Ties That Bind

by Sarah Schulman

  Silence, refusal, cut-off, and withholding in the dialogic power relation of family, state, love, and cultural representation are not neutral actions. They are aggressive, hostile, abusive actions. They create an on-going infliction of pain that is often not deserved. Whether the shunning comes from privilege or from trauma, the consequence on the victim is profound and deserves intervention.

  Frankly, if someone can get a court order to avoid resolution, I think they should be able to get a court order compelling resolution. Telling the truth and being heard, truly understanding one’s responsibilities toward others and the consequences of one’s actions on another person, is in the best interest of the whole. Even if it is uncomfortable. Some no’s are appropriate and would stand up to third-party scrutiny, and some are not. “No, you can’t talk to me because you stole my money to buy drugs” is very different from “No, you cannot speak to me because you tell me something about myself that I don’t want to hear.” The former would be easily explained and the latter withheld and obstructed behind all kinds of victimizing smoke screens.

  People love the people they are good to and hate the people they are cruel to. The object’s actual behavior is too often not a factor. No one fears you more than someone who has abused you. As my grandmother, Dora Leibling Yevish, used to say, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.” In other words, when one person hurts you, they hate you more because you know what they are really like.

  The recipient of inappropriate behavior is a witness, has justifiable consequential anger, wants change, and is therefore not trustworthy in the eye of the perpetrator, which is why governments give permits to homophobic Irish people on Saint Patrick’s Day and take the gay Irish people trying to participate in the march off to jail. The state trusts the homophobes whom they have long rewarded, and the state mistrusts the gay people whom they have long abused. It has nothing to do with the inherent truth about the gay people or the homophobes and how each group objectively deserves to be treated. It is the Ancient Order of Hibernians who have acted badly, who then withhold, refuse to resolve, thereby avoiding responsibility and accountability. And the oppressed, shunned gay people, whose attempts to get into the parade are treated like sexual violators, are physically restrained, put in handcuffs, and taken away into jail cells. Just because the Hibernians don’t want us in and don’t want to talk about it doesn’t mean that we have to do what they say.

  People who have acted fairly have nothing to hide and therefore don’t. Despite the twisted sexual morality associated with “no,” the withholder, through the active assault of shunning, is often actually the violator. The Ancient Order of Hibernians excludes the gay people claiming that they are dangerous invaders and violators, posing a sexual threat, but actually it is the Hibernians, through their shunning, who are the ones causing harm.

  WITHHOLDING CREATES TENSION, ACKNOWLEDGMENT CREATES RELIEF

  (And This Is Why We Are Talking About Gay Marriage)

  We agree that all human beings should have the same legal rights, but here is my question, what does gay marriage really mean? Why do people want it so badly? Is it really all about love, taxes, and extending the special privileges that people receive for being in couples to gay couples as well?

  The propaganda campaigns for gay marriage usually feature a perfect couple. They’ve been together forever, have good solid incomes, one or more happy children. They are perfect, and their perfect union deserves to be protected from the state. The examples are offered over and over of ways this perfect love is vulnerable to the state. If one is sick, the state can keep the other from visitation. If one dies, the state can seize the other’s belongings. Bad state.

  Re-affirming, as I said above, that everyone should have the same legal rights, I believe marriage has never really been about protecting the relationship from the state. The purpose of marriage was originally to protect men’s property and in modern times has served as an inadequate strategy to protect women and children from male abandonment. Legal marriage intends to force consequences (what I have called third-party intervention) on men who try to violate their promises and dishonorably abandon their responsibilities to women with whom they have shared love, sex, kindness, friendship. Even though the state always disadvantaged women, when it comes to marriage, there is some sense that married men do have some accountability to the women they have loved.

  This, I think, is at the core of the desperate desire for relationship recognition that has spearheaded the campaign for gay marriage. Gay marriage does not so much protect the couple from the state as it protects the couple from each other. It is a third-party acknowledgment and recognition that people who have shared love have basic responsibilities toward each other. These responsibilities include having to go through some kind of process in order to change a relationship. Frankly, I think that this is a basic human responsibility and right to not be dehumanized by abandonment, shunning, pretending you have never loved. Legal marriage tries to create a framework, a process, a forced negotiation and forced communication that are inherent human responsibilities.

  A second true motive, I believe, for galvanizing energy around gay marriage, is to force the state to legitimate the emotional life of the gay person as a balance to the deprivation of recognition created by the family. A father may not believe that his daughter is a person, but the state gives her the right to vote. In that tradition, the diminished gay person now has a new standing of status and recognition imposed by the state on the family. The state becomes an agent of third-party intervention, forcing the denying family into a mandated acknowledgment against their will, but transforming the social standard around them. Now individuals who are forced by law to recognize a gay marriage carry that new knowledge into their family. It is social pressure to change personal behavior.

  In these ways, gay marriage is a strategy to prevent or dilute the tension created by withholding and shunning, both from family and from lover. It is this dynamic that I want to explore further.

  Have you ever said “hello” to someone on the street and had them not reply? It creates tension. If the person stopped and said, “Hello, Sarah. How are you?”, then we could experience human acknowledgment, the essential responsibility of people who know each other. But if they refuse that acknowledgment and instead choose shunning, they create a relationship of tension and conflict, which then needs to be resolved. In a way, this is the situation of gay people in America. We want the mutual relationship with the culture, but they refuse to respond. That refusal creates the tension, and it creates the urgent need on our parts to relieve the tension. Political movements are the product of the moment when the tension of exclusion or shunning is no longer bearable.

  Let me restate this idea in other terms: people do things for reasons. Those reasons are located in earlier experiences. In that way, each moment is created by the previous moment. There is no behavior that is not in some way created by earlier experience. For this reason, the truth of any situation can be discovered in the sequence of events. What happened first? What followed? Awareness lies in identifying the core originating action and determining the sequence of its consequences. That’s why people need to talk, so that the sequence of events can be understood. Too often we point to the consequences themselves without looking at the originating action that caused them. Gay people are upset; they are angry. Is this because they are inherently pathological? Or is the anger a result of someone else’s originating action? An action that may be hard to describe or identify because it has been repeated so many times that it looks falsely neutral, or even nonexistent, when it is in fact the cause. Gay people are uncomfortable as a consequence of the exclusion. They are responding to the originating action of oppression, cruelty, dehumanization, diminishment, humiliation, deprivation of rights, however you wish to describe it. The cause is the shunning; shunning forces an urgent need for solution. Some people feel this solution to be gay marriage.

  Back to the withholding person
on the street. She is emblematic of the culture. The next time I see her, I ask, “Why are you angry, Culture? Lets sit down and talk it over.” She refuses to answer and keeps walking. Her action creates a relationship far more intimate than the appropriate kindness would have created. Her action creates a relationship that is fraught and oppressive. It forces me to seek a solution, thereby deepening the connection between us, while she doesn’t try to make things better. I am now forced to think about her, notice her, see what she is like, why she does what she does. In order to relieve the mysterious shunning, I must think like her in order to try to understand what she knows but will not communicate. I have to think on her terms in order to liberate myself from her shunning by ending it, to resolve it. As a result I know her better than she knows me. I know her ways. If I have humane empathy and she does not (as a consequence of privilege or trauma), I can see the justifications for her ways. I can see it from her point of view and my point of view. She thinks I don’t have a point of view. I can see why she does what she does. This is both an expression of and source of love—the effort to understand. After being forced, by the oppression, to think about her so much, I develop a familiarity that makes her marriage acceptable to me while my homosexuality remains unacceptable to her. Partially as a consequence of this one-sided identification, gay people increasingly wish to get married.

  When we ask the culture why gay people must be constantly diminished, they often do not bother to answer at all. For example, I would like to know why literature with primary lesbian content can no longer be published with consistency in the United States. But I cannot get an answer. I would like to see a forum in the New York Times Magazine on this question, but there will not be one. If I ask someone, they don’t respond. Charlie Rose will not raise it with his guests, even the lesbian ones. And they won’t raise it either, or they wouldn’t be on Charlie Rose. No play or movie will ask this question. It is a non-question because the people at stake are being treated as though we do not exist and have never existed. Lesbians are being treated as though we are not human and do not deserve representation—in literature or anywhere else. In fact we do not even have the right to discuss why we cannot have these things. This creates tension. The tension in turn creates an urgency for change. The silent exclusion creates the anxiety, which in turn creates the need to act for change; one causes the other. When people refuse to discuss why they are shunning you, when they give no reason and have no terms for reconciliation, it is because to actually talk about it would be to reveal their own behavior. And their power lies in the ability to command silence about their own behavior. They can only pretend to be neutral if the mechanics of the moment are not discussed. Once sequence and substance are laid out starkly, their responsibility is revealed. Hence, no conversation.

  Right now, half of America believes that gay people are not human enough to deserve the right to get legally married. They have idealized ideas about themselves and about marriage, and distorted beliefs about us, what we’re like and how much we can bear. What makes this moment more disturbing than twenty years ago is that, now, most of these people actually know gays and lesbians. More of us are out now, and so they hold their position with more viciousness, since it is aimed at human beings whose names they know.

  They cling to this idealization of themselves for the same reason that more liberal people, who may support gay marriage, won’t allow lesbian literature to exist. I believe it is because the dominant group (both the conservative and liberal wing) is deeply invested in seeing themselves, falsely, as neutrally objective and value free. If, in fact, other world-views were treated as equally legitimate, their sense of themselves as naturally superior would be dismantled. They don’t want this. So, they maintain the exclusion and the silence around that exclusion as a way to falsely construct themselves as deserving of that power to shun. And this impulse is instinctive, not conscious. I believe that if there were an open, complex discussion of the exclusion, this answer would come to the forefront and that is why there is no such discussion. This is why, perhaps, my friend on the street won’t discuss why she is angry. Because then her own cruelty would be revealed and she wouldn’t be able to pretend neutrality. Shunners believe that they are doing nothing, or God’s will, or maintaining the status quo, but actually their exclusion of us is very active, which is why it is so unbearable. If her own motivations would be visible, her actions might be exposed as unjustified. She, the culture, needs to maintain the refusal to discuss as a way to hide her own inadequacy.

  Let’s say the woman on the street does provide an answer. Perhaps she says, “It’s God’s will. It’s not natural. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman,” as her reason for keeping me out. Well, there is no God, so much for the legitimacy of that excuse. Or, let’s say she explains her shunning by saying, “You broke into my apartment, stole my money, and used it to buy drugs. I will not speak to you again until you have three years of sobriety.” If this drug thing is in fact what happened, my acquaintance is in the right. She has a clear, legitimate cause for her action. Her action is appropriate. It is justified. It is how I deserve to be treated by her. And furthermore, she has terms for reconciliation. This, too, is a basic human responsibility. If I comply with her terms, then we can sit down and negotiate. Of course, if I don’t comply with her terms, she has the right to hold off contact until that changes. But to shun without terms is the definition of insanity. Once a person gives up on the possibility of human negotiation, they become apocalyptic. But, what if that drug answer, in fact, has no relationship to who I really am? I don’t use drugs; I don’t steal money; I have never committed the crime for which I am now being punished by silence. It is a false accusation. A smoke screen. She is mistaken. Or deliberately lying to cover up something else in her life that she can’t face. It’s her father who stole her money but she’s blaming it on me. The burden, unfortunately, is now on me to reveal that she is mistaken, so that there can be relief for both of us. I don’t have to be subjected to the pain of being on the receiving end of shunning, and she doesn’t have to live with the poison of anger that is not rooted in the real. The consequence of her action on me is that I need the truth to become clarified so that she and I can both have better lives.

  When gay people do get an answer as to why we are being excluded or separated, it is often not justified, not appropriate, and not how we deserve to be treated. It is most often a false accusation. These are some cruel justifications that I have heard. This is a true experience that I expressed in my novel, Rat Bohemia. I was on the way to my parents’ house, but first I went to visit my friend Stan Leventhal. This story takes place in the 1980s or ’90s. Stan was very sick. His apartment was a disaster; he was shaking, sweating. He gave me some books that he wanted me to have after he died. It was a stark, truthful moment. I think I was in my early thirties. I had already experienced many deaths. He shit in his pants. It was embarrassing and upsetting. I stayed with him longer than I anticipated. I arrived late at my parents’ home. My sister was there with her boyfriend. I told my family why I was late. My mother said, “You only like men when they’re dying. I had always hoped that you would grow up to be a productive person who was community-oriented but instead you put yourself in this mess.”

  My sister and her future husband sat there and said nothing.

  There are many traumatic components in this experience. First, there is Stan’s pain. His helplessness, his abandonment, his physical torture. Our open acknowledgment that he would soon die. The knowledge that his death was caused by societal neglect. The pain of his love for the book he gave me, Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson. Second, there is the cumulative pain of experiencing the mass death of my friends, the helpless. Third, there is the trauma of having to explain this experience to my family—people whose privileges protected them from the true knowledge. Fourth, there is the lack of empathy or care from my family in the face of this experience. Fifth, my mother’s insistence that my friends were not ful
ly human. That they did not constitute a “community” and that, therefore, loving them did not constitute being connected to other humans. Her false accusation that I wish men to suffer and die because I am a homosexual. Sixth, there is the trauma of the erasure of my productivity and accomplishments. Seventh, the complicity of my sister and her future husband by remaining silent. The enjoyment of their privilege as a heterosexual couple in that room and their privileges of not having to experience the mass death of the young. Their decision to exploit those privileges instead of risking them to create a more humane family. Eighth, the false characterization of the truth of the AIDS crisis, “this mess,” as something one chooses to experience. Not, in fact, something that one chooses to deny.

  In this incident, my family members excluded me in a host of ways from their world of people whose feelings matter. They separated themselves from me. That is a punishment, and its consequences are brutal. The ability to be interactive with other human beings is the gift of life. Choosing to disconnect from others is either a pathological act of cruelty or a consequence of being on the receiving end of that cruelty. Withholding is never the positive choice. It is like the representative shunning woman on the street. Why would I want to be separated from her? To forever be punished for buying drugs I never bought? To forever be faced with silence when I say, “What did you do today?” To forever be denied the human experience of facing and dealing with problems with her, of the treasure of negotiation? To let her feel so badly and be so angry when there is no reason to feel so bad? To live forever on the receiving end of that unjustified anger?