it had never come up during the hearing.) She was paroled in 1994, the second-to-last member of the group to achieve some measure of freedom. An ABC Primetime report about them barely talked to or about Debra compared to the other women. The Academy Award–winning short documentary about the Framingham Eight—Defending Our Lives—didn’t include Debra at all.
The sort of violence that Annette and Debra experienced—brutally physical—or that Freda experienced—murder—is, obviously, far beyond what happened to me. It may seem odd, even disingenuous, to write about them in the context of my experience. It might also seem strange that so many of the domestic abuse victims that appear here are women who killed their abusers. Where, you may be asking yourself, are the abused queer women who didn’t stab or shoot their lovers? (I assure you, there are a lot of us.) But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.
There is also the simple yet terrible fact that the legal system does not provide protection against most kinds of abuse—verbal, emotional, psychological—and even worse, it does not provide context. It does not allow certain kinds of victims in. “By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,” law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, “the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.” After all, in Gaslight, Gregory’s only actual crimes are murdering Paula’s aunt and the attempted theft of her property. The core of the film’s horror is its relentless domestic abuse, but that abuse is emotional and psychological and thus completely outside of the law.
Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. Trying to find accounts, especially those that don’t culminate in extreme violence, is unbelievably difficult. Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean.
When I was a teenager, there was this girl in my sophomore-year English class. She had luminous gray-green eyes and a faint smattering of freckles across her nose. She was a little swaggery and butch but also loved the same movies I did, like Moulin Rouge and Fried Green Tomatoes. We sat diagonally from each other and, every day, talked until our teacher threatened to separate us.
I liked her in a way that made me excited to go to class, but I didn’t understand why. She was such a good friend and so fun and so smart I wanted to rise out of my seat and grab her hand and yell, “To hell with Hemingway!” and haul her out of class; all to some end I couldn’t quite visualize. From the corner of my eye, I stared at her freckles and imagined kissing her mouth. When I thought about her, I squirmed, tormented. What did it mean?
I had a crush on her. That’s it. It wasn’t complicated. But I didn’t realize I had a crush on her. Because it was the early 2000s and I was just a baby in the suburbs without a reliable internet connection. I didn’t know any queers. I did not understand myself. I didn’t know what it meant to want to kiss another woman.
Years later, I’d figured that part out. But then, I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman.
Do you see now? Do you understand?
33. Legal scholar Ruthann Robson calls this a “dual theoretical demand,” and adds, “the demand, of course, is in many cases more than dual. As Black lesbian poet Pat Parker writes in her poem For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend: ‘The first thing you do is forget that i’m Black / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.’”
34. It should be noted that Alice Mitchell was hardly the first woman to create such public confusion over her gender as it related to both her passions and her shocking act of violence. In 1879, when Lily Duer shot her friend Ella Hearn for rejecting her love, a headline in the National Police Gazette read in part, “A Female Romeo: Her Terrible Love for a Chosen Friend of Her Own Alleged Sex [emphasis mine] Assumes a Passionate Character.” Sometime before the murder, a witness reported an exchange in which Lily said, “Ella, why will you not walk out with me? Do you not love me?” “Oh, yes, I love you,” Ella responded, “but I am afraid of you.”
35. It should be noted that the word battered (as in: battered wife, battered woman, battered lesbian), while woefully imprecise and covering only a fraction of abuse experiences, was the preferred term in this era. It is, of course, a specific legal term with specific legal implications, and I have never thought of myself as a “battered” anyone. The fact that the expression persisted for so long, despite the fact that the lesbian conversation in particular focused on many kinds of abuse that were not explicitly physical, is the perfect example of how inadequate this conversation has been—discouraging useful subtlety. (Other ways in which the conversation remains inadequate: devaluing the narratives of nonwhite victims, insufficiently addressing nonmonosexuality, rarely taking noncisgendered people into account.)
36. In a 1991 article about a white lesbian in Boise, Idaho, who successfully used “battered-wife syndrome” as a defense for killing her abusive girlfriend, the reporter emphasized that the defendant was a “diminutive 4-foot-10.” The prosecutor in the case speculated that the reason for the acquittal was that the abused wife “seemed more heterosexual,” and the abuser “more ‘lesbian.’”
Dream House as Undead
I think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.”
Dream House as Sanctuary
The night she chased me in the Dream House and I locked myself in the bathroom, I remember sitting with my back against the wall, pleading with the universe that she wouldn’t have the tools or know-how to take the doorknob out of the door. Her technical incompetence was my luck, and my luck was that I could sit there, watching the door test its hinges with every blow. I could sit the
re on the floor and cry and say anything I liked because in that moment it was my own little space, even though after that it would never be mine again. For the rest of my time in the Dream House, my body would charge with alarm every time I stepped into that bathroom; but in that moment, I was the closest thing I could be to safe.
When Debra Reid was eventually released on parole, she had to stay in prison longer than she needed to because securing housing was a condition of her release and she was having difficulty doing so. She told an interviewer, “I just want to get an apartment and turn my own little doorknob and use my own bathroom and eat my own food.”
I can’t get Debra or her doorknob out of my mind. I hope she got what she needed.
Dream House as Double Cross
This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal.
Dream House as Unreliable Narrator
When I was a child, my parents—and then, learning from their example, my siblings—loved to refer to me as “melodramatic,” or, worse, a “drama queen.” Both expressions confused and then rankled me. I felt things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me, but while that was cute when I was a toddler, neither thing—feeling, responding to feeling—aged well. Ferocity did not become me. Later, retelling stories about this dynamic to my wife, my therapist, the occasional friend, filled me with incandescent rage. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch.
This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?
Dream House as Pop Single
A year before I was born, the band ’Til Tuesday, led by Aimee Mann, came out with the single “Voices Carry.” The breathy, haunting song about an abusive relationship was a top-ten hit in the United States. In the music video—which was in heavy rotation in the early days of MTV—the boyfriend is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous. A meathead in gold chains and a muscle shirt, he delivers his aggressively banal dialogue with the subtlety of an after-school special.
Throughout the video, he dismantles Aimee piece by piece. At first, he compliments her music and her new hair—punky and platinum, with a rattail. Later, in a restaurant that looks like it was borrowed from a sitcom set, he removes her elaborate earpiece and replaces it with a more traditional earring before playfully chucking her under the chin. There is a shot of Mann behind a gauzy curtain, her face pressed into it with desperation, which cuts to her leaving for band practice. Here he confronts her on the steps of their brownstone; when he grabs her guitar case, she tears out of his grasp.
When she returns, he scolds her for her lateness. “You know, this little hobby of yours has gone too far. Why can’t you for once do something for me?” When she speaks for the first time—“Like what?” she asks, tilting her chin upward in a challenge—he attacks her, pushing her against the stairs and forcibly kissing her.
At the end of the video, they are sitting in a theater audience at Carnegie Hall. The boyfriend puts his arm around a now-polished Mann—sitting quietly, strung with pearls—before discovering her intact rattail and curling his lip in disgust. Mann begins to sing—softly at first, and then louder as she tears a stylish fascinator off her head. Then she stands up and is screaming, she is scream-singing—“He said ‘Shut up’ / He said ‘Shut up’”—and everyone is turning to look at her. This final scene, Mann said in an interview years later, was inspired by Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, when Doris Day’s character lets loose a bloodcurdling scream during a symphony performance, to foil an assassination.
Long after the video came out, in 1999 the song’s producer revealed that the initial demo of the song had used female pronouns—in the original version, Mann was singing about a woman. “The record company was predictably unhappy with such lyrics,” he wrote, “since this was a very powerful, commercial song and they would prefer as many of its components as possible to swim in the acceptable mainstream. I wasn’t certain what to think about the pressure to change the gender of the love interest, but eventually thought that it didn’t matter any to the impact of the song itself. Would a quasi-lesbian song have had any effect on the liberation of such homosexuals, then as now several difficult steps behind the gays on the path towards broad social acceptance? I don’t think so, but it was hard to judge at the time.
“If there is nothing social to be gained,” he continued, “there’s little point in risking that people might lose the main plot and be confused by something that might be peripheral to them. Maybe better to pull them in, subversively, as the best pop music does. How many more people are now sympathetic to gay people’s issues because they responded to gay artists who didn’t obviously fly the flag but expressed universal human sentiments that appealed to all? We respond to a song’s humanity first, and that is what matters.”
Twenty-seven years later—decades into her solo career—the pretense was dropped. Mann released an album, Charmer, which included the song “Labrador.” The music video was a shot-for-shot remake of “Voices Carry,” with the triteness heightened for comedic effect. The introduction—in which a greasy, boorish director admits he tricked Mann into doing the remake against her will—is genuinely funny. But the song itself is just as sad as “Voices Carry,” if not more so: the speaker can’t help but return to her abusive lover, doglike, over and over again.
“I came back for more,” Mann sings. “And you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in / Cause I’m a Labrador / And I run / When the gun / Drops the dove again.” The song opens addressed to someone Mann calls “Daisy.”
Despite all of this—the suppressed representation, the hackneyed ’80s weirdness of the video—“Voices Carry” portrays verbal and psychological abuse in a clear and explicable way. The mania of abuse—its wild emotional shifts, the eponymous cycle—is in the very marrow of the music: dampened, minor-inflected verses without a clear key resolving into a shimmering major chorus before locking back down again. It is not the ironically upbeat prettiness of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)”—produced in 1963 by Phil Spector, who later murdered actress Lana Clarkson for spurning his advances—though that is its own musical metaphor. Both songs, despite the darkness of their subject, are catchy and endlessly singable.
And I do. Endlessly sing them, that is. Every time I reread this chapter while writing this book, “Voices Carry” was in my head—and my voice—for days afterward. While working on the final draft, I took a break to stand on a beach in Rio de Janeiro watching blue-green waves curl in toward the shore. Around me people were playing soccer and dogs were running into the surf chasing after sticks and the light was amber-soft, and I realized I was singing it. Hush hush, I sang to no one, keep it down now.
Dream House as Half Credit
When I was a child, my father told me that if I ever was struggling to answer a question on a test, I should, instead, write down everything I knew about the topic. I took this advice seriously. Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say. I waxed poetic on those scenes in a novel I could visualize clearly, instead of striving to evoke the ones I couldn’t. I recorded everything I knew about a particular lab experiment when I couldn’t correctly balance equations on my exam. When I couldn’t explain how particular historical moments shifted the tide of major world events, I wrote down the little stories I did remember.
&n
bsp; Let it never be said I didn’t try.
Dream House as Exercise in Style
It would make sense if, during the time in the Dream House, your work suffered. Why not? You were miserable; you spent what probably added up to weeks or months of your life crying and snotting and howling in agony.
But instead, your creativity explodes. You are brimming with ideas, so many that you sign up for six workshops in your last semester of school. You begin to experiment with fragmentation. Maybe “experiment” is a generous word; you’re really just unable to focus enough to string together a proper plot. Every narrative you write is smashed into pieces and shoved into a constraint, an Oulipian’s wet dream—lists and television episode synopses and one with the scenes shattered and strung backward. You feel like you can jump from one idea to the next, searching for a kind of aggregate meaning. You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before. There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt. Back up, cross your eyes. Something is there.
You will spend the next few years of your career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time—telling them to young readers in classrooms and audiences at bookstores; once, to a tenure-track job search committee. You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.
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