What is essentially wrong about the say-nothing-and-separate approach is that it allows the homophobes to own the family. The therapist must begin from the assumption that the gay person is an equal human being and has equal rights and needs to have a family. Therapists have to bring this perspective actively to the process. Through their actions, statements, methods, they must actively embody a reversed value in which it is the homophobe who is destroying the family, not the homosexual. They have to identify ORIGINATING ACTIONS and then show their consequences, not allow pathologizing consequences to be reinterpreted as justifications. To blame the distress and pain of the gay family member for the infliction of that pain is like blaming someone for ruining your furniture when in fact they bled all over it because you shot them.
Ultimately, what is essential is activism within the psychotherapy industry for ways to confront the sickness of homophobia in therapeutic terms. Families should be able to be court-ordered into homophobia treatment programs. Schools, businesses—any institution that provides counseling or mediation—should treat the homophobic family members as the cause of the problem. Interventionist methods must be developed to assert, immediately, within one or two sessions, that it is the homophobia that is pathological. Whispering this to victimized gay people while being silent in the face of their persecutors is morally wrong and therapeutically disastrous.
The trauma of familial homophobia on the individual is not understood nor addressed therapeutically. Homophobic trauma is not a recognized category of experience. For the most part, victimized gay people, unless they have been physically assaulted, are expected to grin and bear it. They are expected to be made better and stronger by the cruelty they face instead of being diminished and destabilized. In over twenty-five years of therapy, I have never encountered a therapist who understood the primacy of homophobic trauma on a person’s well-being, and I have never seen any systematic approach to treatment. I have never heard an idea about homophobia from a therapist that was new to me. I have never been handed a book that illuminated the experience, nor was I ever referred to or given the name of anyone who was an expert in the field. Basically, I was told repeatedly that these experiences were not central to my condition, which was simply wrong.
The therapist’s own sense of self is an essential part of the problem. Heterosexual therapists who harbor fantasies of their own neutrality, who continue to believe that their own sexuality is neutral but that homosexuality needs to have its origins interrogated—these grandiose individuals should be steered into treatment before being unleashed on patients. Obviously, the damage they do to gay clients through their condescending self-position is dramatic. The damage that they do to heterosexual clients is also huge—by communicating their own sense of heterosexuality as neutral, they reinforce their clients in pathologizing the gay people in their lives.
The lack of development of straight and gay therapists on these issues has a chain reaction of destruction. If therapists are going to continue to counsel their clients to separate from their homophobic families and create gay families, then they have a responsibility to support their clients in facing and dealing with problems, negotiating and behaving responsibly to their own partners. If therapists treating gay people encourage cutting-off, withholding, and shunning, then they are making it impossible for the replacement gay family they envision to actually exist. Gay people have not been apologized to; they have not experienced their own families following through, being reliable; they have experienced being treated with a differentiated degree of respect based on their lack of status. It is obvious why they would in turn be unreliable, be unable to apologize, be disrespectful, not keep their promises to the gay people they love. Or be desperate to cling to relationships that are sexually dead, spiritually diminishing or infantilizing. Of course straight people violate each other, and of course there are some gay people who keep their promises. But the gay family will only equal the straight family when gay people are expected by law, tradition, and each other to be as consistent and accountable to each other through transition, crisis, and change as traditional families are expected to be. Right now, this is not an idea that I have ever heard expressed by any therapist. When gay people extend the arm of the cruelty of family, courts, and culture on their lovers, it is a disordered behavior. One to be identified and treated, not justified and reinforced.
Now, one of the problems inherent in this system is that therapists are not supervised; there is no standard of accountability. Straight therapists carry their own history of condescending to or demeaning gay people that they may wish to justify. Gay therapists with gay clients in particular carry their own homophobic trauma and are also subconsciously aware that their clients are devalued people. They are just as vulnerable to the power of suggestion as anyone else. The therapists are essentially free to act out and project their own pathologies and inadequacies on clients, who in turn have no recourse. And they are able to advise clients in behavior toward others without ever hearing what those others think and without ever being accountable for the consequences of that behavior on them.
In the same way that a therapist who has himself been a victim of homophobia may not have the tools to help his patient achieve what he himself was excluded from, dominant culture therapists may easily reinforce the supremacy behavior of their dominant culture clients. A homophobic therapist may encourage a client to keep her child away from the client’s homosexual sister even though it is the homophobia (or the sibling manipulation of parental prejudice to raise her own currency within the homophobic family) that has created the problematic relationship in the first place. If the therapist does not understand how familial homophobia works and has never heard from the sister, she may be supporting her client in cruel and sick behavior that will deprive the client’s child of a rich, loving relationship with her own aunt. The therapist’s own prejudices and ignorance are projected onto the patient’s unjustified behavior, sanctifying it with tragic consequences for the child who will never know her aunt.
With feminist therapists and lesbian clients this projection can have even more destructive consequences, because the dynamic is gendered—built around two people who have a deprivation of rights for both gender and sometimes sexuality. Feminist therapy in particular has been a great advocate of cut-offs, withholding, and refusal to communicate, which are the behavior patterns of the unaccountable. They repeatedly construct their lesbian patients as endangered by negotiation, so debilitated by sexual abuse (or metaphoric sexual abuse, “violation”) as to be exempt from responsible behavior toward others, and people whose only power is to refuse and withhold.
It is my experience that therapists often encourage lesbian clients toward the “no” position, which they falsely construct as a symbol of power. Heavily influenced by discourses on sexual abuse, incest, and rape, sexual violation has become a predominant paradigm at the core of the therapy of disenfranchised people, just as it is in the larger homophobic culture. Both treat the lesbian as a predator, because she wants to be heard. The model is enforced with any relationship that “threatens” the client. The differentiation between the actual threat of a dangerous sexually abusing parent or assailant is conflated with the “perceived threat” of a friend or lover who may, through depth of feeling or spoken truth, be revealing something that the client needs support to hear. I have never experienced or heard of a lesbian therapist strongly supporting a client to not cut off or shun, but rather to negotiate and face and deal with problems, even if doing so would make them uncomfortable. Yet, repeatedly I have experienced and heard of lesbian therapists encouraging cut-off and shunning, regardless of their client’s role in the problematic relationship.
Remember, the therapeutic position as currently constructed is itself a position that rests its power on withholding, cut-off, and unaccountability. The therapist withholds information about herself that may reveal projections onto her patients. Perhaps she has used the courts to deprive her child of access to anoth
er female parent. Or if she is straight, perhaps she has manipulated social homophobia to get a better job, or to elevate herself within her own family. The client will never know.
The client may not even know if the gay therapist is in fact gay. Whereas straight people disclose immediately by wearing wedding rings or having pictures on their desks, gay therapists often use more coded methods like having particular books on their shelves. (I’ve walked into a therapist’s office and seen my own books on the shelf even as the therapist never disclosed her homosexuality.) And most importantly, they advise, instruct, and reinforce behavior in their clients that can destroy the lives of others who will never be able to make them accountable. If the client feels that the therapist is dishonest, on a power trip, cheating them financially, lying about credentials, improperly terminating, whatever, it is almost impossible to successfully petition an intervening body. No wonder so much therapeutic advice replicates the protective shield of institutionalized non-accountability that therapists create for themselves.
Whether the therapist is reinforcing the straight client’s homophobic cruelty, or reinforcing the gay clients’ extension of familial, social, legal, and cultural homophobic cruelty, the therapist is never accountable for the consequences of his actions on the third party, even though the therapist may be the only authority figure, or in loco parentis figure, in the lives of the client or her victim. Since homophobic parents instruct their straight children in homophobia, the straight therapist is the key authority figure who can reparent the homophobe away from replicating the parents’ cruelty against gay family members. Because homophobic parents cannot impart helpful life advice to their gay children, and withholding results in lack of communication and lack of information, the unaccountable therapist projecting onto her own client becomes overly determining in reinforcing negative behavior.
Because so many of us do not have healthy supportive families of origin, the therapist treating lesbian patients may be the only parental figure who listens and accepts the client’s homosexuality. Within the absence of family, cultural representation and legal protection, therapists have an inordinate amount of influence and power to determine the actions of their clients. Because of homophobia, many couples are not acknowledged by parental figures for the good they bring into each other’s lives. Most lesbian couples only receive affirmation internally, within the relationship. Once the external forces overwhelm the internal ones, a counter-homophobia therapeutic emphasis must be focused on delineating, with clarity and precision, what gifts the women bring to each other, what specific reciprocities they have shown, what actions they have taken to acknowledge and help each other. This may be the only time in the life of the relationship that the value of the other human being is affirmed publicly and one partner’s responsibility to the other is insisted upon. Since this occurs nowhere else in our daily life, the therapist is the one person who has the opportunity to model and insist on keeping promises, negotiating, treating other despised gay people with respect and responsibility. But to do this, they have to supersede their own oppression experiences and overcome the lack of articulated clarity about the functions of familial homophobia and its consequences, as well as the lack of specificity about how to treat both homophobic behavior and homophobic trauma.
DOING TO LOVERS AS OTHERS HAVE DONE TO US/HER
One of the most obvious expressions of gay-on-gay shunning, as an extension of family and governmental oppression, is the use of the court system by one gay parent to deny custody to the other. In the late 1990s, there were about a dozen cases like this around the country. The number has grown exponentially since then. Sadly, a number of these plaintiffs claimed sole custody on the grounds that the relationship, by virtue of not being legal, was illegitimate, and that, therefore, they had no responsibility to be accountable to their partner’s relationship to their children. This is the most stark, while emblematic, example of how gay people extend the hand of anti-gay oppression against each other.
I interviewed Kate Kendell, director of the San Francisco–based National Coalition for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), about the budding trend of gay people using the courts to deny their partner’s access to children that the two had raised together. Although this conversation took place in the 1990s, the questions of morality, responsibility, and group dynamics in lesbian and gay communities are still the same. In the 1990s the relationship of gays and lesbians to the legal system was in a state of insane contradiction. Sodomy was still illegal. Basic civil rights varied from city to city and state to state, as they do today. Gay marriage was still illegal in all fifty states. Today it is illegal in forty-five. A number of cities and states were holding public referenda on repealing already existing gay-rights bills, or creating pre-emptive anti-gay legislation ensuring that no gay rights bills could ever be passed in that area, as they are still doing today. In 2008, Kendell was part of the leadership in California to defeat Proposition 8, an anti-gay ballot measure designed to reverse a legislative decision legalizing gay marriage. Even though Obama won California in the election, Prop 8 was passed and the 36,000 people who had experienced gay marriage had their marriages called into question.
In our discussion, we focused on the psychology of lesbians going to court either to try to keep shared custody of a child they had raised in a now destroyed relationship, or to prohibit the former lover from having access to a child she had raised. It was bizarre and yet predictable to watch lesbians use the state that dehumanized them as a tool to diminish each other. After all, all homosexual lovers have watched the person who has given them pleasure, friendship, caring, love, and kindness be repeatedly humiliated by their family, by cultural representation, and/or by the state. So, when the time came when it was convenient to pretend away any responsibility to that person, the simplest thing to do was to imitate the cruelty they had already always endured. The question was, when a lesbian decides to treat her lover as badly as the lover’s family, culture, and the state had always treated her, would the courts be willing to enforce that repetition? And if so, whose responsibility is it to interfere on the gay person’s behalf with the ferocity that the state interferes against them?
•••
Kate Kendell is a very busy woman. She has an adult daughter back in Utah, a girlfriend/wife, and a young son in San Francisco. She is an attorney with a job that requires a lot of traveling and late hours. But a lot of her time these days is spent trying to understand the lesbian mind.
As executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), Kate is on the forefront of recent court battles of a very disturbing nature. It is not the religious right, not homophobic parents, and not disgruntled ex-husbands who are trying to deny basic parenting rights to lesbians. No, recently there have been more and more court cases involving lesbians who raised children in the context of a relationship, and once the relationship ended, the biological mothers are going to court to keep their old girlfriends away from the children. On what grounds? These women are claiming that they never were a “family” as the courts understand that word, and that their ex-girlfriends are not eligible for the rights and responsibilities that a real family involves. So, they claim, after all those years of political agitation, the dominant culture was right. Lesbian love is not real love and results in no responsibility from one partner to the other. Tough stuff.
The same women now who are using the state to keep children from their ex-girlfriends previously would have had their kids taken away if they had been originally coupled with men and then came out. Now they are “the man” because they have the state on their side. I asked Kendell if people are so corruptible that as soon as they have the power of the state they start bullying and if the previous experience of being marginalized has any impact.
“That’s a very cynical but I think sadly pretty accurate assessment,” she said. “Any other explanation is even more cynical. If it’s not that these biological parents simply are using power just because they’ve got it, then
it has to do with something about the lesbian bio-parent psyche which could be about ownership, a sense of a child as property.”
“Does it have to do with their sense of their own femininity, or being a real woman because they have a child?”
“Clearly,” she said, “we all have this sense, and probably all have an experience growing up where we got the message that if you are a mother and you got divorced, you should have custody, you should seek custody, you should want it and if you didn’t there’s something wrong with you. But what these bio-parents are doing is so beyond that, because in most of these cases, no one is saying that the biological parent doesn’t get custody. She will. She does. It is generally conceded by the other parent. All the non-bio parent wants is to fill the shoes of what is a very common and easily recognizable model, the true non-custodial father model. She’s the non-custodial parent. She’ll have visitation every other weekend and on Wednesday evenings. That’s the standard rule. And will have some role in the child’s life. This is a model that we’ve seen billions of times in every heterosexual divorce in which children were involved. It’s not as if we’re saying to biological mothers, ‘You need to accept an entirely different model because you’re a lesbian family’ or that she needs to give up something more than a heterosexual woman would have to give up. No, what we’re saying is that we should play by the same rules. These biological mothers are saying ‘No, we don’t have to play by the same rules because the legal system doesn’t recognize what I have as a family. So, I’m not going to recognize it as a family either because it is no longer convenient for me to do so.’ ”
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