“For the women who do this,” Kendell continued, “it is classic victim psychology that puts them in a position of fighting for the illegitimate. Maybe it’s because of past victimization or internalized homophobia or a sense of themselves as really out of the protection of the larger society. It’s why lesbian and gay people are horribly racist. It’s a sense of completely not getting it and not understanding the ultimate harm.”
I suggested to Kendell that the only times in their lives they’ve ever had any state power is when they became mothers. All their lives they were treated as lesbians; suddenly they’re being treated as straight women—and having the power associated with heterosexuality. But the person on the other side is not a man.
“No, she’s a lesbian and she is really now the outsider,” Kendell illuminated. “It is a sense of being able to victimize the victim.”
Kendell has talked to several people that she has opposed in court. “What they say is, ‘Well, she never really was a parent. She never wanted to be a parent. I never considered her to be a parent.’ It’s all justifications for why she’s taking the positions she’s taking.”
“Do they believe that or do they know that they are lying about the past?”
“Whether they wake up at three o’clock in the morning and feel sick to their stomach because they know they are perpetuating a huge charade, I don’t know.” Kendell replied. “Now, what’s also interesting is that we have never ever seen or heard of a similar case involving gay men.”
Kate and I were talking about lesbians, people who are a-socialized. What we were seeing was the lives of people who are in many ways pushed outside of the norms of the society, and as a result can act in a way where they don’t care about the consequence, don’t care about how they are viewed because they don’t feel any stake in social agreement about being accountable to each other or a loyalty to social order, even within a lesbian community.
“I used to say that these cases broke my heart because I expected and wanted so much more from women in my community. If someone would have said to me, before I knew about this phenomenon, that this was happening, and it is probably going to happen a lot more, I would not have believed them. Especially that you can convince yourself that taking a parent away from your child doesn’t do damage to that child? When all else fails, that is the thing that I’m most baffled by. How can you say that a seven-year-old, who calls this person “Momma” and has seen her every single day of her life, should be told one day that she’s never going to see Momma again?”
Why is this happening? Why are so many lesbians willing to act so crazily and destructively?
“It comes,” she said, “from a place that is so victimized that you don’t even understand when you’ve moved from being the victim to the oppressor. I’m convinced that the reason most of these cases proceed is that by and large, most women who take this terrible position do have a cadre of friends supporting them. Most of them are not completely alone. They usually have a cadre of close friends who say, ‘Oh yeah, she was a bitch. I never liked her.’ Not appreciating that there is a child in the center of this family. Generally the biological parents who take this position have at least a handful of other lesbians who support her in her actions. The community needs to be able to put sufficient pressure on the bio-mom’s friends to tell her, ‘We can’t support you in this strategy.’”
This is what makes Kendell so interesting. She has articulated a community-based approach to the problem. Since the relationship between lesbians and the court system and lesbians and the state is an ever changing relationship, creating a stigma within the community is the way to regulate people’s behavior. To make amoral lesbians realize that actually someone does care about how they act and that there is someone who notices and cares enough that the woman in question has to be accountable. To tell her that she does live within a moral system. It’s about the responsibilities of not being alone. It’s kind of brilliant.
“I’ll use whatever I have to,” Kendell says. “I think these cases are so ultimately destructive and given the failure of the legal system to catch up, I and other advocates will use whatever we have to try to protect our families, our family law, and these kids. We must stop bio-moms from taking this position.”
Interestingly, Kendell is taking a group of people, lesbians, who nobody cares about. People who, when something bad happens to them, have no one to protect them and, when they are doing something wrong, have no one to intervene and tell them that they shouldn’t. People who have lived in an emotionally anarchistic state. So, basically, I can do anything nasty to you and no one is going to tell me that it’s not okay and no one is going to help you. We have relationships which are illusions of safety. But we don’t have family support and we don’t have societal support. We’re floating, emotional satellites. What Kendell is trying to do is to anchor this behavior by creating a community responsibility so that if someone is acting immorally, a friend will intervene. I asked Kendell, “Do you think that that can be used on other terms besides children?”
She replied, “It can be used for good or for ill. It is a strategy that is very risky. Because you live in Utah and you’re a member of ACT UP and you chain yourself to Temple Square trying to give light to the anti-gay activities of the Latter Day Saints Church, and your friends are saying, ‘Stop it, you’re causing too much trouble and making it hard for us.’ That is an unfortunate use of community pressure. It is a tactic that today I am an agent in creating.”
“If your family was homophobic,” I asked her. “If your birth family said to you, ‘You can’t be near your niece or we’re not going to recognize your achievements or we’re not going to be accountable or value your life,’ would it—based on your concept of the community—be my responsibility to go to your family of origin and tell them that their behavior is not acceptable because I am in a community that is accountable to you? If I’m going to condemn you when you’re horrible, I also have to defend you when someone else is treating you unfairly, right?”
“It gives some substance to the word ‘community’ to think that there would be such an ethic and sense of responsibility,” she replied. “Whenever I talk about the ‘queer community,’ I think of the quotation marks in my head. I don’t know that there really is a queer community—the word connotes a collective responsibility, collective caretaking, collective concern for the welfare of those who are members. I think we’ve got a community in only the loosest sense. But virtually every member of the queer community has their own little community of friends that can have influence.”
“Kate, have you ever gone to the birth families of any of your friends and told them that their homophobia toward your friend was inappropriate?”
Kendell said no. I asked her if she would be willing to do so.
“Yeah. Part of what the issue is for taking on a sense of community responsibility is that you have to have nothing to lose yourself. Even our suggesting that there should be community pressure on these biological moms to not take this position—well, the only way that’s going to happen is if people have nothing to lose, or see it in their self-interest.”
But they have something to lose. And standing up for somebody else is uncomfortable. People will allow almost anything to occur rather than be uncomfortable.
“True,” Kendell replied, “we don’t behave that way, but we could. We at NCLR feel that this particular situation is one where setting up a sense that there should be a community standard opposed to bio-moms doing this is in the best interest of the broader community.”
Yes, because there are children involved. But I asked Kendell, “What if there were just adults involved?”
“They still should treat each other honorably and abide by their promises to each other.”
Here, I expressed my larger concern. If you’ve been told your whole life that you are worthless, what good is your word? When I have done political organizing in a lesbian context, one of the things that I learned there was t
hat we had a constituency of people, many of whom had been told all their lives that they were nothing. Many had never had or used power, did not know how to be proactive, felt that their only power was to be obstructive. A lot of times lesbians would come into a room determined that the only way they could express themselves was to stop something. When we created the Lesbian Avengers in 1992, we had to create a rule that if you disagreed with a proposal you couldn’t just critique it; you had to make a better suggestion. This drove people wild because they didn’t have the skill or authority to be proactive and create things, to negotiate, to face and deal with problems, to propose solutions. They only knew how to obstruct and destroy. That’s what you’re dealing with here. We have it on a lot of different fronts. If we take your idea and expand it—what you are talking about is a real gay family.
If you are in a functional straight family and your husband is treating you like shit, your brother might drive over to the house and tell him that that’s not okay. But if it’s your girlfriend, nobody cares. Your family is not going to do anything, and your “friends” are going to stay out of it. You’re alone. If we want to have a gay family that is equal to the straight family, we need to have an ethic of intervention and accountability that functions along the lines of their official ethic at its most functional. What you are doing is the beginning of something that can really transform what our lives are like.
“To be fair,” Kendell responded, “it’s what advocates in the domestic violence community have been talking about as well. The invisibility of queer-on-queer domestic violence and the collusion of the friends who know what’s happening and then ignore it is tantamount to approving of it and allowing it to go forward.”
“What is the difference between intervening in the life of your friends and bringing in the state? Especially when the state won’t support gay people? Should we be more like the mafia and take care of things internally?”
“You’ve got somebody who’s not going to allow visitation, you go over there, you sit down and you tell them this isn’t okay. The reason that tactic can work and the reason I suggest it is because I know it happens and I’ve seen women insulated by their friends. I know if they lose the last bit of cover they’ve got, those few close friends who are all they’ve got left, supporting them in an immoral action, it is a very rare person who will say, ‘Fuck you all, I’ll fly by myself.’ It is a rare person who won’t succumb to some degree to close friends saying, ‘You can’t do this,’ because it is all we have.”
Basically, what I took from the conversation is that if someday a woman tries to keep her kid away from its other parent, the community can intervene; if someone’s family is abusively homophobic to them, the community can intervene; if your lover is abusive and destroying the fabric of your life, the community can intervene—in other words, we can have a social structure.
“The legal system does not simply require that we play by the same rules as heterosexual couples,” Kendell said. “Eventually, the system will do that, but until they catch up, I can’t demand that bio-moms always be rational, because they’re not going to. The only thing we’ve got left is to say that friends will intervene and say, ‘You can’t do this. We’re not going to support this.’ It is in the long-term best interest of the child, the couple, and the community. If the community could really take responsibility about us being honorable to each other, then it doesn’t matter what the legal system does; then we don’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attorneys; there’s actually more certainty and less wrenching if there is a sense of responsibility. We are responsible for the decisions we make with each other.”
THIRD PARTY INTERVENTION
The Human Obligation
What I find most moving about Kate’s analysis is the way she frames the cruelty of the lesbian partner against her lover as an act of projection. A lesbian who has had no rights and who has been traumatized by the system all her life suddenly has the euphoric emotional catharsis of being able, finally, to stick it to someone else. This reversal is so intoxicating that many will fight like dogs for that ecstatic feeling of domination. It’s an especially potent power when it is held over someone who knows their sexual truth, the very truths for which they have themselves been victimized. The fact that the originating cruelty was from other people whose privileges keep them out of reach seems not to matter. The glee of doing it to someone else, who has even less protection, prevails.
After all, some cruelty comes from privilege and some comes from trauma. Their motivations and solutions are entirely different. But their impact on the victim is the same. When privileged people scapegoat, they do it from repetition, arrogance, habit. The pleasure is the pleasure of entitlement, the inflated sense of one’s self as neutral, natural, and right. But when a perpetrator scapegoats from a place of trauma, it is almost always an act of projection. It was her father who sexually abused her, but it’s the lover who can truly reach her sexually who suddenly becomes Satan. It is her drunken parents who never could face and deal with a problem, but it is her lover making her open the credit card bills, whom she can in turn humiliate and cathartically dehumanize. And because the lover is herself unprotected, the lesbian can impulsively act out her pain on her partner without fear of consequence.
Kendell identifies this as a kind of re-victimization, where one devalued person “does not keep her promises” to another devalued person and does this “not understanding the ultimate harm” of her actions. She says, “It comes from a place that is so victimized that you don’t even understand when you’ve moved from being the victim to being the oppressor.” And she identifies the foundation of this cruel behavior as “a cadre of friends” who support the woman in her illegitimate action.
Being on the receiving end of intense homophobia from family, which is supposed to be the central support structure in a person’s life, is a severely traumatizing experience, which creates a resulting vulnerability that in turn makes the victim again susceptible to these kinds of projections from other oppressed people. Remember, people scapegoat the powerless because there is no consequence for doing so. If there was a consequence, they would stop. Having no family support because you are gay, being pathologized for being gay and then being blamed for the consequences of that pathologization, these twists create a target for the projection of others. These experiences make one extremely vulnerable to being blamed because the blamers know, instinctively, that no one will stand up and disrupt the process. Observing someone else’s vulnerability is suggestive. It embeds the message that this person can be violated without consequence. It is the corrosive power of suggestion.
Actually, knowledge about other people should increase your responsibility toward them. If you know that someone has emphysema, you are required by moral code to not exhale cigarette smoke at that person. If you know someone is an alcoholic, you don’t spike that person’s drink. If you know that someone has no family, you don’t invite them into yours and then shut them out of it again. If you know that someone cannot walk, you don’t hide their crutches. If you know that someone has been scapegoated, you don’t scapegoat them. If you know that someone has been excluded from the children in his or her family, you don’t promise the person a relationship with yours and then withhold it. And if you do, you don’t blame them for being devastated. If you know that someone is thirsty, you don’t pour the water into the sand. If you know that someone is being shunned, you don’t shun the person. If you know that someone has no place to go for Thanksgiving or Passover, you invite them. And if you tell them they are always welcome, don’t be surprised when they show up at your door. These principles should be obvious. Yet, bullies abound. There are a lot of people looking for the catharsis of scapegoating and cruelty to give themselves a pleasurable feeling. And there are a lot of people who will defend their right to do anything that creates impulsive pleasure no matter how much pain it causes others.
When someone is being shunned because they have no institution of
support, whether by a family, the state, the arts and entertainment–industrial complex, society, or a projecting similarly oppressed person, there is one case in which third-party intervention is the moral imperative: when they ask you to. Even if the perpetrator tries to obstruct. Refusing people who are begging for protective intervention re-wounds them. It leaves them worse off than they were before.
Intervening on behalf of a person who is being scapegoated is the positive choice on a number of fronts:
1.It creates integrity and dignity for the intervener, even if the intervention is not successful.
2.It shows the person being victimized that someone cares about how they are treated and supports them even if the intervention is not successful.
3.It gives perpetrators the knowledge that their behavior is morally offensive. Rewarding them with silence withholds this information from them. Forcing perpetrators to justify their actions, engaging them in interactive conversation about why they are doing what they are doing may help to articulate other ways of behaving that perpetrators cannot come up with themselves.
4.It creates consequences for the perpetrators. The more people who protest their cruelty, the less likely they are to maintain it. Only truly pathological people will continue to shun another regardless of how much it costs them.
5.It creates a zeitgeist of response that can protect other people from having to suffer in the same way in the future.
Yet, despite this, one of the big obstacles to third-party intervention that could end this suffering is the perpetrators’ frequent claim that their behavior is “private.” They experience their shunning and projection onto gay people as somehow their inherent “right.” This active, assaultive abandonment gets falsely constructed as the perpetrator’s “privacy” somehow outside of the realm of accountability. As though it were a benign individual choice like wanting your eggs over easy or scrambled. Because it is instead an extension of a huge structural system of injustice, its enforcement by individuals is not only their business. They make a kind of individual version of states’ rights arguments, where states want the right to legally discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality. Individuals have a dialogic relationship with the state, in that they mimic each other’s methods. They may claim that it is their “right” to exclude a gay family member, or to exploit a lover’s lack of power. But, actually, it’s not their right. No one has a “right” to destroy someone else’s life, but only third parties can stop them. This power to exploit someone else’s lack of rights is so dear to the perpetrators that they think it is their private property, out of the realm of other people’s reach. And they theorize other people’s wish to end the cruelty as itself violating.
Ties That Bind Page 7