For example, if a married woman leaves her husband for a woman, she, her siblings, parents, and any of her grown children have a number of choices as to how to express their homophobia. They can pathologize and distance; they can be violent. They can bring in the state and attempt to have the minor children taken away, as Sharon Bottoms’s mother did in Virginia. All of these actions, designed to punish the woman for being gay, elevate the heterosexuals within the family politic. They choose which degree of cruelty they will enact. It is a selection process. Now, no matter what else is wrong with them or their lives, they have one thing that is supreme for certain. They’re straight. And their actions, in conjunction with the actions of their other family members, underline that they are good and right for being straight, whereas Sharon Bottoms is wrong and unfit for being gay. How do they select which punitive action to take? These are not acts of blind following. They involve consciousness, awareness, and agency.
In making the transition from understanding homophobia as a blindly passive state of being to seeing it as a strategized, customized series of decisions, it is interesting to go to Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners to examine his argument toward an understanding of German volition in the carrying out of the Holocaust. Goldhagen asks some very pertinent questions that can easily be applied to trying to determine the nature of homophobic collaboration within the family:
Would they be punished if they resisted?
They would be punished in that they would lose certain privileges. But their level of punishment would never exceed what the gay family member experiences in their daily life.
Are they being blindly obedient?
While totalitarian systems do blunt people’s moral sensibilities, as we have shown above, by exhibiting the power of selection they clearly do not accept all oppressive tasks as necessary.
Do they not fully comprehend the consequences of their actions on their victims?
While there is a callow disregard for the gay person and the impact of homophobia’s long-term consequences on their lives, the straight person usually has some access to information about the consequences of their actions. This is information they have to choose not to engage.
Do they feel conflicted about their behavior?
Some may feel guilty but need the benefits. Others may experience their behavior as neutral, objective, and nonexistent. But once they become aware that such a thing as homophobia exists, they have to choose to not measure their own behavior by its standard definitions.
Goldhagen’s ideas about totalitarian behavior and the fascist personality remind us that all people have the option to judge and act ethically. That there are individuals in all situations who do take responsibility proves the availability of moral behavior as a possibility for the others. There were always white people who opposed slavery, always German Christians who opposed Fascism. There are always Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation, always Americans who oppose the war with Iraq, always men who work for abortion rights. There were always capitalists who opposed the persecution of American Communists and Russian Communists who opposed the persecution of Jews.
Are homophobic family members evil? Well, not if you believe that evil does not have a human face. Yes, the people who won’t take responsibility for their dying gay son, won’t invite their lesbian sister to their wedding, won’t allow their gay cousin to hold their child, won’t praise their gay co-worker, won’t send their gay son a birthday card, vote for anti-gay politicians, give money to a homophobic church, love films that diminish gay people—those people may have all kinds of great attributes. You may love them. They may have taken you fishing when you were six or made you a quilt for Christmas or had a great sense of humor or looked just like you. That is what evil looks like. Evil knows great old songs, can be weak and vulnerable, can love you, can feed the hungry, can pick out a book because they were thinking of you. Evil can have Alzheimer’s. Familial homophobia is deeply human, as all evil is the product of human imagination.
There is also a generational translation of homophobia that changes its face but comes from the same impetus. Whereas your grandparents may have thought you would burn in hell, your parents may have called you once a month but refused to allow your lover in their home. Your sister may let you and your lover come over for Thanksgiving but not let you be alone with her children. It becomes more flexible, more accommodating, perhaps, as the generational context changes, but it is the same animal. A forty-year-old woman living in New York City today probably cannot tell her friends, or herself, that she hates her brother because he’s gay. Nor can she tell them that she is cruel to him because her parents hate that he is gay, and this gives her more attention from her parents. Instead, she’ll just find another reason that is more generationally suitable. As one straight colleague on a job told me, “It’s not your homosexuality that I hate. It’s your clothes.”
THE FAILURE OF THERAPEUTIC SOLUTIONS
When a society is not willing to confront the consequences of its cruelty in public, our contemporary culture offers privatized therapy as the only realm where its consequences might be addressed. For gay people, whose needs are not acknowledged, this makes therapy a hugely influential apparatus.
Of course what goes on in the subculture of feminist and gay therapy cannot be known and measured. It can only be experienced. I have experienced a wide variety of dominant cultural therapists as well as gay and feminist therapists, and I have been on the receiving end of other people’s behaviors that were encouraged by the whole range of therapists. I am fluent in the experiential culture of these therapies in New York City, and my observations come from those lived experiences.
In my experience, both mainstream as well as feminist and gay therapy has been woefully unsuccessful in addressing familial homophobia and its consequences. Regarding the family itself, the primary strategy of therapists has been to advise gay people to separate from their abusive families and to “create” their own gay families. This is a message I have heard repeatedly for many, many years. In fact, I cannot recall a single therapist who suggested otherwise. However, creating another family is a very risky business. The end result of such an approach is, too often, that the gay person doesn’t have a family and the homophobic family remains unstigmatized by their abusive behavior. We lose, and they win.
I personally have had five different therapeutic opportunities for practitioners to intervene with my family’s homophobia and/or to model to my family that homophobia is wrong.
•In 1975 when my father caught sixteen-year-old me with my lover, he humiliated me in front of my brother and sister and put the shunning process into effect. I went to my high school guidance counselor and told him what was happening to me. He said, “Don’t tell the other students or they will shun you.” (It was the first time I heard that word in this context.) What he should have done was practice third-party intervention by calling my parents into school to tell them that what they were doing was wrong. The problem was the absence of social agreement that humiliating your child for being gay was wrong. Even though it was.
•When I was in my twenties, I went to the one gay person who my parents knew, an older man who was a therapist. They claimed he was a friend of theirs. I made an appointment, went to his office, told him what I was being subjected to, and he told me to never speak to them again.
Neither of these people felt that I had a right to have a family. And neither of them was willing to make my family uncomfortable with their behavior. They wanted me to have all the information and all the burden.
•In my early thirties, I asked my father to come with me to see a therapist. I chose a man, who I knew was gay, but did not appear fey. My father did not know that the man was gay. In the second session I told my father about the experience I was having of being surrounded by the constant dying of my friends from AIDS. He said, “Why should I care about them? I don’t know them.” I looked at the therapist, who said nothing. It obviously did not
occur to my father that I or my therapist would find this hurtful. This was an opportunity for the therapist to help my father understand the consequence of his actions, but the man did nothing. I’m sure that if my father had said something sexually inappropriate, the therapist would have intervened. If my father had taken out a crack pipe and started smoking, the therapist would have intervened. I have never been sexually abused and my father was never an addict, but his comments about AIDS were indicative of what he thought was appropriate behavior. The therapist made a judgment call that this kind of homophobia was reasonable enough to not merit intervention. It was a projection of his own oppression experiences and his own lack of self-esteem as a gay man. He may also have wanted my father’s approval. Whatever his own issues were, it undermined my opportunity to witness my father hear from someone other than me that his statements were inappropriate.
My father refused to return. He said that instead of these sessions he would meet me for lunch once a week, but no matter how many times I asked him to, he never did. Like most shunners, he knew that a truthful conversation would mean having to take responsibility for his own cruelty, and since no one but me wanted him to, he had no reason to. If he had been court ordered, he would have had to. And I wish that had been an option. I needed a power larger than my father to give him information about his behavior. To make him keep his promises.
Looking back, I have to acknowledge that my father grew up in a household of people who were severely traumatized by war, anti-Semitism, and poverty. His adopted sister, with whom he was raised, was abandoned by her father to be killed by Czarist soldiers, but instead she witnessed her mother and brother being murdered by Cossacks as she hid in a fireplace. My father’s mother grew up in a situation so profoundly deprived that her family was on the border of starvation and literally did not have shoes. My father’s father came to America alone as a young child. Neither of my father’s parents, nor his grandparents, had basic civil rights in their birth countries. They did not have the right to be educated, to own property, or to practice their religion. Clearly my father grew up among the profoundly traumatized, and he needed treatment himself to be able to emotionally reconnect enough to be able love his lesbian daughter. If that therapist had been engaged, prepared, and skilled with the issues of familial homophobia, projection of the traumatized, and positive modes of intervention, all of this could have been broached.
If the therapist had intervened, my father might have had a better life. He might have had the satisfaction of loving me and being proud of me. After all, I have spent my life doing good things. With intervention, he could have been helped to know this. It would have made him happier.
•In my mid-thirties, I asked my mother to come into counseling with me. The therapist was a referral, and she looked like an obvious lesbian. This gave her no authority with my mother, and she kept trying to establish some. My mother said, “Why should I be overjoyed that Sarah is a homosexual?” The therapist didn’t want to contradict her for fear of losing her authority. She therefore allowed these abusive behaviors to become reinscribed, and since there was no one stopping them, the room became a repeat of the kind of cruelty I had already lived with for twenty years.
During the few sessions that took place, my mother said that she and my sister had a secret, but she was not allowed to tell me what it was. My sister forbade her. The therapist said nothing about these manipulations. Entering that room was like entering a humiliation cell. My mother had free reign to repeat any homophobic violation, and the therapist did not know how to intervene to protect me, without giving up her credibility with my mother. Like all gay people, I was just expected to bear it, no matter what its impact. It was not supposed to have any consequence on me because there was some unspoken agreement that I inherently deserved to be treated that way. I later found out from another source that the secret my sister had decided to impose was that she was pregnant. Like my brother excluding me from his wedding, she wisely chose an event that was rooted in heterosexual privilege to exploit the homophobia of my parents.
My mother also came from a background of trauma, oppression, and mass murder. Her father also came here alone from Russia. His sister was exterminated in the Holocaust at Baba Yar. My mother’s grandmother was a civilian killed in World War I, and my maternal grandmother’s two brothers and two sisters were also murdered in the Holocaust. My mother’s father was wanted by the police for desertion but lied to my grandmother and married her under a false name. My grandmother only discovered the truth about her husband when he was arrested. As a consequence of anti-Semitism and war, my mother grew up without an extended family and without grandparents. She had no experience of familial longevity. Her own mother, who had been educated in Austro-Hungary and could read and write five languages, lost all her status when she became a war refugee. My grandmother and grandfather washed other people’s clothing for a living. My mother’s father died because of inadequate health care, and her mother lived with us all my life because she had no insurance or savings. As a young person, my mother was close to people who were victimized by the blacklist.
I believe that these untreated and unacknowledged traumas made my mother fear difference, fear the disapproval of the dominant culture, which kept her from being able to love her lesbian daughter. I also believe that the destruction of the Jewish people of Europe made both my parents deeply invested in my role as the oldest daughter and my destiny to reproduce the race. However, I also believe that all of this could have been addressed in a proactive, systematic therapy rooted in deep study and interrogation of homophobia, its sources and consequences. If my mother had been supported to see that I am a human being, she could have been proud and happy that I have spent my life working for justice, that I am a hard-working moral and accountable person who has made something interesting and productive out of my life. She could have felt satisfied instead of vicious. But she never could ever have come to this on her own. She NEEDED intervention by other family members, professionals, and authority figures to be able to understand the true meaning of her daughter’s life.
I don’t excuse my parents, but I loved my father no matter what, and now that he is dead, I still love my mother. I deeply and fundamentally believe in the human responsibility to understand why people do what they do. No matter how cruel what they do actually is. I believe that if someone had intervened, almost anyone, the destructive course of their homophobia could have been reduced or abated.
•Finally, one last try, when my sister excluded my lover and me from knowing my niece, I asked my family to come to meet with my therapist. To this day, I am not allowed to be alone with my niece. As a result, I have not seen her in over ten years, and I also have a nephew and a second niece that I have never seen. My mother tells me that my niece and nephew do not know that I exist. My mother agrees with this exclusion because, as she says, if I were able to be alone with my niece or nephew, I would “tell them that their parents are homophobes.” Again it is not the truth that is the problem, but the telling of the truth that justifies punishment. Whether or not they are homophobic, I do not know. But I do know that they ruthlessly exploit homophobia instead of interrupting it. One of my motives for writing this book is so that my nieces and nephew will some day understand what happened in our family and why they do not know me. I hope that when this day comes, I will still be alive and that they will come to see me, so that we can talk.
Anyway, my sister refused to participate in the session. But my father, mother, and brother did come. The therapist asked my mother, “How do you feel knowing that your daughter Sarah will never know your grandchild?”
She said, “Sarah has been terrible since the day she was born. When she was born the obstetrician said, ‘That is a bad and uncomfortable child.’ ”
I interpret this to reflect a shift in my mother’s thinking about the cause of homosexuality. At first my parents believed that they made me gay. Under the influence of vulgar 1950s theory, they thought that m
y homosexuality proved that my father was not a strong father figure and that my mother “loved you too much.” Later, they came to believe that homosexuality was a biological deficiency, and so by saying that I was bad since the day I was born, my mother, I believe, was reflecting her new wish that I was biologically homosexual from birth. After they left, the therapist told me, “Don’t believe anything they say about you. None of it is true.” But why didn’t he say that to them? Telling me didn’t help me. They needed to hear that someone disapproved of their behavior, someone cared about how I was treated. I needed someone to stand up for me, not tell me what I already knew. His own self-oppression kept him from being able to tell them the truth.
In each of these cases, over a thirty-year period, two things were consistent. No therapist that I encountered was able to intervene directly with the homophobia. They had no mechanism for confronting it and no method for modeling appropriate behavior for my family. All they could do was whisper to me in secret that what my family was doing was wrong. And secondly, and most importantly, my parents never had the opportunity to change their behavior because no one with any currency or authority in their lives, ever confronted them about the morality of what they were doing. Clearly, they were not capable of changing on their own.
Ties That Bind Page 5