Carolyn Gage

Intimate Wars is more than an autobiography. As the subtitle reads, it is “The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom.”  It might also read, “and Who Has Continued The Fight For Four Decades.”

The woman is Merle Hoffman, who established Choices Women’s Medical Center shortly after New York legalized abortion in 1971—two years before Roe v. Wade. Abortion, unlike many other issues taken up by Second Wave feminists, remains as hotly contested and as much of a political football as it was back in the day. 

Hoffman’s book is, frankly, a page-turner. She has not held back from revealing her personal story—one that is fraught with the kinds of contradictions that made for good drama. She unflinchingly documents an era and a battle that have been controversial even among the ranks of activists. And she does something else that this reader found to be of enormous value. She models the attitudes and strategies it takes to win against a formidable adversary. She talks about the deep work, the transformational work necessary to bring about social change, even as she shares the details of her public campaigns.

CG: In your book, you wrote about how “women’s health needed a reformation” and how this realization led you to draft a patient’s bill of rights… which ended up being torn off the clinic walls by doctors. Do you feel that women today are more aware of our  rights when we enter the medical system… or has the tremendous erosion of social services rendered us more compliant?

MH: In a sense I believe that Patient Power is more important now than ever.  At the time I was calling for a Reformation there was practically no medical information available to patients (mainly women). The language was one that only doctors could understand and this medical language contributed to women remaining passive consumers of their own health care.

I wanted women to be able to understand in plain English what treatment was being proposed, what risks were involved and if there were any options.

Now with the Internet, medical information is available to almost anyone anywhere at any time enabling individual patients to become more assertive—but patients as a class face an even more intractable challenge which is the fact that the doctors are not virtually available.  With the ever rising numbers of the uninsured, the consistent attacks on any government funding to assist the poor, and the egregious escalation of the attack on reproductive rights, women as patients are in an even more precarious situation.

And what is required to make real change to address an inequitable and profit driven health care system is collective action.

CG: What was so refreshing about the book was your absolutely uncompromising honesty about a subject that is often uncomfortable even for supporters. This was one of the (many) passages I highlighted:

"… attempting to simplify the issue, refusing to look at the consequences or true nature of abortion—the blood, the observable parts of the fetus, the irrevocable endings, the power of deciding  whether or not to bring a new life into this world—reduces our capacity  to register the depth of this issue and disrespects the profound political and social struggle women’s choices engender in our society."

CG: How do you deal with the fact that this is the sensationalized focus of anti-abortion groups?

MH: Head on—I acknowledge that abortion is the termination of potential life—and reinforce that it is the individual woman who has the legal moral and ethical responsibility to make that decision. Reproductive justice is a human right—and the denial of rational moral agency to women deprives them of their humanity.

CG: In your book, you talk about the tactics of anti-abortion activists and the need for abortion rights activists to be as visible and as vocal. One of the brilliant actions you organized with the New York Pro-Choice Coalition was a press conference held literally in a back alley, effectively making the point that banning abortions will only drive them underground. Do you feel that there is a need for more of this kind of grassroots activism, or in 2011 has the issue moved to lobbyists and politicians?

MH: Women have to come out of the closet on this issue—in all the years since I have been fighting this issue—admitting that one has had an abortion still remains difficult. It has not become any easier to have abortion without apology. The first action has to be in each individual woman’s heart and mind—to accept her choice as a “mothers act” and bond with all other women struggle to make their own choices. One march-one action is not enough—it can be great theater—but this issue requires a revolution of consciousness—and individual psychological courage.

CG: In your chapter, “The Loaded Gun,” you discuss your work to empower patients in situations involving domestic violence, and how this work translated to your own response to the growing terrorism directed against abortion providers. You talk about the deep social conditioning of women to respond as victims. I see a Catch-22 dilemma here: How can women who do not feel biologically entitled muster the attitude of resistance necessary to defend that entitlement?

MH: See above—which is why each one of us has the responsibility of being soldiers in this battle—and why this war is “Intimate”—because we have to fight it within ourselves—we have to fight the enemy who has outposts in our heads and hearts.

CG: I appreciated your clarity about the roots of the struggle: “As long as people see abortion as immoral, its legality will be in danger.” This obviously is going to take more than legislation. How can we fight and how can we win that battle when liberals lack the monolithic machinery of the so-called Religious Right?

MH: Position the issue in terms of Reproductive Justice and Human Rights—once again-work on women accepting their power as mothers--work in coalition with other human rights struggles--it will take a long time—which is why I always see this as a generational struggle and do not allow myself to become despairing or depressed about the ebbs and flows of the battles—I am grateful to be part of the struggle (can’t say I am not getting tired though!)

Footnote: Merle Hoffman is also the editor of On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking. The theme of the Winter 2012 issue is abortion.

I have been reading about Jeanette Rankin… and reading about Jeanette Rankin compels one to think about peace. Really think about it… not in the rainbow-smiley-face-give-peace-a-chance way, but in the here-goes-my-entire-career way.

Reading about Jeanette Rankin compels one to think about peace from the perspective of the first woman EVER to be elected to Congress, and from a state (Montana) where the women still couldn’t vote… Jeanette was really, truly “representing” in a way that no woman would ever do again. The eyes of the entire world were on her.

And only one month into her term, the resolution to enter World War I came up for the vote. The President wanted to fight. Many, if not most, Americans wanted to fight. The members of the suffrage organizations for whom she had worked wanted to fight. And if there wasn’t already enough pressure on Jeanette, she knew that a pacifist vote from her would be seen as a gendered vote. Because war is men’s business.

_What did she do? She voted her conscience, and furthermore, she did not hesitate to affirm that women had a different perspective on war, because it was women who raised the sons who would be sent off to the slaughter. She made no bones about the fact that this was an investment, and she was vocal in asserting women’s rights in protecting that investment. In many ways, women spoke out with more courage about our difference before we achieved all this token equality that inspires so much disappearing of biological realities.

Jeanette ran for Congress again, two decades later, in 1940. In December 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and this time she was the only member of Congress to vote against war. Withstanding concerted pressure from party leaders from Montana, she refused to change her vote. After Italy and Germany declared war on the US, Jeanette abstained from voting for or against, simply stating “Present.”

And, of course, that was the end of her government career. She continued in her anti-war work, protesting both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In her words, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” And, “There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”

She visited India seven times, meeting with Ghandi and studying his methods. She helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also a founding Vice President of the ACLU.

_Two other aspects of Jeanette’s life caught my attention. First, she appears to have been a lesbian. That’s a whole other blog.

The second thing was where and how she chose to live. In 1924, she bought sixty-four acres of scrub in Bogart, Georgia, and built a one-room house. It had a fireplace at one end and a car radiator at the other. The theory was that water heated by the fireplace would circulate to the car radiator, but it couldn’t have been very efficient without a pump… and there was no pump, because there was no electricity. There was no running water either. She had an outdoor, manual pump, and she would pour her dishwater into a funnel that led to a pipe that drained to the outside. Her toilet was a wood box that required emptying outdoors.

_She would return to Montana for the summers, driving in her car, but Georgia was her home. Rural Georgia. Jeanette bought a cow. Her mother stayed with her, and so did her sister’s children. Rumor has it that some of her colleagues who came for extended visits were actually lovers. She, of course, started a local peace organization. She planted peaches and pecans.

When this house burned down, she built a rammed earth house with a roof of saplings and tar paper. Now, this was 1942, not 1969…  and Jeanette was an upper-middle-class, two-time former Congresswoman in her 60’s, not a twenty-something hippie.  She ended up abandoning the rammed earth project and moving to a sharecropper’s cabin in Mars Hill, Georgia. Here, she had electricity and other amenities (a chemical toilet!), but she built an annex with a tamped earth floor.

Her friendships with her rural neighbors crossed class and race lines, as she shared her car for shopping trips and organized clubs for the children, teaching them how to make a dam for a swimming hole and then how to sew bathing suits.

Even though she did not preach this lifestyle, I believe it was part of Jeanette’s peace work. I believe that she understood the progression from unsustainable consumerism to unfair distribution of wealth to social and political instability to war. Her peace activism wasn’t just about joining organizations or lobbying politicians. It was down to the roots.  It was “What’s my part in this? And how are my actions contributing to the problem or the solution?”

It’s interesting to me how sources like Wikipedia neither make mention of her lifetime affinities with women and probable lesbianism, nor do they mention her radical lifestyle of voluntary simplicity decades before the environmental movement. I think they overlook the touchstones of her activism.

Okay... Albert Nobbs... 

Is the glass half empty or half full?

I'm going to go with half full, because there is a pretty spot-on depiction of a lesbian butch in the film. And a working-class butch,at that. Not addicted, self-hating, or self-destructive. Comfortable in her own skin, happily married and living in a cozy home.... Sassy, self-confident, compassionate, helpful to a sister in need. Does not die. Yep, nicely half-full. Janet McTeer knocking it out of the park.

So that's where I would focus. Yes, a representation of a butch character that neither exoticizes nor excoriates. See the Butch Visibility Project for a little context.

If, however, I were to focus on the title role, Albert Nobbs... well, I'm afraid that's the "half-empty" part. And it's too bad, because this was apparently Glenn Close's project. In 1982, Close was in a stage production where she first performed the role. This was an adaptation of a short story by Irish author George Moore. She had a dream of making it into a film, which she worked toward for fifteen years. I wish I could say something nice about her portrayal.

Well, I can. It's not her fault. Someone else wrote the story. She plays a survivor of a gang rape, who has adopted male drag in order to secure better employment and (implied) indemnity from more assault. She appears to be in a freeze state of PTSD... either that, or arrested development. She has a nervous breakdown over a flea, nearly passes out at the sight of another woman's breasts, and (spoiler alert) has a heart attack over the excitement of a fist fight.

Let me just say here, it takes a lot of gumption for a woman to pass as a man. Especially in a culture with criminal penalities and incarceration for the deed. Nobbs' character just doesn't make sense. She appears more like Tony Hopkins' fussy butler from the BBC's Remains of the Day. Hate to say it, but it's more from the archive of prissy gay male stereotypes than any lexicon of lesbian butch characters. This is the kind of thing that can happen when  men attempt to create lesbian characters in the absence of visible butch culture.

There is a completely incoherent scene where the butch and Nobbs put on women's clothing (from the turn-of-the -century) and run along the beach. Nobbs is weeping with liberation. The metaphor is completely misguided, in my opinion, because it is their male clothing that has liberated them both. The female clothing signifies "other," subordinate status, sexual prey, economic dependence, and--as Nobbs trips and falls in the sand--serious literal as well as figurative challenges to mobility.

And while we're on half-empty...  the film depicts both Nobbs and then later the butch character sexually objectifying a femmy (and snotty) servant in the hotel where they work. Both of them are not above exploiting her out-of-wedlock motherhood and the stigma that goes with it, to pressure her into partnership with them. One might make the case that the glass is half-full in that they are chivalrously willing to come to her rescue. I see it as half-empty as the woman, clearly in love with another person (a man), is being pressured to prostitute herself in a coerced marriage for the sake of the baby. Not cool.

The author of the short story from which the stage play was adapted, from which the film was adapted, gives us some clues about the character of Albert.

George Moore attended a Catholic boarding school in England where he was the youngest of 150 boys. Not surprisingly, he had a breakdown and was sent home.When he returned, he refused to study the assigned subjects and was sent home for good. Later on, he made a career writing about prostitution, extramarital sex and lesbianism. According to Wikipedia, "Moore was believed by some to be impotent and was described as 'one who told but didn't kiss.'"

Gertrude Stein wrote about George in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She describes him as "a very prosperous Mellin's Food baby." [See Mellin Food ad below.]

_Where am I going with this? I think that Albert Nobbs is Moore's alter-ego. He is writing about himself. He is writing about his surviving of  sexual assault, his desire to escape, his sense of delirious liberation in women's frocks. He is the one fainting at female nudity. He is the one who cannot dare imagine a woman being attracted to him.

You know what? George is half-full. He appears to have been quite a rebel, defying his school, going with a disreputable publisher, rejecting the church, taking part in the Irish Literary Revival, and disinheriting his brother...I'm going to give him a pass  for his appropriation of "passing women."

So, go see the film. Appreciate that Close is opening territory for women. And then enjoy every second of McTeer's remarkable performance.

_ I have just discovered that Tonia Thelma Grant died in 2005, and I don’t remember reading any memorials about her passing, so I wanted to write something.

Tonia was born in Brooklyn on March 28, 1927, and she moved to Gilboa, New York, in 1971. Here she founded Damas Gracias Writers’ Workspace, where lesbian writers could offer workshops and retreats for women.

_The year before Tonia’s death, I had the privilege of teaching a lesbian theatre workshop at Damas Gracias, and one of my favorite memories is sitting around in the evening and listening to Tonia’s stories of being an early “out” lesbian in Brooklyn. I believe she said she had worked as a reporter for the Amsterdam News, one of the historic African American newspapers.

She had a passion for lesbian culture that was undiminished, and Damas Gracias, located on a beautiful creek, reflected the dream of a “room of one’s own.”

The one obituary I have, sent to me by Basil Kreimendahl, who attended my workshop, notes that “She is survived by two sisters, Hazel Chambers of Brooklyn and Ruby Grant of Gilboa; a brother, Edgerton Grant of Brooklyn; a son, Tonio M. Grant of Gilboa; and two grandchildren, Mychal and Amaya Grant of West Virginia.” And, it notes,  there was a service for her in Grand Gorge. 

_Basil, who wanted Tonia to perform in one of her plays, added this:
"I also remember Tonia telling me how much she enjoyed every year going to the Carribean and that she had family there. She also told me that she had a brownstone in Brooklyn. At one point, she had a private club for women in it. This was when that was the safest way to meet. She was also an actress."

Because I am unable to locate more information about Tonia, I  want to turn to the land she chose for her dreams : the small town of Gilboa located in the Catskill Mountains.There are two facts about this small town that seem to me to stand as metaphors for the greater and seemingly lost story of Tonia’s life.

First, in 1926, the year before Tonia’s birth, the original town was razed and flooded by the damming of the Schoharie Creek. Many of the townspeople fought “eminent domain,” right up to the flooding and for two decades beyond. The project was built by African American and Italian immigrant labor.

_(Originally published in On the  Issues.)


The Occupation of Wall Street has been making headlines for weeks, with thousands of protestors flocking to the heart of New York’s financial district to register their shock and outrage at a collapsed economy that took the world by surprise.

But there was a consumer activist—a woman—born over a century ago, who would not have been surprised at all.  Her name was Mary Harriman Rumsey, and she was the partner of Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins.

 Frances Perkins was the first woman to occupy a Cabinet position, and she has rightly been referred to as the “woman behind the New Deal.” Her achievements include the banning of child labor, the minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, worker's compensation, unemployment insurance, employer-provided health insurance, new work programs to create jobs, welfare, and Social Security. The only item on her reform agenda that she failed to secure was universal health insurance. The American Medical Association had as influential a lobby then as now.

(It’s an interesting footnote to history that while the Bureau of Immigration was still under the Labor Department, Perkins fought hard but unsuccessfully to allow entry for hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Roosevelt transferred the Bureau to the Department of Justice in 1940, but had he not authorized this transfer, Perkins would never have allowed the infamous internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent.)

Perkins had made many adjustments early in her career in order to fit herself into the male-dominated arena of politics. She had changed her name (from “Fannie” to Frances) and also her style of dressing (to remind men of their mothers!) But after her Cabinet appointment, she found herself in a Catch-22 situation. 

_It was expected that Cabinet members would all have wives to run their households and to host the social gatherings where the real business of government frequently was conducted. Perkins could not be “one of the boys,” and, at the same time, conform to the social protocols of a Washington hostess.  The Washington Post had attacked her in an article with the headline  “Capital Has a Rigid Calling-Card Code, Social Ostracism Is the Penalty Paid by Women Who Break It.”

 And here is where Mary Harriman Rumsey came to the rescue. She rented a three-story house in Georgetown and invited Frances to become her “roommate.” History notes that the two were far more than roommates, and that Mary was far more than a typical Cabinet wife.

Mary Rumsey was the daughter of a railroad tycoon, and she had grown up on a twenty-thousand-acre estate in upstate New York, where she later supervised the six hundred employees. She had homes on Long Island and also in Virginia. Her dinner parties with Frances were legendary, and, as one biographer noted, it was not unusual to find Will Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Bourke-White, and General Douglas MacArthur at her table, along with an unknown Appalachian folk singer.

During Roosevelt’s inaugural year, she founded a Washington weekly named Today, which later became Newsweek magazine.  More significantly, Roosevelt named her to chair the Consumer Advisory Board that had been authorized under the New Deal. 

_It was Rumsey’s job to see that the retail selling price of goods would not increase proportionately more than the increase which wage earners would receive for their labors.  She understood that, for all the pioneering legislation that her partner was putting through as Secretary of Labor, none of these wage protections would have meaning if the price of consumer goods outstripped the purchasing power.  In an interview with the New York Times, Mary explained:

"There have been disagreements between labor and capital in which each has made known its ills, but seldom has the man or woman who actually footed the bills, by purchasing the things that were manufactured or grown, had a voice in the selling price."

Sadly, this principle was forgotten in the decades following the New Deal, when credit cards were introduced to consumers. By the 1970’s the price of goods and services was increasing at a rate higher than wages, but nobody seemed to notice because, suddenly, even working-class folks could get instant “mini-loans” via credit cards for all kinds of purchases that did not require loan officer approval. Magic money! By the 1990’s, the debt load of an average family was $40,000. By that same decade, the credit craze had spread to the housing market, where lack of adequate regulation led to hundreds of thousands of folks taking out mortgages on homes that would be one paycheck away from foreclosure.

Mary Rumsey would have seen right through this smokescreen of a credit economy, to the widening gap between wage and price increases. And she would have decried a government willing to allow its citizens to be seduced by promises of instant gratification and the trappings of upward mobility, even as they slid deeper and deeper into hopeless debt.

Mary died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 19, 1934, from complications resulting from a fall from a horse. At the time of her death, Frances was in middle of the fight for Social Securty, and Roosevelt had given her a Christmas deadline for her Cabinet committee to complete their work.  Because of the closeted nature of her relationship with Rumsey, only a few very close (and lesbian) friends could acknowledge the degree of her loss. As one of these friends noted, “You are going through one of those tremendously alone experiences, yet lacking in importance outside yourself.” Frances would also lose their home, as it was Rumsey who had paid the lion’s share of the rent. Any attempt on the part of Rumsey to provide for Perkins financially would have raised questions on scandal-mongering Capitol Hill.

So, the same week her partner died and she was facing the imminent loss of her home, Perkins called the members of her committee to her home, set a large bottle of Scotch on the table, and told the men that no one went home until they finished the work. As a result of that night, and the woman whose activism was a living memorial to her partner’s death, millions of Americans have been able to retire, and even more have been able to survive.

Watching, the footage of the Occupation of Wall Street, one hears the echo of Mary Rumsey. In this interview, she was referring to her multi-millionaire father, but her words could as easily be applied to the “banksters” of Wall Street today:

"His period was a building age, when competition was the order of the day. Today the need is not for a competitive but for a cooperative economic system."

References: Downey, Kirstin. The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. Doubleday, 2009.

Mitchell, Donn. “Debutantes of the World, Unite! The Irrepressible Mary Harriman” The Anglican Examiner, http://www.anglicanexaminer.com/Rumsey.html

“The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening; or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive.”

--George Orwell, 1984.

This is what I thought of when I read that 59% of Americans believe in hell. (That’s from a 2009 poll by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. A Fox News poll puts the figure at 74%!)

It struck me that this is a serious political issue, as well as one of children’s rights, and one that needs to be understood in the light of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.

What exactly does it mean that the majority of folks in my country actually believe that they face the possibility of being tossed into a lake of burning hellfire at the end of their lives, where they would experience the excruciating symptoms of being burned alive for eternity? What does it mean that the majority of folks in my country believe that the universe is governed by a tyrannical despot capable of devising this form of torture for beings that he has created and then tempted into damnation?

Honestly, I can’t even imagine taking these propositions seriously. I can’t even imagine going through a day with the possibility of an invisible judge breaking my arm at midnight for some potential trangression on my part I may have even inadvertently committed during the day. I can’t imagine waking up in the morning and looking out the window on a beautiful day, realizing that somewhere beyond the green hills and clouds lies a sulfurous penal colony filled with the screams of the damned—some of them my family and friends!—and knowing that there is a great creator who takes equal proprietary pride in this nightmare underworld. I can’t imagine wishing such a retaliatory, over-kill horror on even a known predator. How do any of these believers—these one-out-of-six of my fellow Americans—ever have a nice day?

Actually, I do know how they have a nice day. I know what it’s like to be completely dependent on a paternal co-creator and guardian who is grandiose, sadistic, and terrifying. I understand what it’s like to scramble to make sense out of a stream of incoherent, inconsistent edicts, because one’s survival requires an unquestioning faith in the madman who issued them. I live with the aftereffects of assuming a guilt that should never have been mine, as the only way to balance this unbalanced power equation. Fortunately, I was able to outgrow and outlive my perpetrator/human father. For fundamentalist believers in hell, there is no way out, and the post-traumatic adjustments that a child must make to accommodate the unthinkable must form a lifetime of disorders for fundamentalist believers, which then become codified into holy writ.

Belief in hell and its creator are profoundly traumatizing. They comprise an unacceptable ideology that must be accepted by the faithful. That, in a nutshell, is the definition of trauma: the unacceptable that must be accepted. And accepting the unacceptable is what causes Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. And, as George Orwell so presciently put it, living with this kind of trauma is like “being a little less alive.” 

How, specifically, might PTSD play out among the faithful? Let’s take a look at some of the syndromes:

1)    Hypervigilance. Wikipedia defines this as “an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hypervigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion.” 

My first thought is “How useful for the patriarchy!” How easy to sell doctrinal hellfire survivors on terrorist alerts, and especially when those terrorists are characterized as infidels. And for what exactly would the person with hellfire PTSD be so vigilantly scanning the environment? What are the perceived sources of threats to life—or, rather, to afterlife? Soldiers with PTSD are hypervigilant about being ambushed. Women and children who have been vicitimized are scanning for perpetrators and assailants. But what about these folks believing in hell? They must be eternally vigilant for temptation, erring on the side of paranoia.

Which brings us to a related symptom of PTSD:

2)    Constriction

In an effort to minimize risk of retraumatization or reduce anxiety (see “hypervigilance” above), the survivor attempts to control her environment. She may restrict her activities, pass up opportunities that involve too many unknowns, avoid social contact. She will choose the unpleasant familiar over opportunities and changes that involve risk, however slight. Constriction refers to the narrowing of her experience that results from hypervigilent choices. 

For anyone who sincerely believes in eternal damnation, avoiding this punishment must obviously be a top priority. There must be diligent, ongoing attention to the maintenance of a reassuring balance of goodness in one’s moral bank account. Constriction, in this instance, would be the result of avoiding any activity that might incur debt in that account, however unintentional. And here we have an explanation for religions that ban dancing or theatre, as well as a rationale for rigid gender roles and brutal child-raising practicies.

But constriction for the faithful goes beyond that. The greatest temptation to sin lies in freethinking. The constricted thought of the orthodox is well documented, and the political dimensions of this constriction are chilling. Voting along church party lines could be interpreted as a form of constriction.  Black-and-white thinking with good-versus-evil moral codes may keep one out of hell in an afterlife, but they are set-ups for fascist propaganda that leads to the creation of hell on earth. Which, sadly, is still a preferable option, and possibly one that provides a measure of catharsis… which we’ll get to later.

My point here is this: PTSD is a neurophysiological phenomenon, tied specifically to survival. The brain switches into a different mode of functioning when confronted with trauma, or when dealing with the aftereffects of trauma. The amygdala, which is the more primitive part of the brain (sometimes referred to as the “reptilian brain” because of its early evolution) is the command center for meeting survival needs. The cortex, the more recently evolved part of the mammalian brain, deals with logic and reason. According to research, the connections from the cortical areas to the amygdala are much weaker than the connections from the amygdala to the cortex. What this means is that the reptile brain can and does trump the cortex. When triggered by PTSD, the amygdala begins to take control (because it believes survival is at stake), sending impulses that bypass the cortex and also overriding signals from the cortex. In other words, there’s no reasoning with folks if their agenda is a response to trauma. What started out as an evolutionary advantage for the species may well turn out to be the mechanism of our extinction via Armageddon.

Teaching people to believe in hell is diabolically ingenious. It can wire them for active PTSD for their adult lives. It impairs their capacity for logical thinking. And, of course, indoctrinating (traumatizing) children with this belief before they are able to think for themselves is ridiculously easy for adults, especially if they are the parents.

Let’s look at a third syndrome associated with PTSD:

3)    Dissociation

Dissociation refers to “partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s conscious or psychological functioning.” This occurs when the mind is desperate to distance itself from an experience that is too much to process… like, say,  the thought of being burned alive for eternity by one’s own creator. 

Dissociation can take various forms. One can feel outside one’s own body or experience (depersonalization), or disconnected from one’s surroundings (derealization). One can become numb or forgetful. And here’s an arresting bit of information from a study on maternal PTSD: Adult dissociation when coupled with a history of child abuse and PTSD can contribute to disturbances in parenting behavior, such as exposure of young children to violent media. Could this explain how adults terrorized by their own indoctrination into eternal damnation feel justified in imposing it on their children? Is sending their kids to Sunday school actually a post-traumatic compulsion? 

Let’s take a closer look at depersonalization and derealization. 

Depersonalization, defined as the subjective experience of unreality in one’s sense of self, can be a relief. In fact, depersonalization is the desired outcome of many recreational drugs. In the face of a terrifyingly unjust cosmos, depersonalization could lead to abdication of personal responsibility for one’s fate… and all that would follow from that. What constitutes moral idiocy or criminal insanity in a universe manifesting premeditated cruelty and injustice?

In fact, the entire notion of sin stems from a kind of universal depersonalization. The notion of sinners does not take into account the effects of organic brain damage, the disease model of addiction, and a host of research into trauma and its effects, especially on children. People who sin are simply bad, deserving of lakes of fire. 

Derealization, a state of dissociation in which the outside world is experienced as unreal, is even scarier. And here, I believe, we have the explanation for the Rapture. Some Christians actually advocate acceleration of the destruction of the environment, because, according to their ideology, the end of the world will bring all them that must closer to the Rapture, when the true believers will be united with their savior. Traumatic beliefs about hell can result in brutal indifference to beings and worlds that are seen as existing apart from ideologies of salvation. Gays, lesbians, and transgender offspring of evangelical families can testify to the stunning cruelty of this dynamic.

Here’s the fourth syndrome:

4)    Freezing, or immobility

This is about helplessness. This is a survival instinct that kicks in when flight or fight are not options. In the freeze response, the body is flooded with the same neuroendocrines as during fight-or-flight; it’s just that there is not the discharge that occurs with fighting or fleeing. This can set the stage for something called “dysregulation,” where the energy mobilized by the perceived threat gets trapped in the nervous system by the freeze.

Dysregulation means the body holds onto stress and has trouble letting go, with the result that the trauma survivor feels both wired and exhausted at the same time. In lay terms, the body’s transmission has broken down. The person suffering from dysregulation has difficulty shifting from high arousal to low arousal, shifting back to neutral, or into states of joy or contentment. Chronic anxiety and depression are states of dysregulation, and dysregulation can result in religious obsessions… or traumatic re-enactment.

5)    Compulsion to re-enact

This compulsive seeking-out of situations that resemble the trauma is usually not conscious. It’s an attempt to gain closure, and may provide a temporary sense of mastery or even pleasure, but ultimately it perpetuates chronic feelings of helplessness and a subjective sense of being bad and out-of-control… which feed the compulsion to re-enact, setting up a vicious circle that, without intervention, is likely to end in tragedy.

How might this work when the PTSD derives from a traumatic ideological belief in an eternity of hellfire? Okay, this is pure speculation on my part, but might the re-enactment compulsion take the form of creating rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal structures that replicate imagined scenarios of Judgment Day? Or waging wars against infidels to project an overwhelming fear of sinfulness onto some “other” who can then be appropriately punished (exorcised)… and the more fiery the punishment the better? Are the infernal weapons of modern warfare some subconscious attempt to gain godlike control over the dreaded hellfire? 

The fact is that belief in a literal hell, however ludicrous to us non-believers, constitutes a traumatizing belief. Spending one’s life attempting to appease a tyrannical and fickle creator/destroyer who insists on being worshipped as a loving father is also profoundly traumatic, and especially if it dovetails with one’s experience of an abusive parent. PTSD, as we know, compounds. 

What does it take to confront and heal PTSD? Usually some kind of intervention, because of the way the amygdala operates. The person with PTSD has a brain that is insisting on external causes (temptation, sin, etc.). Out of touch with the logic and reason of the cortex, this part of the brain lacks the capacity to examine its own process. Just as alcoholism is referred to as “the disease that insists it’s not a disease,” PTSD is the syndrome that insists it’s not a syndrome. 

Unfortunately, these hellfire believers are highly organized and their churches are deeply involved in the funding of political parties… which means influencing or even dictating the party platforms. They are well beyond appeals to logic.

Is there any form of intervention at this point that might be effective against this army of believers hell-bent to not be hell-bent?

I think there is, and I think the key is children’s rights. Children have a right to grow up free to develop their own relationship to the world and to the energies of creation. They have a right to grow up free from religious doctrines teaching intolerance and terror. Research shows that fundamentalist teachings about same-sex orientation lead LGBT youth to suicidal ideation and  self-harm. 

Unfortunately children do not have political clout. They will never have their own party, or even their own PAC. They are the most universally exploited population on the planet. There was a national database for stolen cars years before there was one for abducted children. Certainly, an initiative defending their rights to spiritual self-determination would be daunting. Daunting, but effective. As lesbian-feminists, we can begin in our own communities, wherever churches are in coalition with other organizations. We can begin by including it in our own analyses, making it part of any human rights platform. We can make sure that it’s articulated when we work on anti-bullying campaigns. We can educate people that religious freedom does not include the right to spiritually abuse. 

And in doing this work, we can also take the opportunity to look at our own beliefs about an afterlife. Is our end also contained in our beginning? Personally, I find purpose, peace and morality in an observation made by feminist sociologist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

“Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.”

_ “Hello?” I picked up the phone.

“Do you know who this is?”

I had to think for a minute, before I realized that the voice on the other end of the line was that of Barbara Grier, the publisher of Naiad Books. The year was 1987.

Did I know who she was? Well! How about, did she know who I was? More to the point, did I know who I was. I had just come out as a lesbian, and my world was upside down. Most of the patterns of the first three decades of my life made no sense in the new world I found myself attempting to navigate.

Did I know who she was? Of course I knew. She was the publisher of lesbian books. Everyone knew that. Especially lesbian writers.

_Did I know who she was? Well, obviously. I had contacted her, hadn’t I, about one of the books she had published, We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm? I was itching to adapt the book for a screenplay, and I was needing the contact information for the author. (This was still about a decade before the Internet.)

It was a tough conversation, as I remember. Starting with that memorably abrasive opening line, right through to the end, where Barbara would contact the author on my behalf, but not entrust me with the information. She wanted to make sure I understood copyright law. She wanted to make sure I understood the long history of the novel, which had been brought back into print twice, decades after original publication. She wanted me to know that, unable to locate Wilhelm, she had still published it, hoping that Wilhelm would contact her. Most of all, she wanted to make sure that I understood the weight and the freight of lesbian literature and of those few who were called to work in what I was rapidly coming to understand was some kind of sacred field.  

_Fast-forward two and a half decades. The screenplay for We Too Are Drifting is written, but still unoptioned. I never did meet Wilhelm, but I did eventually correspond with her partner and literary executor. Following in Barbara’s formidable footsteps, I publish my own books. Naiad never did take to the idea of publishing drama, and I was always a little squirrelly about my plays being listed with romance novels and mysteries.

Today I have just read of Barbara’s passing. I hear that voice again, “Do you know who I am?”

No, I don’t. I can’t. I came out in the 1980’s, not the 1950’s. I came out at a time when there was an openly identified, lesbian press—Barbara’s. I came out in the wake of the momentous Women’s Liberation Movement. I have read about the Daughters of Bilitis, but when I came out there were lesbian hiking clubs, and lesbian books clubs, and lesbian chess clubs, and lesbian festivals.  I can’t know what it was like to meet in secret, in private homes, knowing that DOB was the only lesbian organization in the country, the only meeting place outside of the bars. I’ve read about The Ladder, the first openly lesbian magazine. I’ve even read archival copies of it, including the articles by “Gene Damon,” which was Barbara’s nom de plume. But I can’t understand the courage it took to write for The Ladder, even under an assumed name. I can’t know what that publication meant to lesbians unable to locate any sisters in their hometowns. And I can’t imagine what she went through to establish Naiad Books. I came out amid a flowering of women’s presses.

I may not know who Barbara Grier was, but I would catch glimpses of her through the lesbian authors she published. Grier had rediscovered Wilhelm. She also dug up Renée Vivien and published translations of her work. I read the Naiad edition of Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein.

_Decades later, I called Grier again. I don’t remember the occasion, but both of us were considerably more mellow. The conversation drifted away from business and onto the subject of our mutual passion: lesbian literature. Suddenly, she told me she wanted to read me something. She asked me to wait while she found it. And in those few minutes while I held the silent telephone, I understood that I was about to have An Experience.

I want to share it today, because it stands as tribute to a woman who did not define herself as a writer, but who had the genius for discovering, treasuring, and gifting the world with lesbian writing.

What Barbara read out loud to me that day was the ending of The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, a lesbian novel published in 1952—the year I was born.  Barbara would have been nineteen. It was the story of a middle-class lesbian whose lesbianism cost her the custody of her daughter—a story from an era that I will never know. But I appreciate the history, the struggle, the writing, and the passion of the woman who shared it with me:

Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked towards her.

It’s time for a new political party.  “The Party of the Future.” It doesn’t even have to be huge in order to be effective. It just has to be noisy.

I’m talking about a political party whose SOLE PLATFORM is to examine and publicize the long-term impact of any and all policies and legislation.

No focus on political expediency, compromise with corporate lobbyists, deal-making, etc. Because this party is only and ever about one thing: The Future.

We pass economic policy that binds future generations to hopeless debt. We continue to enable an economic system based on unlimited growth of markets...  This has led to colonization, the horrors of NAFTA, and now a philosophy of perpetual warfare (we destroy massive infrastructures and then hire ourselves to rebuild them again). We engage in manufacturing and innovation that is solely profit-driven with inadequate  analysis to how these technologies may impact human society. We generate incredibly toxic waste that we flush into the ocean or waft into the atmosphere or shove into landfills. We have never yet come up with a plan for disposal of nuclear waste. 

The Party of the Future would generate ongoing pressure on the other parties to make concessions to these concerns. Because the Party of the Future would not be owned, and because it would have only one focus, and because it would have moral force behind it, it would have the ability to harass and prod the traditionally  lumbering and pandering political parties. 

I actually believe that the rising generation of voters considers The Future important. Probably because they are facing the distinct possibility of not having one. 

And that is thanks to my generation.

I belong to the Generation of Irrevocable Destruction. It’s a shameful legacy. My generation of “Boomers” has seen… oh, goddess, what haven’t we seen: 

• Extinction of species
• Acid rain
  
• Global warming
  
• Nuclear accidents
  
• Air pollution
  
• Water pollution
  
• Policy of “perpetual warfare” to support corporate capitalism’s demand for ever-expanding markets
  
• Depletion of water supplies
  
• Genetically modified food
  
• Destruction of the rainforests
  
• Pollution of the ocean
• Massive oil spills

… and all kinds of things we probably haven’t even noticed yet.

What would it take to form The Party of the Future?  Not that much. A handful of committed folks with some social networking skills and a great webmaster. And a team of dedicated research folks.  Actually, scratch that. How about a team of folks with some common sense and decency who are able to communicate their concerns with clarity and accountability?

I’ll sign on. It’s the least I can do.

“Trust children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children, we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

These are the words of educational pioneer John Holt. They came to my mind when I sat down to write a review of Christine Stark’s ambitious first novel, Nickels.

Nickels is the story, told in a first-person narrative, of a survivor of paternal incest and maternal abandonment. The chapters are named for the age of the protagonist, and they advance in five year increments, beginning when “Little Miss So and So” is five and ending when she is twenty-five. Although Stark makes clear in her introduction that the story is not autobiographical, the authenticity of the heroine’s voices at these various ages and stages of development indicates—at least to this reader—that Stark has remarkable recall for the voices of childhood.

This is no small feat. Early childhood is a landscape of disconnected perceptions, whose causal links and contexts are not yet understood by the developing brain. It is a world of limited language and limited concepts… or perhaps the better word would be “restricted,” because the child must make sense of her world using templates handed to her and imposed upon her by the adult world. Childhood is a paradox. For all the confusion and intentional obfuscation, children manifest astounding clarity about the beauties of the natural world as well as the hypocrisies of the adult one. Sadly, most of us lose both the sense of wonder and of horror as we mature. It goes without saying—literally—that the child’s perspective is a challenge for most writers. When the child is a survivor, it becomes nearly impossible to retrieve that voice, because of the dissociation, amnesia, and denial associated with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  (PTSD), which is the legacy of child sexual abuse.

Stark has done something in Nickels that deserves our attention. She has not only remembered, but she has resisted the impulse to editorialize. Instead, she has given us the pure voice of the survivor, and in doing that, she compels her readers to experience the world—fragmented, distorted, with fragile islands of comfort and familiarity—through the eyes and limited context of the child. And then she enables us to grow up along with that survivor, collecting and integrating the fragments of self along with her protagonist.

Thank you, Ms. Stark, for what must have been a descent into some kind of personal hell to recover this fictional Eurydice , this survivor with no name, whom you have led back up into the light of publication—an indictment and a torchbearer.

Forgetting childhood sometimes appears to be the primary goal of socialization, even as civilization promulgates evermore clever incentives for amnesia and evermore diabolical penalties for remembering.

Nickels is a tough read, like other novels about incest (Push by Sapphire, which was made into the film Precious, or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.) Historically, the culture has preferred perpetrator-identfied or apologist books like Lolita, depicting the survivor of child sexual abuse as a sexually precocious predator, or a shadowy figure around which the rest of the plot revolves. The trope of the survivor of incest in a father-knows-best world, like the 19th century trope of the “tragic octaroon” in a world of racial apartheid, is that of a lamentable anomaly in a system that otherwise works just fine for everybody. The incest survivor is a reminder of inconvenient truths, and writers and artists historically either pretend she does not exist or they—regretfully—kill her off (suicide, of course, being a form of death by remote control).

Stark does neither. Her protagonist survives. She comes to an understanding of what has been done to her, and as importantly, by whom it has been done. She has been victimized by her father and her mother, by a criminal justice system that fails her, by misguided social workers and foster parents, by mental health professionals and institutions. But she finds a community. She finds feminism. She recognizes her own lesbianism, a lesbianism that enabled her to form a powerful and passionate alliance with another girl at the age of ten. She begins to write and she finds her voice.

I want to give an example of Stark’s brilliant stream-of-consciousness, literary and spot-on accurate portrayal of PTSD. This is an excerpt from the chapter titled “Age Twenty-five.” A little backstory: When the heroine was ten her father made her wear a purse, where he would put the nickels he gave her after sexually abusing her. Now, she is in a women’s bookstore attempting to purchase a feminist novel:

"Sarah rings me up That’ll be 1.95 with tax I give her two dollars five cents is your change she drops a nickel so shiny and bright into my hand I freeze the nickel rolls off my hand onto the counter I stare at it I want to tell someone something the nickel circles itself on the counter looking for a place to settle I don’t move What’s going on Tara says somewhere over my shoulder I stare at the nickel spinning in a spot next to the pile of bright pink A Room of One’s Own bookmarks I shake my head I don’t want them to think I’m crazy don’t want them to know a nickel dropped out of the sky into my hand made me want to die Keep the change I grab the book walk under the shimmering crystal into the street"

This is how it happens, integration of trauma: moment-by-moment, association-by-association, synaptic-connection-by-synaptic-connection, by constant negotiation between past and present, telling and not-telling, depairing and hoping, heaven and hell.

Thank you, Christine, for the gift.

(Nickels (ISBN: 978-1615990856) is available at bookstores, online booksellers, and can also be purchased as a Kindle download. For information about Stark and her other work, visit her website.